Den of Vipers
After five baths, six hours of sleep, and two glasses of wine, Esme was ready to set her next assassination attempt into motion.
She slunk through riotous West Amaris. Magic stung her lungs with its giddiness. Every kind of person clogged the streets, scraping for any bit of fun they could wring from each other, whether it be pleasure in the back of a brothel or stolen money in the back of an alley.
But Esme was not here to overindulge (boo); she was here, yet again, to ruin Isobel’s plans. Maybe Bal had been on to something when he’d said Isobel would use Magic animals for the Valosia. If so, she had a scheme to flip that terrible woman’s plans on their head.
Esme followed the whirling streets to a large, open courtyard with an old-style manor plopped in the center.
The people kissing and smoking and ruining themselves in the grass were just the overflow from the madness inside.
Long ago, the house had belonged to Ramniel, but it had been bought by an upstart family and was now home of the biggest, loudest party in the city. A party that never ended.
The building was wide and low, having only three floors.
The front was all floor-to-roof pillars and acrobats twisted themselves around the ancient limestone.
A particularly ingenious chemist had found ways to change the colors of fire, and each pillar was lit with a flame of a different color around its base.
Drums thumped so heavily from within its the walls, Esme thought it might crack them.
She walked right up to the large man guarding the door. He took one look at her low-cut neckline and the color of her hair and knew exactly what she was. He winked, nodded, and stepped aside.
Esme grinned at the pure, delicious chaos.
Couples (and throuples and fourouples) enjoyed each other openly on the many velvet lounges and glossy wood floors.
The whole affair was dirty and base and sticky, but the home itself sung with so much innate grandness that it made the depravity whimsical.
Erotic portraiture from all over the world decorated the walls.
The haze of imported alcohol and domestic cigars made it difficult to see past one’s nose.
A man blowing fire out of his mouth hung from the mile-high ceiling.
A golden serpent about ten feet long lounged upon the shoulders of a pretty redhead who wore nothing but its heavy body.
This was the Den.
It was three stories of debauchery, all facilitated by its twin owners, Kiren and Karin.
Only nobles could afford the entry fee, which had been waived for Wraiths after Urias brokered a lucrative deal for them to purchase the place a decade ago.
The only way a commoner could get in was by working as a night lady or lord, and then the twins took half their pay anyway.
They were very selective with the workers they allowed in. There were auditions.
Stepping into the foyer was like walking through a Void and being spat out in another world. Magic here was a smog, and breathing it in had Esme’s chest stinging.
“You’re ravishing tonight.” Magic’s black fingers wrapped around the dip of her waist and its face nestled into her neck. “Let us have fun.”
“I’m busy,” Esme said, barely keeping her voice even. “Why are you so thick here?” she asked.
“Where else would we wish to be?” Magic sung. “Your late lover kept such a delicious feast from us for years. Now that he is gone, we may indulge.”
“He’s been dead for decades. Why now?”
“You have finally tipped over the edge.”
Esme didn’t know what that meant, but it felt like the kingdom was on some irredeemable path to ruin, and she refused to think of that. “Well, have fun while you can,” she said, and bit her cheek. Her stomach flipped when she saw a man and two women pinned together not far away.
“Is that what you would like?” Magic asked, following her gaze. It slid its cold fingers up her neck and over her eyes.
Suddenly, everyone was Mina and Bal. Everyone.
A Bal sat just a few feet from her, with a Mina kissing up his neck as he held Esme’s gaze.
His gentle hands played in her wife’s hair before grabbing a fistful of it, and Esme’s breath disappeared in her lungs.
Bal leaned in and kissed down the column of Mina’s throat, and Esme’s own stung with the memories of the previous night.
She touched her neck, too deep into her craving to remember anything but the softness of his lips dragging across her skin and the bone-breaking hold he had on her body.
What she’d do to be held like that again, right now. Her legs itched to walk all the way back to the castle just to crawl into Bal’s bed.
But for now she was here, in the Den, and there were so many more Bals here than in that castle, anyway.
A new hand flattened on the glistening chest of the one she was watching and slid across it, then caressed Mina’s cheek before dancing its fingers down the delicate slope of her spine.
