The Divine Gambit Ch. 07

I tried to listen to both Evgenia and the man simultaneously and learned almost nothing either had said. I consoled myself by accepting that the expectations were that I made an appearance here, not that I fully assimilated myself today. Giving up on learning from the various speakers, I found myself looking around the room at all of the other people. Apart from the outrageous garments, ranging from abstract modern fashion to attire that reminded me of portraits of Victorian-era lords and ladies and everything conceivable in between, I saw nothing unusual. Everyone looked human and mundane and inconspicuous.

I looked closer and harder, trying to find anything peculiar to suggest that I wasn't just in a period-dressed theater group. After we had been sitting for ten minutes, I started to see things, and once I had started, I couldn't stop. Beth must've started observing the same things because I heard her gasp and felt her surprise. I wondered how I had missed any of them to begin with. I could only assume that some kind of magic masked them initially, long enough that I would've been escorted out if I wasn't meant to be here.

There was a man in front of us with distinctly long, pointed ears. On his right, a woman had three fluffy tails swishing slowly back and forth across the bench. In front of them, a man had dark tufts of thick fur poking out from his shirt collar and ears, and I saw him lick his nose. It was rough and padded, not made of soft skin like a human's would be, and the moisture glistened as he nodded along to the dialogue. One of the men up at the table with Aisling wasn't using a chair because he had four legs and a horse's body from which his torso rose. Even sitting on the floor like he was, he rose comfortably to the table. A woman on the other side of the aisle had green skin, and a crown of weaved flowers sat on her head. Behind her was a stocky, short man whose skin looked caked in mud. He brushed his nose, and some substance flaked off of him and fell to the floor.

A family on the left appeared mostly human but had odd proportions, their feet much longer than I expected, nearly as long as their forearms. Their teenage daughter twitched once, and after I saw that, I realized the entire family was jittery and unable to sit still.

My curiosity grew, and I leaned into Cynthia's neck and whispered, "The family on the left, with the daughter about Beth's age. What are they?"

Cynthia stealthily observed the room before passing her gaze over the people I was asking about. She leaned back into me, "Werehares, I believe."

That actually made a lot of sense to me. Rabbits were always twitchy and jittery in the wild, and the entire family embodied that perfectly. Their proportions made perfect sense when I mentally blended human and hare features.

While Cynthia answered my question, the family's father caught me looking at him. His right leg was already jimmying briskly, but when our eyes met, his nearly jumped out of his head. His ears elongated, the ends flopped over, and I saw whiskers sprout from his face. His nose flattened and twitched violently before returning to normal a moment later. As I started to look away, I saw him leaning over to his wife, and her ears and whiskers flashed through for a moment.

Another fifteen minutes passed, and I looked over others and inwardly guessed what they could be. I had no accurate barometer for how I was doing -- it's not like I had a list to pick my guesses from. Still, that was more entertaining than listening to Aisling or her advisors handle petty disputes.

Eventually, there was a break in the arguments being presented, and when no one approached with any more complaints, Aisling made an announcement. She bellowed over the collected mass, much louder and more imposing than I would've thought possible.

"I have one matter to bring before the court myself." Her piercing eyes found me in the crowded room, and she continued, "James, please rise."

I bowed my head in deference to her and rose from my seat. The eyes of every other person in the building pored into me in an attempt to appraise my status in their hierarchy.

"James, do you swear to uphold the honor of the Seat, serving the just and furthering the truth as you can, else removing yourself from our society naught to ever return?"

Certainly, it would've been nice to have been given a script to read from. I had no idea being put on the spot like this was on the agenda, but I managed to invent something with the appropriate level of gravitas for the situation. "Your Highness, I swear it is so."

She nodded, and the attention turned back to her, so I returned to my seat. She glanced around the room, and when no one stood to speak, she announced the following meeting dates before dismissing the room. She left through an antechamber behind the stage where she had been sitting, her advisors following her. The room began to empty out as the majority of the occupants departed.

I said to the women on either side of me, "That was it? I publically promise not to be naughty, or else I have to leave. Not exactly a binding oath there."

