On time once again. This is getting to be a habit...

Many thanks to the fabulous people who commented last time round - Bex Drake, yukatalamia, Silvia, Helena, Lunair, chocolatetree, Shelli and last but never least, the delectable Daugain

Lyrics come from The Zombies 'She's Not There'. I hope you enjoy...

Ripples Part Fifteen

Well, no one told me about her
What could I do?
Well no one told me about her
Though they all knew.

The door slammed. They were enclosed in silence.

Therese sighed. She supposed the girl would run home to shed her tears and then she would become the dutiful daughter she had tried so hard not to. It didn’t bother her that they had refused Delphine; but it would bother her brother. And that, she regretted.

Power saturated the air, thick as honey. It puzzled her...

Then she saw the way that Chatoya and Blue were staring at each other. There was no mercy in either of their expressions, and she thought that any observer would have been hard-pressed to find love within the loathing there.

“Interesting decision,” he remarked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chatoya snapped, leaping to her feet.

“I think you’ve misunderstood the process of a bargain. They get something they want; we get something we want. Whether it does any good for anyone is irrelevant.”

“Not to me.”

“No? Then tell me exactly who will benefit from your altruism today.”

“Why do you care? She’s one shapeshifter.”

“She is not ‘one shapeshifter’,” Blue pronounced with absolute disgust. “She is the child of the pod’s leader and the pod’s prophetess. She is a mermaid in the truest sense of the word and an extremely influential member of the pod – a society, I might mention, who own most of the land in this town, the lion’s share of the power and who have never had a single member of their species in the Furies, for reasons that you might know if you had bothered to do the slightest bit of research!”

“You seem to have forgotten what else she is,” Chatoya threw at him, quivering with anger. She was vibrant amidst the muted palette of the room, her face white, fierce, passionate, her eyes sharp and dark as holly leaves. “She’s just a girl. She’s far too young for any of this.”

“As you were too young?”

That barb hit home. The air surged – gripping, brief – before Chatoya controlled herself, barely.

A thin black halo hugged the witch’s body as Therese quietly marked the exits and activated the defensive charms she always wore in case things became nasty. Nastier. She was not fool enough to watch a lover’s tiff when the lovers in question had apocalyptic powers and an apparent need to antagonize one another.

“I had no choice,” Chatoya said stiffly. “You took them all away.”

“Ah, the sweet taste of irony.” Blue licked his lips slowly. “No, wait, it’s just the appalling coffee Therese made.”

“Don’t bring me into this,” she remarked. “Though he has a point.”

Chatoya’s attention snapped to her as if she were glad to get Blue out of her head. Which was quite possibly the case. “Meaning what?”

“Riose would not have let the little fish come unless he was sure she understood what she faced. She knew what lay before her – and she made her choice. You denied her. You have taken away her choice.”

“I will not hand any more children to the Furies.” She turned away, but there was no mistaking the bleakness in her voice. “No future that waits for her could be worse than us.”

Therese gazed at her rigid back in disbelief. Did the fool really believe that? Did she not yet understand that everyone had their price, that sometimes in the balance of two terrible choices the Furies were not the worst?

Blue’s laughter had a hard, cutting edge. “How little you know.”

“I’ve read her file. I know what I have left her to.” She sounded tired and hollow.

“I doubt it.” He stood – sleek, swift, he went to her, blocking her from Therese’s vision. The afternoon light mingled their shadows into one united shape, but such closeness was a threat, the intimacy of pain in the guise of pleasure. “You guess. You assume. You do not know what she fears.”

“But I know you.” Her whisper was rough, and Therese heard the anguish in it. “I know myself.”

“Those are your fears,” he said, contempt searing his voice. “And your mistake.”

The crack of her hand on his face was like a gunshot.

“My only mistake was you,” Chatoya said coldly. In a blast of churning power she swept from the room, leaving Blue behind and entirely still except for the rosy mark that slowly bloomed on his cheek.

~*~

Phi barely noticed the world passing by her, her heart still unable to believe what her mind knew so solidly to be true. She drifted through the trees with the air of a ghost, barely extant in her own life.

How could they have refused her – how could Chatoya have refused her?

