Volunteer.
A volunteer magpie was a fucking oxymoron if I’d ever heard one.
Volunteers were trafficked and kidnapped, the label slapped on them to make their buyers feel good about themselves. None but me actually wanted to be here tonight. Female inmates from the sister prison received reduced sentences if they joined the Magpie Order, hauled over here for itchy males to rape in the dead of night—perhaps even painted pretty and bussed uptown to the elite at the north end of the island for a little forced debauchery.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
I stared harder, the blemished divinity in my marrow leeching into the fake green I’d adopted for my performance.
The Magpie Order crafted such a pretty, noble picture for their girls. They provided a service. They were to be respected and worshipped, praised and mollified. Having been through the whole process the last two months, I knew the game better than my sisters tonight. I knew the bullshit they fed their newest victims, the lies they whispered in our ears to make this world seem less terrifying.
Like pampered piglets led to slaughter, these Ether Island magpies.
The illusion shattered the second our sad little bus pulled up to the prison’s main entrance. Guards just like these ones hissed venom from the start, leering and laughing. They might not get to fuck magpies—though I imagined some did before they tossed them back on the bus at sunrise—but they got their own twisted kicks from this, from the vitriol sprinkled on these women before they faced actual monsters.
Yet after my fall, I became an acolyte of Lilith.
Friend to Hera and Frigg and Artemis and the Morrigan.
I flew with Furies and Valkyries.
I raged with Eris and Shiva.
And now, to add to the list, I happily bedded sons of the apocalypse.
These petty humans would have to try much, much harder if they wanted to illicit real fear in me.
“Okay, well, back on the bus you go, bitch.”
I tossed the damp torn cotton aside, feet planted as this child in a guard’s uniform tried to urge me onward. “No.”
His partner slowed a few paces away, while this one gawked like I’d just insulted his mother. We were all told when it was over, we would be escorted back to the bus to wait for the rest of the magpies, then shuttled over to headquarters in the forests of central Ether Island. Some of the girls fretted that from the looks of these guards, the stories they had heard, there might be a pit stop along the way—another breach of conduct, another storm of abuse.
No.
“What did you just say?”
I flashed a toothy smile worthy of Lilith herself, then fluttered my black lashes. “Not until I get what’s mine.”
Earlier in the hour, I had screamed for these ten men. Begged for mercy. Insisted I had made a mistake.
An act.
A test—to see if the lies fed to magpies by the mouthful were true, that if we sacred women rejected a suitor, our handlers would spirit us away to safety. In that instance, it was a failing of the men, not the magpie.
No such luck.
How many magpies before me had rammed their fist on that very door, begging for sanctuary, only to crumble and wail as these men laughed on the other side?
One was too many.
I had offered these ten souls redemption—they sealed their own fate.
“No, seriously, what the fuck just came out of your mouth? No?”
I rolled my shoulders a few times and then cracked my neck in either direction. Strange that the hellions had been the ones to rescue their magpie. They knew the truth, what these amoebas would do should I refuse them. Not only had they spared some poor magpie a severe whipping, but they had offered to… free her. Me. In my name, they offered a choice: stay and play as I had done for two months without any of my three monsters realizing—or put my foot down. Had I done that, they would have lashed out. Fought for me.
Since my fall, I’d suffered the bitterness of many a broken promise—but their declaration to liberate me wasn’t one of them.