Secret Secrets: Chapter 5

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Milarose jerked awake to the clang of metal on metal as his cage door was jerked open. He turned his head slightly and let out a groan as the tight pain from his shoulder surged up his neck to the base of his skull, igniting the headache that had only just begun to grow. 

“Get up,” a gruff voice ordered. 

He raised his gaze to see a drakiri looking down at him with stern, yet simultaneously disinterested red eyes. Her broad face, the length of her limbs and what he could see of her body suggested to him she was some kind of Q’Lin mix, and she didn’t seem to have any scales under all that long, dark fur. She didn’t look very friendly either. 

“Lamashtu be gentle with him, he is hurt,” Esperanza said from across the aisle. 

“Gods strike you blind,” Lamashtu snapped, turning to glance over her shoulder at the caged healer. “Your bleeding heart isn’t my responsibility. I transport them from one place to another, if I have to drag them by the balls to do it, I will.” 

“Assuming they still have their balls,” another voice snickered. 

“Shut the fuck up Desmonae,” Lamashtu snarled. “Why they assigned you to this detail is beyond me. He’s a dracus, what are you going to do, poke him to death with that pathetic pigsticker you call a horn?” 

“You’re not much bigger than I am,” Desmonae snapped. 

Milarose could see none of these drakiri from where he lay on the floor of his cell, but he could tell there were many of them in that hallway, and he heard the rustle of leather wings among them. 

“Something crawled up Lamashtu’s ass and died this morning,” a fourth voice said. This one Milarose knew, he was the nightmare that flew with Boadicea. His name was Vyno, right? 

“The day you outlive your usefulness is the day I will have an attitude adjustment,” Lamashtu growled. She turned finally to look down at Milarose, irritation clear in her expression now as she moved farther into the cell. “If I have to get you up myself it’s going to hurt. Get UP.” 

With so many drakiri crowding his cell door, Milarose felt cornered. A bit of his old self shone through as he grit his teeth and refused to stand. He met Lamashtu’s gaze with a challenging stare of his own. 

“Just don’t kill him,” Vyno sighed. 

“No promises,” Lamashtu said as she stalked forward and lowered her head, ramming it into Milarose’s injured shoulder. 

Pain exploded over his shoulder and arm, his vision darkening from it. He felt the other drakiri forcing him onto his side and he twisted onto his belly, gasping in desperation. He lifted his hind leg to kick her in the face, but she lunged at him before he could, teeth sinking into the meat of his thigh between his knee and his hip. He cried out, twisting to reach with his uninjured arm across his body, but he could not reach her. 

“You’re making more work for me, stop it!” Esperanza called, sounding more annoyed than concerned. 

Lamashtu released Milarose and he collapsed onto his side again, the muscles in his thigh twitching and spasming from the sudden trauma. 

“Just kill me,” Milarose spat. “Your brute primal already tore up my skin, it’s worthless to you. So just kill me, I’m not going to make this easy on you.” 

“You assume my recruits prefer things to be easy,” Vyno said, and Milarose could finally see the dark nightmare where he stood outside the cell. His dark mane had an almost reddish hue to it, and as Milarose stared at the drakiri, he realized how young he was. This drakiri could hardly have been out of his childhood and here he stood as the apparent leader of this band of monsters. 

“Psychopaths, you hire psychopaths,” Milarose sneered. 

His gaze moved aside when he heard a mirthful chuckle, looking to the shadowed figure of Esperanza in her cell across the hall. She leaned against the bars of her cage, but still he could discern hardly more than the shape of her body—another dracus, if her size was anything to judge by. 

“He is not wrong,” Esperanza said as the three drakiri in the cell and the hallway turned to stare at her. 

Vyno let out a derisive snort and started down the hall, ordering over his shoulder, “Bring him. If he insists on fighting, drag him. Preferably not by the balls. Bring the healer too, her skills will be needed.” 

Milarose groaned as Lamashtu rammed into him, the only sound he was able to produce. He staggered to his paws, entirely unable to put his weight on his left foreleg and now struggling with his hind. He limped heavily, tail dragging along the concrete floor behind him. 

As he squeezed through the narrow cell door, Milarose was finally able to see Esperanza. She was, in fact, another dracus, with a flowing white mane that draped down her throat and settled over her chest. She had vivid magenta scales and satin rose-colored fur, bright pronged horns and blue eyes that seemed to peer into his very soul from behind long, white lashes. 

“Do as they say, for my sake if not for your own,” Esperanza said as he passed. “I am their only healer, so your stubbornness lands in my lap.” 

Milarose’s lip curled in disgust at her shrewdness, and he turned away, limping further down the hallway toward a set of double doors at the end. He stopped just before passing through the doors, drawing quick, shallow breaths to prepare himself for whatever lay beyond. 

Lamashtu shoved him forward and he nearly collapsed to the floor again, hitting the door chest first and crying out when his nose struck it. Blood trickled from his nostrils down his chin as the door swung open, revealing a massive warehouse. He saw the catwalks above where drakiri of all breeds, shapes and sizes patrolled, looking down at the goings on below. There was too much to see all at once, stations where Milarose could see small figures darting to and fro. They walked on two legs and had a small shock of hair atop their heads, worn in different styles and colors. Were these humans? He’d never had any interest in them himself, but he knew they existed in the world. Why were they here? 