The conversation with Riose in the music room reverberated through her; this despair was an echo of that, deeper, truer, ever more violent. With that in mind that she found herself on his doorstep, ringing the bell until it shrilled endlessly through the house. She needed answers, she needed him to tell her that it was not hopeless.

When he opened the door, his face was flushed with sleep, his hair rumpled into a dark mess, but those turquoise eyes widened at the sight of her obvious distress.

“Phi!” he said, and the sheer astonishment in her face told that he had genuinely believed she might not survive. “Did they…”

“She refused,” she said flatly. “The Grieving Fury.”

He frowned. “Just her?”

“Oh yes. Guess why she said no.”

His gaze was level, very shrewd; she glimpsed one of the Furies then, and found him colder and more calculating than the boy she thought she knew. “Because Malefici said yes.”

Bemused, she shook her head. “That wasn’t what she said.”

“Huh.” His raised eyebrows implied that was of little importance. “What was her reason, then?”

“That it was best for everyone,” she mimicked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Except me, but apparently I don’t matter.”

The anger was stoked to raging temperatures in her; she was flushed, trembling, half a thing of fire, and it felt bittersweet – consumed as she was, at least it staved off the despair that she was not willing to fall to. Not yet, not while there was the slightest chance left.

Riose peered at her. “Why is it best for everyone? What does she honestly think Don Ivan’s going to do for the pod?”

“I wish I knew,” she said, the truth silent and stinging on her tongue: she didn’t know what he would do for the pod. She only knew what he had done to her. That was enough, too much, no more. “What can I do to change her mind?”

His lips parted, but she saw the sorrow that crept over him. “Phi…”

“Don’t tell me nothing, Ri, don’t tell me that,” she hurled at him ferociously. “I won’t accept it.”

“It’s not your choice.” His gentleness was that of a man breaking dreadful news. “It was always theirs. If they said no…”

“One of them said no,” she corrected him, refusing to give in so easily. Raking through solutions, she searched frenetically until- “Wait. Why…why did you think Chatoya only refused because Bane Malefici agreed?”

He looked taken aback by this change of tack. “They can’t stand each other. It’s common knowledge.”

And suddenly her mind was spinning into top speed, moving with the swiftness of someone who understood the intense, visceral power of loathing – who knew just the savagery it could rouse.

“She’d refuse just to annoy him?”

“Possibly, but I don’t see what this has-”

Suddenly the hope was back, roaring, mighty, burning her up like fever. “So tell me, Ri, don’t you think it’d be a perfect revenge for him to help me anyway?”

“No!”

He grabbed her, and his hands were crushing on her shoulders – he shook her, a wildness in his eyes that she’d never seen before.

“Don’t go to him,” he said in a fast, low voice. “Don’t do it, Phi. You don’t know what he’ll want in return, you don’t understand what he’s capable of.”

“Oh, Ri…” she said sadly. “You’re probably right. But don’t you understand? I know exactly what Don’s capable of. I’ve always known.”

“What on earth did he do that makes Blue Malefici look like the soft option?”

Part of her wanted to tell him. It would be shared then, like carving a cancer out of her flesh for the world to examine. But she did not want to dredge up those memories, she could not bear to have it play out behind her eyelids again as it so often did in her dreams and her idle moments.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “It’s in the past. But I don’t intend it to be in the future.”

He let her go with a hiss of frustration. “Phi, please. Don’t go to Malefici.”

“Will your sister help me instead?” she challenged.

“No.” The words were grudging.

“And the Demon Fury?”

His silence, reluctant, furious, was all the answer she needed. They stood in mute and mutual regret, she understanding his chagrin, yet unable to give up this last frail thread of hope.

He turned away with a hiss, and she saw that there was nothing more to say. It seemed best then to leave, showing him her back because he would not show her his face. She hoped she hadn’t destroyed their friendship, but what other way was left to her?

Then she stopped, and turned back to him.

“Thank you, Ri.”

“I told you,” he snarled, and the self-loathing in his voice was dark and blistering. “Don’t thank me. I’ve done you no favours.”

“You have,” Phi told him. “You let me make my own choice.”