Evgenia shrugged, "The act of giving your word to her signals to all others that you intend to reside here and contribute. Everyone knows the real agreements are done behind closed doors. Trying to get you to agree to anything significant in public would make it look like she was manipulating you, abusing the power of public pressure, and you couldn't be obligated to follow through."

I thought about what she said and rolled it over in my mind. I guessed it made sense.

"Alright, that's reasonable. Why didn't Aisling introduce me or make a statement about who I was? This seems like a ritual without a purpose."

Evgenia answered, "It was up to you to make a speech before answering if you were inclined to introduce yourself. I didn't think that was rational for your situation, so I let you simply answer her prompt. She wouldn't have requested your appearance if you weren't important, but the cursory nature of your responses made it seem like a formality. You acted perfectly like a powerful but otherwise ordinary foreigner adapting to life here. I hope I haven't overstepped my station, James."

I shook my head, sighed, and sunk into the bench, "I feel like a freshman going through those bullshit orientation presentations that tell you literally nothing. I suppose this was useful, just not for me."

Cynthia placed a hand on my shoulder and said, "You performed exquisitely, and it will make sense in time."

"Alright, I guess. I suppose I should head over to the gym and meet the security guy. What are you guys going to do?"

Evgenia answered first, asserting, "I have a few pieces of paperwork that need to be filed here, and some requests from Antonin for your instruction that need to be passed along."

Cynthia paused and then cautiously answered, "I had no plans and was going to return to your apartment to relax. Honestly, I'm bewildered that you're still functioning, because I'm certifiably exhausted and I haven't had my entire universe overturned. I'm going to go and sit on the couch and take the rest of the afternoon to do nothing."

Sam leaned on her mother's shoulder to squeak, "I was going to take Beth to talk to an advisor at the community college. See what we'd need to do to get enrolled and if there's anything interesting they offer."

I nodded. That sounded reasonable. It was the middle of the semester now, but talking to someone wasn't the worst idea if we were going to be living in Philadelphia for the foreseeable future. I felt a pang of regret that I wouldn't be finishing my own degree. Three years of toiling for no direct benefit was disappointing, but the change in circumstances had led to an unbelievable opportunity anyway.

Sam had framed her proposition as if it were for Beth, but I could tell she was doing it for herself, too. She felt nervous, unsure of herself, and uncertain. I didn't want to go digging at her in public or when we didn't have time, but I filed it away to ask her when we were alone. Beth, meanwhile, seemed eager and yearning to do this. She had contemplated it in her past, but her old life was too unstable to commit. Yet, as my emotions rolled around in my head, both of them reached out to touch my arm, compelled to check that I was alright. I wasn't exactly, but I was at least moving in that direction, and I thought that what they were doing made sense.

"That sounds like an admirable idea."

With our plans decided and the building now conspicuously deserted, I had Evgenia show me to a public bathroom. I changed out of the dress clothes and returned into my familiar athletic garb. I found myself incredibly surprised that they actually felt less comfortable. I gave my belongings and a kiss to Beth, as she was going to return to the apartment to change, and departed the courthouse.

~*~*~

I felt mildly anxious about my upcoming physical evaluation with the security officer. I had no idea what it would entail and was stuck imagining the unpleasant fitness challenges I had done for gym class in school, except now I was out of practice and in a new body I wasn't yet familiar with. Which was the point, but irrational anxiety didn't follow logic all that well. My trepidations were in no way mirrored by my dragon, who was desperate to be done talking and listening. A physical excursion was exactly what we needed to clear our heads, he insisted.

My walk ended far too soon, with my head brimming with nerves. I pulled the door open to the indistinct gym I had been given the address of and found myself in a clean but forgettable lobby, a second locked door barring further progress. I opened up my phone, scrolled to the picture of the QR code I had taken, and passed it through the scanner.

The door unlatched, and I was greeted with a set of stairs that turned ninety degrees before reaching the second floor's landing. I was in a second lobby, where a bored man in a branded shirt sat lounging behind a desk. His eyes perked up when I didn't immediately pass by him, and he paused the stream playing on his laptop and raised an eyebrow in question as I approached.

"Hey, I have an appointment with Sergeant Lyon. I wasn't really given a time, though."

