Alexandra and Anastasia brought him up to speed on the assignments he'd missed. With his head down, he started taking notes on what he'd need to get started on. Cesare wasn't paying attention to the door or the students that streamed into the room.
"Cesare." The word brought his head up in surprise. It was rare for anyone to talk to him. So rare that when he heard his voice coming out of an unfamiliar mouth, he'd unconsciously called the blade to hand. Warm as blood fresh from the vein, the silver handle molded to his hand, Enochian letters pressing into flesh. Slim as a stiletto, sharp as betrayal.
He had to admit, Yoshisune cleaned up good. The boy's hair was cut short, the uneven ragged mop replaced with something that highlighted his delicate face. The sable strands shown with a black luster that drew admiring eyes from the girls coming in behind him. Thin and trim, he had the body of a runway model, all fine bones and angular face. He was pretty with the androgynous look more than a few men would kill for.
Cesare met the almond shaped eyes of the boy. "Good to see you made it."
Yoshisune gave a low bow, holding himself at an angle with his face to the ground. A shocked silence spread from the boy, taking over the class. "I pleaded with Viktor to go back for you, but he refused. He kept saying it was a sacrifice you were willing to make."
Cesare's lips twisted in disgust. "Yeah, it's always easy to say that when it's not your head on the block." Alexandra's eyes flared with naked hatred while Anastasia swept the room with a hot, rage filled gaze. "Can't say if I would've stayed behind if asked, but I'm glad you made it."
Yoshisune slowly straightened, studying Cesare's face with a fey emotion clouding his face. "The blood of Hachiman must run through your veins to have survived Andras Two Souled." Flushing Yoshisune took in the watching crowd, giving a quick, last bow, the boy made it to his seat in the back that just happened to be in the center of a cluster of girls.
Yoshisune was quickly slotted into a happy group of two girls. They'd waved the rules for him, given his pedigree, money, and importance. The poor were chained, contained, and controlled by rules, but the rich broke them with a smile and a laugh. Rules were a cage to keep the masses in line, never meant to inconvenience the masters. Anastasia and Alexandra stayed close to Cesare's side, Anastasia reaching out to lay her hand on his arm as they talked.
The bell sent the class surging for the door in a mad rush for lunch. Cesare took up his duffel, cinching it across his back as he gave Elizabeth a wave goodbye.
Stepping out of the room, Cesare's eyes snagged on Greg leading Yoshisune away. "He was appointed as the boy's mentor. Kinda of like what he did for you," Anastasia said. "He's been taking him to class and letting him eat with the gladiators."
Cesare shrugged at the words. "Greg knows what's good for Greg. He sees what everyone else does, that Yoshisune will come into money and power. Greg's angling to be part of that, one way or another."
"And what does that mean for us?" Anastasia asked, tracking the small group ahead of them.
"We won't know that until he takes power. That could be years in the making. For now, we'll stand back and watch."
Cesare had given a lot of thought to what Abraxas had said, and the dragon was right. They needed to pull the powerful into their ranks. Not as Furies, but as backers. It wasn't enough to be the strongest, they needed the influence. The strong were tools for the connected, they had to have enough pull in the corridors of power to set their own agenda. How to get the powerful on their side was something he'd have to talk to Anastasia about.
The three grim specters entered the lunch room under the eyes of the school. Whispers spread around the room as the trio headed to the lunch line. Kids shied away, the line evaporating like water under an unrelenting sun. The Furies were creatures of contrast, pariahs and titans, envied and hated. Cesare heard bits of the newest rumor about the Hounds. The majority were going with it being a lie.
Handing trays to the girls, Cesare gave the room a careful sweep. Curiosity, hate, anger, disgust, and desperate, unwanted hopeful. What the Furies were doing was working, but that just put an edge to the pressure already cracking their bones.
