Chapter 3 Tamsin
The heat hits me first—volcanic, primal, the kind that makes you immediately aware of every layer of clothing clinging to your skin and how desperately you want to shed all of it.
I step through the reinforced door and the air wraps around me like a humid, eucalyptus-scented blanket, thick enough to breathe, heavy enough to feel against my exposed skin.
My lungs fill with the herbal warmth. My skin prickles with instant sweat.
The room smells like sage and mineral stone and something ancient and earthy—like the inside of a cave that hasn't seen sunlight in a thousand years, like standing at the mouth of a geothermal vent where the earth itself exhales heat.
The lighting is dim, recessed into the smooth volcanic stone walls that gleam dark and polished in the orange glow.
Oversized heat lamps burn in the corners with a dull, molten light that makes the entire space feel like the inside of a kiln, like I've just stepped into the belly of a forge where something massive and dangerous is being slowly, carefully tempered.
And then I see him.
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
The reinforced massage table is massive—industrial-grade, built to support non-human anatomy—and I thought that meant a really big werewolf, maybe a minotaur, something vaguely humanoid with extra muscle mass and a tendency to shed during full moons.
I was catastrophically wrong.
The thing on the table is a geological event made flesh.
He's face-down in the padded cradle, arms hanging at his sides, and he takes up the entire table—not just the length of it, but the entire width, his shoulders so broad they extend past the reinforced edges.
His back is a landscape of slate-gray stone, smooth and dense, carved with ridges of muscle that look like they were sculpted by someone with a very specific vision of "intimidating as hell" and "completely untouchable. "
And then there are the wings.
Oh, Jesus Christ, the wings.
One is folded against his back, tucked in tight, the leathery membrane draped across his spine like a collapsed parachute made of shadow and bone.
The other is extended across the plush furs, stretched out to its full span—easily eight feet from tip to tip, maybe more, the membrane dark and glossy, almost black, with a faint iridescent sheen that catches the dim orange light and throws it back in subtle gradients of charcoal and deep purple.
There are sharp bone spurs at the joints—wrist, elbow, shoulder—each one as long as my forearm and wickedly pointed, the kind of natural weaponry that makes you immediately recalibrate your understanding of what "dangerous" actually means.
I stand in the doorway and stare.
This is my client.
This is the thing I'm supposed to massage.
This is what I signed an NDA for.
My brain is doing that thing where it tries to process too much information at once and just sort of.
.. stalls, like a computer that's been asked to run a program it wasn't designed for, like my entire nervous system is buffering while it tries to reconcile "massage therapist" with "geological cryptid with functional wings. "
Okay. Okay. This is fine. This is a job. You've worked on weird anatomy before. Remember that guy with the back acne that looked like a topographical map? This is just... bigger. And made of stone. And has wings. And probably weighs more than your car. But it's fine. It's totally fine.
It is not fine.
I take a breath—the air is so thick and warm it feels like I'm inhaling soup, like breathing through a hot towel—and I force my legs to move.
One step. Two steps. I walk toward the table, my sneakers silent on the polished stone floor, and as I get closer, I start to notice details that make my professional assessment instincts kick in despite the sheer absurdity of the situation.
His skin isn't just gray. It's slate-gray, with a texture that looks smooth from a distance but up close has a faint grain to it, like polished granite, like someone took a massive slab of volcanic rock and carved it into the shape of a man and then breathed life into it just to see what would happen.
There are veins running beneath the surface—not regular veins, but something else entirely, something that glows.
Crystalline tracery spreads across his shoulders and spine, pulsing with a dim, unstable light that flickers between soft gold and dark orange, like molten metal cooling unevenly, like his body is barely holding itself together and the light is the only thing keeping him from cracking apart.
The luminous seams are concentrated along his spine, his shoulder blades, the base of his wings, spreading outward in delicate networks that look almost organic, almost beautiful, if you ignore the fact that they're glowing because something is very, very wrong.
I stop at the edge of the table.
He doesn't move.
He doesn't acknowledge me.
