4-3
Well fuck. Now Sara had no Gilead, no Juniper, no sister, and this stupid fucking itchy fake mustache glued to her face, and all of that without even a gun on her that she could use to shoot herself out of sheer frustration. Elaine’s sudden departure had left her unmoored in the role she was playing: what was a manservant supposed to do in absence of his mistress? She remembered seeing a sort of island of idle servants amidst the buffeting chaos of the party; maybe one of them would know something worthwhile.
Why had Gilead done that, though? Was he so in-character as Elaine that he had decided the only thing she could do in that situation was to fold immediately and go along with whatever the tall Russian lady had said to do? Or did he really think, as he had implied, that this was a good way to gather more intel for the mission? It was a stupid thing to think: Vilena wouldn’t reveal where Zahra was being held, and she wouldn’t have the time to tell Gilead about much else before she’d drained him dry. Her only hope was that Gilead would realize his mistake and find a way to escape before catching a bad case of the exsanguination.
By the time Sara found the place where all of the unattached servants were standing, she was no longer in any mood to be asking questions. It had all gone wrong. Zahra was going to die, Sara was going to die, Gilead was definitely going to fucking die, and Juniper and Wes were going to live with a new sad story about the group of Pretenders they’d met once who all died badly.
And speaking of Juniper, there she was, pushing out of the crowd. She didn’t stand out at all, quite unlike Elaine in that way: she was middling height, skinny, and moved with a natural and easy grace as she wove between the various conversations. She recognized Sara immediately, and in her panic, didn’t bother asking before taking her arm and pulling her along into the ballroom floor.
“Where is Elaine?”
Sara had to choose her words carefully until such time as they were away from any listeners. “She caught the eye of one of Ruthven’s wives. Vilena, the Russian one, took her upstairs.”
Juniper sucked in air through her teeth. “Could you not have stopped her?”
“She… Elaine went along with it. What was I to do, contradict my mistress and my hostess at the same time?”
Juniper swore and increased her pace.
In the back corner of the second floor was an array of narrow corridors and small side chambers, the places where the folding tables and extra candelabras all went during peaceful times. Coincidentally or not, all the extra walls also served as baffles, preventing any noise from passing between the main party floor and a handful of small balconies overlooking the city.
Juniper and Sara were not truly alone out there, but the only other people were fucking each other like two marmots in a burrow, so there was little risk of their secrets getting out regardless.
“Did you find her?” were Sara’s first words.
Juniper nodded. “Top floor. Ruthven is keeping her in a nursery with the door locked.” She pointed up, and sure enough when Sara craned her neck she saw, just under the roof, a barred window with faint light shimmering through from within. It made her heart hurt to realize how close she was to having her sister back.
“Is she hurt?”
“Not that I could see. She looked miserable and pale but I couldn’t see any wounds and it looks like he’s been feeding her at least. When I first looked inside, Ruthven was… brushing her hair.”
Something Vilena had said clicked, and Sara retched, fully doubling over as her stomach seized again and again. This ball was supposed to be for Ruthven to select a new wife; but at the last minute he had changed his mind.
“Mother of God,” Sara choked out as she held down her stomach’s contents. “That bastard, that rat fucking bastard.”
Juniper did her best to comfort Sara, patting her on the shoulder and telling her that they were going to get Zahra free, but the knowledge refused to leave. She imagined the horrors that Ruthven aimed to commit, no matter how much the looping images hurt her, until she was left gasping for breath.
“He’s going to marry her,” she finally said. “He’s going to marry my sister!”
“What? No, that can’t be— what makes you think that?”
She relayed, in between gasps, what Vilena had told her. As she spoke, Juniper’s expression turned from confusion to horror, then disgust.
“It’s always the noblemen…” she hissed. “That fucking pedophile. Alright, let’s go rescue Gilead, then we go up and—”
“No. He made his bed, now he can lie in it. We rescue my sister first, then get him while we’re on the way out, assuming he’s still alive.”
“I thought you liked this man?”
“Sometimes,” Sara replied. “But right now he’s just made me mad.”
Arm in arm, Juniper and Sara made their way once more across the dance floor, this time angling to get to the stairway going up. There was, of course, a problem: a guard had been stationed just outside of the stairwell, precisely to prevent any guests from sneaking into the off-limits upper floors.
“I’ve got this,” Juniper said. “Wait right here.”
Sara waited, curious to see where this was going. She’d never known Juniper to be one to get her hands dirty; in all of the time they’d known each other, she’d only ever used her Pretension for behind-the-scenes work, planning and enabling those with more direct capabilities to do the work.