At the table, Cesare laid out the remedial books after Alexandra's prayer. "The question of Yoshisune brings a bigger problem, political power. We need to secure as much of it as we can, not just here at school, but outside it. We can't just be stronger than the Thagirion, we need the influence that goes with it. Anastasia, you know that world better than either of us?"
Taking a bite of her Salisbury Steak, Anastasia looked out over the student body. "The teachers hold the most influence at school, with Miss Raven, Viktor, Jerold, and Sarah, being the strongest. Jerold's against us, and Sarah follows him even if she doesn't agree. Viktor is apolitical, he doesn't care about anything that doesn't affect him directly."
Tapping her fork meditatively on her tray. her words came slow. "We're locked with the Thagirion. They have Jerold and by proxy Sarah, we have Miss Raven. While no one listens to her voice, and she has no allies in the alumni, she has carved a place for herself. The most pull with the Mistress, and a power the eclipses all but the immortals, they can't afford to dismiss her. With Victor staying out after his fight with Miss Raven, I don't think we can break the dead lock. All the other teachers are small fries."
"That leaves us with outsiders and alumni, those that give money to the school and have influence behind the scenes. My mother's the largest single donor to the school, and she's solidly behind you." He smiled as he remembered Kali's words to the teachers. "But she's only one. There are other kids in school who come from less powerful families but are still financially influential and from alumni family. We need to make overtures to those groups. I'll think on it and run it by my mother."
Happy with that, Cesare turned back to the mountain of remedial work he was trying to wade through. Working through lunch, they were an island of their own devising with clear borders only violated by the foolhardy. The rest of school wasn't sure what to make of the three, the one thing they knew beyond doubt was that they were dangerous, willing to savage anyone that broke their circle.
Walking out of the lunchroom, the door closed on an explosion of loud conversation his name riding their lips. Shaking his head, he led them to Viktor's. "I don't get what the big deal is."
Anastasia interlaced her fingers with his. "It doesn't matter what they think or believe, Cesare. All that matters is that they're talking about us, well, you. How many of those kids are going to write home about the man who escaped from Andras Two Souled? Before this week's over, the story will circle the globe. This is at least as good as any of my fights."
Stopping outside Viktor's class, Cesare looked at the new door. The stone had melted like candle wax, black scorch marks marring previously pristine stone. He grinned at the flush that climbed Anastasia's cheeks. "Something I should know?"
"We didn't take it well when we heard he'd left you behind." Alexandra's words turned him around to face her. "We would have killed him if you hadn't returned Cesare." The simple way she said it gave it a gravity, a meaning, that he would have never understood before he'd found people he'd kill for.
Anastasia met his eyes, a black un-light flickering through them, devouring the light instead of gifting it to the world. "He thought you were nothing and left you to die." Her voice lowered into an intense whisper. "Your everything. The only one I can touch, the only one I want in my bed. My best friend and the best man I've ever known. When he left you there … I was more than willing to kill him. You're my sheltering shadow in a world that sears my skin and burns my eyes." She pulled him down for a soft kiss born of a need more than carnal.
It was a raw honesty that only love can inflict, scaring, terrorizing down to the core, possessing all the pain of life flooding into dead flesh. It was everything he'd wanted and secretly prayed for, that they couldn't be together didn't matter. That they would never be together was insignificant, it was the fact that right here and now, she felt that way. It was precious, and he hoarded the feeling as a miser does money.
Opening the door, Cesare met Viktor's eyes. Sitting on a bench, the man leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Heard you made it back." Shaking his head, the man ignored the girl's hot glares with distilled apathy. "I'll tell you what I told them. I had to choose between staying and trying to save you or getting the asset out of the kill zone. I chose the asset, and I won't tell you I'd do it different. I've trained warriors for most of my life and the first rule of any mission is to never lose sight of the objective." It was said with a kind of relaxed assurance. Viktor knew no matter how angry they were they couldn't take him.
