Monday January 19th 2015

Cesare met the girls at the bottom of the stairs, taking in their sidelong looks. Those looks had started after the incident with the gladiators. They'd thought he'd lose. Had readied themselves to swoop in and rescue him from his choices.

Alexandra was proud, but it was the back handed pride of an owner for a particularly well trained dog. She enjoyed sparring with him, but they both knew she could tear through him like a piñata made of rotting meat. It was hard to respect someone unworthy of killing. He was a cute puppy, fun to play with but worthless in a fight.

Anastasia had known him too long. She’d seen her harem beat him into the ground, had watched him scramble in the dirt like a maggot. That would always be her first impression, a worthless victim, a lesson to teach, a mission to accomplish. Only months separated him from being a maggot to now. She’d been there when his guts hit the air and he was butchered into less than a pig for slaughter.

He wasn’t asking them to respect his strength, had long ago faced the fact he’d never be worth it. But that didn’t mean he had to stay a pet in need of protecting. With time to plan and perfect circumstances, he might pull a win. But in the world of predator and prey, he was one failed trick away from the butcher’s block.

“I hear Greg and Dan will do their presentation today,” Anastasia said, eyeing his reaction. “You know, I thought a lot over the weekend, and I don’t see why they did it.”

“Abraxas put them up to it,” Cesare said as he met her sharp eyes. “He wanted to push you out of your game, get your mind fucked for training, and make you an easy mark for the fight. I had a talk with him.”

The girls stumbled at his words. Opening her mouth, Anastasia slowly closed it. “I don’t know where to start.”

Alexandra didn’t share her problem. “When did you know he was behind it?”

“Friday. I got it out of Greg when he was on the ground.”

“And you kept it to yourself.” Thick with anger, the vampire’s eyes blazed into his.

“Neither of you could help me,” Cesare said, weathering the glares of the two. “This had to be done in the shadows. You don't have the skills or flexibility of conscience needed for that kind of work.”

The three of them walked in silence as they mulled over his words. Hitting the stairs into Primrose, Alexandra stopped him with a hand on his arm. “What happened?”

Anastasia pushed in, face a mix of worried anger. “You should have told me. I had a right to know. It was my ass they thought they were jacking off too.”

She’d been the one humiliated, degraded, and cast aside, turned into less than a fleshy fuck doll in their eyes. She had every right to know who had put the two boys up to it. “You would have confronted the snake and gotten into a fight you can’t win … yet. You'd be expelled if he even let you walk away,” Cesare said.

Her eyes flared with fury. It didn’t matter that he was right, all that meant anything was that Cesare had taken it from her. “That wasn’t your call. It was mine.”

She was right. It should have been hers from the beginning, the planning, the execution, the final scream that cut the air, her banquet to savor. From the fight with Greg and Dan, to confronting Abraxas, in a fair world it would have been her show.

Looking at his princess, with her ravaged, melted flesh, and darkly incandescent eyes hot with thwarted fury, he couldn’t deny she was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that wasn’t flesh and bone. “What would you have done?” Cesare asked.

With a shake of her head, she refused to be pulled away from the point. “I’m not a child, Cesare. I can take care of myself. You should have trusted me enough to talk to me, instead of doing your own thing.”

“I’d still like to know what you did.” Alexandra cut in sharply with a glare for Anastasia. The vampire had limits to what she'd allow others to say to Cesare.

“I set bombs in the dragon’s room and told him I’d kill him if he fucked with us,” Cesare said, the word stopped the girl’s dead, both of them blinking in stunned surprise.

Alexandra seemed stuck between raw admiration for the sheer balls it took, and the need to slap him for doing something so stupid. Admiration won as she broke out in peels of bell like laughter, her smile blooming bright and hungry, hand tightening on his shoulder. “Brilliant. In one sweep, you locked him into a course you control.” A cloud of sadness passed over her face, eyes overflowing with something too violently wild to fit into civilized words.

Looking between them, Anastasia’s words broke the silent bond. “I don’t get it. Bombs wouldn’t stop him, even in the mendacium.”

With a nod, Cesare handed Alexandra the floor. Hand resting on Cesare’s shoulder, the vampire inclined her head to him before addressing Anastasia. “They've dictated the conflict up to this point. Getting you back on the team is the prize, but it goes deeper than that, it’s about control of the school. Us or the Thagirion.” Alexandra stopped, seeking Cesare's approving nod.