In this case, as soon as she had left Sara’s grip, Juniper started acting drunk. In the classic manner of a woman trying to start a distraction at a party, she threw herself at the guard, grinning and mumbling sexual innuendoes as she pawed at his chest. The guard, to his credit, was not distracted, shoving her back as best he could and keeping a lookout on the door. But he wasn’t prepared for a Pretender. He suddenly slumped over, Juniper guiding him safely to the floor. With the door now open, Sara closed the distance.
“Is he dead?”
Juniper turned around, grinning wickedly. “For in his twentysomething-th year, the cop shall prick his finger upon a sewing needle”—she produced the needle in question, hidden between her fingers—“and fall asleep for one hundred minutes!”
“I always knew you were an evil fairy just as much as a good one,” Sara said.
“It used to only be a hundred seconds. Maybe someday if I keep finding sources of edgeblood it’ll become a hundred hours. Either way, your sister and knight don’t have that long; let’s get moving.”
They ascended the five flights of stairs to the top of Ruthven’s palace with all possible haste, though Juniper rapidly reached the end of her endurance and had to huff and puff her way up the last stretch. The stairs terminated at a simple door: the peaked tile roof of the palace had no access. Sara plucked a pair of simple metal lock picks from her uniform and set to work on the knob: sure enough, it wasn’t a very well-made lock. She was by no means particularly well experienced at lockpicking—a previous teammate of hers had taught her over the course of a few afternoons—but it only took a minute before the door clicked open.
And beyond that? Nothing. Juniper and Sara stepped out into a completely blank plaster cube, about eight feet on a side. No doors besides the one they’d come in through.
“What?”
“Oh, hell,” Juniper moaned.
“What is this? I thought you said she was up here?”
“She was! Ruthven must keep his private quarters hidden behind a, a hidden door or something. Or maybe the windows are the only way in; vampires can fly, after all.”
“No, no, no, there has to be a secret door, he would need to have brought Zahra up here some way. Juniper, search with me.”
And so they searched, pressing themselves up against the smooth plaster and searching for any sign of a seam, any mysterious hollow-sounding spots in the wall, a concealed keyhole, anything at all that might provide evidence of where the secret entrance was. But the search was a slow process, too slow for Sara’s tastes. Her sister had been kidnapped by a pedophile. God alone knew what he’d already done to her; every second that Zahra continued to remain in his custody was a second where he might do something irreversible. This was going too damn slow! Too damned slow! Fuck subtlety, Zahra was in danger!
“First Pretense: Watch The World Burn.”
The numbness came over her, body and clothing alike transmogrified into that eidolon of plastic explosive. Calculations ran fast through her mind, and in a second she had settled on exactly how much she would need.
Juniper, meanwhile, stumbled backwards, startled. “What are you doing?”
“We don’t have time to go through this room with a magnifying glass,” Sara said. “I’m going to blow the wall.”
“That’s such an unbelievably terrible idea,” Juniper said.
Sara didn’t have eyes with which to glare at Juniper, but she made her best effort.
“Okay, fine. First Pretense: Piece of Cake.”
Juniper shrank away and vanished into the football-sized sphere of golden light, which promptly zipped away down the stairwell, presumably off to hide in some bright corner, or maybe next to one of the lamps. Sara, meanwhile, pressed the palm of her left hand against the wall, then let it detach. She couldn’t regrow it until the material had been unmade, so it was only with her right hand that she could mash her disconnected body part into a flat, circular disc, all the better for demolition.
That done, Sara hid herself behind the door in the stairwell and set off the charge. If she had normal ears, the sound that ensued would have instantly rendered her deaf, perhaps even permanently: not only was she close, but the excess shockwave was channeled down the stairwell like a cannon’s blast. The shockwave tested her grip on the railing, threatening to shove her over it, but she held firm. The dust had yet to settle when Sara charged back in. She raced through the hole in the far wall, ignoring the splinters that embedded themselves in her legs.
The room beyond was the exact sort of nightmare one might expect from a vampire’s private chambers. It looked like a Victorian hospital, full of slabs and copper surgical equipment, but the lifeless bodies around said that its purpose was far more sinister than medicine. Ruthven was cutting women apart, draining their blood, searching through their organs for… something. Was he trying to advance the understanding of human anatomy, or just amusing himself?
It didn’t matter. Juniper had said that the nursery was on the right, so Sara went that way. There was a locked iron door at the end of a short corridor; Zahra could be seen through the bars.
“Zahra! Zahra, I’m here!”
The little girl was sat against the far wall, head lolling to the side like a discarded doll. It took a few seconds for her to stir, then a few more for her eyes to focus on the doorway. She smiled, and with an old woman’s carefulness, rose to her feet. She knew her sister’s Pretension form, after all.
