4-7
It had been a long time since Vilena had felt so properly, fully satisfied. The lack of blood-hunger after consuming the lives of a dozen or so full-grown men was only part of it; for the first time in years, she no longer felt like she was living a mistake, a half-life wrought in the echoes of a single irrevocable error.
Could she be blamed for accepting Ruthven’s offer? Her hands had held up the machine of suffering Ruthven had built. And now it was her strength, her claws that were tearing her out of it. Ruthven and his remaining wives could try to kill her if she so wished; Vilena would fight them with everything she had, the very same as she had just done to the men he’d assigned to protect his own palace. Once the last round of murders was done, calm had finally returned to her, the blood-fury burned out by exertion, and she was ready to take Elaine wherever she needed be taken.
Except that Elaine was gone. Where she’d left her stood three strangers—no, two strangers and Elaine’s manservant, who at a second glance had actually been a woman crossdressing the entire time. Next to her were two enigmas, those being a man in heavy armor and a living porcelain doll with only half a face. The contrasting of a small yet fearsome woman of middle-eastern stock with a knight in shining armor sparked something in Vilena’s memory.
“Wait. You’re the same group who killed Rutter, aren’t you?”
Something else Vilena had said had sent a shock through the group, or at least the two members with perceptible facial expressions: the woman looked shocked, while the knight had turned away in apparent shame. After a second, the woman was able to recover from her surprise enough to speak.
“Yes, that was me. I’m Sara.”
Despite the fact that they were now on the same side, there was something faintly satisfying about finally having that mystery resolved for her.
“And that means you,” she said, pointing to the knight, “would be—”
“Gilead du Carbennic, certes.”
Oh. Oh no. The voice may have been deeper, but it was still the same voice. Except now its owner was blockily-built and locked up within a shell of steel armor, with short golden hair and a flat chest. Vilena crept forward, silently re-evaluating herself.
“Elaine?”
She turned around, squaring her shoulders and narrowing her eyes. “I tried to tell you. But you didn’t seem to want to listen.”
For a second, Vilena wondered if she had been wrong, if this was all some great deception played against her, if there was nothing to her one chance at freedom after all. But the merest glance at Elaine’s eyes told her otherwise. There was a dimness to them, cataracts preventing them from seeing the world in all of its beauty, that had not been present when she had gazed into those same eyes before, not even during the worst of the strange frenzy she’d fallen into. The lady in the burgundy dress had been the truth; this was the disguise.
“So that’s how it is,” Vilena said, mostly to herself but still accidentally loud enough for the rest to hear. “We will discuss this at a later date. For now, there’s a little girl to rescue. Where is she?”
No answer came. Instead, Sara spat out a burst of rapidly-spoken words in a foreign language; presumably Arabic. To Vilena’s great surprise, Elaine replied in kind, though her own Arabic was much slower and still tinged by that Welsh accent of hers. Whatever they were talking about, it was almost definitely an argument; after a few rounds of back and forth, Elaine looked ashamed, and Sara looked annoyed.
“We need to move,” Sara said. “No more time to argue.”
And move they did. Sara and Elaine immediately fell into each others’ pace, though with a substantial amount of clanking from the latter. The machine, who introduced themself to Vilena—in Russian, somehow—as Qi Zhen, fell behind, leaving Vilena to take point. In a moment of cleverness, she did so not in her corporeal form, but rather as mist, hovering a meter or two in front of Elaine.
Where were the other wives? Their absence struck Vilena like a bullet in the back. Imogen had been at the party, which meant she was likely somewhere in the house, completely blood-wasted. Vilena was fairly certain she had seen Hildegard doing much the same, so she could likely be counted out for at least a little while. Estella and Tanyth were afield, taking care of some of Ruthven’s business in the Kingdom Forest. Which left exactly one wife unaccounted for, that being—
A blur slammed into Elaine, throwing her through the door of the stairway and out into the chamber beyond. Sara screamed, firing a shot from her pilfered rifle that went wide. Qi Zhen charged to follow, but they were made of common metal: Vilena was not, which meant she was the first one to catch up with her beloved.
Elaine was pinned to the floor, in pain but not substantially harmed, for the blow had been mostly absorbed by her armor. She fought with her legs, displaying an expertise at grappling that could not overcome the immense strength of the creature pinning her down.