"I expected you to leave me if something happened," Cesare said, holding his ground. "It's what you do, what you've always done. You trained boys to fight in wars that turned them into rotting meat. You've left every woman you've been with because you can't care for anything beyond your cock. Leaving is your one great talent." Crimson bloomed across pure snow, the slow swinging of the hanged man as wet shit dribbled down his leg, the lolling tongue of the fool as its throat was slashed open, his words were acidic poison, they lived in the air, drank in the shadows, and suckled Cesare's cruel hearts blood as mothers milk.
Viktor's muscles bunched and twisted under the force of keeping himself in his seat. Yellow bleed into the feral's eyes, fury mounting in its body, potential staining the air with violence. Cesare's face stretched in an easy, insolent smile. Alexandra fanned out to his left while Anastasia moved away from his right, primed and ready for a fight.
Flowing to his feet, the man stepped forward, checking his movement at Alexandra's low hiss of lethal intent. Viktor slowly, piece by piece, forced the fury down, the man didn't have any choice but to swallow it. If Cesare was by himself, the man could have indulged in his fantasies of violence and proper respect. But with the daughter of Lord Dracul on one side and Lady Kali's on the other, it would be suicide to attack them. Cesare could see it register along with the understanding that a younger Viktor would have done it anyway. It added the jagged edge to the uselessness Cesare heaped on the man.
Viktor had left him to die. Cesare had watched him drive away and leave him in a shit hole parking lot surrounded by killers. The man had taken him out of school to find a lost kid in a pile of wet shit. And Cesare had delivered, only to be cut down by his own side. He didn't care about the reasons the man had left, gave less than two shakes of a cock for the excuses. All that mattered was he'd run.
An understanding passed between them. Cesare would never forgive. Viktor had pushed Cesare away after the attack with Anastasia and when the girls had joined class, Viktor had thrown Cesare onto the trash heap. There was nothing between them but the ashes of might have beens.
Viktor had always thought Cesare was like other kids, unwilling to see the primal differences. Every kid he'd ever had in class had been love drunk with Viktor. Lost in fantasies of who they thought he was, they'd discarded any fact that didn't match the idol they'd birthed. More than willing to take his shit for the chance to be near the legend. Cesare didn't care. No awe lit the boy's eyes, no forgiveness stirred his black heart, no needs moved the boy to cut Viktor the slack he needed to make it past this wasteland of mistakes.
For the rest of class, Viktor kept his distance, watching and correcting with words but keeping outside the bubble the three erected around their group. It was unsaid, they understood t the class was enemy territory.
Leaving the girls, Cesare walked up the stairs to his class with Tamlin. Taking his time, he rolled one thought over and over through his head. Tamlin had known Cesare wasn't human. It was a curiously neutral thought.
Taking a deep breath, Cesare opened the door. Gliding across the wood floor, he caressed the great wolfs face, fingers finding its ears with easy familiarity. The deep rumbling that resounded in the air was a counterpoint to Cesare's pleased growl. A wild, untamed thing, it settled into the corner of his consciousness with the same predatory arrogance it displayed when taking its patch of sunlit floor.
Brushing along the wolfs body, his hands disappeared into ebony fur as soft as a bunny's belly, pleasure twisted around rightness in the bond. Its pleasure was simple and pure in a way that humanity had lost. It was happy he was back, luxuriating without out shame in the feel of his hands across its body. There was no care for tomorrow, or even the next hour, only this moment existed for the wolf.
The light scuffing behind him announced Tamlin had come up on him. That Cesare had heard that much was only because Tamlin wanted him to. "You knew." The words slipped into the room, sharp and cold, fading sunlight dimmed under the assault of barbed words.
"I knew," Tamlin said without apology.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Facing the wolf, the words were whispered to the animal, disregarding the man behind him. Threading his fingers through the wolfs sable hair, Cesare lost himself in its steady wildness.
"I told you what you needed to hear. That it wasn't the truth doesn't change that," Tamlin said.
How would Cesare have reacted if he'd been told on that first day that he wasn't human? There was no way Cesare would have agreed to learn from the man. To look on abominations and not turn away was one thing, to look in a mirror and know your DNA was wedded to carnage, that your appetites were those of a killer. That was something that took a little working up to.
