#cleo 004

“I’m beginning to think you’re not an inspector at all,” Siobhan said, squinting at the man’s hat. From a distance, it said: I have a PhD. Up close, Siobhan could see the smaller writing underneath. “Pretty huge dick,” she read aloud. Honestly, she should have smelled the stink of stupidity from him, but the Miller Lite had overpowered it. What else was she supposed to think anyway? Combined with his shirt that proclaimed him to be a female body inspector, he seemed like a man of authority. Or rather, he seemed drunk enough that his gaze was latched unerringly to Siobhan’s cleavage. Such a cultured man was exactly what she wanted. 

“It’s just a fuckin’ shirt,” he slurred, jerking against his bindings. His skin was pink under the thick ropes, the weaving groove of thread worn into his flesh. Siobhan tilted her head, accessing her work: he sat in the mud, bound across the chest and waist with his arms twisted behind him, curving around the rotting stump he was tied to. He kicked his feet like a child. “Are we gonna have sex or what? You didn’t even ask me for my safe word.” 

Siobhan tilted her head the other way, as if the angle might make the scene more artistic. She should have brought candles. Oh, but she couldn’t have Cleo thinking she had put any real effort into this. Siobhan’s standing with other fae was complicated, to say the least. No, she no longer cared about the community of them. However, the chance to be correct was a fae’s weakness. She was meeting Cleo for one clear mission: prove that Cleo was not murderously beautiful. 

Siobhan crouched, looking her captive in his drooping eyes. “You listen to me very carefully, Rick—”

“Ryan,” he said. 

“Rick.” Siobhan grit her teeth. “You listen very carefully: when a woman comes here, you will say she is ugly. Am I clear? You will look her in the eyes and tell her that she is repulsive.”

Ryan’s eyes were glued to Siobhan’s breasts again—now that she was crouched, he had the perfect downward view! Siobhan sighed and stood up. Was it too late to get a new human? A branch crouched behind her. Too late, she thought. 

She spun and forced a smile, smoothing her black dress; cut low on her chest, cut high on her thighs. Her glamour was firmly in place, and her knives were happily tucked into her leather jacket. 

—

Pride was a strange emotion for the likes of Cleo. She knew she had little claim to it and yet she clung to it all the same, head held high with the sheer belief of her superiority due to her nature. And yet she was a traitor to that nature. Abandoner of her aos sí, rejecter of her duty and a downright uninspired mess. 

It was not wrong for a muse to be a mess, not even wrong for them to be uninspired — but to accept it as unmoving fact and not make anything of it? That was wrong. To wallow in grief without creating something because of it? That was a waste. The words spoken to her back in chor-gleów were still sharp on her mind. Accusations of her sadness and grief being futile, if not human. Questions of whether she’d tried writing about it, singing about it, doing an interpretive dance on it, and if that had helped. 

She was a stunted creature, she knew that. But she was still proud.

So when a banshee – of all fae! – accused her of lying when she said her very appearance was enough to kill a man, she had to set the record straight. Cleo saw no issue in that at all. She had a reputation to uphold, even if her reputation was close to non-existent. 

She approached the place Siobhan and her had agreed to meet, a branch snapping underneath her boots. She did not much care for walking through the woods, but she was willing to make small sacrifices in the name of justice. When she saw and sensed the banshee, she looked her over swiftly to make a surface level judgement. She was glamoured, as she was, but looked fine. Not as stunning as she did.

But she did not linger long, her eyes falling on their judge of the day. Cleo clenched her jaw at the sight of a man tied to a stump. It wasn’t a sight that agreed with her, but his fashion choices were somehow almost at the same level of offensive. 

“Wow.”

Before she could get anything out the man spoke. Not to her, but to Siobhan. “Her? But she is not —”

Cleo interrupted. “Did you kidnap a man for this, Siobhan? Do you really think this appropriate?” Kidnapping was so crude. So ugly. So uninspiring. She considered the bindings, stared with disgust at the man as well as his situation. Under her breath she muttered, “Arschgeige.” Looking at Siobhan again she tutted. “You banshees…”

—

Cleo was okay-looking. Average. Slightly above average. Beautiful, in a regular, unremarkable way. Okay, fine, but certainly not as stunning as Siobhan herself. Her face was symmetrical, Siobhan could concede that. And her eyes were… captivating. The curve of her lips— 

Siobhan turned her head, grimacing as her cheeks pinked. Her brain supplied, unhelpfully, that this woman might really have a form that is beautiful enough to stop a heart. Siobhan would not accept that; being proven wrong was so utterly shameful and any victories Siobhan had recently could be counted on one hand—if you happened to curl your hand into a big, fat zero. 

