Chapter five begins with Merry meeting Norton at a restaurant. He’s tall and broad shouldered with a brown ponytail, because all guys gotta have long hair, you know. Can’t be attractive in this world without that! He compliments her, Merry plays meek and shy, and they he basically begins groping her and making out within a minute of meeting her. No time passes before he asks her to go back to his place, and they leave.
Seriously, there’s no mention of the time that had passed between Norton walking to the table and them making out/leaving. There’s no way to tell how much time has passed, at all. They meet, he gets all gropey, they kiss a lot, and they leave. This is weird. People do not do this. All she had to do to make the scene even remotely believable was throw in a line like “We chatted and finished our dinner…” that’s it. But it doesn’t happen at all and instead the whole thing feels weird and awkward. Ugh.
They drive back to his house and Merry notices that he has pretty strong wards thrown up around the door. Merry realizes that Norton is stronger than they had assumed, but she continued with the decoy job because she knew Jeremy and Uther were nearby and would come to her rescue.
They move it to the bedroom, and immediately upon entering Merry nearly drowns in the power of the room. She’s barely able to move through it, and Norton keeps pushing her to the bed. Merry is able to tell that he has a circle of power drawn around the bed. She worries that perhaps the circle is drawn to trap fey within the circle.
But whatever, they start making out again! Merry keeps trying to get Norton to slow down, but he eventually picks her up and moves her to the bed, so an entire page of her worrying about the magical circle on the floor for nothing! The inside of the circle felt like being in the eye of a storm. She couldn’t feel the crushing power inside of it.
Norton starts stripping, then pulls out some massage oil to rub onto Merry. Merry pulls the stopper out of the bottle and thinks that the cinnamon-vanilla scent is sort of familiar, but she couldn’t recollect where she’d smelled it before. Probably any Bath and Body Works, that place is basically a giant bomb of vanilla.
Merry trailed the stopper over her breasts and then allowed Norton to smooth the oil into her skin. Merry succumbs to his seduction and Norton straddles her. She suddenly realizes why the oil scent was so familiar. The oil was a magical concoction known as Branwyn’s Tears, Aeval’s Joy, or Fergus’s Sweat. It could turn a human being into a sidhe lover for the night. It has the ability to overpower a sidhe as well, making them basically sexual slaves until it wore off. It also stripped all glamours, because glamours require very strict concentration, and after the application of this magical oil, one cannot concentrate on anything but sex.
Meaning Merry’s very strong glamours were suddenly stripped from her. Her skin suddenly begins glowing. Her eyes, which she typically can dull to a normal human green, flare to life, golden with a jade ring surrounding an emerald pupil. Her red hair both brightens and deepens in color, like a shiny spill of blood.
Norton stared at her in amazement and says “He said you would come if we were faithful, if we truly believed…” He advances upon Merry and she slaps him, trying to turn the power of the oil from sex to violence, but he pushes her down and pins her to the bed with his body. He begins kissing her again, and she allows the magic to take over and reacts to him. She glances up to the large mirror in the bedroom and feels as if she is being watched through it. That’s when she begins to feel her power start draining slowly, and a figure appears in the mirror, cloaked under an illusion.
Norton uses this distraction to ram his crotch into Merry, and Merry fights to get him to stop. He doesn’t listen to her at all, but stops and looks at the mirror. He then dumps the remaining oil onto Merry, and she is immediately affected by its power, ripping Norton’s underwear off of him in a sexual frenzy.
She then notices a small black spider crawling onto her, and realizes that while the spider is on her, her mind is clear and the magic from the oil hardly affects her. She realizes that this spider is one of Jeremy’s spells that has managed to cross Norton’s strong magical wards. While Merry is focusing on the spider, Norton manages to SLIP HIS PENIS INSIDE HER. Just the tip, though.
Merry again begins fighting him off of her, pushing and pushing and even placing her hand between their groins to block him. He manages to pin her down and drives himself into her. Oh cool, it’s rape.
Merry screams for Jeremy, screams “No!” at Norton, and Norton suddenly stops. He notices the spider now crawling onto him and squishes it. He pulls his hand away to look at the blood and notices two more spiders crawling onto him. He pulls away from Merry as the spiders begin to cover him. They swarm over his body and out of his orifices and he begins flailing around the room trying to knock them off of him, trying to kill them.
Merry hears a voice yell out “Get under the bed!” so she does. Suddenly she hears glass breaking and Jeremy calling out for her. Roane helps pull her out from the bed, but Merry realizes she was still covered in the magical oil which has now gotten onto Roane. Before she can think of what that means for them, she sees Norton’s body on the bed, now a mass of raw meat, ripped to shreds from the mirror glass exploding onto him.
Characters Introduced:
Alistair Norton: tall (6’), handsome. Dead by spider
Mysterious Cloaked Shadow Mirror Figure: spoopy
Themes Introduced:
Branwyn’s Tears: magical oil that turns any non-sidhe into a sidhe lover for the night. It lowers inhibitions and turn people/sidhe into slaves. Removes the power of glamour. Basically a rape drug.
Sexiness Rating: 0/10. Hello, there’s a rape scene in this chapter, and then a character explodes with spiders. The spiders are pretty cool, gotta admit that, but the rape JUST KINDA negates all that.
Trailer Park of Emotion 