The Devil's Favourite Obsession

Cassian’s grin came slow, and there was something in it that lifted the fine hairs along Cixi’s arms.

"I must ask your forgiveness," he said, "before I do something rather ungentlemanly."

Alarm rang through Cixi’s head when a wide grin appeared on Cassian’s face. She had seen it before. It preceded nothing good. It preceded chaos and confusion and decisions made entirely for his own amusement.

"What are you planning to do?" She was already shifting her weight, ready to scramble to her feet, ready to run.

She was far too slow. His hand found the small of her back, and with no more effort than a man brushing a leaf from his sleeve, Cassian pushed her into the pool.

Cixi pitched forward. Her arms flailed. Her mouth opened in a gasp that swallowed nothing but warm air, and then the water closed over her head.

She plunged into the pond.

The surface swallowed her whole and she expected to hit the bottom within a second because the water reserve had looked shallow, barely a foot deep.

She went on sinking, drawn down and down through a cold and endless blue that offered no floor she could feel and no light above her that did not shrink smaller with every passing second. The water turned from warm to cool to something vast and open around her body, pressing against her from every direction, and the sinking did not stop.

It dragged an old memory up out of the dark along with it. The ocean. The night she had died inside the sea.

Even as the fear closed over her, some stubborn and honest corner of her mind corrected the thought. She had been in the ocean before, yes, but never like this, never by accident. She had gone into that black water on purpose, from the hold of a ship, being carried off to be sold, and she had taken a gun and shot one of the men who guarded her for the single reason that she wanted them to turn their own guns on her. She had wanted, that night, to die.

She would have corrected herself infront of Cassian . She would have screamed it at him while he stood beside her with his hands in his pockets and his infuriating calm, except he was an asshole who had just pushed her into a pond.

It was then, through the fear, that the strangeness of it reached her.

She was not suffocating.

There was no pressure crushing her chest. No burning in her lungs. No frantic, desperate need to inhale. The water surrounded her completely, filled the space around her nose and mouth, and yet her body breathed as though the water itself was air. As though the pond had decided she was welcome and had adjusted its properties accordingly.

’How deep is this water?’

A hand closed around hers.

Cixi looked to her right. Cassian floated beside her, his dark hair drifting upward around his face, his clothes rippling in the current. He looked at her and gave her a perfect, unhurried smile. The kind of smile a man gives a woman he has just pushed into a magical bottomless pond and is thoroughly enjoying her confusion.

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to curse his name. She wanted to demand an explanation immediately.

But his hand was warm and steady around hers and the water was not killing her, so she settled for glaring at him with every ounce of fury her grey eyes could produce.

They reached the bottom.

Cixi’s feet touched a surface that felt like smooth stone, and she stood. Upright. On solid ground. Beneath what should have been hundreds of feet of water. She stood the way she stood on earth, her hair floating gently around her shoulders, the water moving past her body in slow, lazy currents.

Cassian stood beside her, still holding her hand.

Before Cixi could form a question, the water in front of them began to move. It pulled apart. A vertical seam appeared, widening slowly, the water peeling back on either side the way curtains peel back from a stage. An empty space opened between the parted walls of water, a path, dry and still, stretching forward into darkness.

Cassian walked into it.

Cixi followed, her fingers tightening around his.

As soon as they crossed the threshold, a cave came into view.

Cixi’s lips parted.

The cave was enormous. The ceiling vaulted high above them, curving inward like the inside of a cathedral, and every surface sparkled. Thousands of tiny stones were embedded in the walls and ceiling, each one catching the faint, sourceless light that filled the space and throwing it back in pinpricks of silver and pale blue. The effect was staggering. It looked like standing inside a night sky, surrounded on all sides by stars that were close enough to touch.

"Where are we?" Cixi breathed.

"Whenever I want to escape the world," Cassian replied, releasing her hand and walking further into the cave, his voice echoing gently off the sparkling walls, "I come here and stay."

Cixi turned to look at him, puzzled. "What do you mean you come here and stay?"

She took a slow, full turn, her eyes sweeping every corner of the cave. There was no furniture. No bed. No chair. No blanket. Nothing but the stone floor and the glittering walls and the vast, shimmering ceiling above.

"How can you stay here when there is no sofa or bed to sleep on?"

"I do not need a bed to sleep, Cixi." Cassian looked up at the ceiling, his dark eyes reflecting the tiny lights. "I simply lie on the floor and sleep for days. Sometimes for months, if I want to."

Nothing made sense to her.

She knew he could be something other than human. She had watched him crush a knife to ash with his bare hand. She had watched him make her belly vanish with a touch. She had watched the living room dissolve around them and reappear as a prison facility. But she had assumed, foolishly perhaps, that whatever he was still required the basic comforts that any living creature needed. Food. Sleep in a bed. Warmth.

Apparently not.

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