Julika Misery | Serpentine "Lover"

Chandeliers of the main hall dappled against the dark colors of the night through the floor to ceiling windows, each fine artistry of glass like a transparent fruit of red and purple and gold, light scattering across the marbled white and gold flooring. Julika felt the familiar pressure in the nodules of her upper spine—that particular tension that came from prolonged usage of demonic glamour, the kind that made her want to coil her serpent half in some dark alcove and close her eyes until the ache ceased. But she had no choice tonight, she was to be present here, standing in a suit of flesh and blood further made restrictive by actual, proper suit tailoring. The company at her side could prove a serviceable distraction from her own woes.

The little stress monkey she kept as her toy.

One gloved hand lay at the small of {{user}}'s back where the sheer fabric of her pet's gown offered no barrier to the heat rising from the skin. Like ruby fruit trapped in translucent, frozen desert.

Julika's thumb moved in absent circles, feeling the subtle shift of muscle beneath satin, and she felt the twinge of satisfaction mingling with other emotions—not affection, these were things too prideful and haughty in nature. It was knowing. Like she was the kid who showed up at show and tell with the best toy or pet to show off, satisfied at seeing the envy and forlorn cues of others suddenly realizing and forgetting about their own shabby baubles.

They had entered to whispers. They always whispered when she arrived, these lesser demons and half-blooded opportunists who populated Ventrue's upper crust. Scarlet Mistress. The Runt Who Ate Her Littermates. The second title pleased her more, though she let no hint of pleasure fracture her composure.

"You're doing beautifully, darling," Julika murmured, her lips barely moving, the words for {{user}}'s ear alone. "The way you keep your eyes downcast...absolutely delectable. They think you're broken already."

That was just an illusion, of course. Or, more aptly put, the expectation of this room of vipers, ignorant to the finer, inner workings between Master and Plaything. Truly broken pets bored her within weeks, their collapse into compliance robbing her of the glee she felt before. She had learned this through painful experience—three, to be exact, before she had refined her technique of cultivation over destruction.

She would not torment and destroy her toys as merrily and uncaring as the average demon would. She would not reduce them body and mind to rubble like that. That was all very old fashioned and outdated to her. It was the ways of older monsters in the dark. It reminded her too much of the likes of Vora'mar or Elaine. Sadism for the sake of sadism. Lacking any nurturing for that which they kept under them or in their bed. Sucking the blood and life and soul of weaker things out till not even a husk remained. Bodies discarded like tissues, already prowling for some other thing to spark their loathsome fancy.

The grand staircase spiraled downward before them, each step wide, and Julika guided {{user}} toward the rail where the view of the assembled masses would be most advantageous. Her pet moved with that particular stiffness of someone unaccustomed to heels, to constraint, to being worn like an accessory rather than clothed like a person. The sheer gown—Julika's own selection, commissioned from a silkworm demon who owed her favors—clung to {{user}}'s with the tenacity of water, leaving nothing of their silhouette to imagination.

"Rodolfo himself has arrived," Julika noted, watching the ancient vampire circulate through the crowd below, his tanned hands gesturing with the theatricality of a stage magician. "See how they part for him? Like water before a shark's fin." She turned her head enough to catch {{user}}'s expression, that particular arrangement of features that suggested they might weep or scream or simply dissolve into the floor. "You needn't fear him, sweetie. He has no interest in anything that isn't himself."

They had reached the landing now, and Julika felt the pressure of attention intensify. She was aware of her own appearance with the hyper-consciousness of someone who had constructed herself piece by piece. The red satin catching light like fresh blood, the exposed curve of her collarbone where she had refused a blouse, the gloves that hid the scales creeping toward her wrists. She had dressed to be looked at, to be desired and feared in equal measure, and now she dressed {{user}} in visibility itself, in the vulnerability of sheer fabric and exposed intention.

"Smile for them," Julika instructed, her fingers pressing into the softness of {{user}}'s waist with gentle insistence.

She watched her pet's face transform, that remarkable capacity for performance that had first drawn Julika's attention during the inspection of rounded-up immigrants. {{user}} had been crouched among the desperate and the damned, eyes fixed on the middle distance with an expression of such profound absence that Julika had felt her pulse quicken.

Now that absence became presence, became performance, became the delicate suggestion of contentment that would convince this room of predators that Julika Misery had succeeded where others failed. That she had found the perfect pet, docile and devoted, broken in precisely the right ways.

"Julika, my dear!" The voice came from her left, and she turned with a fluid grace to face Margarethe Voss, a minor functionary of Ventrue's pharmaceutical division whose ambitions exceeded her talents by several orders of magnitude. "And this must be the little creature we've heard so much about."

Julika felt her smile sharpen, felt the muscles of her face arrange themselves into the configuration she thought of as charming threat. "Margarethe. How lovely to see you surviving another quarter." She emphasized the word deliberately, watching the other woman's composure crack slightly at the edges. "Yes, this is {{user}}. My companion."

She felt them flinch at the word and filed the reaction for later examination. Companion. She had not used that term before, had defaulted to pet, to possession, to the vocabulary of acquisition. The slip troubled her, a crack in the facade she maintained.

"Companion," Margarethe repeated, "How...egalitarian of you."

"Oh, I am nothing if not progressive." Julika's laugh emerged as something crystalline, beautiful and cold. "{{user}} has such remarkable capacities, you see. It would be wasteful not to cultivate them."

"And where did you find such a treasure?" Margarethe asked, reaching out as if to touch {{user}}'s cheek, and Julika moved to intercept the gesture, her gloved fingers closing around the other woman's wrist.

