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The first time a guy called Shantay and her powers 'intimidating', she actually thought he meant it as a compliment.
"Thank you," Shantay said, unable to pull back a startled smile. A good word, intimidating; lots of sounds to play around with, like that sharp second syllable with the crisp, promising T, tongue flicking satisfyingly at the back of the teeth. She let it roll through her mind like distant thunder or an unsuspecting punch to the head.
'Intimidating' sounded perfect for the girl who could turn her skin to metal and punch through walls.
Except. Except the guy (she forgot his name after that, out of spite -- she asked one of the girls with memory powers to futz with his identity in her mind so no matter how many times they're introduced she never remembered) blinked at her. "Oh," he said, backpedalling, and across the room one of the trainees yelped and nearly dropped her mug. (His power was the ability to boil tea -- and only tea -- from a hundred feet away.) "Oh, no, I meant -- okay."
Shantay was not and would never be stupid. Back at her room she pulled out her battered student thesaurus and paged through to make sure she'd remembered the word correctly -- that 'intimidating' meant strength and power and confidence, all the traits her parents taught her a girl should have if she was going to survive in a world that would eat you soon as look at you. Shantay found the entry and read through it -- once, then again, then a third time. She ended up nearly missing her chair as she collapsed into it, landing with her ass half on the edge of the seat and bruising her tailbone.
in-tim-i-dat-ing, adjective: frightening, threatening, menacing, sinister, brooding, daunting, tormenting, formidable, fearsome, terrifying, chilling, disturbing, disquieting, unfriendly, unwelcoming
That morning Shantay had crept out to the balcony to watch the sun rise; she held out her hand and let the metal creep over her fingers, flowing over her dark skin like a silver river, and tilted her arm so that the pink-orange glow of the morning rays glinted over the shining surface. She'd gone on to smash a room full of targets at her pre-breakfast training, then practiced her defences against the girl whose hair turned to daggers whenever she pulled one out.
It never occurred to Shantay to think of it as anything but a good thing, go figure. Then again, she was only fifteen years old, so she cut herself some slack.
Later at supper, Shantay made sure to squeeze in next to the guy in the cafeteria line. When she reached past him for a tray, she focused her powers and ran long lines of quicksilver from each knuckle up the back of her hand and arm. He flinched away, and Shantay bared her teeth in a sharp smile. "Sorry," she said cheerily. "Didn't mean to intimidate you."
"No offence," said another boy once, while Shantay sat and thought very seriously about punching him into the wall. "It's just that a power like yours is kind of wasted on a pretty girl like you. You should have something complementary, like summoning flowers or moonlight, and let someone else do the smashing. You shouldn't be beautiful and badass, that's just not fair."
"Is that so," Shantay said in a flat voice. "This coming from the guy who commands bug armies."
"I don't command them, I possess them," he said in a snotty, condescending tone. "I put a piece of my consciousness inside each one; that way I can be a hundred places at once."
Shantay made a mental note to put insect repellant along the cracks of every door into the girls' dormitories, but she kept her expression level. "Can you possess that ant over there?" she asked, pointing. She waited while he squinted in concentration, then as soon as he announced he was in -- and started narrating the ant's deep desire to find a particularly enticing crumb of cheese -- Shantay stomped hard on the insect with her boot, smearing it against the tile.
He yelped and staggered back, slapping at the side of his face. "Hey!" he said, glaring at her. "That hurt! What did you do that for?"
Shantay flipped him off and skipped away, feeling much better.
"I don't think I like guys," Shantay said the next time she visited home. She pushed her carrots around her plate, ignoring the blaring car alarm that had been screaming when she got in and hadn't stopped yet, despite their neighbour's apparent belief that it could be deactivated by excessive profanity. "Would anybody mind if I turned lesbian?"
She'd hoped for a reaction, but Mom just clucked her tongue and leaned over to slap the back of Tyrone's hand as he tried to snag another helping of potato kugel on the far side of his brother. "We don't reach across the table like savages in this house," Mom said sharply, and Tyrone made big Bambi eyes and asked please-pass-the-kugel in a sugary voice. It got him another smack for attitude, but also the kugel.