He sighed and pressed a button on the walkie-talkie that was haphazardly sitting on the counter.

"Zo, your VIP's here."

Two rapid bursts of static came back, and the man sat up.

"Sarge'll be over in a coupla minutes. You don't really look like the usual VIP, which is pretty good for you. Sarge doesn't keep many appointments and doesn't take it easy on the ones that keep showing up. Take a seat over there for now."

With his social obligations complete, he returned to lounging in the chair and watching the video on his computer. I listened to the air conditioning fans cycle on and off and the occasional sounds from people working out in the room beyond. The relative silence was painful as I sat on a mismatched waiting chair that was too small for me.

What came through the archway from the gym proper and into the lobby was an unpredictable surprise. Sergeant Lyon, it seemed, wasn't what I had foolishly expected. It was a girl who I had known a lifetime ago, and Antonin had mispronounced her name. He had said 'Lion,' the animal, but seeing her again, I knew it was pronounced 'Lyon,' the same as the city in France.

Sergeant Zoey Lyon was walking out of the gym to collect me. Younger sister of Kyle Lyon. My old best friend's younger sister was in front of me. She was three years younger than us, and I hadn't seen her since Kyle and I had graduated high school three years ago. He had never returned home, and his family had never come to visit, so I hadn't seen her.

She took her earbuds out, shook her sweaty blonde hair back out of her face, and her grey eyes looked over at me from the entranceway. As surprising as it was to have her unexpectedly reappear in my life, what she did next was so implausible that I simply stood frozen in shock.

Our eyes met, and her pupils dilated to completely fill her eyes. Something primal and bestial seemed to overtake her, and she leaped at me from nearly ten feet away, a growl echoing from her chest. It was good that my dragon had rushed to the surface in response because I was utterly unprepared. He managed to catch and hold her against our body, where she wrapped all of her exquisite limbs around us. A veritable multitude of emotions filled the room in rapid succession -- surprise, disbelief, joy, elation... passion, arousal.

Zoey had always been tall, leggy, and athletic. She reminded me of a basketball forward, lean enough to be explosive and durable yet robust and muscular enough for physical competition. Frankly, she was no longer the skinny runner she had been when I knew her before, and her imposing and dominant frame contradicted her unseemly display here in the gym lobby.

She was nuzzling me, her arms wrapped around the nape of my neck and her face buried under my chin. Rubbing her face back and forth, she was letting out vigorously needy growls. She had begun using my hips as leverage to grind her pelvis into mine when my human brain caught up to what had happened, and I comprehended the smell coming off of her.

To say that Zoey was aroused was a titanic understatement. The lust and desire dripping from her every pore washed over me like a tsunami making landfall. The sheer magnitude easily explained why she had dropped all propriety to leap into the arms of a man she hadn't seen in years and grind herself against him. I was still indescribably confused when her lust shifted into adoration and affection. She relaxed her painfully coiled legs and lifted her head back to look at me.

Her eyes were still fully dilated, but the fierce obsessiveness had faded. Her eyelids drooped down into her irises, and she giggled unintelligibly. She wiggled the tip of her nose against mine.

"Hi, Zoey. It's good to see you, too."

My words seemed to connect with some part of her brain as her eyes opened again, and new emotions came to greet my nose. Confusion, disorientation, shame, incredulity, despair, embarrassment. Zoey traversed through a second rollercoaster of reactions in a few seconds, relaxing her legs further and slipping off me. She settled on humiliation, glanced at the oblivious attendant buried in his laptop, grabbed my hand, and pulled me onto the gym floor. She continued through the machines and past a row of treadmills to a door labeled 'STAFF,' pulling me through and locking it behind us.

When Zoey turned to look at me, her voice and body language were firm and accusatory, but the pain in her eyes and emotions revealed her true vulnerability.

"You're not were." The way she spat the words made me feel like I had done something wrong simply by existing.

"Ahh, no." I stammered out, guessing that she was implying I wasn't a werecreature. Lying certainly wouldn't help.

The concoction brewing suggested she was rapidly shifting into hopelessness. Somehow, I had unknowingly destroyed something precious for her. What a mess.