Ryan whistled low. “She’s fuckin’ hot.” 

Siobhan kicked him and he whined like a child and whimpered like a puppy. “He means to say… hot… dog,” Siobhan said. “You look like a hot dog.” Siobhan’s skin prickled with the lie. Her cheeks reddened more. “I found him like this.” The lie bubbled through her esophagus. “Kidnapping is a tradition among our people,” she emphasized; what kind of a fae didn’t enjoy kidnapping? “Not that he’s kidnapped—perhaps re-located.” 

“I’m hungry,” Ryan said, as if answering. 

“Hungry for the truth,” Siobhan sneered. “Just as I am.” What was that word Cleo said? Arse… gay…ger? What language was that? Siobhan, who had been all over the world, hadn’t paid attention to the sounds that came out of the human’s mouths. For all Siobhan knew, it could have been some invented muse language, like when Pelvisa tried to invent Boneglish. It hadn’t worked out for the banshees of Saol Eile but perhaps the muses from wherever Cleo was from had figured out some obnoxious language for when they giggled over paintings.

“I see you muses are as delightful as ever. Do you have a problem with murder as well? Sorry, darling, but we’re fae,” Siobhan said, paying no mind that Rick was hearing all of this—he was off in his own world planning out how many hot dogs he wanted to eat, as evidenced by his muttering. “Chaos is in our nature. And this man”—Siobhan kicked him again—“is still very much alive after having seen your so-called beauty.” 

—

The compliment was crude and hardly the type Cleo liked. She was so much more than ‘hot’. She was stunning on a good day, pretty on a bad day, and went unseen on truly horrible ones. But she was not too bothered by it, as the compliment seemed to bother Siobhan and win her some points in her favor. Besides, the intent here was to prove Siobhan right — that she could kill with her looks. His poor choice in compliments would not continue to plague this earth much longer if she managed that.

Siobhan talked a lot and Cleo used that time to observe the banshee. She was not bad looking herself, though of course a glamour only told half the story. A glamour could smooth a few wrinkles. Hide the ugliest set of wings. Still, it was worth noting. 

As Siobhan pointed out that they were fae, a look of discomfort marred her face for a moment. “I’m well aware that we are fae. I do not need to tie up a man and murder him to feel like one. That is not in my nature. That is a very dull take on chaos.” Of course, she did not partake in chaos as much these days. She was a consumer of it at times, but not an enforcer. Her restraint with feeding meant she no longer pushed musicians to chaotic heights where music became something wild and unfettered. But that wasn’t something worth noting.

“Just because you are so dreadfully obsessed with death, doesn’t mean I am,” she pointed out. Of course, Cleo was deeply obsessed with death. She thought of it every day. Of the death she’d caused, the one that she always kept coming back to. “But I suppose he will die. Considering what we’re here to find out — the truth.” 

She looked down at the man again. “What are your credentials? What institution does a Female Body Inspector work for?”

“The ministry of beer and breasts.” 

Cleo turned towards Siobhan. “This is a miserable excuse of a man. Why could you not pick someone with taste? Elegance?”

—

Siobhan rolled her eyes; a perfect roll, as she had practiced in her mirror tent. “Oh no, did you forget what I am? If he was going to die, I would know. And”—Siobhan glanced at her watch—“as the seconds tick, I have yet to scream.” She sneered. “The proof is in the wail, darling.”

Fates, she hated Cleo and her insipid symmetrical face and that hair. By Death, what great hair, but even hair like that couldn’t distract from the sour personality under it. A dull take on chaos, she said? If only Siobhan could have had a bone for every time a muse called her dull. Their view was so narrow, so misguided, and it was clear that Cleo was the worst of the worst; attacking Siobhan’s faeness to thrust out her own. Nevermind that Siobhan really did need to kidnap and murder a man to feel like one. How else was she supposed to know she was a perfect being of immense power and irrefutable superiority? Meditation? 

Siobhan rolled her eyes again. “If he offends you so much, why don’t you go find a man, hm? It seems to me that I did all this work—found this nice, young Female Body Inspector—and all you’ve is whine and look pretty.” She paused. “Ugly, I mean.” She swallowed the rising burp of acid. She turned her face away and kicked Rick again. 