This hand belonged to a new man, one with black hair tied back messily.
Twin steaks of silver from his widow’s peak dripped onto his impossibly wide shoulders.
He had horns, pretty and bone white, like a ram’s.
His radiant skin was the sun made flesh, and his face, even part hidden by a curtain of hair, made Esme’s belly twist. She wanted him so badly, her stomach gnashed.
His touch would be her food and drink and his kiss her shelter and light.
It would be all she needed. Nothing else in the world would count.
All she had to do was submit to his pull.
There was only one of him in the whole room, and she desperately wanted to put herself between him, Bal, and Mina.
It would be so easy. It would feel so good.
“Get off me,” Esme bit out, wrenching herself from Magic’s illusions. With its glamour gone, the man and all the Bals and Minas disappeared, reverting to the people they really were.
“We simply showed you what you wish to experience.” Magic wheezed a laugh. “Do not blame us for your perversion.”
“Leave me and my perversion alone. And keep those hands off me and my lovers,” Esme seethed, stepping over a puddle left by someone very dehydrated.
“Hmm. We love the taste of your love,” Magic sang. “Don’t you need something? Wouldn’t you give us just a little bit? We promise to make it worth it.” Its spindly fingers tapped around her shoulders. “I can bring that pretty horned man to you if you wish.”
Esme’s heart tripped over a beat. She didn’t know who the man was, but her body did. She searched her own memory for him—some drunken romp in another country, or a tryst—but she could find him nowhere. He was new to her yet somehow carved on her heart.
“He was a pretty face you threw into a fantasy. I don’t need a fantasy.”
“Hmm, but you are so tense. Surely you need something—”
“Go make someone piss on someone else. I’m busy,” Esme said, shooing it away. Its tinkling little laugh whispered off.
She weaved through the bodies to the steps on the other side of the foyer, then climbed them three at a time, eager to outrun the temptation to go back down and ask Magic to slap that glamour back over her eyes.
Maybe later.
Esme moved through a hallway at the top of the steps with an iron will.
A man leaning against a wall had that mystery man’s jaw, and the girl tucked into his chest was offering an unbeatable price for an ounce of the season’s favorite drug.
The lord cackling with his three mistresses could have been so easily pickpocketed that it was almost a crime not to grab his satchel and run.
Three men were being loud in the corner and Esme could hear and hate their every word.
There was a window at the end of the hall, and it would have taken half a thought to push all three out at once.
The crimson splatter they’d make on the pavement below might even look pretty.
Fuck.
She stumbled into a wall and shook her head. This was even worse than what had gotten to her and Bal last night. If Magic was getting to her this badly, she couldn’t imagine what it did to the humans.
Well, she did know knew what it did, of course. There was an orgy downstairs, and she’d just stepped over a bundled-up Uhmerian rug that reeked of burned flesh.
She took a turn down the hall, and Magic thinned, just enough for her to breathe and remember what she was there to do. She took another turn and came to the end of a hallway with a man standing watch in front of it.
“I need to see your employers,” she told him.
“Are they expecting you?” the man asked, moving his coat to flash her the knife strapped to his belt.
“Of course they are.”
The man struck the wall with his hand, and a segment of it just tall and wide enough to walk through sank into the ground, revealing a door behind it, which then swung open.
Another man stood behind it, arms crossed.
He gave her a once-over but took her up a thin set of black steps to another door, guarded this time by a woman with silver eyes.
“Do you know the time?” she asked.
“Twenty-three and four halves,” Esme replied.
“That is impossible.”
“Thank you.”
The woman smiled and pulled a crowbar from the back of her belt. She shoved the tip into the small slot between the door and the frame and pried it open. “They’ve been waiting,” she said, nodding to the ruined door.
Esme eased through the door and closed it behind her, watching as magic sewed the ruined splinters back together and fixed the frame, then slid a bolt home, resealing it.
The last little traces of Ramniel’s magic lingered in these old places. Esme smiled almost fondly at it.
“Finally got the door to work, Kiren?” she asked, perking a brow at the twin sitting at their shared desk. The other one was pulling something out of a folder on the other side of the room.