Awakening to My Nature (1)
"Miss, are you all right?"
I nodded at the deer mask's question. A faint guilt prickled at me — the sense that I had been the one to kill them — but that was only something the ring had shown me. More importantly, an enormous gap lay between the future the ring had revealed and the person I was now.
In the vision, the horns on my head hadn't existed. That was the future it showed if I were a human woman.
Before I sat, I called a waiter over and ordered a cold drink. Then, as if nothing at all had happened, I took a seat at the dice table with the cat mask, the lion mask, and the deer mask.
It wasn't only our table. All around us, people were throwing themselves into their bets with feverish heat. The game used five dice — three of gold and two of silver. You added the pips of the gold and subtracted the pips of the silver, and all five went into the same cup to be rolled at once, the better, they said, to shut out any chance of cheating.
"Minus three!"
"Minus nine!"
Hit a negative number and the payout could climb as high as thirty to one; hit a positive and it was five to one. Bet on a minus, though, and the multiplier dropped by one for every person who had put money on the same number.
A strange fervor hung over the place, and yet, seated before the dealer, I felt myself going cold. At the sight of me Ethan Mauter moved his head — only a little. A moment later he lost interest, seized two cups, and shook them.
"Ah, so close!"
"Ah!"
Gasps and excitement rose from every side, and my own heart began to lift. I had seen a vision, but it wasn't something that would happen right away. Above all, unlike the woman in that vision, I was a dragon. I let the current of the crowd take me.
I picked up a pouch and started betting ten gold coins at a time. I drained the drink the waiter set before me in a single swallow and laid money down again. The pouch, packed full of gold, showed its bottom in an instant. Once the first was gone, a heat climbed into my head; I set out two more pouches and began to raise the stakes. Thinking of everything I had already lost, I put one bet on a number even lower and more extreme, and another on a number that felt as if it might actually come up.
"Ten on minus nine! And..."
The three masks who had first approached me had vanished at some point. In their place sat unfamiliar masks, drawn in by my voice.
"Come now, miss. You'd do better with minus five here. You see..."
"What are you talking about? Right now, just like this young lady, minus nine is..."
The voices multiplied, and the pouches emptied. I cleaned out the second entirely, and about half of the third remained. This time, with the conviction that this one was real, I put a hundred gold coins on minus nine.
"A hundred on minus nine!"
"Ten on minus three!"
I was just thinking I ought to wrap it up with this and quit when a voice cut through.
"The result is minus three. Congratulations."
Of the fifteen people at the table, five had bet on minus three. Two hundred and fifty gold coins appeared for each of them in a flash, and I filled my second pouch to the brim. It did not take long after that before I had gone through the third pouch as well.
I wondered whether I ought to exchange more money, then thought better of it and stood. My head cooled. I had kept going because the money I'd lost stung, and in the end I lost every coin. Gambling was gambling, I told myself, walking the floor. The excitement and the heat of the crowd burned through time in an instant. It was fun, though.
Max arrived right on time — the man I had sent to fetch someone. Following the guide, I found him dressed in clean clothes acquired from somewhere, and beside him a woman I had never seen. The moment Max saw me he flinched, and his eyes darted. Come to think of it, I had never once lowered my hood in front of him.
The woman seated at his side was quite pretty. A ponytail, a height of about five foot three, the face of a maiden who looked thoroughly innocent.
Her dark brown hair and emerald-green eyes were lovely, yet whatever was unsettling her, she could not keep her body still for even a moment. I sat down in front of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and only then did Max seem to recognize me. He shot to his feet, bent halfway over, and offered a greeting.
"Aigoo. Lady Croa. Those horns are magnificent. Forgive me for not knowing you at once. You simply cannot trust these money-grubbing bastards. What do you think of this one? I prepared her as a bed warmer. Introduce yourself."
"Ah — h-hello. My name is Mary."
An enormous bosom heaved. It nearly rivaled my own. Even so, my figure was surely the better one. I had spent a long time customizing it, after all.
But a bed warmer... did that mean a sex slave?
"What?"
The moment I spoke, Max went silent. About three seconds passed. Then his eyes flew wide, and he slammed his head against the table in apology.
"I'm sorry! The name Croa — I thought you were a man, and without thinking I..."
"No, no. Right. I see."
Now that I thought about it, this game really did have a lot of useless NPCs. And I was curious, besides. Taking my own chest in my hands had felt unpleasant, and it had brought a sour wash of self-loathing. With that woman, I thought, I might actually be able to spend my lust. I stopped Max, who was already trying to hustle her out in a panic.
"Fine. She'll do."