“Bring him to the shower, scrub all that filth off him so I can see what he has to offer,” a new voice called. It came from a raised platform that stood at about eye-level for Milarose, with a ramp leading up to the top. On this ramp stood a drakiri who held a thick leger in his hand, scribbling in it with a pen. 

The drakiri was large, with a long torso and spiraling curls in his mane and tail that Milarose had seen in few others. This drakiri was a crossbreed, perhaps nightmare somewhere in his bloodline but he certainly had dracus blood in him. He had the face for it, and the size as well. His coat was pale, mostly white in fact with only shimmers of pink showing when the fluorescent lights above caught his fur just right. But his lack of markings was far from the most notable thing about him. 

When the drakiri turned, every hair on Milarose’s body stood on end with alarm. Where there should have been scales on his throat, instead there were teeth lining a gaping red maw that ran the length of his neck and further onto his chest. They may have extended further, but Milarose didn’t want to look. The teeth opened and closed like the mouth of a venus fly trap, clicking quietly against one another like the chittering carapace of some enormous, disgusting insect. 

“More walking, less staring,” a nightmare with black fur, glowing yellow eyes and a white mane snapped. She had vibrant aquamarine scales and leathery wings that were black as night itself. 

“Desmonae, don’t you have a party to lead?” Vyno asked, turning to face the other nightmare. She was twice his size, but she danced back from him when he turned to face her. “Go, they’re not going to wait for you for forever and Boadicea is in that party so I NEED you there.” 

“I don’t want to lead a party with her in it,” Desmonae complained, her wings hanging lower in petulance. “She’s so fucking weird, why do you keep her?” 

“She’s good at her job and she doesn’t give me lip every time I tell her to do something,” Vyno retorted. “Now go, you know your assignment. Come back with something or don’t come back at all.” 

Milarose had stopped walking to watch and listen to the interaction, mainly because Vyno was blocking his way forward. But when Lamashtu snarled behind him and Desmonae trotted off toward the double doors, he started forward again, limping heavier now as the limbs he had which still worked began to weaken. 

“That’s Mijhael by the way,” Vyno said, looking over his shoulder at Milarose as they walked slowly across the warehouse floor. “Mijhael Apollyon. He’s our appraiser and our risker. That’s what the humans call him, anyway. He tells us what’s worth what and where we can get away with selling it. You want to be on his good side, because if you’re suddenly worth nothing, there’s no reason to house or feed you.” 

Mijhael had turned away for a moment to speak with another drakiri, but when he turned back, his pink gaze settled on Mila, and the dracus’s skin crawled to have someone such as that look at him at all. Let alone look at him to gauge how much his body parts were worth. Yet when he raised his gaze to meet Mijhael’s, he felt seen—if only for a moment. He couldn’t have said why, but something in the other drakiri’s face told Milarose that Mijhael wanted to be there as much as he did. 

“Why is his pelt torn to shreds?” Mijhael demanded. 

“He put up a fight,” Vyno said nonchalantly, guiding Milarose toward a large grate that was set into the floor. The spaces were only the width of a whisker, but still incredibly painful to stand on as Milarose limped onto it. He looked up to the platform where the appraiser stood, narrowing his eyes. 

“Must have been quite the fight,” Mijhael said disapprovingly. “We may need to take the skin and regrow it if we cannot salvage any part of it. Wash the blood out of his mane and tail, we can take those at least. And his horn. The scales are worth more if sold as a set but can be sold separately at a loss.” 

“We haven’t washed him off yet, is it worth the effort if we can’t use his skin?” Vyno asked. 

“He is a dracus with an abnormal coat color, someone will pay handsomely even if he doesn’t have distinctive markings,” Mijhael said, closing his ledger with a snap. “Wash him, then bring him to my station.” 

Hearing these two talk about selling his body parts like they were haggling over cuts of meat made Milarose feel faint, but that could also have been from the pain. His head hung as he laid down on the grate, unable to stand for much longer. He heard Lamashtu growl, but Vyno turned and put himself between them. 

“Your duty is done, go escort Esperanza to Mijhael’s station,” the nightmare said. There was a tense moment where the two held each other’s gaze, neither willing to back down, until Mijhael spoke from above them. 

“Why is it always a pissing match to get anything done? You expect me to work under this management?” the drakiri demanded, the teeth that lined his throat moving with more agitation before settling closed like some ghoulish zipper. 

“Run along,” Vyno said lowly enough for Mijhael not to hear. “Or there will be another order for scarlet eyes and scales. And you remember how long those take to regrow.” 

Lamashtu bared her teeth in a ferocious snarl, but she turned on her heel and stalked across the warehouse to the double doors once more, out of Milarose’s line of sight. 

“You can stay laying down,” Vyno said, “but if the washers need you to move, I suggest you do it. They use cattle prods on ones who don’t listen. It’s less damaging to the product and more effective than poking with knives.” 

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