Not Quite Human

Chapter 15

She watched them kill him.
The queen had made a public spectacle of it, setting an example for anyone who might be paying attention. She flinched with every strike of the whip, the sound of it finding something tender in her chest. The crowd cheered. Pathetic, all of them — finding their courage now, when he could no longer turn around and take it back from them.
He wouldn't beg. She knew that without having to watch. Her love would never give the queen the satisfaction.
There was nothing wrong with what they had done. They were blood fey. The others were lesser — that was simply the order of things, the way it was meant to be. Who did this queen think she was, making an example of him over a few deaths that were deserved?
She watched the queen hand Arrogane — her most favoured subject — a heavily spelled object, something that resembled a branding iron. She watched him press it into her love's eyes. The object fed on his soul. His scream tore through the air, his face frozen in an expression she would not forget. The queen dragged what remained of him back toward her castle, and she turned away. She had seen enough. He was already gone.
She walked home in tears.
The thought came to her quietly — that she could follow him, that it would be simple enough. She carried a knife. She turned it over in her hand and looked at it for a long moment.
But how would she avenge him if she did?
Her fingers tightened around the hilt. Under the full moon, she made her vow. She would strip every person who had raised their spine against him — every person who had cheered — of everything they had. She would make them bow. They would thank her for it, in the end. They were lesser people. They simply didn't know it yet.
She could wait. She would need allies first — people willing to share a cause and the patience it required.
She could be very, very patient.
Neil yawned like a hippopotamus and immediately noticed that something was wrong.
It was sweltering. Inexplicably, aggressively hot — despite the snow falling steadily outside his window. He was sweating through his sheets, tangled and miserable. He opened one eye and found the answer: three thick woollen blankets stacked on top of him and the heater cranked to maximum.
"LOKI."
He kicked the blankets to the floor without ceremony and dragged himself to the heater to pull the plug. The man-child would answer for this. One day. Possibly soon.
The day crawled by without Loki making an appearance — which Neil initially took as guilt, before remembering that Loki had no known relationship with the concept. He was more likely somewhere comfortable, planning the graffiti he'd draw on Neil's face overnight. Neil scowled at the memory of the previous morning: waking up to what appeared to be a glowing pink bunny on his face, rendered in something that absolutely would not wash off until he'd gone through the indignity of asking Loki to remove it.
Not that Neil was the only target. Loki loved riling Nerezza in particular. She had, over the past several days, been turned into a pink pig, a fluffy cat, a pug, and a squirrel, among other things. She'd bitten him once in retaliation, apparently hoping the venom would do something useful. It hadn't. The castle servants had also suffered periodically. The only people Loki left entirely alone were Abbadon and Damien, which Neil found both interesting and suspiciously strategic.
He thought about the boy he'd seen in the library yesterday — one of the palace servants, quietly searching the shelves when Neil came in. He'd never seen anyone jump so high at the sound of a door. The boy's arms had been covered in scars, and he wouldn't speak — had looked genuinely mortified when Neil offered to help him find whatever he was looking for. Neil had left him alone and watched him disappear from the room at considerable speed. He felt bad about it. He hadn't meant to frighten him.
One good thing had come out of the past few days, at least: Neil no longer crashed into things when he flew. He wasn't graceful about it by any measure, and his body still ached in the way of someone who'd recently taken up a very physical new habit, but he could manage. He was fairly sure Nerezza was quietly pleased with this, which was probably why she'd given him the day off. He suspected Loki's sustained chaos had something to do with it too — she likely just needed a break from being turned into small animals.
He couldn't blame her. Though he did miss having her around, for all that he'd never admit it easily.
Loki, for all his chaos, had become something Neil hadn't expected. Somewhere between the pranks and the man-child energy and the complete absence of appropriate boundaries, he'd turned into something that felt a lot like a big brother — the loud, ridiculous, occasionally infuriating kind that Neil had quietly wanted since he was small.
He wouldn't tell him that either. The last thing Loki needed was more power over him.