Mother Dragon
Seth Mazzaglia and Kat McDonough continued to have intense sexual encounters in which he indoctrinated her into his personal brand of BDSM. Seth said he wanted to punish her, to demonstrate his dominance over her, but that kind of “play” would leave bruises that would take days to fade. Fear of their relationship being discovered by Kat’s parents kept those sadomasochistic games off the table for the time being.
“I feel like my powers were used for complete and total evil,” he said, “and that makes me feel very warm and fuzzy inside.”
The couple had also been talking about Kat moving into Seth’s apartment. She didn’t want to stay under her father’s roof any longer than she had to. Kat was finding it harder and harder to contain her contempt for Peter McDonough, which didn’t improve his attitude toward her either. Kat began bringing small boxes of her things to the apartment, telling Denise that she was packing up old clothes to throw away. Graduation was just months away. The plan was for Kat to move out that summer.
Seth told Kat he’d be even happier if she moved in right away. Kat explained that things would be easier if they waited until school was over. Seth countered that he didn’t like Kat living with her father, whom he now regularly referred to disparagingly as “Princess.” He reminded her again and again that he was prepared to swoop in and rescue her from her family home at a moment’s notice.
“Dream of the fortress that holds the dungeon where we torture everyone so exquisitely. Dream, my arms around you, of those screams lulling you to sleep.”
Seth also began to refer to Denise as “Mother Dragon.” At first it wasn’t derisive, like calling her father “Princess.” Seth recognized Kat’s tight bond with her mom and hoped to use Denise’s influence to his advantage. Despite her having initially discouraged Kat from dating him, Seth still believed that if Kat casually mentioned running into this wonderful guy again and again, Denise would come to see him as good for her daughter.
As time passed, however, Seth grew annoyed with Denise’s insistence that her daughter come home after work or attend family functions on weekends. He felt the Mother Dragon’s demands were cutting into his time with Kat.
While once he had been satisfied waiting in the Target parking lot for Kat’s fifteen-minute break, Seth now needed longer stretches of time to bring her from Portsmouth to his Dover lair, ravage her body, then get her home in time to start their nightly instant-message marathon. Mother Dragon was becoming a problem.
Seth began to sow seeds of discontent. He told Kat that he took her mother’s rejection of him personally.
“She is stepping on my rock garden when I need my Zen,” he said.
Kat always wanted to please her Mom, and the key to having it both ways was to keep Seth a secret. For her own part, Denise McDonough knew little of what was happening with her Kat. The daughter who had been attached to her hip for so many years was pushing away, vague about her activities, and often grumpy (due to being constantly tired), but that too Denise chalked up to Kat’s being a teenager, at least at first.
She wasn’t completely oblivious to the idea that Kat had a boyfriend. But the only person Kat had expressed any interest in was “Lex,” and Denise had made her feelings clear. Denise’s intuition told her something was up and it was likely with the older man, but she hoped the mismatched relationship would run its course, and she knew pressing the case was unlikely to do anything but push her daughter away.
Kat was beginning to make her own decisions, Denise knew, and that meant sometimes her daughter’s heart would get broken. But she was not the kind of girl who would openly rebel—start smoking, go Goth, and scream, “Fuck you, I’m seeing him anyway!” Despite her hunch, Denise refused to believe whatever Kat was doing behind her back was unhealthy or unsafe.
Kat could start to read the clues when Seth was upset. There was a blackness that would come over him, subtle changes in his body language.
At first he would pretend nothing was wrong, but his anger would soon emerge in petulant tantrums. If the problem was something she could solve, like faking a work shift so they could be together, she would. If it was something that was out of her hands, she’d tiptoe around it. She still longed for a chance to try out for Walt Disney World, but Seth had instead been insisting she sign up for an EMT-B course he was also going to take.
Kat wasn’t opposed to the idea. There were EMT-B classes that began in the spring and in the summer. Kat told him she’d likely sign up after graduation, but Seth was insistent she take the class in the spring.
Seth’s patience for Denise had worn thin. Mother Dragon’s demands on Kat’s time were too much for him to handle. He had asked Kat to spend several days of her Christmas vacation with him at the Lair. His girlfriend’s answers were wishy-washy, because Kat wasn’t sure if she could pull off such a prolonged absence from her family over the holidays.