He glanced back, and his face softened, confusion wiping away some of the hatred he bent inward so effortlessly. “I wish you’d chosen differently.”

She smiled, though it was a flimsy mask for all her doubt and dread. “I don’t.”

~*~

The burn on his hand still hurt. If anything, it seemed a little larger, but perhaps that was his imagination. Zeke had never had a scar. Wounds aplenty, yes, but that was just part and parcel of a slave’s life in the court of the Soulless King, and none ever marred him for longer than a few hours. Mere minutes if Ryar had been around.

He paced the confines of the clearing, restless. Occasionally he rubbed at the burn, unconscious of the gesture.

There had to be some way around this. Not by word or thought or deed; neither Phi, nor anyone else can know of her plans.

But only of her plans. Avy put no proviso on anything else – on knowledge of his existence.

He didn’t know why that thought lingered, what it meant, only that some nagging certainty had caught him. Thoughts of Avy were interspersed with far sweeter thoughts of Phi: flashes of her auburn hair vivid as autumn leaves tumbling down to carpet the ground. Of her faithful weight in his arms, of her kisses which had not tasted of desperation or obligation.

He swung between them like a pendulum, the two inextricable in his mind. While Avy lived, Phi was in danger. All the pieces of herself that she’d given him glittered brightly in his mind, stars against the unforgiving future that had lain before him with the surety and tenacity of nightfall.

Faces cycled past, brought to life by her voice – the friends she held so dear, Celia and Finn and Riose and Jo, her parents, the merpeople-

Jess Arryn.

He stopped, wire-tense, suddenly seeing what should have been clear so much sooner. She had known him and she surely must have guessed he had something to do with Aurora. Her and that other one: what was his name, the boy – old now, surely?

Another face from Phi’s gifted memories – lone wolf, she’d called him with a fond note in her voice, but Zeke could strip away the years and see the pack boy that had adored Aurora so intensely. Iry. That was it. Iry and Jess, still here.

His mind raced. Yes, they would recognize him. Surely they would question him – they would need to know – and if they plucked his secrets out by force, well then, what could he do about it?

It was risky. No doubt there. He could not tell them – they would have to seize his secrets. They would have to be ruthless, angry, beyond mercy.

He closed his eyes, and thought of Aurora at her last, raving and vicious. He remembered the look in the wolf boy’s eyes when she left him to run to Zeke – jealousy acid in his stare, his heartbreak as public as everything had been between Pack and pod.

Yes. He could do it. Someone had to – Zeke would not play the Pied Piper, leading Phi to death.

Grey of her eyes, flashing into his mind, so very steady and unafraid. And he thought of a world he’d once known, buried deep in a distant land, where people had sung back the sun and it seemed to him that her eyes were the exact, soft colour of a morning sky waiting for the light to return.

It haunted him as he left the grove, determined that her wait would end. The past would not be forgotten lest the future - and her - tumble into dust with it.

~*~

The winding walk through the forest seemed to take less time. Perhaps it was because she half-ran, dodging through the dappled shade with a gambler’s reckless speed.

It gave Phi a cold jolt to see the house slide forth from the thickets like a cloud. The cat still spilled across the car hood in a mass of ginger fur and flab. She felt oddly timeless, as if all three of them would still be within. Only the lengthened shadows and the now-closed door told her that she had aged, entered, been denied.

She hammered on the door so hard it hurt, and when it swung open, she only just stopped herself from thumping Bane Malefici – a mistake, she suspected, that would have cost her.

His narrow gaze swept her but before he could say anything, before she could have the sense to be frightened, Phi jumped in.

“I want that blood-oath broken. The decision was wrong.” Defiant, she stepped over the threshold, so close to him that if he hadn’t slid back with something close to distaste, they would have been pressed together like hands in prayer.

“Do come in,” he drawled, but sounded amused. “Your persistence is admirable. Your rudeness is not.”

“Neither would be necessary if you hadn’t turned me down.”

“I did not turn you down.” There was no inflection on the words – but it meant something. It was not a flat out refusal.

“No,” she agreed. “Which is why I’ve come back.”

“If you were wiser, you would have approached Therese.”

This was unexpected. Honesty, she decided, was the best policy. “Riose said she’d turn me down.”

