Familiar Faces

Jack awoke violently, expression immediately pissed off. Completely shrouded in darkness, he reached to support his fractured arm before realizing there was no pain coming from the extremity. Stretching, testing his arm, he brought his hand directly in front of his face but couldn’t see shit. A nasty thought crossed his mind and he hoped to Christ he wasn’t blind. Do I call out and hope for the best? Why did that China girl jack me from Lily’s place? Where the fuck am I? Using his arms as feelers and testing the ground in front of him with a foot he started moving in the darkness, eventually coming to a wall higher than he could judge and traveling  horizontally in both directions. At least there was no giant goddamn snake in here. He paused and frowned. That would suck, blind and now feeling around the inside of snake infested environment, at least with sight and twig he felt like he could do something. Crouching down, he felt the floor and it was hard, no sand. Fuck this shit, he snarled.

“Hey!” he yelled, back to the wall, hands out defensively. Suddenly the wall was lifted away. The light was blinding, he raised his hands to try and shield his vulnerable eyes.

“Motherfucker,” he growled.

“Hello Jack,” he heard the familiar voice of Hilde say, though he couldn’t see her yet because of the harsh light.

“Bitch,” he answered.

There were several chuckles from a bunch of different people. He blinked furiously trying coax his own into focus. Indistinct figures began to sharpen and he realized where he was, Hilde’s house.

He looked around, there were at least a dozen women in the room with him, most he knew, some were strangers to him

“What the fuck happened? Where’s that turbo cunt Lily?” he demanded, raising a fist.

“Oh my god! He is adorable!” said a gorgeous blonde haired woman, girl practically he didn’t know. He extended his right arm and showed her his middle finger.

Hilde smiled, almost a smirk, “We sent Lily on a little trip,” she answered.

“Trip?” he asked.

“To another place. She will be back in time, but for the next while she will be how should we phrase it, indisposed,” Hilde informed, golden eyes full of mischief.

He glowered at her, then swept his gaze over the other women in the room, stopping at Selene. He pointed a finger at her, face dark.

She grinned.

He stopped, looked down at his arm, then back toward Hilde. “That was some magic bullshit that came out of my arm,” he said.

Hilde nodded. “Designed to bring down Lily’s defenses,” she explained. “We implanted that spell beneath the null sigil there, so no one could detect it. Once you were in her inner residence, the spell was triggered, disabling all of her wards and allowing Diaochan to get in here and set the trap, kind of like a Trojan virus piggy backing its way in before doing what it was designed to do,” she answered.

“You used me as goddamn bait?” he challenged, stepping forward.

She nodded, smile intact.

“That crazy psycho bitch tried to feed me to her bloody snake, after she broke my arm!”

Hilde shook her head. “Medusa has recently fed and unless you antagonized her, she was no threat,” she informed, “Frankly, I think you’re being a shade overly dramatic.” She waved a hand and turned her head away.

He looked to the Asian woman. “Diaochan?”

“Where are my manners? Jack, this is Diaochan, Diao this Jack,” Hilde introduced, holding him forward. The beautiful black haired woman with jade colored eyes smiled and nodded.

Looking back at Selene, “Did you know?” he asked.

Hilde chuckled, “Of course she knew, she was the perfect vehicle to get Lily to bite into the plan,” she said shaking her head.

“Her bitch friend Jessa?”

“Jack, I thought you were smarter than that, Jessa belongs to Lily’s circle and did exactly what Lily wanted her do,” Selene answered, “We just facilitated.”

“That is fucked,” he grumbled. “Like a fucking worm on a hook,” he shook his head.

“More like the perfect lure to stick it to Lily,” Hilde answered.

The blonde woman who had called him adorable came close. “I’m Simone,” she introduced. In the background Clarice glowered.

He gave Simone a feigned smile, “Isn’t that special.” He was about to add another insult, but caught sight of the white haired woman, Serah, staring at him, he stopped in his tracks. There was something in the way she was looking at him, he couldn’t describe it.

“Anyway,” Hilde’s voice breaking the fascination, “You’re probably wondering why most of our circle is here,” she said.

He turned slowly back, “Nope, not unless it’s about making me might right size again.”

Hilde slowly shook her head, “Clarissa has decreed not until we’re resolved of the Halston affair where unfortunately for you we have encountered a bit of a wrinkle, anyway, that’s neither here nor there, we’re assembled in case there is a retaliatory action on the part of Lily’s circle. I think it’s highly unlikely, in fact I’m hoping in her absence, her circle splinters,” she stated.

“So this,” he extended his arms out, “Is a like a defensive bunker to ward off on an assault?”

“Exactly,” Hilde said with a smile.

“So why am I here?”

Hilde shook her head, “You have no idea what an anomaly you are to women like us Jack,” she informed.

“What do you mean, anomaly?”

“You are a son of Garth,” she stated, there was a titter of hushed voices, but Hilde raised her hand, “And as such, none of us need restrain ourselves, so to speak, very ,very, rare and now you have that sigil that hides you from our sight, talk about candy,” she chuckled throatily.

“That’s me, sweet through and through,” he said dourly.

“Now you must choose one of the women in this room,” she said, looking at the faces peering down on him.

“WHAT?!” he blurted.

