by Ari Marmell
On a rooftop across the street, obscured by curtains of night and storm, something howled in a voice just barely human.
The second cry was heard by Widdershins alone, as Olgun screamed in terror at what he felt was coming.
“It means so very much to see all of you here tonight.”
No empty words, those; he absolutely meant it. His head pounded, his stomach still rose and fell in burning waves, but Bishop Sicard would have chosen to be nowhere else than standing at the pulpit of the basilica's main sanctuary. Every lamp, chandelier, and candelabra glowed warm and bright, glinting in deep colors off the stained glass and a clear, almost blinding white everywhere else.
It wasn't the light, however, lifting Sicard's spirit after what had, thus far, been a difficult and terrifying night.
Word had spread quickly, faster even than rumor's normally swift wings, of the unnatural entity that had invaded the church, and the assembly of clergy who stood against it. By the time Sicard and the House priests had emerged from seclusion, their combined faith having finally banished their fae attacker back to the shadows whence it came, the Basilica of the Sacred Choir was already packed with enough people to raise a deafening cheer.
The crowd grew further still when the other priests sent word back to the noble Houses of what had just occurred. When midnight mass rolled around, the normally sparsely attended service was packed, so much so that the temperature in the great chapel had grown uncomfortably warm, and the sound of prayer and paean utterly dwarfed the thunder shaking the building from outside. Despite the deathly late hour and the pounding storm, the people had come to hear the word of, and lend support to, the voice of the Hallowed Pact in Davillon.
Had Sicard not been so drained, so exhausted, he might have realized—either through the faint intuitions that often came from the 147 gods to their most devout clergy, or simply via educated guesswork and deduction—that other such attacks must have occurred throughout the city. He might have attempted to do something; even though there seemed precious little he could have done, he would have wanted to try.
But exhausted he was, and what energy he could muster was devoted to delivering service and sermon at an hour to which he was unaccustomed even on normal days.
So, with the equally exhausted, aching, and worn House priests fanned out on the dais behind him, Sicard launched into the tale of what had occurred—and, to an extent, had been occurring recently throughout Davillon—assuring his flock that the situation was gradually coming under control, that the Church was with them, that there would soon be no more reason to fear…
She was afraid, terribly afraid, before she even knew why.
Although she could certainly guess.
For Olgun to panic that completely, that loudly, whatever was coming had to be something bad. Really bad, demon-bad, Iruoch-bad.
Lisette-bad.
So when she felt her god's power pulling her vision through the darkness, winding around the raindrops to the distant rooftop, she wasn't remotely surprised to spot the thick red hair or the bestial snarl on the otherwise shadow-veiled figure.
The world narrowed, so there was nothing but the rain, the cobblestones, the buildings before her and the burnt-out ruin behind. And Widdershins—brash, confident, defiant to a fault; thief and duelist and, no matter how she tried to avoid it, how she never would have accepted it, hero—had, for one instant, a single despairing thought. Foreign, even alien, and cold as the oldest glacier, but as absolutely certain as if it were written on the bedrock of creation.
I'm going to die tonight.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. After everything she'd been through, everything she'd done, she deserved better than this. She wanted to shriek at the injustice of it, kick the mud and spit in the rain, curse the world and the fates and the gods who would do this to her.
She did nothing of the sort, of course. She kept herself, on the surface, calm. Collected. She knew what Lisette could do, knew that no help of any significance would arrive, could possibly arrive, in time to do any good. She couldn't win. She couldn't escape. Not even Olgun could save her. Simple fact.
Even as her gut twisted like a dying snake, though, and her heart began to pound faster than the falling rain, Widdershins realized that that wasn't what scared her.
I'm going to die tonight.
But I'll be baked and breaded if anyone else is!
She continued to scan the street, as though still searching for the source of that horrid cry, as were Robin and Faustine—hand clasped in hand, until the skin went white as bone and not a trickle of the rain could squeeze between. In the process, Shins took a step back, nearly bumping into her confused and frightened friends.