"No really," Shantay said, louder this time. "I think I'm going to go all lesbian."
This time Mom looked up and raised an eyebrow. "If I'd had the good sense to turn lesbian years ago, I bet my life would be very different. I'd be a successful businesswoman somewhere instead of tied down with you little monsters." She waggled her finger at the boys, mouth twitching as she tried to hide a smile.
Tyrone grinned, cheeks stuffed full; Nathan just rolled his eyes, since thirteen-year-olds don't react to anything and he'd already shrugged once today. After this he'd have to ration out his one remaining sigh, which meant staring down at his plate with a noncommittal scowl for the rest of the meal.
"Is it the boarding school?" Dad asked, frowning. "Is that what this is? I've always said New Hampshire is full of libertarians."
"It's not the school," Shantay said, joining Nathan in sending her eyes up to the ceiling. "It's just ... guys. They're kind of stupid and rude and they think I'm intimidating and I don't really think I want to date any of them."
"Oh." Dad blinked, then cheered up and speared a piece of brisket on his fork to gesture more effectively. "Well, you're absolutely right there, boys are bad news and you should stay away from them. If sticking with girls for now keeps you from ending up pregnant at seventeen, I'm all for it. Bring on the lesbianism. Intimidate away!"
Shantay slapped a hand to her forehead. "Never mind."
Late that night Mom slipped into her room to say goodnight, and she sat on the edge of the bed and stroked a hand over Shantay's hair. "Any boy who thinks you're not good enough, all that means is he's not good enough for you," she said with fierce determination. "Don't give up on boys just yet, but don't take anybody's nonsense, either. You just keep being you."
"Thanks, Mom," Shantay said, and if Shantay with magical metal-growing powers could be half as strong as her mom without any manifestations at all, she'd be okay.
Shantay and all the others in her graduating class got taken out to a bar to celebrate their initiation into the Croatoan. Technically none of the new recruits would be twenty-one for a couple of years yet, but funnily enough neither the bouncers nor the bartenders ever seemed to notice.
"Is it a mind control thing, or do we just have influence?" Shantay asked one of the older women, leaning in close to be heard over the music and the crowd and the shaking of the bottles along the back wall, caused by the boy whose body reacted to alcohol with bursts of low seismic activity.
"You know, I never thought to ask," Chloe said, flashing her a grin. "You'll learn not to look at good things too hard. Just take what you can get and run with it."
Shantay took a sip of her mojito and winced at the cloying sweetness before setting it surreptitiously back down on the bar. Someone else would take it; in a bar full of people with the ability to turn themselves into weapons in various unorthodox ways, nobody was much worried about anyone spiking drinks.
At one point one of the Pawns a few years above her sauntered over, levitating his beer bottle like an asshole. "Hey," he said, leaning against the bar and looking Shantay up and down. Nice. "Let me guess. Your power is being absolutely drop-dead gorgeous."
Shantay reached out and plucked his beer from the air, letting the metal flood her hands as she did so. She tightened her grip and the bottle exploded into shards, liquid spraying what's his name all across his artfully-tousled hair and shirt that cost extra to look like he'd pulled it from the clearance rack. "Not quite," she said, and let her hips swish a little as she sashayed away, fingers still glittering silver in the dim lighting.
Shantay quickly learned that beauty is just a different kind of armour.
By the end of her second year with the Croatoan, Shantay had heard some variation of every single line in the playbook. By the third, she'd stopped even finding the ones adapted to accommodate very specific powers amusing. At that point she considered filing for a secondary manifestation and putting herself down as having a physical allergy to any sentence that began with the words, "Girl, you must be --" so she'd have an excuse for punching them through the wall.