“She would. As I said, wiser.” Something eerie and indescribable stirred in his eyes, and suddenly his hand was around her throat, light, the promise of pressure there. “You don’t want to bargain with me.”

Fear crawled up her spine then, scraping like a bitter winter wind. He must have felt her pulse jumping against his fingers; perhaps it was that which made his lips peel back to bare fangs, his humanity rolling back with it to leave him absolutely unearthly, his pupils black as blood.

The door slammed shut behind her. He had not moved, but the shadow that fell over them made it appear he had – it put strange hollows into his face, paring away all colour until he was monochrome, terrible, an angel corrupted into darkness and bone.

Mud and blood and bone...

Even he was better than that.

“No,” she said, her voice thin, slight as gauze. “I don’t want to. But I need to.”

Both of them knew she needed him; he needed no one. “Then you will pay.”

“Yes,” she answered, hopeless.

Bane Malefici’s smile was brilliant and cruel.

~*~

It was only a matter of a few polite questions. Jessica Arryn was well known enough for no one to be suspicious of a stranger asking for her, even one that kept his eyes aimed firmly at the ground.

When he came trudging up the path to where she was weeding the garden, he must have appeared a ghost to her, unchanged by the years. He raised his eyes to her, coppery, gleaming, fire caged in flesh.

“Hello Jess,” he said quietly.

The trowel thudded onto the flowerbed. Her hands were trembling, he realized.

He could still see the laughing, mischievous girl buried beneath the seams of age and it made his heart ache. Nor had time snatched the steel from her, because she only straightened slowly and took him in from top to toe.

“Now, I know I’m not senile,” she said. “Which makes you real. And foolish, boy. Why have you come back?”

“To explain.”

Her laughter was bitter. “I need no explanations from you.”

“Probably not.” The little wooden gate squeaked as he opened it. The garden had the feel of her - a chaotic muddle of colours burst from every corner. “But I thought you might want one anyway.”

She held up a hand as if to stop him coming any closer. Her face was hard. “Why now? You’ve kept your secrets and your silence for decades.”

He hesitated, but this much of the truth at least passed his lips without pain. “I...no longer think it fair to keep them. I owe it to her and to you.”

“Yes, you do,” she said with great calm and dignity. “And to Iry. He deserves to hear this too. You’d best come inside, boy.”

“I have a name. You knew it once.”

“So I did. I won’t poison my tongue with it, though.” Her scorn was a dreadful mirror in which to view himself. Part of him cringed. Yet unpleasant as it was, he needed her hostility. Without such a beginning, he could not make an end of this farcical pledge Avy had bound him to.

The burn on his hand ached. It was too keen a reminder.

~*~

Bane Malefici didn’t offer her a seat. Phi took one anyway because she thought she would fall over if she didn’t. Her heart was thudding relentlessly, her blood sloshing around her veins with such indecent speed that she felt sick.

“I assume you understand exactly what breaking means,” he said carelessly.

“The…the blood-oath?”

His eyes consumed her, spat her out as bones and truth. “What else?”

She heard the treacherous quiver in her voice. “You’ll take away the part of me that’s mer. The contract was between two mer and this will make it invalid. Don can’t marry me, but he can’t punish my parents either.”

“Legally speaking, you’re correct.”

She understood what he did not say: that there were no guarantees, that in rage and power denied, Don might still try to claim her parents’ blood. But she hoped – she had to – that the Elders would step between them. She would do everything in her power to make it so, to make it public, visible, irrefutable.

Phi licked suddenly dry lips. “How will you do it?”

Something that might have been mirth flickered at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, I shan’t do a thing. Tell me, Delphine, what do you know of your people’s history?”

It was a strange question. “I know about my grandparents, if that’s what you mean, and about Aurora.”

“And of your very first days, when you were newly made by Ryar ap Sangager and sent across the steaming seas?”

“I know our legends,” she said uncertainly.

He gestured. “Enlighten me.”

