Page 3 of Bottoms Up
“I don’t want to pull Ellania away from Lauren. Bacchus would do it, but…” He stopped talking and looked at Silver a few seconds. “No. Not my great-grandson.” He looked at Kirsten. “I can’t ask my sister Enyo because she doesn’t need to be in the same room with X, either. Ellania or Adonis. I’m afraid those are the only two I would trust for this.”
“Not Adonis, and Ellania is settled in Vegas, having fun performing. How about Harmonia? She’s in Vegas too, but…”
“Jupiter has taken a liking to the whole band,” Nathan said. “I doubt he’s going to volunteer to hang out with Silver possibly indefinitely, but he might have someone he can assign.”
Mordecai nodded to Nathan, looked at Kirsten a few seconds, and vanished.
“You’re welcome to stay here until we work something out,” Kirsten told Silver. “Go, get a shower. This is a safe space for you.”
When she left, Kirsten told me. “She’d have started crying if you’d hugged her. Don’t take her wanting to escape to the shower personally.”
I’d guessed that, but it was good to have confirmation. “Thanks. You should explain the pros and cons of Adonis guarding her, so she can make an informed decision. We haven’t promised monogamy to one another, and I would not deny her a few weeks with a god.”
Kirsten shook her head. “I try hard to keep him away from the public areas of the house. I don’t want any wolves falling into his spell. They mate for life, and I can’t imagine the damage his mojo could do to one in a committed relationship. He and I are friends, but I spend time with him away from Homewood.”
“My wolf had her fun with him years ago,” Marco said. “So she’s safe from his magnetic personality.”
I smiled at Cora. “Lucky you. I used to dream of Adonis setting his gaze on me.”
“Since your Silver wants some alone time,” Marco told me, “we have work to do.”
I followed him to the underground, aligning things by priority in my head. Mostly these days, I work on Senatus business for him, but we had an issue in South Carolina — businesses Marco owns that are being mismanaged. Marco was moving people around so he’d have loyal people in place to clean house and then run things properly.
* * * *
Silver
It’s kind of fucked up, but it wasn’t until I had a legitimate offer to make me ‘normal’ that I realized Ilikewho I am and don’t want to change.
And I definitely don’t want to bear children. For one thing, there was no way all the female hormones necessary to make me carry a healthy child to term wouldn’t massively change my body. I didn’t want more curves, or bigger tits. My body is perfect as it is. A waist cincher if I want more curves for a specific outfit, but otherwise, everything works no matter what gender I feel like being on any particular day.
Would I want to father children? I had the same questions — would the male hormones give me more facial and body hair I’d have to wax? Would they change my voice?
I looked at myself in the mirror when I got out of the shower. I mean,reallylooked, like I’d never seen myself before. Small tits, a picture-perfect dick even if it’s a little smaller than average. Slightly curvy body. A face that could pass for male or female — and did, depending on the hairstyle and makeup I either wore or did not.
While I was staring at myself, the necklace appeared around my neck once again, and I rolled my eyes at it in the mirror.
“I put you in your case because I’m tired of your ass.” I narrowed my eyes at it. Considering. “I bet there’s some kind of Mount Doom for you, and either no one’s telling me, or they don’t know what it is. Someone melted you down and turned you into a coin, right? So I could maybe melt you down and…”
It suddenly didn’t feel like I should say what I was thinking out loud, but what if I had this couple of ounces of gold melted into, like, twenty pounds of gold, and then that gold melted into a thousand rings and necklaces? Could you dilute it enough so it wouldn’t be sentient? Or would it make the whole twenty pounds sentient?
I did the math in my head, and twenty pounds of gold would be a little over half a million dollars — totally worth it for even the chance it might work.
Okay, so what if I did some kind of jewelry as merch? Little gold guitars? Or hell, I could make ten thousand gold coins like the kind I wore to the Grammys. Fuck yeah, that could work. Twenty made of real gold and sold with serial numbers so they’d be collector’s items, and a couple thousand made of silver with gold plating.
Mordecai popped into my bedroom with his back to me, and I walked into the room without bothering to put clothes on. He seems to know more than even Marco — it was nice of him to turn his back, but I was smart enough to know he knew everything about me. “You’re going to try to talk me out of it.”
“I don’t believe the necklace will allow you to do what you’re planning. It may or may not enjoy the idea of so many copies of its current form floating around out there, but it isn’t going to let you mix it into that much gold unless it’s certain it can be sentient when diluted. If so, it’ll allow it, and then you’ll end up with a whole bunch of magic necklaces, rather than just one.”
I walked to my suitcase, opened it, and stepped into a pair of shorts. “You’re sure there isn’t some kind of Mount Doom that Kirsten can zap me to?”
“The original torc was forged in Svartalfheim, the realm of the dwarves, and it was made of gold and silver, not just gold. The torc was a solid piece of metal, worn as a necklace. The silver and gold were woven together, with gemstones at the ends and the center.”
He looked at the little seating area in my room, and I said, “Please, sit.”
The women had mentioned, during our little drunken soiree, how the ‘old ones’ are big on certain formalities, like notsitting in someone’s home, or even their private space, without an invitation.
When the giant of a man, even bigger than my Julian, sat on the loveseat, I sat in one of the armed wingchairs.