Before Christmas, Seth gave Kat a promise ring. He meant it to be a symbol of his commitment to her in this life and in the others. For the girl waiting for Prince Charming, it was the most romantic gesture anyone had ever done for her.
“Every time I look at it or feel it there, I think of your love for me,” she said.
“You should think of that every time you look at the ring we gave you.”
Seth said “we,” since he’d told her that the ring was a gift from both him and Darkheart.
—
Seth was preparing the best he could for a flurry of police entrance exams in a half dozen New Hampshire communities. He had gotten disciplined about jogging, which kept his weight in check. His frame was more toned too, which he told Kat was the result of all of the sex they’d been having.
Seth soaked up everything he saw at the Citizens Police Academy. One of his classmates was a much older man Seth knew from the theater scene. This man fascinated Seth because, decades earlier, he’d done several years in prison for a nonviolent larceny. Seth always had questions for him about criminals and jail, and would use the man’s stories as inspiration for his fiction writing.
He asked the ex-con if he’d act as a technical advisor of sorts, giving him a screenplay he’d written about the president’s daughter getting kidnapped by thugs after she stopped to use an ATM. The old man gave the pages back at Seth, pointing out the president’s daughter wouldn’t use an ATM, and if she did, the kidnappers would never be able to guess which one or when. The guy was left with the impression that Seth had no sense of how the real world worked.
One evening at the academy in Portsmouth, an officer was explaining to the group how a Taser worked. He playfully asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to get zapped. Without hesitation, Seth raised his hand and walked to the front of the conference room.
The cop ran through several questions, variations on Are you sure you really want to do this? Seth didn’t back down. With two of his classmates ready to catch him, the officer rested the nose of the pistol-shaped device against Seth’s arm.
There was a loud crack as the quick burst of fifty thousand volts raced through his body. If Seth thought he could resist—that Wild Card or Darkheart or his martial arts training could keep him on his feet—he was wrong. He dropped straight to the floor, the electricity ordering his nervous system to contract every muscle in his body.
But in the time it took to help him up, Seth already appeared clearheaded. The officer led a round of appreciative applause.
The old ex-con noticed Seth’s swagger as he went back to his seat. He’d seen it in prison before—that peacock walk when someone thinks he’s proven he’s a tough guy. In later interviews, the man said he questioned Seth’s enthusiasm in volunteering to get Tasered. It was like Seth had something to prove.
Seth signed up at several local police departments holding entrance exams in December and January. The evening before each of the tests, he told Kat he wanted to log off Facebook early to get a full night’s rest—a courtesy he hadn’t afforded her before she took her SATs.
Seth thought he’d make an ideal candidate because, as he said in an IM, he was “clean, strong, healthy, educated, bold, intelligent.”
He was convinced that every department would want him.
On the police exams, the essay questions were his biggest challenge. He was asked to detail his community involvement and to write about the qualities he possessed that would make him a good cop. Seth wrote about being hardworking, self-reliant, and a team player. He talked about his work as a karate instructor mentoring young students. He wrote that he’d seen people suffer and he wanted to help.
He said he was a “strong, unique, and passionate person who is devoted to the people around him.” On the cover letter to one resume he wrote, “Yes, I am the Taser Guy from the recent Portsmouth Citizens Police Academy.”
—
As Christmas approached, Seth amused himself by browsing online for lingerie. He trolled fetish-clothing websites and picked outfits he thought matched each of Kat’s personas.
Kat told Seth that she had sliced her fingers on a cardboard box at work. Lasciviously he responded that he wanted to suck the blood from her cuts. After confessing to having “evil thoughts” about her, Seth said he had been eyeballing some chains at the local hardware store. He wanted to purchase more knives and some belts to use as restraints.
The couple made plans for Kat to raid Denise’s supply of costume fabric. Seth instructed her to find fabric measuring one to three yards long and six to twelve inches wide, which would be ideal for crafting restraints. Shorter lengths would work for blindfolds. He wanted things in white, black, red, and blue.