She could read nothing from his face, which was still and white as unsullied snow. “It was the last days of the Burning Times. Things were desperate – Ryar had betrayed her own people to try and save the witches from annihilation, and hundreds of the dragons had gone with her, but it wasn’t enough. There were more dead than living, and the witches were begging her to try and save them somehow. She took some of their children and she gave them her own power, so that they would be strong when they grew, but she knew they couldn’t defend themselves…” She trailed off, feeling foolish. “Is this what you mean?”

“It is.”

“She knew they couldn’t defend themselves,” she repeated, “and the witches could spare no one from the fighting – or at least, anyone who would volunteer to go wasn’t likely to offer their lives to save a pair of freakish kids. So she went down to the ocean and she took the water and the starlight and the last of her hope and fashioned us from it. And then she gave the children to us and we took them far away from the war, over the ocean to a great, still land which knew nothing of fire and hatred.”

She snuck a glance at him. His half-closed eyes seemed sleepy, but she thought he’d made some small sound of contempt. Maybe it had been her imagination.

“Later, when the war was over, we returned to find Ryar. But she was dead – killed by her own husband, who couldn’t live with her betrayal. We searched until we found her body, here, beneath the lake, and we swore to guard her remains as we had guarded the children.” She spread her hands. “We’ve been here ever since.”

His laughter was sudden, jarring, and jagged with scorn. “An interesting version of the truth.”

“Isn’t everything?” she said flatly.

His glance was shrewd. “How very cynical. And accurate. Do you want the truth, Delphine? Do you think you can bear it?”

“Do I have a choice?”

She felt tired inside. Her mother had always told it as a fairytale; and Phi had always accepted it as one, and yet…and yet the history of the mer was something she had always taken pride in. Against a world at war, they had saved lives and made an idyll in a corner of the seas.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said bitingly. “It is part of my price.”

The fear was back, overwhelming. “And the rest?” she whispered. She had nothing to negotiate with – she could only take what he offered, and pray that the horror would have an end, if not a merciful one.

“A day and an hour.”

His eyes were dark as tar, heavy with desires that made her skin crawl. The metres separating them no longer seemed enough – she wanted miles between them, an ocean, the unending void of space.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said hesitantly, afraid that she did and wanting to be wrong.

“The day will be of my choosing. One day, Delphine Thetis, for which you are mine, and you will survive it.”

“Why?” she said, terror leaching her of all tact. Survive, yes. No mention of whole, unharmed, sane. Oh gods.

His smile made him beautiful, a creature of icy edges, sleek, dazzling, sharp.

“So that you will remember, and wait for the hour.”

She could not turn back. It was too late – she was no longer sure if this was the better choice, if she had run mad beneath her desperation and her panic, yet now she had to live with it. Perhaps to die for it. “Which hour?”

“The last hour of your life, Delphine,” he said in a voice rich with promise. “It will belong to me.”

A story, a day, an hour. It sounded such a small price if she thought only of the words and not of the intent behind them. Such a small price to rouse such awful and intense fear.

But what else could she do?

“Yes,” she answered at last.

His voice was pure, purring triumph. “So be it.”

“When-” she began, tentative and he cut her off with a raised finger.

“Why now, of course. Isn’t it said that there’s no time like the present?”

She could not answer him; she was paralysed.

“Although,” he added thoughtfully, “you may think otherwise when this is done.”

~*~

“So.”

Iry Lupine had felt the touch of time less than Jessica Arryn. His hair was flecked with grey, but his face was still youthful and his eyes still burned with unholy anger. He stalked towards Zeke, his mouth grim – and then he hit him so hard that Zeke staggered back into the wall. The picture of Aurora rattled on the mantelpiece.

“You’ve got a nerve,” snarled the werewolf.

Zeke wiped away the blood trickling from his mouth.

Iry lifted his hand again – and Jess caught it in her gnarled fingers.

“Not in my house, Iry.”

He barely gave Jess a glance. He could have shaken her off easily, yet the werewolf stood there, willingly shackled by her. “Then where, eh, Jess? Where’s a fit place to kill him?”

“There’s no such place,” the dolphin answered sharply. “I didn’t call you here to spill blood on my carpet. I called you to hear what he has to say.”

“I’ll hear,” Iry said flatly. “An’ then I’ve a few things of my own to say.”

Under that brutality shone a clear, profound grief.