“Priya!” Vilena shouted.
The woman in question reared up, baring her fangs and tossing the long, straight hair she was so terribly proud of. “Vilena, so good to see you. Help me tear these intruders to pieces.”
“No, not this time,” Vilena said. She closed the rest of the distance. “Don’t you see that this is our chance? We can be free!”
Priya was the second most recent of Ruthven’s marriages, and unlike Tanyth, the newest wife, Vilena had always sensed a similar hesitation in her that she had felt all this time. If any of the other women was going to take her side in all of this, it would be Priya.
“What? You are turning against our husband?”
“Yes. I’ve had enough of this pointless murdering. He’s a monster, but we don’t have to be. At least not forever.”
Vilena’s rebellion had been a process of months and years, a slowly building pressure with no possible outlet except for to tear through the walls of its container and destroy everything around in a hail of shrapnel. If she had had the same months to win Priya over with friendship above and beyond that central rotted rope tying them all to the same pillar, she could have earned herself an ally.
As it was, in the heat of battle, with the scent of blood already at Priya’s nostrils? Not a chance.
“Traitor!” Priya screamed, and before she could do much more than that, Elaine’s sword went through the soft part of her jaw, scraping the underside of her brain-pan. It wasn’t a proper decapitation, not enough to kill, but it did buy Vilena a crucial second, all that she needed to lunge, pulling the vampire off of Elaine and sending the both of them tumbling to the floor.
This room, one floor below Ruthven’s chamber, was his own personal fencing studio. Despite his superhuman strength and speed, he had always had a taste for the blade, if only as a hobby, and whenever a visitor from one of the other shards showed any sign of having abnormal capability, he would beg them to duel him, purely for the chance to be faced with a real challenge. Even under the strict confines of the foil, he nearly always won.
His wives, meanwhile, were forbidden from learning any formalized combat. So it was that when Vilena and Priya went down together onto the cloud-white padded mat, the fight was more of a brawl than a grapple.
They slammed fists into each other’s faces, gouged at the eyes with long nails, tried to tear out each other’s throats with their bare hands. Even that most basic vampiric power, to dissolve into mist, was all but forgotten. It was all but useless, of course: every wound they made healed almost instantly, and there was no world in which either could gain enough advantage to tear out the other’s heart.
Sara proceeded to break the stalemate. “Vilena, get back!”
There was an odd distortion to her voice, but Vilena understood the assignment at once, remembering the reports from Carlisle about Sara’s unique capability. She didn’t retreat, though: instead she went in even further, pulling her knees up to pin down Priya’s midsection while her hands held down her throat.
Sure enough, a large object (Sara’s arm, detached by the power of her Pretension form) crashed into the corner of Vilena’s vision. At the last possible instant, she dissolved herself and flew directly upwards. Priya, unaware of what had struck her, remained stunned for a crucial second.
Boom.
Vilena was reminded of what it had felt like after that Einsatzgruppen bastard had sent a bullet through her skull. This time, though, her resurrection was more gradual; she was not returning to her physical body, but rather to the form of the concentrated vortex of mist. The shockwave had dispersed her, but not quite enough to be permanent. In the room below, though, no sign of her survival could be found: a crater had been blown in the floor, and the whole room was scattered with bits of Priya.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit! I told her to get out of the way, why didn’t she?” Sara’s reaction couldn’t quite be called upset, but she at least seemed slightly ashamed.
Elaine, meanwhile, stumbled into the crater, looking lost. “Vilena?” she asked softly. “Vilena??”
Vilena drifted towards the ground, and though she had to exert herself to do so, returned to flesh. Physically, there was no sign of injury, but internally she was exhausted. The instant that she stumbled, though, Elaine was there to hold her up.
“My mist body is resilient, but apparently not entirely immune to shockwaves,” she said, the adrenaline of a near-miss bubbling in her stilled veins.
“Great weal that you yet live, Vilena,” Elaine said softly. “I have a witting that you might make the difference between rescue and captivity for Zahra.”
“We don’t need your vampire girlfriend and we never have,” Sara said, striding back to the stairwell. “But I’m never going to be unhappy about a miraculous survival.”