“You need to run!” she hissed between her teeth.
“What? We're not leaving you alone!” Shins could hear the steel coalescing in Robin's voice, the stubbornness that she absolutely, positively couldn't afford to indulge right now. “There's no way we—!”
“Robin! There's no time for this. I need you to go. I need you to go!” The idea of lying to her best friend almost made her throw up in mid-sentence, but she managed to force it out anyway. “If you stay, if I have to worry about you, you're going to get me killed.”
A second howl shook the night, closer. Even knowing it was Lisette, now, Shins could barely hear her voice in the horrid sound, a roar of murderous fury soaked through with a burgeoning pain.
“Faustine, get her out of here!”
Robin still protested, growing ever more frantic, but Faustine clearly heard the urgency in Widdershins's tone. She nodded once, began gathering the younger woman to her, leading her away, when Shins called after her.
“Faustine! As soon as Robin's safe, I need you to get to the bishop as fast as you can. Tell him I said yes, but it has to be now or it'll be too late! He'll understand.”
Olgun was screaming again, this time at her. It buffeted her, harsher than the storm. Had the earth vanished beneath her feet or she found herself slammed into one of the nearby walls, it wouldn't have come as the faintest surprise.
She ignored it. It wrenched at her, like dismissing the pleas of a drowning loved one, but she remained steadfast, refusing to take back her demand.
Maybe she had been willing to risk Olgun's life along with her own, but she wouldn't throw it hopelessly away.
Widdershins held herself rigid, a statue in the rain, unwilling to take the chance that Olgun might yet manage, mystically or emotionally, to influence her actions or her words. Only when her friends were off—Faustine helping Robin to shuffle along as fast as her bad leg would permit, Robin staring back with wide eyes glinting in the glow of the streetlamps—did Shins force her shoulders to relax. She stepped into the road, drawing the rapier she'd thus far “neglected” to return to Paschal.
“Stop yelling at me!” she snapped as she reached the center of the road. Then, as she looked up at the roofs, blinking against the rain that seemed like it would never stop, “So much was awful, but I wouldn't have missed it. I love you, Olgun.”
She actually smiled, then, trying to remember the last time she'd felt him so utterly stunned. Lips tight to filter out the water, she took a single deep breath.
Her shout, when unleashed, seemed to stomp along the street, knocking on doors and windows as it passed. “You just going to stand around all night screeching, Lisette? And what's with that, anyway? Got to be murder on your throat, and even you can't have a singing voice that bad. Is it a mating call? Is this deranged homicidal lunatic season already?”
A vaguely human-like blot, dark even against the gloom, shot from the roof down the street. It sailed in a sharp arc, an impossible leap, landing atop the building directly in front of Shins. A juddering thump announced her landing, but for the moment she remained too far from the edge for Shins to see.
“You'll have to excuse the screaming.” It sounded more like Lisette's voice, now, calling over the rain, though there remained something raspy, bestial within. “I'm s
till getting accustomed to controlling foreign emotions. And they are so very angry with you, little scab! Not as much as I am, but close!”
Foreign emotions? Shins could come up with three or four ways to interpret that, and not a one of them were pleasant.
“It's almost funny, in a way,” the madwoman continued from above, her tone suggesting absolutely nothing at all in the way of amusement. “Such an intricate, interlocking plan, and all you had to do to bring it down was open your fucking mouth!”
“Well, it wasn't that easy. They took some convincing.”
“The godsdamned Houses haven't worked smoothly together in decades! It should never have happened. But that's what Widdershins does, isn't it? Find new and unexpected ways to bugger everything up! I should have killed you years ago, when I had the chance!”
“Uh, you never actually had—”
Something moved at the roof's edge. Shins tensed, waiting for whatever came next.