He loved her, Zeke realized with a clammy, sick feeling in his stomach. Then - and now.

He had not thought it more than passing desire. Aurora had spoken of Iry as one admirer among many; merely the most persistent. But it had been more than that, and he had been too blind to see it.

And would he have cared? He was so desperate then, so very selfish. Aurora had opened up a future that was better than what lay before him. Zeke thought that he would have stolen her away, his changeling hope, no matter what.

And now…?

The thought was sudden and frightening. Yet unbidden it unfurled in his heart, blazing like a flag.

And now he had someone he was just as afraid to lose.

Zeke dared not follow it any further. To dawn-grey eyes and a mop of fiery hair, to…

To the reason he was here. He drew himself up, jaw aching, and gave Iry the flashing, arrogant smile he had seen on Fireblade so often. “Then say them where she can hear too.”

“You took her.”

“I buried her,” he acknowledged. He could not tell them why – of the ghastly fear that had haunted him, of the Burning Days come back to him and the terrible nature of all Fireblade’s sorceries.

A low snarl rolled over the room. There was no mistaking the hatred in Iry’s eyes. “Show me.”

~*~

“What do I need to do?”

Phi heard how flat her voice was. It didn’t seem quite real, any of it. Here she was, sat in the Demon Fury’s house. The sun was shining, the clock ticked on – she felt the world ought to have at least paused in its spin, but outside the birds still trilled merrily.

“Have a little patience,” he said idly, and then – to her utter disbelief – picked up a book and began to read.

She stared at him, but he didn’t appear to notice. All his attention was devoted to the book. She focused on the title, and couldn’t help but feel bemused.

“Good book?” she inquired, unable to contain herself.

“Educational,” he said. “You might find some merit in it.”

“I think I’ve grown out of fairytales,” she said acidly.

She was surprised when he leant over and handed her the book, but then she caught the glint of malice in his eyes. “Are you so sure?”

She dropped her eyes to the page. The words leapt up, and she was a child, Jess reading to her by the fading light of a summer sunset.

Far out at sea the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower and as clear as the purest glass, but it’s very deep, deeper than any anchor line can reach. Down there live the sea folk…

Speechless with mingled fear and fury, she handed it back and he settled into the story again. Now though, a faint smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. She hated him for it.

Adding insult to injury, he had the gall to sit in front of her reading The Little Mermaid.

Eventually, she could bear the mocking silence no longer. “I thought you said there was no time like the present.”

She gasped at the pain that hit her, twisting like a rotor blade inside her head. She was lost, helpless beneath agony, which moved with exquisite slowness through her – she tumbled in its wake, disjointed, thoughtless as world receded into black and red and grey-

It ceased. He had not even bothered to raise his eyes from the page, but she felt the power that simmered about him like smoke.

“You have a choice here, Delphine,” Bane Malefici murmured, and a certain drowsy languor in his voice told her that he had enjoyed her suffering. “You can wait quietly and patiently, or you can draw my attention again and have an accurate preview of just what one day with me will mean. Which would you prefer?”

Lips pressed together, she made no answer.

“Precisely,” he said, and thereafter nothing broke the hush except the rustle of a turning page.

She could not say how long it was she waited – long enough for her shivering to stop, for the pain to be no more than a thin film of memory.

And then a sound - the door opening, hasty footsteps…

A woman came into the room.

She seemed evanescent and shadowy – as if the sunlight would shine right through her. Her moon-white hair drifted about her in shining, fluttering array, pale as her skin. It was not a lovely face, rigid with fear, the darkness of her eyes like bruises.

But Phi knew the power that radiated from her because it was an echo of her own, magnified to a strength and a potency that could mean only one thing. It made even the strongest of the pod seem insignificant: for she was the true, clear note and they mere echoes.

“Ryar,” she gasped, not believing, not able to deny it.

And Ryar ap Sangager, the first and truest mermaid, who should have been dust in her tomb beyond the lake, raised those fearful eyes to her and the pain there pierced Phi like a spear.

It was true. It was her.

Her voice was soft as breaking waves. “Yes.”

But it’s too late to say you’re sorry
How would I know?
Why should I care?
Please don’t bother trying to find her
She’s not there.

~*~