Elaine was immediately offended by this, but seeing as the two of them were holding hands, there was relatively little that she could do to counter the claim that Vilena was her girlfriend besides wordlessly sputter about it. Vilena let herself fall into the background. She wasn’t sure if this was a good idea—she and Elaine had known each other for half an hour at most—but it was the idea of love that mattered. That and the prospect of getting out from under Ruthven’s feet.
Qi Zhen helpfully prevented another round of argument between Sara and Elaine by asking, “Are we sure that Priya is dead?”
All eyes went to Vilena. She glanced around, taking note of the places where large chunks of flesh had bowled over racks of swords and lamp-stands. “If she isn’t, she won’t be regenerating quickly, that much I can say. Let’s move.”
As the four raced up the final flight of stairs and through the huge gap that Sara had blown in the trick wall, Vilena made sure this time to stay close by Elaine. Though now clad in heavy armor, the fact remained that Vilena would always be more durable. She would like to get the chance to decide for herself how much she genuinely loved her, rather than be forced to mourn her forever.
The sixth floor of the palace. The playground of medicine that the trick door let out into certainly had the look of a place that had just seen a serious fight, scuff marks all over the floor, fresh bodies propped up against the wall without even having been stripped of their clothes first. Down the hallway on the left was his bedroom, where he had made Vilena’s life into a living hell for the last eight years.
In what she had to imagine was a distinct contrast to the people she’d thrown her lot in with, Vilena was hit by a surge of relief when she saw that Ruthven was waiting there for them. No need to return to the bedroom. He sat on a wood-frame upholstered chair, Zahra in his lap, speaking to her barely above a whisper as she sat, paralyzed. There was no fear on her face, but neither was there any love. She simply was.
“First Pretense: Watch the World Burn,” said Sara, and she was transformed into a statue of yellow, doughy matter. Elaine surged forwards, but Vilena had her shoulder in her hand, and was able to keep her in place.
“Give the child back to her mother,” Vilena said, “and we will be on our way. I’ve had enough of you, and you deserve worse than a treaty, but I will be satisfied to be let go.”
Ruthven didn’t even look up at her. There was a sadness writ across his face, a faint melancholy as though thinking back to a long-lost family member. “Sister, actually.”
“What?”
“This girl is that woman’s sister, not her daughter. If you had done anything to actually get to know these apparent co-conspirators of yours, you would know that.”
Vilena glanced at Sara, who made the subtlest nod. Damn it all.
“I really thought you were better than this, this… petty outburst. I know you are young, Vilena, but a woman of almost thirty years should know better than to engage in these sorts of tantrums.”
Ruthven still had eyes only for the child, gazing upon her lovingly. Too lovingly, considering what he was planning to do with her.
“If you are going to talk to me like that, suka, at least fucking look me in the eyes!”
As soon as he did, Vilena wished that he hadn’t. There was a scintillating annoyance in those eyes, like fire had been lit behind them, that same sort of louche disdain that was Ruthven’s most common form of disapproval. Her muscles yearned to lurch her body forward, onto her knees, but her brain held them in place, at least for a moment.
Sara said murmured something in Arabic, and Elaine responded a second later. A burning heat erupted inside Vilena; did Ruthven speak that language, or would she and Elaine be able to coordinate something without him overhearing it? Either way, Vilena had his attention.
“You almost had me tricked, you know,” Vilena said, pouring out her anger in an attempt to stifle the raging fire of Ruthven’s power. “Believing that it was all worth it to be away from the streets, that the bargain you forced me into you was something I couldn’t undo. Then you had to go and marry a child!”
He gasped. “Really, my dear, is that all you take me for? A common predator? I assure you, I have no intentions of laying a finger on her until she comes of age.”
The anger became genuine again. “As though that makes it better!”
“I was left with little choice, Vilena. Once I saw what Zahra was capable of, I could not let her out of my grasp. The power of the sun, all for myself! No coupling could be so sweet!”
Sara and Elaine continued their muttering, both holding deathly still, the better to hide their intentions.
“The power of the sun?” Vilena asked.
“These so-called friends of yours really haven’t told you anything, have they? Perhaps this isn’t a tantrum after all, perhaps you’re simply being duped. Zahra, my dear, why don’t you show her what you’re capable of.”
In a manner far more mechanical than the actual machine slowly flanking around Ruthven’s left, Zahra raised one arm. The palm of her hand started to glow, and even at its faintest, the light made Vilena sick down to her very bones.
