Five to Love Him (Phoenix Immortal: Hive #1)

2. HIVE

two

W e looked over our shoulder. It was what we did, ever since before coming to Newstaten’s underground. It was safe here though, and quiet, and expecting to be followed, to find shadows chasing us, should have become a fading urge, but far from it.

“Hey, did you get that?” asked a customer at the Dazzle, and we flinched in our sleep, at the stove in the small house at the end of Silver Line, and with our notepad in hand, standing at the customer’s table.

“We—I did, sir,” we said. Back at the stove and while balancing our checkbook at the kitchen table, we practiced it back and forth, saying I instead of the more natural we . It was not a requirement at the Dazzle, but we never knew when we’d have to be able to fit in again.

We focused on the Dazzle where two of us were currently working. It was a good job, better than we had expected from a literal underground bar. We wanted to give it our all, even if they were only paying us like they would a singular and had told us never to be more than two while we took a shift. We repeated the order to assure the customer and made our way back to the bar.

“Hey, do you have an issue with snakes?” the barkeeper and our boss asked us.

“No, Coral. Why?”

They—he looked at us as if confused. “You nearly jumped out of your skin when the gorgon over there talked to you.” He looked at us where we were slicing lemons at the other end of the bar. “Both of you.”

“Oh. We were just lost in thought, Coral. We apologize. It won’t happen again.”

Coral sighed and leaned forward to glance at our notepad. “One Bloody Mary coming up. And don’t add Coral each time you talk to me, okay? It’s a bit much.”

We nodded—all of us. “Okay, Co—okay.”

Back home, we looked up from our checkbook while we turned around in our sleep and moved on from the lemons to get two customers their beers. We still didn’t know how to talk to singulars, not really. Sometimes, their names were important, but clearly you could overuse them. Where was the line though? Yes, we knew the theory of it, but failing in the practice frustrated us, some days more than others.

We looked at the checkbook. Numbers were easy and had always been, but this was hard. Small doubts crept through all of us sometimes. Should we really have left? We could have borne it. A hive was not easily broken. But we had wanted freedom. We had wanted not to hurt.

All the same, sometimes we wondered.

***

When the human walked into the Dazzle, we were incredulous and surprised for all of two seconds before a fuzzy warmth spread through all of us. We checked the time on our phone. An hour to midnight on a workday was late for normal humans, and normal humans at the Dazzle stuck out even when it wasn’t late for them.

This human had come with another and with an oceanic. The other human looked very neat and clean. Clean in all the ways, like someone who wasn’t going to explode and beat you up. He had a messenger bag and brown hair. We took note because the first human—the gleaming one—and this one had come in together and clearly knew one another. It mattered that he didn’t look like he would hurt the gleaming one.

But the gleaming one…we knew only we could see the gleaming. He looked very neat too, so pretty. He had one of those cross-body shoulder bags we’d seen on others but never gotten for ourselves, and his hair was a light, golden brown with a soft wave to it. The strands reached over his ears, and we wanted to touch both his ears and his hair. Back home, we woke up and blinked the sleep from our eyes.

“Hey, what’s gotten into you?” asked Coral. They—he followed our line of sight. “Oh. Is that a shifter? You like broad shoulders, hive?”

“We…excuse us.”

We headed toward the group and checked we looked presentable from behind the bar where we were making a Gin and Tonic. Luckily, we did. At home, we got dressed and put the checkbook away while turning off the stove and covering the stew so we could eat later. This took precedence over dinner.

The oceanic was big, bigger than we were, but most oceanics were not aggressive either, especially not on land.

“You’re full already?” they asked, clearly assuming we’d turn them away. It was not unusual. The Dazzle was popular.

“No, not at all. We just wanted to show you to a table. You will need room for three?”

The gleaming human looked at us. He had brown eyes, but the left one had a flake of green in it. We loved that.

“Yeah. And just for one or two rounds,” the oceanic said.

“Please follow me,” we said and led them to one of the quiet tables at the back where we’d have an easy time keeping an eye on them.

“Wow, this goes on! Ez, you never told me this place was this big!”

“It’s like a cave,” the gleaming one said, and we also loved their voice. We blushed.

“You could call it an artificial cave. This area was dug out to make room for the bar,” we told them.

“Sort of creepy,” the gleaming one said.

Back home, we checked we looked as neat as was possible on short notice and headed out. We’d not be able to come into the Dazzle, of course, because Coral had forbidden it, but we’d wait outside to take the gleaming one home. And maybe we’d have to explain to him. Although, with humans who were here and with a supernatural, things should be easier and quite straightforward, thanks to Hawthorne. They had very strict rules about who got to go down to the underground, one of the reasons why we’d decided to live here rather than above.

Now of course all of that might change. We’d have to figure something out if that was the case. But no, there was no if. It would have to change. Just a little over two hundred square feet was fine for us, but humans often liked to have more room than that and could easily feel cramped if there were too many singulars around. And they would see us as that at first, as singulars, at least if they’d never interacted with one of us.

We beamed at them. “We here at the Dazzle think that creepy is our selling point.” Coral had told us to explain this to newcomers and the curious, although we didn’t quite have his lernean charm.

The gleaming one looked at us while the other two were sitting down. He looked so long that we thought we had offended or done something wrong, but then he started a smile like that cat from the old cartoons, the one that kept trying to catch the mouse although they were actually in love.

“Creepy is good.”

We exhaled. That was a relief.