His head lolled to the side. He snored. 

—

She squinted at Siobhan and her banshee logic. “Sure, and you are never wrong, of course,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm. Banshees were a mystery to her on most days, what with their secretive ways, but she found this confidence frustrating. “You make yourself sound like the God humans revere. As if you decide who lives and dies, as if something strange could not just happen.”

But something in her was stirred, a little unsure. Cleo had heard many muses speak of the people they had killed with their form, and she too had witnessed someone breathe their last breath in front of her unglamoured beauty, but who was to say it would happen here again? Siobhan was a banshee. What if she truly could sense that Cleo’s appearance was not enough? She looked at the man who might die at the sight of her – she should not be doubting herself like this, and yet – and saw how he’d fallen asleep.

She felt the snore was a personal insult on them both. Siobhan was still a fae, after all. “If this is how you define nice, I’m very awfully worried for your standards. And I won’t apologize for not being satisfied with this situation — a drunk man, tied to a tree, making comments crudely inappropriate and not at all in an interesting way. Did you not say you found him like this, Siobhan? Are you lying now too?” A tut. “And you insinuate I’m a bad fae. Well, we should wake him and get this over with.”

—

Siobhan bristled, colour rising to her cheeks. “I am not a judge; I don’t decide who lives and dies. That belongs only to the sacred web of Fate.” How could she expect a muse to understand? Their idea of faith had to be sniffing a Van Gogh. “Nothing happens which does not pass through Her fingers.” Siobhan was such a puppet of her mother, it shocked her to look down and see her own hands—to be aware that it was her lips which moved without thought and her voice which carried the words steadily. She turned her head and frowned, an uneasy flutter in her stomach at the mere memory of her mother. She didn’t stop to unspool what she believed from what she had been told; it was best to leave it all untouched, like tiptoeing through the den of a sleeping lion. 

She crouched down and slapped Rick across the face, her own satisfaction evident in her grin. So, she liked slapping men. Best not poke that animal either. Siobhan stood and brushed herself off as the man sputtered awake. His half-lidded gaze traveled up Cleo; his slobbering tongue dragging across his cracked lips. Were his hands not tied behind his back, he would be rubbing them like a fly. 

Siobhan grimaced. “You’re right, Cleo. Nice was entirely the wrong word.” She brought her attention to the other fae, a much better sight. “Oh, like you don’t lie. We may struggle with it but what fae has ever loved the truth? The truth is a toy to bat around.” Siobhan knew she was projecting; it was her that couldn’t stand it. At any rate, they were searching for their own truth now. Would this man die because Cleo was so heart-rendingly beautiful? Siobhan stepped aside and gestured for Cleo to go on. 

—

“And you think fate is always upfront and honest with you? That you have a direct line with it?” She found the whole idea ridiculous and put in no effort to hide it. “That is the same if not a worse level of hubris. Stupid, altogether. Whatever higher powers are out there do not speak with you.” Cleo thought the highest power out there was art, something that was created through the magic of muses and the exertion of humans. Death surpassed it. Or at least, that was how she had thought of it for most of her life — now she thought death capable of killing art, too.

Siobhan was slapping the man across the face to wake him up, which was effective yet crude. She thought the man deserved a bit of slapping though, and though she thought herself better than Siobhan – who was clearly enjoying it – she did not find only disapproval within herself. Satisfaction, too. “I appreciate the truth for what it is. Reality. No compromise, just forwardness. It is disappointing you see it as only a toy.” She was not lying, not entirely. She did value truth. She just found it hard, these days.

The banshee stepped aside for her. Cleo moved forward, staring down at Rick. He was still wetting his lips. “They sell lip balm at many stores,” she pointed out, grimacing at his cracked lips. She undid the buttons of her coat, sliding it off.

“Awooga,” Rick said, salivating even more now.

Cleo stared at him for a moment, before looking at Siobhan again. “He is truly the lowest form of human,” she said. As punctuation to the sentence, she dropped her glamour. Her eyes became iridescent, shining in blues and pinks. Her ears grew. Her skin started to change, humming softly with a glow that seemed to radiate warmth. Her human features too, seemed to enhance. She turned her hands, opening them up to Rick, and waited for the man to die.