“I knew you’d come and find me,” she said, voice hoarse and weak. What had Ruthven done to her?
“Step back. I’m going to explode the door open.”
Sara did so; locks are easier to blow than walls when you don’t care about being stealthy, which considering the stairway cannon, was no longer a concern. Its lock destroyed, the door swung lazily open, and Zahra loped through. The only thing stopping her from hugging Sara there and then was that she found the texture of Sara’s pretender form “gross”. She still grabbed hold of her sister’s hand.
A dozen men with rifles pushed their way into the room. One of them, the one with the extra golden button on his chest, took the initiative to start shouting commands, while the others raised their guns to their shoulders.
“Whatever you are, unhand our Lord’s property, and submit yourself to his justice!”
Sara tapped Zahra on the shoulder, and the little girl faded back a step. Then she started to advance, the bulk of her amorphous body adding undeniable weight to her advance. Being essentially up-jumped cops, Ruthven’s house guard proceeded to respond by pressing down on the triggers of their rifles.
But they didn’t fire. Gunpowder, after all, is a type of explosive. And after the fresh infusion of refined edgeblood she’d taken on during the crossing from Leedsrealm into Topeka county, Sara had discovered that her power over explosives had extended to preventing detonation just as surely as she could induce it. The leader of the squad didn’t even have the time to drop his rifle before she was on top of him.
She detonated a small portion of her elbow: with no bones to break, her arm could fully absorb the recoil of the blast and turn it into unstoppable force. The punch turned his face concave, and snapped his neck from the whiplash. The rest of the line reacted by shattering. Some of them fell back, trying to load in more rounds that wouldn’t work; others drew pistols. Yet more, realizing that guns would do nothing, drew bayonets, using them as standalone knives for lack of any time to actually fix them in place.
The ones with knives were the most dangerous: Sara’s Pretension form could regrow lost matter, but if a knife cut the doughy matter apart, the only way to heal the cut was to shed that part and replace it. If that part was on her torso, then she was SOL. She put her fists up, deflecting slashes and stabs with micro-explosions that left shallow divots in her matter.
Fighting unarmed against a knife left few moments to counter, but that was fine: Sara would only need one opportunity. A single punch, propelled by explosive blasts at the start or finish, could turn flesh into pulp and bone into fragments that shredded her opponent’s insides. Ruthven had been very smart to interrupt her before she could activate her Pretense, because in this form, she could just about match him in terms of sheer destructive potential.
So long as she didn’t run out of time. She could only keep her form for a few minutes, and the clock had already been ticking for decently long when the fight started. Frustration and fury, the need to relieve the pressure of her sister’s kidnapping that had been wearing on her for two and a half weeks, drove Sara onwards, but it also made her sloppy. She took a few slashes around the collarbone, slashes that didn’t slow her down at the moment but absolutely would once she reverted. Ruthven’s soldiers needed to be dead right now.
“Stop! Revert your form, Pretender witch!”
Sara spun around, ready to send a hand-sized concussion bomb flying in the direction of whoever had just ordered her to stop. Then her eyes caught up with her brain. A woman was holding Zahra up off the ground, arms pinned behind her back.
The woman was blonde and white and pretty, with a diaphanous dress and her hair piled up on top of her head. Nobody dressed like that aside from Ruthven’s wives. She must have been in mist form when she entered, flowing in through the window or maybe drifting right past the ongoing brawl without Sara even being able to notice. Her mouth, though the fangs were covered by makeup-painted lips, was mere centimeters away from the side of Zahra’s neck, the implied threat blindingly obvious.
“Revert at once, or the girl dies here and now.”
She could charge in, grab Zahra, wrestle her out of the vampire woman’s hands. But, for all that her Pretension was powerful, it wasn’t actually strong or fast when it wasn’t being propelled by an explosion, and she didn’t dare detonate that close with Zahra. For the same reason, throwing a bomb the vampire bitch’s way was a nonstarter. It was then that it finally hit Sara: she’d lost the second she detonated that bomb to blow her way through the hidden door. The one thing that she’d known from the beginning was to be avoided at all costs was drawing the attention of Ruthven or his wives.
She reverted. Instantly, the agonizing pain of all of her cuts flared into being, as did the heart attack sensation of seeing her sister in peril. Sara fell to her knees, clutching at her injuries in an attempt to stanch the flow. The vampire smirked, glaring down at her before her eyes flicked to the guards.
“Well? Arrest her!”
Sara stopped paying attention as the rough hands seized her wrists, as the barrage of slurs besieged her ears. She’d burned all of her fury and impatience in the fighting. Now she was as focused as a needle going through cloth: she’d rescue her sister somehow.