“Those friends you just oh so gallantly sent away?” Lisette purred from above. “I'm not chasing them down because you might use the opportunity to hide for a few more days, and I really want you to die tonight. But I want you to know that, once you're dead, I'm going to hunt them down. We're going to make them suffer, body and soul, until they beg with their last sane thoughts for me to kill them, and then they're going to suffer more.
“And only because you care about them!”
Shins's breath came quick, now. Her clenched fingers left divots in the wet wrapping of the rapier's hilt. She felt it roaring up inside her, not merely her own anger but Olgun's, too.
“Then I guess,” she spat, “I'll just have to not die tonight!”
Lisette jumped, laughing, from the roof.
She landed hard in a crouch on the building's stoop, the impact spraying puddles in every direction. Although the nearest streetlight shone clear upon the doorway, she remained partially obscured. Shadows rolled and dripped from her arms, her legs, her shoulders, as though she were ridden by a variety of dark and fidgeting serpents.
Still, they were not so thick, those shadows, as to obscure her from Widdershins's sight, not with divine power augmenting the young thief's vision.
“Gods! You look terrible!”
A statement that was rather akin to telling a vampire he appeared “a tad pale.”
That crimson hair seemed straw-like, brittle, noticeable even matted and wet as it was. Her lips were cracked and broken, her gums—as Shins saw when she snarled—shrunken and retreating from her teeth. But worse, far worse, were her eyes.
Or what had been her eyes.
Sunken sockets held pools of a lumpy, viscous black, like ink mixed with the congealed fats scraped from atop an old stew. It sluiced down her face, leaving tarry streaks on her skin that the rain seemed powerless to touch. Water dribbled away from it, polluted and dark, but failing to dilute the stuff even slightly.
“You should see it from my side,” Lisette sneered. “I'm going to need months to recover. Maybe I never will.
“Oh, but it's worth it! They're here with me, you see—and they're painting the walls with my other enemies, at the same time!” Her face twisted into an almost conspiratorial smirk. “That's people you care about, dying horribly as we speak, in case you weren't sure. If a part of me is the price they need to manifest like that, I'm thrilled to pay!”
Oh, gods! No, no, no, who else has she—
A steadying hand and whispered emotions stopped her before her thoughts drove her to hysterics. Don't think about that. Can't be distracted; that's what she wants. Focus on her, worry about the rest later…
As if there would be a later.
Instead, hoping the sounds of the storm would hide any of the tremor she couldn't quite banish from her voice, Widdershins said, “You may feel different when you're too shriveled up and pathetic to use a chamber pot without a pulley, three assistants, and a mule.”
Honestly, she barely knew what she was saying. It didn't matter. Lisette was arrogant, a talker, always had been. So keep her talking and taunting! Every extra second Faustine and Sicard have…
Either the Gloaming Court had added mind-reading to the powers they'd granted her, however, or—more likely—Lisette had simply grown tired of trying to get a rise out of her enemy. Perhaps, even in the midst of her overconfidence, she'd recalled what happened the last time she'd taken the opportunity to gloat, to draw things out.
The shadows about her swirled faster, sliding over her skin, a dancer's train of dark silk, as she took her first step from the stoop. “I may awaken feeling like the floor of a stable,” she sneered as she approached. “But for tonight, I—we—are as strong as ever. How does that make you feel, little scab?”
“Like I'm still waiting for you to actually come here and prove it,” Shins snapped. At which point, despite her defiant words, she did the only sane thing she could.
Olgun's power pumping through her body, augmenting muscle and blood and bone as never before, Widdershins ran.
Every extra second…
The first time she had nearly fallen, her bad leg scooting out from beneath her against the treacherously slick cobbles—the first time she'd been saved from a short, painful stumble only by the sudden tightening of Faustine's grip around her waist—Robin had only yelped aloud, startled and a bit embarrassed.
The second and third times, she'd cursed a blue streak, profanities that would make the average longshoreman sound more like Widdershins.