He just lies there, massive and immobile, his forehead resting in the padded cradle, his arms hanging limp at his sides, and I can see the way his entire upper back is locked up, the way the slate-gray skin along his left shoulder blade is darker, almost charcoal, the golden networks beneath pulsing with dangerous instability.
I clear my throat.
Nothing.
"Hi," I say. My voice sounds small in the heavy, heated air, swallowed by the volcanic warmth. "I'm Tamsin. I'll be your therapist tonight."
Still nothing.
Okay. Cool. Silent treatment. Great start.
I walk around the table, assessing, because this is what I do—this is my job, and I'm good at it, even when the client is a seven-foot-tall gargoyle who apparently communicates exclusively through brooding silence.
The extended wing is the most immediate problem.
It's stretched out across the furs, the membrane taut, the bone spurs at the joints vibrating slightly with tension.
I can see the calcification spreading down the leathery skin, a grayish discoloration that looks like frost creeping across a window, like his body is slowly turning itself into a monument.
His left shoulder blade is worse. The slate-gray skin is darker there, rigid, and the crystalline tracery beneath is glowing a deep, unstable orange, pulsing erratically like a warning light on a machine that's about to catastrophically fail.
This is bad.
This is really bad.
I've worked on athletes with severe muscle tension, construction workers with chronic pain, office drones whose shoulders were so knotted they could barely turn their heads without wincing.
This is worse than all of that combined.
I take another breath—the eucalyptus is making my sinuses tingle, making my eyes water slightly—and my palms are already sweating from the heat, from the adrenaline, from the sheer absurdity of standing in front of a gargoyle and thinking, Yeah, I can fix this.
Okay. You can do this. You need to do this. Five thousand dollars, Tamsin. Five thousand dollars and you can pay rent and eat something other than ramen for the next three months. You can do this.
I walk over to the supply station built into the volcanic stone wall, stocked with oils, towels, and what looks like a small arsenal of massage tools that probably cost more than my entire apartment.
I grab a bottle of high-heat volcanic oil—the label says it's designed for "extreme temperature tolerance" and "non-human dermal application," which is both reassuring and deeply concerning.
I also grab a hair tie from my bag. My hair is already sticking to the back of my neck from the heat, damp with sweat. I twist it up into a bun and secure it with the pen I keep in my pocket. Professional. Efficient. Totally not panicking.
I strip off my hoodie. Underneath, I'm wearing a black tank top and leggings. The tank top is already clinging to my skin, damp with sweat. I roll my shoulders, shake out my hands, and try to channel every ounce of professional competence I possess.
I pour a generous amount of volcanic oil into my palms. The oil is thick, almost gel-like, and it smells like burnt sage and mineral stone, like something ancient and powerful. I rub my hands together, warming it up, and then I approach the table.
I place my hands on his upper back.
The texture is shocking.
It's not skin. Not in any way that my brain recognizes as skin.
It's cold—not just cool, but cold, like pressing my palms against a granite countertop that's been sitting in a freezer.
Rigid. Smooth in some places, rough in others, with that faint grain that makes it feel more like stone than flesh.
There's no give. No warmth. No softness.
I press harder.
Nothing.
I shift my weight, leaning into the pressure, and I feel the faintest resistance—not from his body yielding, but from my own hands struggling to find purchase on the stone surface, like trying to massage a marble statue.
This is going to be a problem.
I've worked on clients with dense muscle tissue before—bodybuilders, powerlifters, guys whose backs felt like slabs of beef wrapped in leather.
But this is different. This isn't muscle.
This is literal stone. My hands are sliding across the surface, unable to penetrate, unable to make any kind of impact.
I pull back. Reassess.
Okay. New plan. More pressure. More leverage. More... everything.
I climb onto the table.
Yes. I climb onto the table.
Look, I'm five-foot-four and a hundred and twenty pounds.
He's—I don't even know. Seven feet tall?
Four hundred pounds? More? If I'm going to make any kind of dent in this geological disaster, I need to use my entire body weight, and I need to stop thinking of this as a massage and start thinking of it as a structural engineering problem.