"Look into yourself, Cesare. You have the strength to face the truth." Tamlin urged quietly from behind him.
Aleph burst through him, sight, hearing, and smell vanishing in less than a blink. Reality burned brutally sharp with obsidian edges, stripped of illusion. Turning that sense inward, Cesare dissected his body through its malign sight.
Aleph throbbed with a searing brightness on his chest. Tendrils pulsed with primeval energies born squirming from the node of madness incised in his flesh. Wherever the tentacles touched, his fundamental nature changed into something different, bending flesh into distant dimension's, blurring the edges of reality.
Molten white energy shone along his nadis, a pure light unsullied by the cancerous light of the sun played along the veins of his soul. The Enochian Blade making itself at home, seeing the extent of the growth, he could fully understand how permanent the blade was going to be. As intertwined in its own way as Aleph, the blade could never be separated from him.
Pushing deeper, he looked at the core of who he was, seeking the resonance. A sound that thrummed through the ether, unique and yet fitting into a wider symphony. Vampire, werewolf, human, animal, they all possessed a resonance. A vibration that was sight, smell, and hearing, twisted around a thread that bound the race as one.
He found his as easily as he had everyone else's, staring in horrified understanding. Others were beacons of light that danced and played across the world. He was their antithesis, a void of devouring nothingness. A palate of shadow and night, glittering edges of broken soul shards, wisps of shadow leaking and bleeding into the air like blood. It had once been beautiful, he could see that, a stained glass window created by a genius. It was less than a shattered mockery of that perfection, fused together by a mad child, shards grating against each other, edges cutting and clashing, jarring things that twisted in on themselves. Cesare was composed of the maimed, crippled pieces of cast off creatures, a grotesque joke of what he should have been.
Not long ago, he'd thought he'd seen his soul, but that had been beautiful, something worth being proud of. Now his face was pushed into the shit of his soul, revealing what distance had hidden. The way a rotting corpse looks alive but up close, you see the decomposing flesh and squirming maggots. He'd seen only the night, not the crippling disfigurement. His was the beauty of the ugly and misshapen, a caricature of how a thing should be. A poet once said nothing beautiful was not equally ugly and fey. The very mangling of form creating something that transcended the rules of beauty.
"I'm broken." Shattered by life, Cesare had put himself back together as best he could. A blind, diseased child playing at the art of gods.
"You are not what you were supposed to be," Tamlin said, devoid of pity or apology. "The destiny laid out for you is nothing more than ash and bitterness now. You're cut from the strings of the Fates, discarded by them as a failed thing."
Cesare had been left for dead his whole life, the Fates were just one more thing that had no use for him. Whatever mad thing had birthed his soul, it had deserted him just as quickly, maybe like everyone else, it hadn't seen anything worth sticking around for. It confirmed what he'd always known, that he was on his own. At the end of the day, any success or failure he had, were his to own. It didn't matter if he had a broken and crippled soul, it was still his.
Taking a step back from the wolf, Cesare nodded. Nothing had changed, he was the same person who'd walked into Primrose months ago. He owned the meat he lived in, even if he was parceling out his flesh to things of ravenous, mercurial hungers. Cesare owned the blood in his veins and the broken dreams that haunted his nights.
"You've acquired an Enochian Blade, may I see it?" Tamlin asked.
The blade filled his hand with warm familiarity, heat spilling up his palm and into his arm. White light danced across the blade and handle, shifting flickers like moonlight over still waters, liquid and beautiful. No longer simple steel, it was a creature of razor edges and quicksilver skin.
"Striking that it has bonded so fully with you so quickly, as surprising as it bonding with you at all." Tamlin turned, leading the way onto the mats. "The Enochian Blades were created as a way to bypass the natural gifts of the Umbrae Lunae. They're designed to penetrate the resistance that midnight races are gifted with. Since the time of their creation nothing has withstood their soul edge. Steel, rock, wood, cloth, armor, it all gives way under the cutting edge of the blade. It goes without saying that no one but you can use that blade. Its power feeds off the soul of its wielder."