Hilde brought her hands together and clapped, “No, I’m just messing with you, the circle has already decreed you community property.”

“Remember?” reminded Clarice, “Sharing,” she said, gorgeous smile on her face. Fuck she was cute.

He nodded and pointed a finger at a sexy brunette he was unfamiliar with, “Who are you?”

“Elizabeth,” she answered, smile on her pretty face.

He nodded, turning on the spot, the center of attention for the twelve women looking down upon him. “So how long is this slumber party supposed to last?” he asked.

Hilde checked her wrist watch, “Another twelve hours or so I would guess, we’ll know by then if Lily’s group was able to identify our involvement and develop a counter offensive,” she said.

Jack frowned. “Twelve hours?” he asked, again looking around at the assemblage and slowly shaking his head, “And I’m the only dude, in a room full of gigantic pussy with twelve fucking hours to kill,” the smile on his tiny face seemed disingenuous.

Defrosting Serah

Having remained silent throughout the entire discourse, Serah moved toward the table and removed something from her brassiere, before setting Jimmy the Pin down on the table.

Jack’s face brightened, “Jimmy” he said.

Being the object of scrutiny by so many huge women, the Pin hustled over close to Jack. “Jack.”

Leaning in close, “From what I heard about the ice queen over there, I’m surprised you’re still in one piece,” Jack said.

Serah pointed an index finger down at Jack, her face an inscrutable mask. “I would speak with this one, in private,” she said, looking to Hilde.

Jack got an uneasy feeling. Jimmy put his hand on his shoulder.

“She can be incredibly scary, but you need to talk with her,” Jimmy said, looking up at Serah.

“Seriously?”

Jimmy nodded.

Hilde looked at the faces of the women, a curious expression on her own face, “Of course,” she said.

Serah put her hand down near the table.

“Go,” urged Jimmy.

“You’re going to be alone with all these broads,” Jack said, taking a few steps in Serah’s direction.

Jimmy chuckled and shook his head.

Simone gave out a small cry, several of the women turned in her direction but her eyes were fixed on Serah.

The white haired woman received Jack and quit the room, retiring to Hilde’s office.

Setting him down upon the desk, “I know of no other way to say this, I believe you are brother to one I loved a long time ago.”

He nodded slowly, unsure of what to say or how to respond to her statement. It was evident in her disposition that this long lost brother was indeed someone very special to her. “What was his name?” Jack asked softly, his normally abrasive veneer gone.

“Tius Valerius,” she answered.

He nodded. “Sounds like a name from the movie Gladiator,” he commented.

She chuckled, “He was a roman centurion,” she said.

Jack nodded his head, “So I had a brother who was kicking some serious ass back in the day,” he said.

“He was a very skilled warrior,” she said. “Without peer.”

“It runs in the genes,” he said, breathing on his knuckles and pretending to dust them off on his chest.

She reached out and touched his face tenderly, her blue eyes welling with tears.

“What happened to my brother?” he asked.

“Lily ripped him in half, right in front of me,” she said, a tear spilling down the side of her cheek.

“He was tiny like me?”

She shook her head, then paused, “He was his normal size and so was I, which is still about the same difference between us now,” she explained.

“What a cunt,” he commented, making an angry face.

“I would have killed her if not for Hilde, Selene, Vanessa and Simone. I didn’t care. I became my mother’s daughter that day,” she said, voice soft.

“Who is your mother?”

She chuckled. “The Pale Queen, the Goddess of Death.”

“Jesus,” he mumbled, frowning, a little spot in the back of his mind wondering who gave the Goddess of Death a jump and made a kid?

She locked her eyes onto his, “I didn’t know his heritage then, didn’t know there could be another like him, until I saw you the other day here at Hilde’s,” she informed.

He nodded slowly. Why was she telling him these things and what did she expect from him in return? “Um,” he started, “I don’t know what to say,” he confessed.

A slow smile came over her face, “Say you’ll give me an opportunity to get to know you.”

“Okay,” he said, not entirely sure what that meant, “But you will need to understand, I’m not him, I’m me and though we may have the same father, we are different people,” he clarified.

She nodded, “Of course,” she replied.

“I would be more comfortable with this happening between us, you know, when I’m normal sized and all, but we can hang out and get to know each other,” he offered.

“Once we resolve the issue of the Soul Reaper,” she said, “Then we spend some time with one another.”

“Soul Reaper?”

“Like Hilde, there is one running loose right now,” she shared, “And we have to track her down before she wreaks too much havoc.”

He shook his head, trying to wrap his head around the information she was sharing. Standing, she encircled her hand gently around him and brought him near her face, kissing the side of his face softly.

She returned with him to the room where the others were gathered. He smiled outwardly, but inwardly he was filled with a ton of uncertainty. So many things could go wrong and he could stuck in the middle of some serious shit between the children of gods. What about Clarice, or Clare? Was Serah looking for a boyfriend or some kind of commitment? Hilde was only joking when she said he had to pick one, but if he did, he was going to have a lot of pissed off girls, who had already demonstrated a propensity for consuming people who wronged them. Why did the gods have so many bloody girls? Where were their male contemporaries?

He chuckled softly to himself, either these girls killed them all or they were probably fucking hiding, smart bastards.