Whatever time they could get together was filled with sex games at the Lair. Seth said each of their personas had different personalities in bed, different preferences. Kat got off on being restrained by ropes, but Seth no longer had the patience for tying knots. Instead he’d quickly belt her hands together or to the legs of the futon.
One time Kat complained about the bite marks and scratches he’d left on her stomach. Seth replied, “I wasn’t exactly going easy on you.”
A safe word was never invoked during any of these encounters.
Seth’s temper was also getting shorter. Once, right before leaving to pick Kat up from the bowling alley, he got a Facebook message from Kat saying that Denise needed her to cover at the pottery studio.
Seth had had his heart set on a long afternoon with Kat in his bed. He threatened to come over and pick a fight, have Kat pack her bags and pull her right from her home.
“Mother Dragon is the enemy,” he said. “Remove her. Remove the problem.”
Seth never saw any of Denise McDonough’s requests for help at work as coincidence, nor did he see Kat’s required presence at family gatherings as anything other than an obstruction. He now saw Denise as an aggressive competitor for Kat’s time and attention.
“She’s deliberately psychically fucking with me!”
As soon as he stopped getting his way in the real world, Seth began telling Kat there was trouble brewing in the Veil. The Darkness was billowing. Darkheart must have his way. If Kat could not make the time to be with him, then Darkheart must find a minion—a sexual partner to ravage and throw away.
He took a keen interest in Kat’s high school friends. They talked online about who might make a good partner in bed, discussions directed by Seth. There was Felicia,* who Kat described as a nice girl but a bit flighty. Seth, despite having never met this girl, said Felicia was likely his dark-haired woman from a previous life.
He also had his eye on Jill,* Kat’s best friend since the first grade. Kat arranged for Seth to “bump into” her and Jill at the mall, and Jill had been friendly—even flirty—with him. Seth thought Jill was sexy, and the positive feedback he got from her electrified him. Seth told Kat that if she left him for Florida, the Darkness would drive him to take Jill as a lover—a minion—and that Kat would have to accept that fact. As with Felicia, he claimed Jill had already been a part of their sexual circle in their past lives, and that the persona Anay had inhabited Jill’s body before fleeing again to the Veil, just out of his reach. He wrote to Kat, “To be frank, I’d have to kiss her, and ultimately fuck her, to know for certain.”
Seth also said there was an old girlfriend of his, someone named Bridget,* who’d recently tried to friend him on Facebook. He let Kat know she would be a good minion to use. Seth said he could regain control of the Darkness before it consumed him, but only if Kat gave him his sexual release first.
To accommodate his requests for time, Kat fabricated another story for her mother in order to get out of working at the studio. When she returned to her laptop, she messaged that her mom had agreed to push things back by three hours, but that Kat needed to be at the shop at the newly appointed time. Seth still wasn’t satisfied.
“I’m still putting a black mark down against her for this one,” he said, but he told Kat to prepare herself for “rough, wild, violent, Discovery Channel sex.”
—
One night after work, Kat told Seth that while she was putting clothes on hangers in Target her four personas began arguing in her head. She told him Violet (who supposedly was destroyed in her sex sacrifice to Darkheart) was scolding Skarlet for the way she was treating their host’s body. Bad food, too much sex, not enough sleep. Then Kitty complained about the way Skarlet had sex with Darkheart. Charlotte/Anay jumped in, reading all the others the riot act.
Seth was piqued. He asked for more details and expressed approval Kat was engaging her alter egos without his prompting.
It’s impossible to know whether, while standing in the middle of Target’s clothing section surrounded by shoppers and coworkers, Kat actually experienced this internal dialogue or whether she made up the story to entertain her restless boyfriend. It’s impossible to know whether Seth believed her psychic encounter or was simply gratified Kat had become so invested in the spiritual narrative he’d drawn for her. Was Kat trying to find a way to tell Seth in his own language that their relationship was consuming her?
Either way, it was clear that Kat was working hard to emotionally sort out the real-world conflicts in her life: the struggle to maintain a relationship with her mother (Violet), her increasingly exotic sex life (Skarlet), her secret future with her boyfriend (Anay), and her own yearning to learn who Kat McDonough truly was (Kitty).
