Lyssa Hudson

For once, Freddie was glad of the collar, limiting how much of the vulnerable skin of his throat was available to the woman. He watched her lips, trying not to give away quite how much he understood. His fingers scrabbled to retrieve his pencil but it was already well within her grasp. He reached for another pencil, this one a dark blue. WHY? he wrote across his flip pad, holding it over his neck.

Tessa had to be no genius to figure out that this woman was no help. She would watch her die and probably enjoy the show. It was only her goddamn luck that the Mistress was also the only chance she had. “Please”, she continued to beg. “Please. You can’t- I mean. I mean I won’t be any use to you dead… right?” Her stomach twisted at the words. There was little to convince her to voluntarily spend more time with the woman but if it worked, she would at least live to regret it. “I mean look at me. You can take me anywhere, do anything. I’ll do what you want, no complaints”

Freddie liked to think of himself as pretty good at reading people, given it was a necessity for him; there were bad vibes coming off this particular woman in massive waves. He wrinkled his nose involuntarily, glancing up from his sketchbook. Play dumb, he thought, averting his eyes from the intensity of her stare. He reached for his flip pad, and wrote a single word on it, underlining it before holding it up to her. "DEAF." Then he went back to his sketching, an uneasy expression on his face.

To say that Freddie wasn't best pleased was an understatement. He hadn't wanted to leave his mum in the first place, and to arrive somewhere that seemed to be some kind of active warzone and immediately be collared and degraded was... Well, it felt pretty bad. He'd thought about demanding to drop out immediately and go straight home, but what would he say to his mother when he got there? The money that they would be on the line for alone was vomit-inducing, and there was little chance of him finding another placement elsewhere. All told, the fact that when the administration had got to the last item on the list: magical creatures, Freddie had taken the revelation like a champ. He wanted to hit things, hit people, but pissing people off immediately felt like a terrible idea. Instead, he'd taken himself to the beach with his sketch book, hoping he could sit in splendid solitude for a few hours before being obliged to process what was happening to him. He huffed, blowing bits of eraser off the paper as he worked. It was angry, abstract pencil marks, almost like a cave painting in its construction of shapes, people made out of harsh triangles, layered on top of one another to convey movement. He paused a moment to look out across the water at the horizon. What the fuck had he got himself into now?

“IT!?” Tessa pulled on the plant as if to emphasize her words. A mistake, for the tendrils only tightened their grip around her joints. What kind of fucked up magic was this? “Ngh! Oh- Please, please, please” Another wound opened and suddenly the slave felt like crying. Why was nobody else here? Where was Sawyer? Where were the guards? Most of her life had been driven by an unlucky streak. Tessa had no doubts that this may well be the end of her. “I will- I will die if you leave me behind”, she pleaded. “Please. I will do whatever but please don’t leave me here”