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By Root 410 0

waiting instead in my off moments in the halls for Angela to pass through so that I might stalk her without seeming to. Now that I was actually taking time to investigate her residence for the first time, I immediately felt a moment of disorientation. Expecting to find another small hovel, I instead discovered something much grander. What I had taken before to be the front entrance to a simple hollowed-out cave like Augustus’s (not a home but home to a few smelly sealskin rugs) was merely the back end, the alley exit, of a palatial fortress. Instead of rough markings made into the ice, these walls were perfectly smooth, except where moldings and primitive candelabra had been expertly carved into the surface. And there was furniture as well, not just heaps of animal carcasses but elegant pieces carved out of the very ice into chairs and tables and even baskets for storage. I saw this and was amazed, and also shamed: if you have to suffer the indignity of being a possession, it’s an even worse insult to be the possession of a pauper. Angela certainly seemed to have landed a prince, or some other branch of royalty, although to look at him you couldn’t tell. Or at least I took the beast I now saw to be her principal captor, but that was just because I found the thing standing behind her, staring intently at the woman as she worked. Angela was in what appeared to be the dining hall, a cavernous room immaculate aside for the smell that hung in it. There was a soft-shell crab place in South Philadelphia on Passyunk I used to go to, open for decades nearly twenty-four hours a day: this cave smelled like that joint’s sidewalk. But the place was spotless, clearly owing to the labors of the brown woman making it so. Still, there was a haughtiness to the creature sitting behind her on a raised surface, as if he himself was responsible for the efficiency of her work. He was no more responsible for his clean home than I was for Augustus’s messy one (I wasn’t touching that place, it was disgusting), yet there the creature was, as arrogant as a Shar-Pei.

At the moment, Angela was down on her knees, digging at the debris in the pale floor with a bone tool, pouring wet slush over the crater to smooth the surface in her wake. Despite the thick Gore-Tex and fleece which padded the majority of her body and limited her movement, Angela had the task down to industrial-level efficiency. She was so consumed by her efforts that she didn’t notice me for a long moment and, when she did see my boot, barely looked up.

“Is he still there?” Angela asked finally, not pausing from her digging. The debris she threw onto a skin which lay beside her, one that kept freezing to the floor, so that as she progressed she kept giving it firm tugs. I looked over at the creature directly and, thinking of Jeffree’s now missing eye, smiled the best I could at him, bowed my shoulders a bit, and tried to look stupid and harmless.

“Still there. Is he giving you trouble? Do you want me to do something about it?” It felt manly at first to offer the help, but the moment after I said it, fear quickly performed its castration. What we both knew: there wasn’t a damn thing I was going to do. This monster was huge, and even if he was made of more krakt than muscle, like Augustus was, the whole of their society was too much for me. This was their frozen territory, I could barely keep the turns correct in my mind to make it through the tunnels to town. As to how to make it back to the Creole base, I knew the direction was up but not how to get there without getting lost and freezing to death first.

Angela flashed her eyes to mine just long enough to make contact, and even then the creature made a bellowing sound, removing his hand from within his shroud and making me wonder uncomfortably about where his paw had been resting moments before. “You have to get me out of here, Chris. I’m not going to make it. I’m not made for this life, you know that. I went to Spelman, Christopher. I am a soror of Delta Sigma Theta,” Angela emphasized, her whispers otherwise barely audible over her