This time she didn't even bother waiting to hear the payoff. "I'm not into men," Shantay said, tilting her hand and letting the light bounce off her rings. She rolled the bottom of her wine glass against the counter in slow circles, creating an ever-widening ring of condensation that apparently required all her visual attention. "No you won't be the exception, no I don't just need to try it, and no you're not allowed to watch. I think that covers it, but if you think you'd found a loophole I'll refer you to my legal team."
"Your legal team?" the guy said, taken aback. "I -- will that help?"
"Sure." Shantay raised her hands and curled her fingers closed as they flashed titanium. "Associates of Knuckle & Sandwich. Feel free to schedule an appointment."
Buddy pretty much fled after that, to the shock and dismay of no one. Shantay grinned and sipped at her wine.
"You are so not allowed to mock dudes for using cliches anymore," Maggie called from down the bar. She was a junior Chevalier who specialized in the ability to turn things inside-out, including but not limited to anything -- or anyone -- who crossed her on the field. Shantay read her case files with a combination of horror and fascination. Punching was so much more elegant, and didn't require frequent trips to the laundromat. "Knuckle & Sandwich, seriously?"
Shantay raised an eyebrow. "Do you have a problem with the way I get rid of strays?" she drawled, tilting her head and studying Maggie. Fairly pretty, no-nonsense clothing, no boyfriends as far as Shantay knew about, though in their line of work that could just mean she took her profession seriously. "I'm open to suggestions if you have any more effective ones."
"I just hope your come-ons are better than your fuck-offs," Maggie said with a wink. "It's harder to entice someone than to chase them away, you know. How's your game on the other side of the fence?"
Interesting. Shantay grinned and signalled the bartender for a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, enjoying a shiver of anticipation rather than irritation, for once. "Care to find out?"
Three days later, Shantay had the spare key to Maggie's apartment, a prescription for extra-strength painkillers, and a collection of what her doctor called an impressive number of pulled muscles.
Almost a year, it lasted. In the end it wasn't the field work that ended them -- weeks posted on opposite sides of the country or overseas -- or the incident with the nymphomaniac body-snatcher who overwrote Maggie's consciousness with his own on a month-long assignment in Sardinia and used her body to sleep with half the women in Italy. In Shantay's world, where the supernatural was more mundane than actually reaching a real live person on the end of a company phone line, she learned to hold tight to what she wanted and screw the rest. She loved Maggie; what else mattered?
In the end, a single word did what all the manifestations and late nights and (literally) explosive arguments could not.
Maggie had been quiet since Shantay's commendation the month before. Shantay located a nest of furies and managed to convince them to give up wholesale mass murder of unfaithful husbands. After a day of intense negotiation they agreed to go to law school and start their own divorce firm, with specializations in child support payments, custody, and infidelity for those clients who might find themselves unable to turn to traditional attorneys. A brilliant stroke, the Croatoan told Shantay, the kind of blunt-force diplomacy that likely saved hundreds of lives by avoiding a war with one of the most notoriously nasty races in the west.
"They said I might make Bishop before I'm thirty," Shantay said the night she got the news, waving the wooden spoon in her hand and splattering the wall with tomato sauce. "Can you imagine? Who was the youngest Bishop, does anyone even know? And no I'm not counting Caoimhe Bacharach, because she'd been twelve for at least three hundred years before she got the position."
Maggie didn't answer, but then again she'd insisted on making the pasta by hand. Maybe she needed to concentrate. Except she didn't answer the next time Shantay tried to get her attention, or the time after that, and finally Shantay abandoned the sauce, twisting the dial to turn off the gas. "Okay, what's going on?" she asked.
"Nothing," Maggie said, and Shantay immediately glanced around, looking for anything that might wobble and warn her of an imminent inner-outer transposition.
Shantay folded her arms. "Right, and I was just appointed Queen of the Leprechauns." The pasta sauce hissed on the stove behind Shantay, still simmering with the last of the heat from the burner.
