10. The Mess Hall
THE MESS HALL
Seraphina
By the time we’re heading to the Mess Hall for lunch, alliances have already begun to take shape.
Now that everyone’s caught a glimpse of each other’s abilities, or lack of, the biggest threats seem eager to keep their fiercest competition close.
I wonder how long it will last, probably not very, but training in the halls has made it very clear that I could do with forming an alliance of my own, and I’d be foolish not to look beyond Diana for it.
Lilliana and her fast-growing band of sycophants are an immediate no.
But Khali…
The fact that she's taken a clear dislike to Lilliana helps, and the enemy of my enemy feels like a promising place to start.
She keeps standing out as the obvious choice.
After watching her train, she probably won’t be picked as Ferrum’s champion for the Triad today, but not because she’s lacking, she’s clearly been preparing for this for years.
But from what I’ve seen so far of the other cadets in Ferrum Company, the bar here is going to be set much higher than I anticipated.
Training is very different from true combat though. Once the sparring starts later, and Silver selects his first champion, alliances will shift all over again.
But my reasons for needing allies run much deeper than strength or skill or who is most bloodthirsty in a fight.
I’m not here to join the Sisters’ army.
I’m here to kill them.
They may not have done it with their own hands, but they are responsible for the death of the only person I have ever loved and the only person who has ever loved me back. So, my alliance needs to serve more than survival, it needs to serve my mission, cause and end game.
Khali, no matter how uncomfortable I might be with it, fits that requirement much better than Diana.
She clearly knows Vulcaris, and from the conversation she had with Zaheer yesterday in the Sparring Yard, she’s spent years here, like a fly on Vulcaris’ walls.
Silver seems to treat her with a degree of respect that he doesn’t offer to any of the other cadets either, not even Az, and especially not to me.
How much might she know about what awaits us in the games?
More than I do.
And right now, that’s what matters.
Sure, I’d bristled when she braided my hair before breakfast, and every time my gaze lands on her silver hooped horns, but I need to swallow my instincts and return her friendliness with something resembling my own.
Of course, allying with Khali would mean allying with Az by extension, but despite Az’s contradictory bravado, shameless flirting, and wildly inappropriate questions, he’s annoyingly difficult not to like.
Besides, after spending the last four hours watching him watch Khali in the training halls, I suspect the flirting is nothing more than a very loud, very poorly constructed shield.
Inside the Mess Hall, lunch, like breakfast, offers far more food than I know what to do with.
Though I haven’t had to go hungry for years, it’s strange to be able to choose what I eat. Strange enough that, earlier, I’d bypassed the entire buffet of sausages, bacon, hash browns, and beans, and reached instinctively for plain oatmeal and a glass of orange juice instead.
Exactly what had been left on the bottom step of my turret every morning.
My stomach groans as I join the fragrant buffet line, plate in hand.
“The skillet-fried river fish is good,” Khali says as she sweeps in beside me.
“They let you try it when you were just staff here?” I ask, trying very hard not to look directly at the fish’s cloudy dead eyes staring up at me.
“Only when I was a good girl.”
Her voice is amused as she stabs a fish clean through the eyeball and drops it onto her plate.
She laughs. “I’m joking, Scarvo. Of course they let me try it. You sound like you think they feed soldiers like kings and queens and starve the staff. Far from it. Look at Az.”
She jerks her chin toward the mountain of a male.
“When they pulled him from the pit of Luxuria, he didn’t have a muscle on his bones. Now he’s got muscle on muscle. You don’t get that way if you’re kept on scraps. This isn’t that Repulsion Academy.”
“Repentance Academy,” I correct, not meaning to sound so defensive.
Why do the demons seem to know more about the academy than I do as someone who has helped make the place possible?
I figured pretending to have come from the academy with the others would be the easiest part of being a spy here. It’s proving to be one of the things that could too easily trip me up and leave me scrambling for excuses.
“No, Angel girl,” Az says as he finally finishes stacking his plate to a height that could brush the gates of Heaven. “She was right the first time. Anyway,” he beams at Khali. “Go on with whatever you were saying about how hot you are for my muscles.”