I turned away and removed the mask. Once my face was hidden again beneath the hood, I left the Secret Garden with the two of them.
Sunset was sinking through the sky. I had gone in before lunch, clearly, so I must have stayed a long while. When we reached the mansion I had newly bought, Max led me to the banquet hall. Thirty people I had never seen were waiting there. Six were cooks; the rest, he said, would manage the house and serve as its staff. Mary was among them.
Max climbed onto the stage that had been set up in the hall.
"Today! The reason we were able to gather like this..."
He spoke better than I had expected. I had taken him for a useless thug, but it seemed I had picked up a decent one. When the short speech ended, Max called me forward.
"And the one who brought us all together — Lady Croa Renium!"
He didn't ask anyone for applause. I could feel him watching my face, reading me. I liked that. Nothing grandiose, and a good eye for the room. We were going to be bound together for quite some time, I suspected.
I stepped up onto the stage and lowered my hood. There was no reason to keep it on for long inside my own house. A ripple of gasps went through the hall.
"Do what needs doing, and keep what needs keeping. That's all."
I gave Max's shoulder a light tap — he was staring, a little dazed — and he jolted as if waking up. Stammering slightly, he began introducing the people of the house to me. In truth it felt less like a noble's presentation and more like a boss being shown his crew.
In the banquet hall the cooks prepared food on the spot. It amounted to little more than mixing ingredients that had already been trimmed and readied, but the taste was decent. The small party satisfied me. Light chatter passed around the room while Max carried the mood. When I brought out a little of the aged liquor that had been sitting in my Sub-space, eyes rolled back and cups went up, and once the sun had fully set the drinkers abruptly burst into motion.
They cleared the hall. The cooks went to sleep against the chance of a summons at dawn. The servants started back toward the annex, but Max called Mary aside and came over to me.
"Which room were you thinking of sleeping in?"
"The largest. The furniture's all been placed, hasn't it? That's what I gave you the money for."
"Of course. With this many people and this much money, that much is the bare minimum."
Needlessly smooth. Max ordered Mary to wash first and have everything ready. A sudden curiosity stirred in me.
"Max. You seem used to this sort of thing."
"I'm only doing the basics. Just the basics. You have no idea how much time I spent reading faces while I rolled around the bottom. Do that long enough and you learn to steal a look at everything a person does, and pick it up. I worked as a servant for the coin, skimmed a little while I was at it..."
The light joke didn't grate. I nodded and headed for the fourth floor. Five rooms waited up there: one a bath, one a privy, and the rest bedrooms. I had the feeling I had seen the place somewhere before. People said that sleeping in a different room now and then left you feeling new. Whether that was true, I couldn't say.
I washed at my leisure, then stepped into the largest bedroom — and found Mary in the bed, face flushed red, gone stiff as a board. I was every bit as tense. It wasn't that my appetite was especially fierce. I was only doing this out of curiosity, and because it was still far too early to sleep. Putting on the calmest face I could manage, I threw off the robe and the rest of my clothes and lay down beside Mary in nothing but my underwear.
"Well then. I'll be in your care."
Perhaps she was ashamed of her nakedness; Mary would not come out from under the blanket. The face that looked ready to cry was cute. I drew my fingers gently down the back of her head. She flinched every time, and it was plain she was every bit as innocent as she looked.
"Um... what should I start with..."
Mary asked it in a voice that seemed to crawl. But I didn't know either.
What would a shut-in who never did anything but grind games know? In the adult videos, they always started with a kiss. Was that what I was supposed to do?
I looked down at Mary. Her face and her body certainly weren't bad. The sight of that innocent face put a thought in me — that I, the man, ought to be the one to lead. An awkward, indecent air settled over the room. Lying beside her, I slipped off what little underwear remained and let it fall to the floor below the bed. I snuffed the candle on the bedside table, and darkness covered the room.
Mary closed her eyes and parted her lips like a baby bird. Slowly I brought my face to hers and pressed our mouths together. When our teeth clicked lightly, Mary lifted her head. My tongue was still hesitating over whether to cross the threshold when hers came to meet it and wound around it. The slick collision of tongue against tongue filled the room with wet, sucking sounds. My own tongue had gone rigid; hers toyed with it, deft and unhurried.
Sensation swelled, little by little. I gave my body over to that strange feeling and closed my eyes. The hand that had been cupping Mary's head loosened and came to rest neatly on the bed. She tipped my chin up and laid me out flat on my back. Even then, our mouths never parted. The moment her saliva formed it spilled into mine — whether from gravity, or because my own was far too slick. One hand closed around my right horn. The other seized the back of my head and pulled me in hard.
I could not resist her.