Cesare nodded, flipping the blade around his hand, testing the grip. "It burned Alexandra."
"They are the bane of the Umbrae Lunae. An Enochian Blade does not just cut Umbrae Lunae. It kills flesh instantly, making regeneration impossible. The only way to heal a wound is to carve out the dead flesh." Tamlin stopped, admiring the blade with avid eyes. "It's a devastating weapon, perfectly designed to kill the midnight races, and that's only the start of its powers."
Cesare raised an eyebrow in question. "No, the rest is up to you. Each blade forms a unique bond with its wielder, that relationship is what gives rise to any additional abilities." Tamlin answered before moving on, "Let's see what you learned in your fights with the Hounds."
The blade shot up his arm in a coiling rush, winding around his forearm with eager pleasure. Rushing at him human quick, Tamlin tested technique and timing. Punches darted into Cesare's guard, slipping through the smallest openings, fists slammed into meat with bruising force. Tamlin grunted in disappointment at every impact.
He'd been trying to teach Cesare how to grasp the Sen of combat, but progress was slow for Tamlin and painful for Cesare. The mat squeaked as Tamlin adjusted his foot, lashing out in a punishing kick. Cesare dodged with a sidestep, without thought, consciousness stripped from flesh, his bladed hand speared into Tamlin's leg.
Neither of them stopped at the breakthrough, the moment moving on before Cesare's thoughts could catch up. Instant intuition and unconscious comprehension moving quicker than reflection. Cesare weaved around them punches, body coiling into strikes at Tamlin's vital points. The moment warped, serene coldness butchered by feral instincts, hungers born in cruel realms turning it predatory.
Patiently seething with violence. No longer did it wait with the calm of man, still and ready, questing for weakness, jaws aching for tender flesh. It was a primal change, owing to the wolf that wove through Cesare's mind with a scarlet touch.
A predator looked for the kill, to win at all times. Turn away from the lion, no matter how beaten you think it is, and it'll rip your guts out and leave you as meat. An omnivore sought only to survive, beat it down and it knows only how to crawl away. For the predator, you won, or you died.
Even as the thoughts drifted cloud like through Cesare, his body pushed forward and retreated, dancing with Tamlin across the mat. The wolf dashed through his mind, scarlet lines replacing golden human instincts, reforging him into something new, a creeping change, raw and mean, birthing him anew as a malformed abomination wedded to killing.
Cesare collapsed to the ground, legs giving out under exhaustions demands. "Good. You've grasped Go no Sen, the art of leading your opponent into a trap. But that's only one of three, it won't be enough to save your life." There was no goodbye with Tamlin, only parting advice.
Grunting, Cesare levered himself up, feeling over the new instincts that had taken root. Had Tamlin pushed him this past month because he'd known the wolf was changing him a little bit every session? Was Tamlin hunting down instincts, uncovering them from their dens for the wolf to change? Instead of training, was the sparring really about transformation?
Cesare set himself before the wooden man, flowing into action, skin broke and bleed, fists ramming into unforgiving wood. A hammering elbow hit the wood with a gunshot crack that reverberated through the room. Nerves could be trained, broken, shattered, and dulled with pain, beaten into submission. Bone could be subdued, micro-fractures caused over hours of training healing stronger, calcium building into hard, blunt weapons of war. He'd worked hard to turn the meat of his body into a weapon that obeyed. Weapons didn't cry in pain, they lived to be useful, they existed to kill, their meaning was in action.
Tamlin's motives mattered as much as what Cesare's true nature was. Monster or human, angel or god, the words didn't make him worth more than what he'd started with. All Cesare cared about was results. Tamlin's motives didn't matter, only power meant anything. With Tamlin's training, Cesare was stronger, that's all that mattered.