[P] Linger

[Marisol]

there will be singing
about the dark times.

Marisol despises her, as soon as she walks in the door.

Or—not despises. (She is losing her edge, her way with words.) The Commander is jealous. Jealous in a way that defies description, jealous in a way that makes her skin burn, in a way that overtakes her until she feels nothing but burning, clawing envy green as sin in the corners of her mouth. 

Jealous: this girl is so bold as to enter her office dripping wet, sloughing sea-water over the floor, smelling like the bottom of the ocean. This girl, this thing, has no shame. She’s happy to waltz in here with her sharp-toothed smile and her hair wrapped in knots of seaweed. No problem with batting her lashes, wearing a smirk, holding her queen’s eyes a second longer and a modicum more intense than anyone could consider appropriate.

Mari does not make wrong decisions. But this—this may take more work than she’d anticipated.

Slowly, deliberately, she climbs to her feet. Anandi’s eyes are dark, far too dark, a whirlpool in deep water: Marisol meets them with an expression that is not cold, but surely critical, bordering on derogatory. When her lips curl, it is in a smile that is only partially amused. 

Her Emissary stands in the doorway, waiting to be invited in, and Marisol remembers her books. Dracula, Carmilla, La Morte Amoreuse. She remembers the old stories of vampires—how beautiful they are, and how unassuming. And how, where they are not bound to morals, they are bound to custom.

Now she really does smile, a brief, sweet flash of teeth.

Mari clears her throat. “That is your decision to make,” she says, somewhere between solemn and dryly amused, “As I will make mine. Come.” And she extends a wing in the tiniest kind of curtsy, stepping back to allow Anandi enough space to enter the narrow office, to slip into the space just in front of her. “I am curious to hear what you think we have to talk about.”

Never make the first move. Is this not the first rule of diplomacy?


“Speaking.”

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