"Leprechauns don't have queens, they have regents," Maggie said peevishly, and Shantay gaped at her. Finally Maggie gritted her teeth and pushed her hands into her hair, apparently forgetting the dusting of flour that covered her from fingertips to wrists. "Look, it's not your fault, you're just amazing, that's all."
Shantay blinked at her and waited for the words -- which made sense individually -- to come together into something that had meaning. It didn't work. The lid covering the sauce rattled against the side of the pot. "Run that by me again?"
"You're too amazing," Maggie corrected herself, and Shantay sucked in a breath. "You're beautiful and tall and sexy; you could roll around in a garbage dump and dress in rags stolen from the bottom of a homeless man's car and you'd still be the best-looking woman in the room. You're smart and talented and you have one of the most badass talents I've ever seen. I thought maybe living together it would change things, you know, let me see you with toothpaste on your mouth or morning hair, but it didn't help. It's just -- it's too much. I can't handle it anymore."
Shantay stared at her, wide-eyed. "What are you saying?" she asked, but even as she asked the question, a strange, curling inevitability twisted inside her gut.
Maggie dropped her hands, letting out a short, barking laugh when she finally realized she'd combed her hair with flour and egg. "I don't know what the word is," she said, and the heavy feeling in Shantay's stomach grew deeper. "It's not your fault, it's probably mine, you're just --"
"Intimidating?" Shantay supplied, the word falling from her lips with a sick familiarity.
"Yes," Maggie said, letting out a breath of relief that hurt more than everything she'd said out loud.
A loud clang startled Shantay enough that she actually jumped, protective metal spreading over her face and hands by reflex, but it was just the pasta sauce, bubbling over the sides of the pot and hissing against the burner, which Shantay had mistakenly turned to 'maximum' instead of 'off'. She fixed her error now, wincing, and reached down to pick up the fallen lid, leaving her fingers coated with metal rather than fishing for an oven mitt.
Shantay stared at her hand, red sauce smeared over shining silver fingers, and she rinsed her off the mess in the sink while the water plinked against the metal. "I'm sorry," Maggie said, and she lay a hand at the back of Shantay's neck, where she'd kissed a hundred times before falling asleep. "But you'll find someone who --"
That sentence could have ended five or a thousand different ways, all of them a different poison, and Shantay didn't wait to hear which one. Metal raced down from Shantay's hairline to her shoulders, and Maggie snatched her hand back. "Save it," Shantay said with forced nonchalance, struggling to control herself, and she pulled her powers back, watching the liquid silver recede like the tide. "I'll have my stuff out by the end of the week."
Maggie didn't protest, and two weeks later she was reassigned to Portland.
By her twenty-ninth birthday, the Croatoan had awarded Shantay with a special distinction, an honourary membership in the American Association of Aquatic Beings, Mermaid Chapter, and finally, the rank of Bishop. Shantay celebrated her thirtieth alone in her apartment, curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine, a stack of no-longer-avoidable paperwork and a worn hoodie stolen from her third ex-girlfriend, whose terrible commitment issues were matched only by her amazing taste in sweaters.
Not the most auspicious way to start a new decade, but oh well. Almost everyone in the Croatoan was married to the job; Shantay may as well join the ranks.
"You know you're really sad," said Bishop Morales one night when they went out for drinks. Platonic ones, since Morales' tastes ran only toward non-humans, more power to her. "You live alone in your apartment and you won't even get a pet. I know you think it'll mean admitting you're on your way to being a crazy cat lady, but the denial is worse. You should at least own it."
Shantay glared at her. Nobody in a long-term relationship, especially with a pygmy dragon, had any right to comment on a single person's life and the patheticness thereof. "I have a pet," she said.
"Your laryngitic mandrake does not count. It tries to kill you every time you change the pot."
"Yeah, but it can't, that's the point," Shantay said triumphantly. "All the hortoccultists said the loss of voice is permanent." Recently it had created some form of sign language, which meant that Shantay now had to close her eyes during the repotting or suffer a strange numbness in her limbs, but that was more of an inconvenience than anything else.