This, in the lee of an old gothic building, its gargoyles huddled miserably against the storm and cringing from the lightning that made them visible, was the fourth.
“Go on without me.”
Faustine turned her head, dragging a snake of wet hair across her neck, to gawp. At first Robin assumed it was disbelief, until she realized that her words had been swallowed by the latest crash of thunder.
“Go without me!” she shouted.
Now it was disbelief. Then the older woman's face hardened and she continued on, Robin clasped to her, apparently not even planning to acknowledge the request.
Until Robin locked both her feet, and Faustine could either stop or drag her over to fall against the cobblestones.
“I don't know why you think there's a chance in hell—!” Faustine began.
Robin brushed her fingertips over her lover's sodden cheek, halting her in mid-sentence. “You run all over town every night. You could be at the Basilica in minutes. It's going to take an hour or more, if you stay with me.”
“I don't care! I'm not leaving you alone!”
“If Lisette comes after me, there's nothing you can do. If anyone else does? Even robbers are at home on a night like this. But Gerard's place is only a quarter-mile from here. Even I can walk that.” Much as she tried, much as she had other concerns at the moment, she couldn't quite silence the bitterness. “I'll be safe there.”
Faustine actually stomped her foot, which would have soaked Robin's shoes if they hadn't already absorbed all the water they could possibly hold. “No!”
Robin smiled, even as her gaze hardened. “This is important. You know it is. Shins is out there, fighting, maybe…” She swallowed once, moved past it. “I know you worry about me. Want to help me. What you can do for me right now, tonight, is to help her. Please.”
A taut, almost violent shaking came over Faustine's shoulders—and then they slumped in resignation. “Swear to me you're going straight to Gerard's,” she pleaded. “That you're not going to try to go back and do something stupid.”
“I promise. I know I can't do anything—and I'm not leaving you.” Robin stretched up on her toes for a kiss—brief, all too brief—and then stepped back. “Now run, damn it!”
One more second of reluctance, and then she was gone, gracefully slipping away as though racing between the torrents.
Robin sighed, and then, before she could stop herself, called out as loud as her lungs could manage. “I love you!”
In the moment, Robin realized
with some dismay that she couldn't remember if she'd ever said that to her before. She hoped Faustine had still been near enough to hear.
Then, for just a few heartbeats, she looked back the way they'd come. Maybe, just maybe I could…
No. I can't. And we all know it. Besides, she'd promised.
With a second, deeper sigh, Robin shuffled across the street and set her feet toward Gerard's tiny flat.
Another cry of warning, a surge of panic from Olgun. They came so fast and frequent now that Shins was having trouble distinguishing one from the next. She dove, rolling painfully over the road thanks to her inhuman speed. Mud splattered up even as the blades swept down, not merely ringing loudly against the cobblestones but actually carving divots into them.
Lisette was keeping up, and her arms were again somehow warping, winding, slashing, and stabbing at Shins from a good fifteen feet away, or even more. It just seemed unfair, perhaps even rude, for her to do both.
The swords spun and whipped around each other, swirling in circles that no human arms—even bizarrely lengthened and disjointed as Lisette's now seemed to be—could have managed. On the rare occasions Shins had felt it safe even to glance over her shoulder, she'd seen the woman coming after her and the steel flashing, but she'd been utterly unable to make out the movement of the limbs between, or even how they connected to the shoulders anymore.
Not even Olgun's help could allow her to see through the rain, the blurred steel, the writhing shadows.
The height.
Fae-ridden, leaking dark magics, Lisette didn't follow Widdershins from directly behind. She hung suspended, above the level of the streetlights, from wavering limbs of shadow. They skittered silently, unevenly, the horrible offspring of spiders and the very specific darkness found only under the bed; stepping across ground or the walls of surrounding buildings with equal facility. The awkward gait flopped Lisette around at the apex of those shadowy, segmented legs, until she looked as boneless and yielding as a corpse in a waterfall.