“You…left…me…to…die!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
You Broke Her
“You broke her,” Evadne said, crouching over Keely’s limp form.
“Good,” Elissa snapped, refusing to even look their direction.
“Serious,” Evadne said, waving a hand slowly in front of Keely’s face. “The girl’s breathing, but nobody’s home. She not even blinking. It’s…creepy.”
“I didn’t hit her that hard,” Elissa muttered.
“She was broken before we got here,” Ulric said. “No sane person would mistake me for that prince who’s been mooning over her. If you want my guess, she hit her head when the ground collapsed and Scarlet got inside again. That would certainly explain why she left you there.”
“Thank you,” Elissa sighed. “A big helping of guilt is about the only thing that could have made this day better.”
“She never struck me as all that balanced to begin with,” Evadne said.
“Yeah. Right. Okay. Let me think.” Elissa rubbed at the ache in her forehead.
“You think,” Evadne offered. “We’ll keep on to the inn. Time’s wasting.”
“Yeah. Go.” Elissa nodded when Ulric hesitated. “We can’t leave her, and we can’t drag her through the street. Get cleaned up and see if you can come up with a plan more specific than, ‘Find someone to help us sneak past the Inquisition.’ Safe is in short supply today, but I’ll be as safe here as any of us.”
When the others had gone, Elissa stood pondering Keely for a moment where she lay, then took a deep breath and sat down cross-legged, pulling Keely’s head into her lap in an effort to at least make her look less uncomfortable. Keely, meanwhile, remained an unresisting rag doll. “All right. Maybe I overreacted,” Elissa said grudgingly. “I don’t know what happened to you, I can’t swear I would have played the hero if you’d been the one trapped down a hole with a bloodthirsty demon, and you never pretended to be a hero. I just…let myself think we were a team, after all we’ve been through. I know you’re a crook and a liar, but you were my crook and my liar, watching my back when I didn’t have anyone else to do it. I hear there’s one born every minute. I just didn’t think I was that one. I guess no one wants to think that. Anyway, we still need you here, and I promise to have more sensible expectations if you’ll come back and finish what we started.”
The gentle rise and fall of Keely’s chest remained the only proof she wasn’t dead.
“Or I could just take your boots and walk away,” Elissa offered. When even that failed to elicit so much as a blink, Elissa sighed again.
“Is this what happens when Scarlet gets in your head and wins?” she asked. A series of emotions fought for control of her face, but in the end it was simply biting her lip that came out ahead. “No. That’s a cop-out. I broke you, didn’t I? But that’s good news, right? If I broke you, I should be able to fix you.” She sat quietly for several minutes, lost in thought, her fingers combing through Keely’s hair.
“Bookend?” she asked finally. “Are you in there? There’s butterflies loose in the garden. Lots and lots of butterflies. I’m freaking out here.”
Nothing continued to happen in great quantities.
“Orange ones…blue ones…pink ones…I could really use a rescue. What are you hiding from, silly cat? There’s fish in it for you.”
The great quantities of nothing maintained an admirable level of consistency. Elissa gave it up and began humming a lullaby, punctuating it with what lyrics she could call to mind. When the song trailed off, she pulled her thoughts together again.
“Why ‘Jenny’?” she asked. It might have been her imagination, but she thought perhaps this time she was actually rewarded with a blink. “I can correct you a million times, and still it’s ‘Jenny’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Jenny’. Why ‘Jenny’?”
This time, Keely did blink. She drew a deep breath. She calmly opened her eyes, rolled over and sat up, all without any show of recognition that Elissa was there at all. She looked down at herself, spread her arms, and inspected what bits of herself she could see before rolling her eyes and finally glancing up at Elissa—who had already risen halfway to a crouch, and looked poised to run.
“Relax,” Keely said evenly. “I’m not Scarlet.”
“Maybe,” Elissa said, not relaxing. “You’re not Keely, either. You’re using her voice, but you don’t sound like her. You’re wearing her face, but she’s not behind it. You don’t even move like her.”
“I am not Keely,” Keely agreed, unperturbed. “She is, as you say, broken. Sorry.”
“Then who are you?” Elissa asked warily.