—

Rick—which definitely was his name now—didn’t die. He continued to sit there, legs caked with mud, smiling dumbly at Cleo. It was as if not a single thought had ever, or would ever, touch his head. Siobhan, even for all she wanted to be right, was achingly disappointed. The minutes spent with this disgusting, drooly man made her crave his death. If she didn’t think that Cleo would find it distasteful, she had half a mind to kneel into the muck and pray for Fate’s call. Because it was a direct line, despite how loudly incorrect Cleo was. A banshee was a messenger! What did she understand of it? Cleo was so….

Beautiful. Her eyes were like gemstones, her skin shed the messiness of life—not a wrinkle, vein or blemish. All at once, Cleo appeared to be a sculpture come to life, except that wasn’t the right way to describe it either. Siobhan had no words, she barely had any breath. It was the perfect lines of The Veiled Virgin—David’s humanly inhuman representation—beauty, as can only be told through the artist’s fingers and still not enough. One could search for a million descriptions, and they would land flat at Cleo’s feet. One could break their hands craving her from marble and never describe the way light sat inside Cleo’s skin. The longer Siobhan looked at her, the more the word ‘beautiful’ itself slipped away from meaning. 

Now, if only she was holding some bones; all of this would really be improved by a skull or two. 

Siobhan turned her head away, Rick was still licking his chapped lips. She’d seen muses before, but it had been so long, and perhaps she had forgotten there was a reason they inspired art in the first place. Rick, however, looked like he thought the highest form of art was action-comedy films. If Cleo’s looks could kill, it wouldn’t have worked on Rick. 

“You’re so hot,” he slurred. “Like Gala”—he swallowed his drool—”Galadriel. Cate Blanchette, not the woke TV show one.”

“He says so many words,” Siobhan said, “and none of them please me.” Siobhan gestured, keeping her eyes away from Cleo. “And yet, talking is a sign of not being dead. When is he meant to combust, exactly? Or is it a gradual death? Say in… Oh, twenty years? Thirty? When the beer and hotdogs have caught up, I imagine.” She smirked. “‘I appreciate the truth for what it is. Reality. No compromise’.”

—

Cleo was not sure what she had expected. For Rick to suddenly come to pass and succumb to a death that would be explained away as an alcohol overdose, rather than being thoroughly overwhelmed with her appearance? She wasn't sure. It should be what she had expected, to have had blind faith in herself and her appearance, all the generations of muses that had come together to create her. And part of her still thought that an honour worthy defending, but Cleo was also aware that plenty of humans had seen her and had not died. Or at least, not as a direct result. There was just the one (and if that one was questionable, that went ignored). 

She looked from Rick to Siobhan and was ready to go back to Rick when she at least got some satisfaction from the other fae's expression. If Rick thought her beautiful, in the way many men tended to think women (human and otherwise) beautiful, that would do little for her. But seeing another fae at least somewhat struck by her appearance? That satisfied. Muses were the lookers of their kind, after all. 

But there was still Rick, who compared her to the icy blonde from those movies. Cleo had seen them years ago and mostly appreciated their soundtrack, and thought the comparison was rather foolish. It was less disrespectful than being simply called hot, as if there were not a hundred more poetic words that should befit the way she looked in her truest form. Hot was so offensive, wasn't it? So reductive. She would take sultry or enticing, alluring and hell, even bodacious. But hot? It made it clear to Cleo that Rick saw only a fantasy. And not an interesting one. 

“Shut up,” she said, “Just because I have ears like her does not make us similar. You are so stupid.” And alive.  

Cleo was not a murderess in the sense that she went out and about to kill people. Humans died under her influence (though it had been years) and she carried little guilt for it (except for that big one, the main one, the Harley of it all, the one that had undone it all). But she thought Rick should die. She hoped the banshee would do it, though. She did not kill with weapons or hands. Hers was a slower death. “He has no taste,” she pointed out, “You picked a poor excuse for a human, to set me up for failure. And they do not combust. They die mouth-slack, eyebrows raised, overwhelmed. Did you make him drunk? It makes humans less receptive, you know. You are a saboteur.” 

—

Siobhan raised a brow. “I’m surprised you know who Galadriel is.” She paused. “Nerd.” Of course, Siobhan wasn’t going to comment on the fact that she only knew who that was because she’d read the books, which was far more indicative of perceived nerdiness. Still, it was fun to call someone a nerd. The lack of lockers to shove Cleo into didn’t appease Siobhan’s dreams of being an American movie bully. She’d find other insults. Or, perhaps, a nice set of stairs to push Cleo down. 