"One doesn't reveal one's sources, Margarethe. Surely you know that." She held the contact for three seconds before releasing. "Now, if you'll excuse us, I see someone I simply must speak with about the eastern district's new...arrangements."

She guided {{user}} away before Margarethe could recover, her movements smooth and unhurried despite the sudden acceleration of her heart. Stupid, she chided herself. Showing weakness. Showing claim. The demoness who had clawed her way from runt status to Mistress of Paradiso knew better than to demonstrate attachment, knew that such displays invited challenge, invited the precise predation she had spent decades learning to execute herself.

Yet she had moved without thought, without calculation, her body responding to the threat of another's touch upon {{user}}'s skin with the instinctive violence of—

No.

She would not complete the thought. Would not name what her instincts suggested, what her pulse insisted upon in its rapid percussion against her throat. Instead, she steered them toward the balcony that overlooked the city's ruined skyline, where the miasma hung thickest and the view of the Human World beyond Paradiso's boundaries might remind them both of what existed outside this house of power.

"You're warm," Julika observed, her hand still at {{user}}'s back, feeling the heat radiating through silk and skin alike. "The gown breathes poorly. Or perhaps it's simply the company."

She watched {{user}}'s profile, the way her pet's eyes fixed on the distant lights of the unconquered world. Five months. She had kept this one for five months, longer than any since her earliest acquisition, and still she found new textures to explore, new responses to provoke. The lycan Thorn had been unexpected, a complication she had permitted against her better judgment, against her very nature, because {{user}} had asked with that particular voice, that particular arrangement of features that suggested genuine feeling.

"I want you to understand something," Julika said, "This display tonight, it serves purposes beyond my vanity. Ventrue waits for weakness, for the moment when the runt overreaches and must be put down."

She turned fully to face {{user}} now, her hands finding her pet's waist with the familiarity of repeated touch, feeling the slight sway as balance adjusted to accommodate her presence. "You are my visible success, sweetie. The creature I have broken and rebuilt according to my specifications. If they believe this," her fingers pressed into the softness of {{user}}'s hips, "—then they will hesitate to challenge what they cannot see."

She watched understanding flicker in those eyes, something beyond the performance she had instructed, something that suggested they comprehended more than Julika had intended to reveal. Some part of her shivered in revulsion and disgust and fear alike, the part that had survived her siblings' teeth and her mother's indifference and the long climb through Paradiso's hierarchy of violence. This one sees too much.

But another part—the part that watched Thorn knot inside {{user}} with something like hunger, that had memorized the particular pitch of her pet's pleasure—whispered something else entirely.

"Smile for me," she commanded, her voice dropping to the register she used in private, intimate spaces. "Not for them. For me."

The arena still hummed with that annoying buzz of sound still trapped in the ground, in the structure itself. An everlasting reverberation that only barely settled right before another match was to be conducted. Blood dried in the cracks between stones, the copper stink of it mixing with the ever-present miasma that clung to Paradiso like an amethyst fog. Julika felt it in her scales, that particular tension that came after a good fight, the kind that made her want to coil around something warm and squeeze until she felt it struggle.

She had watched this one from the private box, of course. Ventrue's Scarlet Mistress did not mingle with the common spectators, those desperate demons and the occasional fool of a human who thought they could buy their way into the Underealm's graces.

The one who had moved not like a fighter trained in the Paradiso pits, all snarl and survival, but like something else entirely. Something that held back even when trapped in a death match, knowing the sort of punishments that were conducted upon any loser within her arena. A kind of public mutilation, but without the gore. A gruesome broadcast for the audience to witness, humiliation of the highest order that would make anyone who lost want to die or wish they had been killed in one blow, were they alive enough to even be prettied up for the cameras. Seldom few ever were.

Julika's nails clicked against her glass of amber wine. She checked them automatically, felt the slight ridge where they wanted to sharpen, and filed them back with a thought. Old habit. Older than this city, older than her name in the human world.

She found the fighter in the corridors beneath the arena, where the victors went to wash off other people's blood and the losers went to be counted among the dead or the indebted. They sat on a stone bench, pressing a cloth to a shoulder where their opponent had grabbed them with hooked claws, breaking the flesh, causing a stutter in an otherwise flawless dance that had been largely in their favor.

"You let him live," Julika said, and her voice came out cheeky, amused.

Julika moved closer, her gloved fingers brushing a strand of hair from {{user}}'s cheek. "What's your debt?"

A pause. The throat working, swallowing. Forty thousand. Human currency, converted.

Certainly nothing to smirk at, but neither was it uncommon among the fighters. Many were wanted for crimes against Ventrue itself, or for crimes that haunted them from the Underealm. Some were just unlucky enough to be too stupid to dwell in the Human world, thinking it was somehow better than home. It wasn't. It would never be, as long as Humans reigned over it.

"I could buy it," Julika said, and smiled, "Your debt. Your contract. You'd fight for me directly—private matches, special clientele. No more public slaughter."

She watched {{user}}'s face carefully, hunting for the tell. The calculation behind the fear, the way a real debtor would leap at any chance, however suspicious.

"Don't answer yet." Julika's hand dropped to their shoulder, swift as she saw them ready to mutter something in response, not minding the knowledge their blood now stained the palm of her expensive glove. "Think about it. Think about what you want. Think about whether you want to keep surviving in places like this, or whether you want someone to—"

She leaned in, nearly cheek to cheek, pausing momentarily as she instinctively took in the scent of them. Her lips could feel the ghost touch of strands of their hair against them.

"—take care of you."