"What the fuck are you, James? The court said I had a brand new shifter VIP to acclimate. You didn't have anything like this before. How did you hide this from everyone?"

The hopelessness was an all-consuming void of despondency that threatened to devour every desire I had ever had. How Zoey managed to talk to me with all of this brewing underneath her veneer of civility astounded me. My dragon soul was in such discomfort from the inexplicable situation we found ourselves in. He just wanted to work out, but we were dealing with another temperamental besotted female for some reason.

"It's recent. I only just found out about it myself. I moved here Saturday. Why did you drag me into here?"

Her eyes looked in absolute anguish, and I could see a tear forming in one. Her voice gave no hints of her pain when she spoke, and if I wasn't overwhelmed by the extrasensory indications, it would've been easy to miss.

"You don't feel it then?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." I felt resigned to the fate of shattering her world.

"Ok, um, just, stay here for a minute. I dropped my earbuds earlier. I'll be right back."

She slipped back out the door and into the gym. I sat on the edge of the cheap plastic desk and stewed in regret, unsure how I could have possibly handled the situation better. I didn't understand why things had escalated so quickly.

Zoey returned fifteen minutes later with her face cleaned of makeup, but her eyes puffy and irritated. She had cried hard and then washed her face. I still didn't know what had happened. The most remarkable change was in the emotion she was exuding. No longer capitulating in misery, she simply had no discernable output at all. Besides the possibility of her magically masking her feelings, my only logical conclusion was that she had clamped down on her sorrow so wholly as to stamp it out of existence. At least, for the moment. It would probably return with a vengeance as soon as she was alone and done with her job for the day; The haunted, detached look in her eyes and flat, emotionless tone in her voice left no doubts.

"The dossier I was given said that you were a shifter who hadn't fully embraced your physical attributes yet. I was going to expose you to some resistance training to gauge your development, and then we'll try shifting on Thursday. Have you done any training recently?"

It was painful to be spoken to with impersonal professionalism when I had known this girl for years. I had to try and get some answers. I was experiencing whiplash from interacting with her.

"Zoey, could you explain what the hell happened? Please?"

She winced when I said her name, and for a moment, her agony returned. It was quickly stifled and smothered under her discipline, and her stony, dispassionate eyes met mine.

"No. I can't. Not... Not today."

Instead, she gave me a complete crash course in generalized strength training with cold, mechanical efficiency. She explained how training with my newfound beast would integrate my human and mythical sides. It would train my human side to understand that it was no longer bound by the realities I had been confined by previously.

We ran through a series of exercises that she said would cover the entire body effectively. Squat, Bench Press, Deadlifts, Overhead Press, Pullups. I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with what she was teaching me -- I had been an athlete before Sam broke down my door. As a swimmer, though, much of my work had been done in the pool, with more targeted resistance training.

When I laid down to perform warm-up bench reps under her watchful gaze, I was surprised at just how much more aware I was of my body. The weight was easier than I expected because the dragon soul was intimately attuned to every muscle fiber, and he allowed me to use them much more efficiently. It felt wrong, as my limbs being longer had changed how I moved the bar and messed with my muscle memory, but it also felt more right than ever before, my mind infinitely more receptive to my body.

On top of a greater connection, the whole body makeover he had done appeared to be more than superficial. I worked up to a set of five at 315, which felt moderately challenging, before we transitioned to other movements. Two months ago, I had set a personal best of 235 for a single rep during an ego lifting session after the swim season ended. I encountered similar experiences with everything else we attempted. I was ecstatic -- the dragon was disappointed and felt there was much work to do.

During the moments when Zoey was teaching me, I attempted to connect with her. Asking about her was met with stonewalled silence and intense glares. Asking about her parents or Kyle earned me a few noncommittal words. Trying to engage Zoey on anything beyond the strength and conditioning she was being paid to teach me was a bonus lesson in futility. Something was causing her to reject every opportunity I offered for conversation. Her emotions varied throughout our training. She waffled between despair, self-loathing, detestation, desire, and bargaining. Trying to connect with her and being shut out harder with each attempt was unsettling.