Someone else was also quite sick of it, for entirely different reasons. Sara let out a battle-scream, rushing forward at Ruthven. He moved swiftly as well, rising from his seat with Zahra held close to his chest as a human shield. A collision seemed certain, with Zahra caught in the middle, until Sara was suddenly propelled sideways by a concussive blast like a handgun going off inside a car boot. She’d detonated part of herself, the shockwave redirecting her momentum sideways, off the wall and around to Ruthven’s back.
Elaine was charging forward as well, attacking from the front with her shield held high and her belt glittering in the lamp-light as Vilena suddenly understood what the two of them had been plotting. A human shield is only good from one direction, and in the confines of the room, Ruthven wasn’t fast enough to prevent himself from getting outflanked. While Elaine’s pilfered sword threatened to cut open his legs, Sara was able to slam her fists into his back, the detonations painfully loud in Vilena’s ears.
No matter the pain, Vilena had to help. She was the only one who could hope to keep up with Ruthven physically, so she rushed into the fray, making for a third angle he had to cover. Only Qi Zhen hung back, silently watching the brawl.
Zahra, at least, was not the sobbing, terrified wreck she had every right to become. Instead, her eyes were closed and her body was limp—not as though she’d fallen asleep, but as though she were trying desperately to wake up from a bad dream. Ruthven held her close to his chest, turning and turning and turning, facing Elaine’s sword, Sara’s fists, and Vilena’s claws one after the other after the other.
He made his choice, and turned to mist. Zahra fell as the force holding her up dissolved, but she never hit the floor: Sara had flickered back to her human form, catching her with both hands and holding her to her chest in a way that lent much credence to Vilena’s original assumption that she was the child’s mother.
That moment of tenderness was a distraction, though, and in that moment, Ruthven was able to fly across the room, re-materializing immediately behind Qi Zhen. He had distinctly underestimated them. Whether it was raw skill as a martial artist or the speed of a machine, either way Qi Zhen saw it coming, already turning to meet the attack as Ruthven turned from mist to flesh, stopping his attack with a shin-kick to the midsection that would have ruptured the organs of a normal human being. Ruthven stumbled back, and for a few seconds they fought nearly as equals, the millennium-old vampire cocking his fists like a bare-knuckle street boxer. Then Vilena and Elaine caught him in a pincer, and Qi Zhen launched themself away to continue their silent observation.
What fueled Vilena was the desire to tear this man apart. She needed Ruthven to die, for herself and for the world, to undo what he had built in hopes of maybe undoing some part of the knotted guilt inside of her. Her rage granted her strength and speed and force, but those things were not enough.
With both of them being true vampires, Vilena and Ruthven should have been on an even keel, but alas, an undead warrior is still a warrior. Ruthven wasn’t faster, but he was very slightly stronger, and even without a weapon his skill at the basic, reflexive acts of battle was obvious to see. He could deflect every blow Vilena sent his way, turn them around, off balance her. It was the opposite with Elaine: she was a master, and having weaponry was a distinct advantage, but even the most sophisticated feints could be overcome by clumsily dodging with superhuman speed or simply letting the steel sink into flesh.
Would only that the two of them could merge into a single being; perhaps she would have been able to defeat him. As it was, they could only occupy him, buying time for some other intervention. One mistake was all it took. Elaine misjudged her attack, no doubt for reasons related to the sweat pouring down her shoulders, and Ruthven was able to catch her hand. With a single flick of his wrist, Elaine was disarmed and tossed aside in the same measure. Vilena charged, screaming wordless vengeance, but with the gnat in his side taken care of, Ruthven could focus fully on her.
He let loose with a textbook combination, a one-two-three punch that would have sent Vilena toppling backwards in shock were it not for the fact that he caught her by the collar of her dress, dragging her upright. Vilena hadn’t even realized that a vampire was vulnerable to being dazed by impact.
Baring his fangs, Ruthven took hold of the collar of the dress in both hands and tore it open down to the sternum. Vilena tried to raise her hands to protect her modesty, but he stopped her, eyes glowing like hot coals as he glared at her body.
“I gave you my heart, Vilena Sofiyevna Krasnova. Seeing as you’ve betrayed me, I should like to have it back.”
He pressed his fingers against her skin, and blood began to spill. Vilena screamed.