Order of Scorpions

by Ivy Asher

Bones is Riall, with his short ash brown hair and beard, hazel eyes, and thick muscular frame. Curio is Skull, the short, perfectly styled hair he had while wearing his glamour is gone. It’s still black and beautiful, but now it falls to his mid-back. Warm hickory-brown irises have replaced the black orbs I’m used to looking at, and he appears much larger in his own skin than he seemed before. They all do. Scorpius’s, or Tarek’s, creamy skin is smooth over bulging muscle, his ice-blue gaze watches me shrewdly, and the waves of his shoulder-length dark brown hair soften his square jaw and the angles of his high cheekbones.

I know all too well that life is nothing more than a brutal dance between predator and prey.

“You’re my brother and I don’t want to hurt you, but she’s my mate. If you don’t move, I will fuck you up,”

She knows her mind, and it’s a mind I want to know too. She’s unlike anything I’ve ever come across, and I want to unwrap her secrets and thoughts layer by layer until I’m as deep in her as I can be.

I usually love when the sky gets angry like this. The ocean always answers its fervor, and for a spell of time, the world mimics what too often rages inside of me.

I don’t want to get a taste of this life and love it, only to find out that it’s poison.

for the first time since I can remember, I wonder if maybe the key to my survival here is to demand more. My wishes and needs have never been a consideration before, but I can ensure that doesn’t happen here.

Hope is a dangerous mistress, but I don’t have to rely on that bitch, I only need myself.

“What doesn’t kill us fortifies us,” I offer gently, my strokes through her hair slowing as we stare at one another. I feel as though a part of her is reaching out to me, and something in me takes a hold of it and vows to never let it go. “We can take those things…” I continue, my voice growing deeper as purpose and regard settle like a tether between us. “Melt them down, mold them, and reshape them until they work for us instead of against us. Then, when we have weapons instead of wounds, we make the fuckers pay for what they did to us.”

but it’s time to get back to the truth I do know about this world. I am the only one I can really count on, and I need to figure out who the fuck I am and what the fuck I want, and I need to do it soon.

The lines around her eyes and mouth crinkle as she smiles, and I wonder what it would be like to be so happy that it’s physically etched in the planes of your face. I don’t know if I’d be capable of feeling that kind of cheer even if life knelt before me and offered it. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of person to find joy and contentment despite the circumstances.

“Tarek can shadow walk, manipulate heat, lightly compel, and cloak—those are his thura. Riall can also shadow walk and is Sanguinna, like you,” she

“I choose good when I can find it,”

“After all these years, I still can’t decide if the best thing in all the realms is incredible sex or the sound of some vile piece of shit breaking. It’s a tossup for me,”

“Partnership isnnae ownership, Poppet. That’s not how mates work. Trust takes time to build. You need to nurture it, give it a chance to take root, and then tend to it thereafter,”

“Males always think they’re so tough. Ridiculous, if you ask me. They get a mere taste of what they’ve spent their lives doling out, and they crumble faster than a sand house at high tide.”

How many times will I watch the Scorpions sting themselves in an effort to prove the sincerity of their actions and words?

She’s strong, intimidating, formidable…she’s…me.

“Full moons, half-moons, crescent moons, all the moons, now just as deadly as my Moonling,”

“What doesn’t kill us fortifies us,”

She tastes like home and fucking vengeance, two things that call to my soul and anchor me to this world.

They should really consider a name change from Order of Scorpions to Order of Confounding Cunt Teasers.

Someday maybe I’ll find out who she was and discover what her life would have looked like had she not been robbed of it. But who I am today was born in the pits from blood and brutality.

“Your heart is beating in tune with mine,”

If the three of them are the bargain for my soul, they can have it.

“If you dare dine on fox, beware the fangs,”

“You should know better than anyone that when you let a wolf into the paddock, the sheep always lose.”

“You’re not her anymore,” Skull mumbles quietly in my ear, his hand pressed to the small of my back. “You are not defenseless. You are not at their mercy. You are the dangerous one now. You are their reckoning.”

Everything up until now has been about survival, about brutality and the hunt. I’ve claimed a hard-won seat at the table of blood, bone, and blades, and I thought that was all I would ever have.

Fate just might be a fettik scorpion. The stars know I’ve been poisonous for everyone except these three.

“Time isn’t often fair,”

“Life promises us nothing,”

“Don’t let might and could rob you of what is right now.”

They lift me toward what I want instead of plucking it down and handing it over. They help me find solid ground in a world made of quicksand. I lead, they follow. I need, they give.

They shift who’s at the helm based on strengths, with no jealousy or competition marring the smooth transition of trust and control. They’re family, a true team in every sense, and now I am too.

I’m violent and broken. The shards of who I am aren’t easy to navigate, and I have a tendency to cut anyone who tries.

“I was already a monster; you just showed me how to embrace it.”