“We form a block of power that must be controlled or broken. They can’t let us be together and keep their authority. Our joining was a sea change for the school. Even if you return to the team, the fact that we’re seen as a group threatens their standing. They have to win the fight to prove through blood that they’re the strongest,” Alexandra whispered, eyes sweeping the grounds for listeners.

“And threatening Abraxas changes that how? Because I still don’t see it, and I have no intentions of fighting the Thagirion for control of the school,” Anastasia said, voice cutting air. “The abuses prove that good could be done if the right people came to power. People who care about the less privileged.” Cesare never doubted she wanted to help the other students, but that wasn’t what drove her to keep the Thagirion in place. No, the hidden truth was, if we tore them down, she couldn’t claim their power.

Shaking her head, Alexandra’s eyes cooled. “All power corrupts. The greater the power, the greater the corruption. The only power that’s pure is power given up to God.”

Turning, Cesare led them into the school. “Before we get into a philosophical argument on the nature of the universe, let me tell you how I shifted things. By forcing Abraxas to realize my power existed outside established boundaries, I changed the paradigm and added myself to the table. Playing by the rules to keep me sidelined is a good deal for him. He can’t match me for dirty deeds, but he can keep me from playing my cards. That means staying away from stunts like he pulled last week.”

Anastasia searched his face. “Or what?”

“I’ll eliminate the Thagirion.” Starkly simple, the words settled in the air with a finality greater than death. Alexandra’s smile was a feral thing, frighteningly alive with lethal intent, glittering with a pride she didn’t hide.

Shaking her head, Anastasia's lips twitched with amusement. “Cesare … I know you’ve gotten stronger, but there’s no way you could take any of them in a fight. They’d step on you without noticing.”

“You’re just like Abraxas,” Cesare said, his words stripped the smile off Anastasia’s face. “You think fighting is a time, place, and rules. That’s a joke, a game for kids measuring cocks, not a fight worth the name. I’m that bug you called me a second ago.” Cold seeped into the air at his words, a biting, nasty thing, burrowing into bones and biting at soft bits. Shadows lengthened down the hallway, sanctifying newborn sunlight with tendrils of darkness.

“A spider doesn’t fight the tiger, what does the tiger have that the spider wants? The spider bites when it's pushed before quickly scuttling into the darkness at the first chance. No honor, no pride, no cheering, only a cold decision birthed crying and bloody from the womb of necessity. Umbrae Lunae can be poisoned, burned alive, blown up, and cut to pieces. It takes perfect planning, and heavy demolition to get it done, but familiarity breeds weakness. After months of living here, I know where to hit, and now Abraxas knows it.” Violence saturated the air, stroking across the back of the neck and the tender part of the thighs, stalking the shadows on the edge of sight.

Anastasia stared at him as if she was seeing him for the first time, behind the masks he wore, down to the arctic core of who he was, to the part birthed in sewers and raised by crippled souls. Ruthless, amoral, and cruel, it was the evil that thrived on the streets, existing in the fleshy hell where innocence was the only commodity. Lain inside him, slithering through his blood and heart, it had grown day by day, gorging itself on stillborn empathy and the dregs of his compassion.

She flinched back from the unrelenting viciousness of his eyes, turning away in troubled silence. It was hard to face the death of an image you’d crafted. She’d created an idol of who she wanted him to be, throwing away the facts that proved its lie. He wasn’t what she wanted, hell, he wasn’t who he wanted to be. But the only thing life had left Cesare with was who he was. False idols always die, taking the best parts of you with them when they go.

No one had ever liked the deformed face under the mask he wore. It didn’t matter who they were or where they came from. He was unnatural, a crippled abomination, a being born with a dissected dead thing in place of the shining hearts others owned. Born wrong in a fundamental way, a lifetime of degradation, abuse, and torture, had only honed his cruel madness.

Shaking his head, Cesare was caught by Alexandra's predatory stare. She met his eyes unflinchingly, not only met them, but smiled as if she’d just come home after being locked out in the cold. That savage core that disgusted the world was what drew her to him.

Anastasia's easy rejection brought the familiar wash of self-disgust and raw apathy twisting into a chimera that snuggled into his heart. No god was going to bless his evil. What he'd done to survive was unforgivable, no one saw anything worthy in him. And in the world’s rejection, he’d come to a torturous acceptance, an easy self-loathing that pulsed with sickly hate. It was ugly, but it was his.

Alexandra bumped his shoulder with a grin, the light of understanding turning her green eyes almost luminescent. Only another abomination could understand the darkness of his diseased soul. If anyone would know that truth, it was the psychotic vampire. Bumping her back, he returned the grin, his mood breaking apart under her shining happiness.