The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

The library’s swinging doors swung, and disgorged a three-foot-tall woman with a fringed garçonne skirt in striking teal and a twin-tailed wig.

It was an excellent wig; Seth wouldn’t have known if the girl whose head it was sitting atop didn’t have needle teeth and if her big obsidian eyes weren’t going two directions at once. Kari-kine didn’t grow body hair.

”Feeeeeli,” this one sang, and hopped into the al Ydris daughter’s lap with feline precision. “You’re back so early!”

“I missed you too badly.” Ofelia set her book aside and draped an arm across the kari-kine’s midsection. “Mother was taking too long. I had to butcher a village or two.”

The kari-kine giggled and swatted Ofelia’s knee. “You did not.”

“Seth, this is Atra al Mikn.” Ofelia gestured across the snug burgundy library to where Seth picked through a recessed bookcase. “Atra, Seth.”

“Hullo, Seth,” Atra sang.

He bowed—best to play it a bit careful when greeting an al anything. “Honored, milady Atra.”

Ofelia waved two more women in. “And this is Luzia, and here’s Ponytail Magda. Not to be confused with Blonde Magda.”

“Charmed,” Seth said, and had no choice but to note: “You don’t have a Ponytail.”

Ponytail Magda—a shapely shawl-draped girl seeming about Seth’s age, but who could say with the unlit—shrugged and sat criss-cross on the floor next to Ofelia’s clawfooted chair. “Blonde Magda’s not blonde anymore.”

“The rest are on the way,” skinny Luzia said, in a voice that gave Ofelia’s a run for its monotone money.

“But if I’m first here, that means I get to read first.” Atra curled up in Ofelia’s lap. “Right?”

“That, my lovely little lyricist, is only fair.” Ofelia dangled a cherry over the kari-kine girl’s head; she obediently opened her fanged maw and Ofelia dropped the cherry in.

This is the only city in the world where an unlit can cut loose.

Atra chewed gleefully; the pit crunched beneath her anglerfish jaw. “I have a new stanza. Elle is gonna despise it.”

Seth sidled to Tiago’s overstuffed easy chair, where he sat with his harness and kit spread out in his lap like a gleaming and heavily armed leather cephalopod. “The rest?”

Tiago unscrewed a jar of stringent-scented polish. “No.”

“No what?”

“No, I’m not engaging with this.” Tiago daubed a rag into the polish and applied it to his holster with vigor. “If I have to explain my sister’s harem to my mother’s boyfriend, I might climb the Psychelith and jump off.”

“They’re not my harem,” Ofelia said, one hand idly rubbing the back of Luzia’s slender neck. “They’re my salon.”

“But you sleep with them?” Seth asked.

“Only if it’s late enough after the sex,” Ofelia said. “Otherwise they go home.”

“Is this another drawing room-slash-sitting room thing where I’m too provincial to understand the distinction?”

“In a salon, you read poetry after the orgy,” Luzia said.

“And sometimes before, if it’s early enough,” Ponytail Magda added. “Oh, look. He’s scandalized.”

Seth poured bleaching vacancy over the ink of his expression and returned to the spines of the al Ydris family’s library. “No, I’m not.”

“Get used to libertinism when you’re in the Necropolis, Mr. il Gutierre,” Ofelia said. “It’s one of our city’s governing laws.”

“Nobody worries about pregnancy.” Tiago pried a bent iron eyelet from its place in his belt and thumbed a replacement in. “Everybody looks twenty-five for twenty-five years, and everyone you see on the street can sleep with you without getting their soul blown back to the wheel. Even if they’re lit, we’re close enough to the Psychelith it catches them. This is the only city in the world where an unlit can cut loose.”

Ofelia stuck out her tongue; Luzia placed a cherry onto it. “The Salon wouldn’t have to worry about pregnancy regardless,” she said, around her chewing. “The only ones with pricks are Poka and Emily. And Poka’s a muran, and Emily is finally out of the scene this year, isn’t she?”

“She downgraded the sorcerer to a fling, apparently,” Ponytail said. “She’ll be around.”

“Oh, poor Em.” Ofelia spat her cherry pit into a dainty ramekin, its porcelain stamped with a laughing skull. “I thought they were darling together.”

“The point I was making,” Tiago said, “is that it’s a perfect storm.”

“And now our lovelorn Tiago is off the market, with his lovely little ginger snap,” Ofelia said. “Well, not ginger anymore. But still snappy.”

“Ooh, Tiago.” Atra sat up in Ofelia’s lap. “Tell us.”

Tiago pointedly rolled his eyes. “Feeli’s doing that thing she does, There’s nothing to tell.” Ofelia’s bird-of-paradise lovers drooped in disappointment. Tiago sighed, and with something bordering a smile added a “Yet.”

The salon flew into eager tittering and conspiratorial congratulation.

“Tiago has been the perfect brooding boyfriend material,” Ofelia said. “She’d be crazy not to at least give you an audition. Or gay, perhaps, in which case please do point her our way.”

“The poor girl’s been ripped from her home and turned unlit and lost her family and mauled by a seraph,” Tiago said. “And now she’s stuck in the undead capital of the UTSL. She needs time to plant her feet on the ground before I can think about sweeping her off them. And to acclimate. Anyone would.”

“I didn’t,” Seth said. “But I accept not everyone can be as adaptable as yours truly.”

“You were more adoptable than adaptable,” Ofelia said.

“What’s that even mean?”

“It means that unlike you or me or Feeli, Riccy already belonged somewhere,” Tiago said. “She had a future. She had all the expectations of a life, all the rhythms. The growing up, and growing your family, and growing old. They fall away or twist out of shape when you unlight. The milestones vanish, or stretch into the strange horizon. Things get weird.”

“Do you hear that?” Ofelia nudged Atra. “He’s calling her Riccy already.”

Tiago tossed a wadded-up grease rag at her.

A soft movement outside drew Seth’s attention; nobody else seemed to notice. Someone had been holding very still at the door, and was now departing.

“Weird is enjoyable, with the right shift in perspective.” Ponytail shrugged blithely. “Just get the girl a hobby and a king-sized feather mattress, and help her thoroughly explore them both.”

“In the books you can jump a dozen chapters ahead,” Ofelia said. “It’s made my girls and I rather impatient. Do feel free to stutter and shuffle a while before you confess your feelings. Some people go in for that.”

“I’m not stuttering,” Tiago said. “I’m being measured; I’m being mature. You and il Gutierre can follow your appetites all you like.”

“I followed your mother’s, actually,” Seth said, to peals of scandalized laughter from Ofelia’s Salon and a scoff from Tiago.

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