Neon Blue by E Frost (best big ereader .TXT) 📕

overlooked, ignored, scrabbling for scraps of energy, of attention grudgingly given when he/she did something novel, something none of the others could do. Learning to change constantly, to keep delighting, to never settle into one shape, one gender, one personality.

I bathe in Reece’s fluidity. It’s not something I can hold onto. I let it wash through me. My will shapes it, creating currents in the stream. Directing it out across the ashy ground to circle the burning tower. A moat of bitterness, that will drown any trying to cross it in anguish.

Enough.

I’m not sure who thinks it. Maybe Jou. Maybe all of them. For a moment, I reject the thought. It’s not enough. I could keep going. Pull on the flickers of awareness I feel around me. The dark, crawling thoughts of the creature that lairs in the caves below the hill. The fathomless rage that swells within the nearby pit. The icy metallic strength of Zeifyr and her sisters, connected to Jou with glistening threads of blood and loyalty and emotion—

Enough, sweetness. That is Jou. His thought is weak with fatigue, but layered with satisfaction. He’s so pleased by what we’ve accomplished that he’s conflicted about stopping me. Part of him wants to push me on, to see everything I can do, even though he knows it might kill him and his clutch. But then his will, his indomitable will, to survive and to protect what is his, reasserts itself. It’s enough, sweetness.

I pull back into myself a little. Jou’s conflict swirls inside me. I don’t want to stop. There’s so much power here, and it’s so easy, so safe. I don’t need complicated recipes or exacting rituals to shape this power. There are no consequences here, no elemental balance to maintain. Hell’s power is right there, right on the surface. Ready to shape. Ready to use.

Ready to use you, sweet meat. Let it go.

Reluctantly, I open the mental fingers I’ve been clawing through the minds and magics of the demons and their home. Release the energy I’ve gathered. I feel it flow back into Jou’s siblings. Feel Fulsome and Nevida begin breathing again. I didn’t realize I’d drawn so hard on them. Reece shudders against the cold stone floor, rolls over and begins painfully crawling away, towards his/her dark hidey-hole in the lower recesses of the tower. Away from me.

Reece . . . I didn’t mean to hurt . . . Jou—

Reece’ll be okay. Come inside for a minute.

We don’t move so much as shift. Our lack of substance means that everything is insubstantial to us. The tower’s new defenses melt around us. We slip into the courtyard where Jou’s family clusters. Fulsome and Nevida lie prone in the arms of Bizzy and Cazin, while Icky hops nervously around Reece. Jou bends over Fulsome, murmuring something I can’t hear, his glowing eyes casting bizarre shadows across the golden demon’s face.

Fulsome looks like a Renaissance painter’s idea of Apollo, lying in Bizzy’s arms. His beauty should draw me, but it doesn’t. Surface beauty never has done much for me anyway. Jou’s harsh strength has more appeal. But that’s not drawing me either as I look around the bare courtyard. There is something here. Something that calls to me. Something that desperately longs to be more.

I feel my way towards it. Down through the ash and rock. Down to a hot magmatic heart that beats fiercely, yearning to be free of the oppressive weight of rock.

I ball my mental fingers into a fist and smash down through the base of the tower, reaching towards that straining heart.

What the fuck’re you doing?

I don’t respond. I let Jou feel the compulsion that drives me. Feel him acquiesce. Hear him move his family away from the crater that I’m opening in the middle of the courtyard.

I reach the knot of magma that lies coiled and yearning deep underneath Ash Hill. I wrap my mental fingers around it tentatively. Fire’s not my element and in my hands it’s unpredictable. But this is Earth-fire. Molten rock. Burning stone. And it responds readily. When I coax it towards freedom, it surges upward, gathering speed, to explode in a fiery fountain ten feet above the courtyard’s cobblestones.

I cup my mental hands, hollowing the broken ground into a glassy bowl for the magma to fall back into. I watch the fountain play for a moment, listen to the rumble and hiss of the molten stone, before I turn back to Jou.

He’s watching the fountain, arms crossed over his chest, a lazy grin lighting his face. Better than those blinds of yours.

Jou—

I’m just teasing you, sweetness. I like what you’ve done with the place. He surveys the fountain with that same overweening sense of satisfaction that he felt when I fortified the tower. Any other redecoratin’ you’d like to do?

I glance at the fallen demons. Reece is still trying to crawl away to his/her sanctuary. Fulsome is beginning to sit up, but Nevida lies limp in Cazin’s arms, her dark face ashen and pinched with the strain of sharing her power with me.

I shake my head. I have no idea of demon aesthetic. No idea what they might want. I’ve made their home safe. That’s got to be better than tricking out their pad.

You sure? This’ll be your home, too. He runs his hands down my arms, a touch that starts cool and ghostly at my shoulders, but by the time he reaches my elbows, I feel a hint of warmth.

What are you doing? I begin to back away from him, but his hands wrap around my elbows and hold me in place.

Can’t you feel it? The way the Hill responds to you? The way we respond to you? You belong here.

It was amazing. To be so free to use my power. To do so much without fear. I glance at his family again. Look at what it did to them. There’s no balance to maintain here, no limits on what I can or can’t do. And that much unrestrained