“I was done,” she says, but the faint blush warming her otherwise ghost-pale cheeks is impossible to miss. “Your ego needs no more encouragement.”
Az shrugs and flashes me an innocent look. “What say you, Angel girl?”
About his muscles? They’re… exactly as Khali implied. But I’m not about to feed a demon’s ego. Not today. Not ever if I can help it.
“You’re from Luxuria?” I ask instead, proud I manage to steer the conversation into safe territory.
“Sure was,” he says, but doesn’t expand.
I let the silence stretch, hoping he will go on and fill it as I move past the bone-broth stew and beast meat pies, choosing bread and fruit instead. Simple, familiar things, though they look quite different to the way the chefs at the citadel prepare them.
The Scelus kingdom of Luxuria is as fascinating as it is horrifying of a place. I’ve never been, but from the books I’ve read, it’s a region built to tempt, dazzle and trap.
Beauty is currency there, desire a weapon. By day, travelers are drawn in by rose-gold towers and orchards of too ripe fruit, but by night, temptation becomes an art form and everyone’s an artist.
Az is handsome, undeniably so, perhaps even by seraphim standards, though not quite as perfect, rougher around the edges. But what had Khali meant when she said he came from “the pit” of Luxuria?
“My old dear,” Az says, then pauses to tap a cross over his forehead and chest.
I half expect him to catch fire and have to grind my teeth together to stop my jaw from hitting the ground at the gesture.
“Satan bless her soul, she had more sons than she had fingers and toes. Too many hungry mouths to feed, and all too young to work in the clubs, if you catch my meaning.”
He winks, and I wish I didn’t catch his meaning, but I do.
Luxuria’s sex clubs are infamous. I’ve read every record I could get my hands on back home while researching the seven kingdoms of Scelus.
The things described were… eye-opening. Especially considering the farmer’s son, Elias, had been sent to the Repentance Academy for a single lust-filled night in a barn.
So had Lorelei if what she’d told me in the alleyway were the whole truth of it.
I can’t imagine what it would take to atone for an evening in one of Luxuria’s clubs.
“So, she sold you?” I ask before I can stop myself.
The words feel barbaric the moment they leave my lips.
My mother would never have sold me, not even in the human village we came from, where food was scarce and magic didn’t work to ease hardship.
I’d never known I had angel blood in my veins to fuel it when I lived there, but even with me and a few nephilim refugees among the otherwise human population, it was nowhere near enough to light a single orblight—not so far from the capital where the majority of the nephilim and seraphim live.
We’d had nothing, other than an annual visit from the High Seraph to ease the hunger with offerings of grains and to lift morale. Still, only death could have separated my mother from me.
“Mmhmm.” Az tosses a grape into the air and catches it between his teeth. “Best thing that ever happened to me,” he mumbles around it before biting down. “You’ll see.”
Not likely.
“What about your half-brothers?” I ask. “Are they here too?”
Something flickers across his face, a heavy emotion, gone as quickly as it came.
“Long story,” he says, looking more uncomfortable than I’ve seen him. “And I am far too sober and hangry to get into it right now. You gonna eat with us?” He gestures to the empty table I hadn’t even realized I followed him, Khali, and Reiva toward.
I blink. Diana sits at the next table over with Jack, Gabe, and Micah. She meets my eyes and nudges her head toward the seat beside her.
I want to take it. Truly.
They are nephilim, like me. We should stick together. Form our own alliance before seeking out others to join it.
But when lunch ends… Jack, Gabe, and Micah will go back to Aes and Stannum, and it will be just me and Diana again.
I’m not a gambler, I would have been whipped for less at home, but still, I don’t like those odds.
So, I sit with the demons.
Not demons, I remind myself, they are cambion, and cambion have some human blood in them. Perhaps they aren’t all bad.
Possibly.
Maybe.
I’m not convinced, especially after seeing the look on Diana’s face of utter shock and dare I admit, betrayal.
I try to focus on the shred of humanity running through the cambions’ veins every time Reiva’s arm brushes mine as he lifts food to his mouth and my skin prickles.