“I’m Regula,” not-Keely said.
“What are you?” Elissa demanded. “And what have you done with Keely?”
“She’s broken,” Regula repeated. “I thought we’d established that. I don’t expect I’ll be able to fix her, either. She was such a patch job to begin with.”
“Wait,” Elissa said. “You’re saying this is your body?”
“Of course not,” Regula said dismissively. “This is Jenny’s body.”
“Ooookay. Maybe you should lie back down,” Elissa suggested. “Or maybe I’ll have a lie down.”
“Seriously?” Regula asked. “All you’ve been through, and this is what makes your head spin?”
“Can we at least take this from the top?” Elissa asked.
“Fair enough.” Regula shrugged. “I’m Jenilee’s imaginary friend. I help her keep track of stuff—or at least I used to. Jenny kind of ‘checked out’ on me a few years back when, well, everybody died. She couldn’t cope, so I did my best to resurrect the one person we knew who could cope, and that was our best friend, Keely. I thought she’d make Jenny feel safe enough to come back, but it never really worked, and I’m more ‘support personnel’ than an actual person, so it’s been Keely’s show ever since.”
“So all this time she’s called me Jenny because she’s mistaken me for herself?” Elissa asked.
“Sort of. Well, basically.”
“Do you have any idea how twisted that is?” Elissa fell back on the grass with her arms spread wide, staring at the sky.
“Probably not,” Regula said. “Anyway, Jenilee checked out on me when she couldn’t live up to page twelve, and now…”
“Page twelve of what?” Elissa interrupted.
“Of me,” Regula answered patiently. “I’m really just a book.”
“It’s only fair to warn you,” Elissa said, “if this is just some game to see how credulous I can be, we either end it now, or I kill you when we do.” When Regula showed no sign of being perturbed, she asked, “All right. What’s page twelve?”
“Fight for what you love.” The words came out of what Elissa had always thought of as Keely’s mouth, but this time they didn’t even pretend to use her voice. Elissa had often enough heard Keely change tone and inflection—even accent—to better play a role. It didn’t seem to be a specialty or anything, but she did it well enough that she could hold her own on a theatrical stage.
Actual mimicry—changing her voice to completely disguise it as belonging to someone else—was something Elissa had never even heard Keely attempt. Yet the voice that somehow emerged from her mouth now, unhesitatingly and with crystal clarity, should have issued from that of a man grown and at least ten years her senior. Gentle sincerity and paternal conviction filled the voice, sharing space with a tangible weight of years. For the briefest moment, Elissa could have sworn she heard gulls crying in the distance, and smelled the faint aromas of fish and of pipe tobacco.
“The poor thing tried.” Regula said, returning smoothly to Keely’s voice as reality came crashing back through the surreal sensations. “She made a real effort to stand up to the Inquisition, but, well…apparently this isn’t the first time we’ve been caught between them and Bloody Scarlet.”
Elissa, who’d almost had time to think she’d finally run out of reserves of surprise, blinked again. “It’s not?”
<
br /> “We didn’t have a name for her, but I recognized her face when Scarlet showed up in Denecia. Keely didn’t, and we don’t really talk, but the bad gut feeling she had that night was me telling her to get out of there. And before you get to asking about the why’s and the how’s, it all went down a lot like this. The same thing that brought the Inquisition to town had brought Scarlet to town, and between them, they managed to kill pretty much everybody. Between an army of the Inquisition and an entire town several times the size of Weasel Gap here, I can only vouch for five people having walked out of the wreckage of that night. Worse, three of them walked out of it in this one body.”
“And the others?” Elissa asked.
“Scarlet, of course,” Regula said, “and at least one knight of the Inquisition. I suspect the Inquisition could claim some other survivors, but their losses were obscene in any event. If any other locals lived through the night, I don’t doubt they died later in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Our friends did nearly get out intact with us. We escaped Scarlet once, and we got out into the swamp while she and the Inquisition were busy with each other, but she was on an absolute rampage.