“Saboteur?” Siobhan repeated, scoffing. “Me? Darling, he wouldn’t have died if you were the only woman he had ever seen in his life. You’re just not that…” Siobhan couldn’t get the lie out; it burned, lodged in her throat, and she coughed. Her gaze was still cast away from Cleo, scraping over the mud or raking across the clouds instead of settling on the muse. “Have you considered that you’re simply not beautiful?” she asked, not technically a lie, and cleared her throat. She had to look at her; there was no hope of convincing Cleo that she was unaffected if she couldn’t look at her. Slowly, she dragged her gaze forward. 

It wasn’t just that Cleo was beautiful, though she certainly was, it was the terrible green beast. Her skin was so smooth; had it ever known what it was like to curl in, protecting itself from a rain of sharp stones? Had her ears, pointed in the vision of every human story of fairies and elves, ever heard the sneers and ridicule of everyone she knew? Every scar on Siobhan’s body burned. She wanted to peel Cleo’s skin off but it would be such a shame to ruin something so beautiful; a thought no one had ever spared for her. 

Siobhan tugged her jacket closer. “I picked a sub-optimal human. However, all humans are terrible. Really, what’s this one from the next? If you can’t kill him, you can’t kill anyone. You are good for nothing, a shame to muses everywhere.” Siobhan rolled her aching shoulders; her body was tense with the effort of looking at Cleo and the punishment of keeping her attention latched on to what she could never have again. “All I hear are excuses. And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to… cleanse my eyes. From you. I need to go look at a bone.” 

—

“I was alive when those books were written and first published. Your attempt at being derogatory will not work on me — I have seen Tolkien’s work rise to mass popularity, have seen the premieres, there is no nerdiness about knowing a piece of fiction that defined a genre for decades to come.” Cleo exhaled after she was done talking. One of the members of her aos sí had claimed to have fed off Tolkien while he worked on the Hobbit, which would have been a devastating lie if not true. (Still, some muses wanted fame so badly that they lied despite the consequences.) 

She looked at Siobhan with incredulity. Was she seriously asking this? “I have not,” she said bluntly, and then clutched at her chest. Cleo was surprised by the stab of pain that usually accompanied a lie, because she had not thought that a lie. She had never considered that, had she? Or perhaps she had. There were many days that felt like they did not exist, spent simply standing, sitting or lying down while the world passed. Where she had called her reclusion hibernation. When she had thought herself too grotesque a sight to show the world. “He is faulty!” Her skin reached a higher octave. That always signified something in a song, but she refused to acknowledge that it signified something about her.

And then Siobhan continued with cutting words. They had been tossing out mutual insults about the other’s faeness the whole time, but now Cleo felt harmed by them. She wanted to argue Siobhan that she could kill and had, but it was an argument she could not make without bringing Harley’s spirit to the forefront of her mind. Invoked as proof against a cruel banshee. She could not do that to him. And though there were others who had succumbed to her feedings before him, it mattered not.

“So you will just leave? Walk away? I am not cleaning up this – this mess you made, Siobhan!” She watched the other with anger in her gaze, which was a better emotion to hold than the sheer sadness that coursed through her. She was a shame to muses everywhere. That too was something she could not argue. Cleo focused for a moment, reinstating her glamour. Rick made a sad sound. She glared at him, then at Siobhan. “No, let me excuse myself. I have seen enough here. I do not wish to be around his and your stench any longer.” She crossed her arms and stomped once before turning on her heel.

—

Siobhan relaxed the moment Cleo spun away from her, exhaling the tension like a popped balloon. She crouched to Rick’s level, who was asleep again, and watched from below as Cleo stormed off. “‘The mightiest and fairest of all elves’,” Siobhan said softly. Waiting only until she was certain that Cleo couldn’t hear her, she added, “I’m sorry.” 

The words had been a little cruel, hadn’t they? They left an angry hollowness sinking through Siobhan. The target of them was herself; no matter how it was put, she was the failure to everything that a banshee, or a fae, was meant to be. The hope that by setting the curse upon Cleo, she could relieve herself of it, was crushed open. She should have known better; one does not shed a truth with a lie. 

Siobhan looked at Rick. “As for you, you might actually be a disappointment to the human race.” 

He snored. 

She sighed. “Do I have a stench?”