Meremon isn’t listening to me. He’s looking hard at the slime on the floor and I follow the direction of his gaze.
It’s moving.
Toward me.
I gasp and try to step back. “Please, I said I’m sorry.”
“You should have told me you were so eager for your present.” His voice is as flat as usual and I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“My present?”
The green goop reaches my shoe and climbs up it toward my ankle, beneath my skirts. I feel it touch my bare leg and I let out a high, thin shriek. “Make it stop! Please, it’s getting higher.”
Meremon doesn’t seem surprised by this. It’s reached my knees now, crawling up the inside of my leg. I squeeze them tightly together but it forces its way through and I feel it creeping up my inner thighs as if intent on—as if aiming for—
I cry out in horror as it oozes against my sex. I’m clenched so tightly but even so it finds its way between my lips and starts to pulsate.
I gasp at Meremon, “You’re doing this. Stop it at once, it’s disgusting.”
But the necromancer ignores my words, his silver eyes gleaming intensely. He’s looking at me like he did the jar of goop earlier, as if he’s created something very pleasing.
The slime is touching me like I touched myself in my dreams last night. He knows that I meant to steal the jar and he knows what I dreamed about, too. He knows I’m dirty, that I’m wrong. Maybe he didn’t even give me the mark. Maybe it’s just a result of my own badness.
“Meremon, please,” I pant, but it’s getting harder and harder to think straight. The slime feels so twisted in a good way as it rubs against my flesh. It’s concentrated on that sensitive pearl now, rubbing me just so, small, fast movements making heat flood my skin.
“Deliciae, you look so lovely when you’re flushed. Does it feel good? I wanted to give you a present for coming to me.” The faintest smile is on his lips. He’s watching me fondly, a mockery of affection in his eyes.
It feels—it feels like nothing natural and yet my body is responding as if it’s been waiting for this my whole life. The slime keeps massaging me, on and on, and a sweet ache begins within me, deep in my core.
I can’t call it pleasure. I won’t.
Meremon seems to know exactly what’s going on beneath my skirts and he’s staring at my hips as though he can see what the slime is doing to me. He’s driving me toward that precipice that I felt in my dreams and I don’t know what it is except that I know it’s something powerful. Something transformative.
He meets my eyes and says softly, “Don’t be afraid.”
But I am afraid because all unknown things are to be feared. How can these feelings be good and right when they have the power to take hold of my body like this? My eyes close as the sensations surge through me. Tight, golden heat rises up within me and I can’t hold it back any longer. My body flexes in the ropes and I shatter into a thousand pieces which fall in gentle sparkles to the ground.
The ropes finally release me, but I don’t fall gently. I end up in a clumsy heap at Meremon’s feet. Hair falling in front of my bowed head, I start to sob. “Why are you doing this to me? You’ve already ruined my life. You made me an outcast in my own village.”
All I can see are his booted feet. He doesn’t move as I continue to cry. The slime slides out from beneath me and forms a goopy ball a few feet away, finally motionless.
The feelings he gave me have shaken something loose and I cry out my misery. “Some days I feel like a ghost because I move among them, ignored and unseen. And now you do these things to me and it’s like you’re proving to me what I knew all along. That I’m dirty. That I’m wrong.”
Meremon crouches down before me and lifts my chin with a forefinger. I don’t see sympathy in his eyes, only more curiosity. His experiment is reacting in a surprising manner. I’m his experiment.
“Were they cruel to you, my Rhona? Were they afraid of what they didn’t understand?”
Tears trickle down my face. I don’t understand, either.
He gets up and moves away and then comes back with a tiny glass bottle in his fingers, no longer than an inch. Delicately, he collects each of my tears as they run down my face.
I feel weak and shivery after what his terrible concoction did to me. “Why are you stealing my tears?”
He collects each drip carefully with the manner of one engaged in fascinating work. “To study them later.”