The dried fruit strips are tough as leather but sweet, and the stone-ground black bread is dense enough to double as a weapon, but fills my grumbling stomach, nonetheless.
The cambion chat easily, lowering their voices to discuss the other cadets now and then.
I feel like I’ve been branded by freshly forged iron across the forehead with a set of feathered angel wings despite the fact they don’t seem to care that I’m listening to them discuss strategy and theories.
“Scarvo,” Khali says, snapping her fingers in front of my face. I flinch back and ball my fists. “Woah, easy. You in there?”
“What? Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I asked why you told the officer you were an assassin. I didn’t think you nephilim lie.”
“We don’t,” I say. “But we can.”
She frowns, head tilted. “Right. Well? Why did you pick assassin as your occupation? You could have told them anything—”
“Something believable,” Reiva mutters around food.
“—and yet that’s the lie you went with?” she finishes.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
“What makes you think I lied?”
“I mean, you weren’t as bad as your friend over there,” she tilts her head toward Diana. “But you need to work on your kata. And sword work. And stance. No offence.”
“None taken,” I say truthfully. It’s a relief she noticed. If she thought I was a threat, would I be sat with them now? Probably not.
Unlike most in Ferrum, the demons sharing a table with me don’t seem interested in allying themselves with the strongest or most fierce, which is odd.
Reiva, their bunk mate, is very average himself, and quiet, the kind of quiet that comes off as shy more so than rude, despite his obvious disbelief that I could ever be an assassin.
I don’t care about that though. I don’t want or need to prove them all wrong.
I don’t.
Really.
Blend in, Seraphina.
Khali clears her throat and shares a look with Az before turning her head to me. “We can help you if you want?” she offers.
I almost choke on my bread. “Why would you do that?”
She shrugs, then takes a sip of water to wash the fish down. “A nephilim has never survived a game. Not even the first one. Even those who have worked here for years like we have and knew what they were getting themselves into. I want to change that, and I dunno, I have a feeling about you.”
She does?
I don’t flatly refuse or give any answer right away. I weigh up her words, buying time as I try to chew through the fruit strip sticking my teeth together.
Accepting her offer of help could work.
I’ll still have to pretend, downplay what I can do, but that’s no different to what I’ll be doing anyway. And how better to gain their trust than having private, possibly secret, training sessions with them?
Can I trust them?
Not at all.
“What’s in it for you?”
“Erm, I don’t know,” Az says. “Only potentially saving the life of another Ferrum.”
My eyebrows pinch together. “And that matters to you?”
“Ugh,” he huffs. “I forget how evil the nephilim always think we are when they first get here.”
“It’s a stupid idea anyway,” Reiva says. “Sneaking about Vulcaris to give the pretty angel girl private lessons.”
“Her being pretty has fuck all to do with it,” Az argues, then lowers his voice. “If Khali has a feeling about her...”
“I do,” she says, eyeing me. “Besides, she can help us, too.” She turns to me. “If you want to, that is.”
That one actually shocks me. “I… I can? How?”
“You’re from Virtus,” her voice barely above a whisper now. “You can share your knowledge of the seven kingdoms and all of your virtuous ways, while we teach you how to fight.”
My spine straightens. “You want me to give you inside information so you can share it with the owners of this island and have them send their army in?”
“Pha. No.” Khali says, like I’m barking up the wrong tree. “So that we can pass the games.”
She leans in closer.
“Look, I don’t know that much about the games,” she says.
“They insist I have to go in as blind as the rest of you, but I know enough to know that being an expert on Scelus alone will not be enough. And sure, there are a load of books, but why bother reading all the boring stuff about angel shenanigans when you can go straight to the source and work out at the same time?”
She lifts a brow.
I have so many questions.
Who is ‘they’? The Overlords? The Sisters?
And why would knowledge on Virtus help pass deadly games? Surely skill with a sword and brute strength is the only thing that can help with that.
“So, what say you, Angel girl?” Az asks, making to stand and gathering the dirty plates and cutlery, stacking them all into a neat pile.
What do you have to lose?
“Deal,” I say, then immediately stiffen at the word.
Virtishans don’t make deals. Especially not with the offspring of the devil.