—
One evening after Seth dropped her off, Kat found her mother waiting up for her in the kitchen. Denise was no longer fooled by Kat’s claims of attending extra play rehearsals.
“Whose car was that?”
Kat blurted out the name of a male cast member.
“It was Seth, wasn’t it?”
Kat reached for something new to say, but Denise stopped her.
“I don’t ever want to be lied to,” she said.
Kat’s silence was all the affirmation needed.
“I know how old he is,” Denise said. “It’s not normal for a guy his age to date an eighteen-year-old. A guy his age should be dating ladies in their twenties.”
“But I like being with him. We really get along.”
“You shouldn’t be pursuing him either.” Denise sighed then. “I’m only okay with you two being friends.”
Kat said nothing more. She sat with her arms folded, throwing shade like an American teenager.
Denise tried to reason with her. She asked Kat to think about all the different men she’d meet when she got to college. She told her she’d find the right one after she’d had these experiences.
“Wait for the raspberry chocolate with sprinkles. Don’t settle for plain vanilla,” she told her daughter.
Hearing about it later, Seth Mazzaglia—the vessel of the Nameless One and Doomsday, the connoisseur of bondage and sexual sadism—bristled at Denise’s characterization of him as “vanilla.” He wouldn’t say it at the time, but Seth told Kat later that the ice cream comment hurt his feelings far more than it angered him. He said Darkheart was also insulted.
Seth reported back that there were visions from the Hollow One foretelling Kat would move out after New Years in order to avoid an epic battle to slay Mother Dragon.
Seth warned that the stress of Mother Dragon’s interference was making it hard to hold the Darkness back. He said he’d have to seek out a minion to control the urges roiling inside of him. Seth talked about calling up his ex-girlfriend Bridget for a hookup or “seizing the first young woman I see and doing something horrible.”
Kat promised to make it all up to him after Christmas, when she had a week’s vacation.
—
Kat texted Seth on Christmas morning.
“I fucking love you. I’m in a sex mood.”
They would not see each other on the holiday, but the day after would be free once Kat got off from work. Before leaving, she messaged Seth to pick her up at four from Target. Moments later, she IMed again saying she couldn’t make it.
“Did Mother Dragon just put her foot down? What happened?”
Kat explained the house needed to be picked up and her room needed to be cleaned because relatives were coming in from Florida and Denise needed an extra hand getting things done.
Seth was apoplectic. They had planned a two-hour visit, two hours that were set aside to relieve the Darkness, he said. Mother Dragon was once again getting in the way.
“Fine,” he wrote. “She gets you today—but she is going to let me see you for at least four hours every day for the rest of the week.”
Kat wasn’t sure how to answer. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work?”
“I’m not just some little toy you two are trading off.”
Seth continued his tantrum. He’d been through so much leading up to Christmas, he said. He’d struggled to push down the Darkness and resisted the urge find some minion to satisfy his needs. How could Denise do this to him?
Unable to deal with him any longer, Kat switched off her computer and went to work.
Seth waited to hear from Kat after her shift ended at four o’clock, but she didn’t return his calls or respond to his instant messages. With nothing but time on his hands, Seth composed a series of long letters appealing to Kat and Skarlet. He wrote to each of them as if they were separate people and begged them for forgiveness and proclaimed his love. He spent the entire night writing, explaining, pleading.
“You are my lady. The mighty, chaotic, bloodthirsty and powerful Skarlet Tempest. And I am your ferocious, loyal, cunning, and primal Darkheart.”
The next morning, when she finally received the message, Kat responded, “You are my dragon . . . I found you, pulled you from your other dragons, and will never give you up.”
Seth said that Denise’s reaction had been “truly unexpected” by the Hollow One and the Nameless One; it had not been foretold in the tarot cards. He said that Mother Dragon was threatening everything and Kat needed to leave home. She agreed to make it happen.
In the struggle over who would pull the toy away from the other, Seth believed he had won.
Seth then made a strange promise to Kat.
“If my Darkness is ever going to drive me to do something horrific to another person,” he said, “I will first check with you.”