Morales shook her head. "Sad," she said with emphasis, and topped up Shantay's wine.
By the time Shantay met Myfanwy Thomas, the Checquy's most elusive female Rook, she was well used to the fleeting expression of jealousy and -- yes -- intimidation that flickered across the other woman's face at their introduction. Shantay did her best to keep the resigned amusement from her own, but Rook Thomas soon rallied and didn't allow her initial impression, whatever it had been, to colour their interactions. In fact, very quickly, she demonstrated a dry sense of humour and a frazzled lack of verbal filter that appeared genuine, rather than the excuse young people nowadays made to avoid consequences for being little assholes.
Rook Thomas turned out surprisingly easy to get along with, especially after the notes in her personnel file indicated her to be not much more than a glorified pencil pusher, brilliant at paperwork but shy and unassuming in person. After the most pleasant discussion of multiple murders and the possibility of international invasion and subsequent world disaster that Shantay had ever had the pleasure of engaging, they met for a long and gloriously expensive lunch courtesy of the Checquy official account. Their conversation flowed as smoothly as the wine, and by the end of the meal Shantay decided she would have no difficulties liaising with the UK office after all.
Shantay saved Myfanwy Thomas' life the day she tagged along on a field assignment. She didn't expect Myfanwy to save hers in return.
Shantay made her living punching things, and shooting the things too strong to be punched. Before Myfanwy saved her, Shantay caved in the skull of a creepy cultist with nothing but her fists, otherwise known as business as usual. Fairly used to rescuing other people's lives -- a common enough occurrence with a power that worked for both offence and defence -- Shantay had prepared to shrug it off with benevolent nonchalance and make Myfanwy promise not to worry about it.
But no.
No, in the end, not Shantay's fists, nor her arsenal, nor her biting sarcasm were able to take down a house full of carnivorous living fungus. In the end it was Myfanwy, armed with nothing but her mind and grim determination, who closed her eyes and killed the whole thing with a single thought. Nothing in Myfanwy's files had indicated she had that sort of power; nothing in their previous conversations, either. It came absolutely nowhere and left Shantay reeling.
That kind of ability -- well, Shantay only knew one word for it, though she dared not even think it lest she be struck down by the gods of irony.
For the first time in her life, Shantay knew how it felt to look at a person and feel simultaneously awed and terrified, to think back over her years of accomplishments and wonder whether they were insignificant. For a split second, when she sat with Myfanwy in the youth hostel and her new friend explained what she'd done without a hint of grandstanding, Shantay understood how Maggie and the others felt. In that moment she almost, almost offered them a silent apology.
Except no, because bullshit. Yes, mousy, unassuming Myfanwy, with her average features and average body and absolutely no idea how to dress herself, had within the space of a day made Shantay -- youngest and most attractive Bishop in the entire Croatoan -- feel horribly outclassed. But the thing was? It felt amazing. Unlike those who had flung the i-word in her face, Shantay didn't want to leave, didn't want to run away and lick her wounds and reassure herself that she was really quite strong and amazing and didn't need to be around someone who made her feel small. Instead she wanted to grab Myfwany's hand and keep her close.
Among other things, but one at a time.
"Why are you grinning?" Myfanwy asked later, twisting her hair up into a messy bun as they stepped into the famous Bath hot springs. Bruises stood out against her pale skin, and good thing Shantay had no healing powers because otherwise she really would have been tempted to misuse them.
"No reason," Shantay said easily. She slipped into the pool and lowered herself until the water reached her chin, biting back a groan as the heat permeated her aching muscles. Yes, this was a good idea.
Myfanwy gave her an odd look, but Shantay only smiled wider. Eventually Myfanwy rolled her eyes in a manner Shantay decided was affectionate and joined her. "Well, whatever evil scheme you're planning, leave me out of it," Myfanwy said, leaning her head back against the side of the pool. "I've had enough machinations for the day."
"We'll see," Shantay said, smiling sunnily, and Myfanwy snorted and splashed her in the face.