“As best I can piece together, the Inquisition killed her sister that night, and she held all of us responsible. Once the town had been emptied, she came scouring the countryside with those ‘hounds’ of hers. In the end, they tore our friends apart while Jenny cowered behind a rotting log, too terrified to move. That’s the only reason any of us made it out, but still, she broke the rules. When push came to shove, she didn’t fight for what she loved. On top of all the other horrors, that knowledge shattered her.”
“Wait,” Elissa said. “You said the Inquisition killed Scarlet’s sister? How?!”
Regula shrugged. It seemed to be one of her favorite gestures. “Holy horseshoes, I expect. They trampled her in the street.”
“You’re sure she was dead?”
“She certainly looked the part, but given what we’ve seen Scarlet come back from, if they really were sisters, maybe not so much,” Regula admitted. “We didn’t stick around to check to see if she was some sort of minor goddess. She was just ‘Aunt Molly’.”
Elissa had never risen from where she’d collapsed back onto the ground, yet she somehow gave the impression of doing it all over again. “What have I gotten myself caught up in?” she asked.
“Wish I could tell you,” Regula said. “Sharing living quarters with Keely is confusing at the best of times, and I’m doing a lot of guesswork here. I’m not omniscient. I’m just observant. It’s a rare day I don’t get to devote to just watching and thinking about things. Blackwater Molly said she was Jenny’s aunt on her mother’s side, and I think she believed that. I was born of a few words from Jenny’s mother, but that’s all the memory Jenny ever had of her.
“The night of page thirteen—when everyone died—Molly said her sisters were in town, and Jenny was supposed to finally get to meet her mother, but everything went south before that could happen. And in the middle of it all…”
“Scarlet shows up,” Elissa finished for her. “And just now, I threw it in Keely’s face that she broke the rules like Jenny had, and so she’s broken, too?”
“Just so. She’s not one for letting it show when she’s under stress, but it’s there. It’s always there, and this whole thing has been spiraling out of control.”
“And on top of everything else, she’s afraid now that this monster who destroyed her life and killed her friends right in front of her is actually her own mother?” Elissa asked.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Regula said with a nod. “Words are never simple when you’re trying to sort out the pronouns and antecedents concerning three minds in one body, plus Keely has only confused and fragmented memories of how that night went down. She didn’t exist at all as you know her until after it happened. They’re actually Jenny’s memories, and when they do start to coalesce, Keely shoves them down as hard as she can and shatters them again.”
“Sounds like just the sort of treatment that would keep Jenny from returning.”
“I suppose it is,” Regula agreed. “At this point, it’s all moot. Keely’s gone. Jenny’s gone. I’m just a book…” She shrugged. “About all I’m good for is getting what’s left of us out from underfoot.”
Elissa snorted. “That’s what this whole mess is over, you know: just a book. And you’re not just a book. You think. You have agency. What that makes you is a librarian—and if you dare to tell me you’re ‘just a librarian’ I promise I will slug you again.”
“What exactly do you want from me?” Regula asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“Bring me Keely,” Elissa said.
“I told you…”
“And I told you,” Elissa said, pulling herself up off the ground, “bring me Keely. That’s not a request.”
“Even if I was willing to accommodate you,” Regula said, “I don’t know how you expect me to comply. She’s gone.”
“She can’t be gone,” Elissa snapped. “It’s against the rules.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Regula said.
“The hell it doesn’t,” Elissa growled. “If it’s so bloody important to her that she curl up and die because she abandoned me, then there’s no way you can stop her from coming back. We need her. I need her. This is her one chance to atone for all of it. You’re so bloody observant, but do you even hear that?”
Elissa pointed off in the direction of the forest, from which a distant cacophony of unearthly laughter was just becoming audible. “It’s happening again. We’re all caught between the Inquisition and a hard place, and Bloody Scarlet is coming for us. She’s coming for us, and she’s going to single me out for special attention because of what I had to do when Keely ran off and left me to her.
“Swords aren’t going to stop her. Guns aren’t going to stop her. All my luck and pluck and cunning only slowed her down for a couple of hours. It’s going to take nothing short of a miracle for me to live through the day, and Keely is the closest thing to a miraculata we’ve got. Keely didn’t just mistake me for her best friend, I am her best friend. I’m the one who put my faith and trust in her when no sane woman would. I’m the one who stood by her across half a continent, no matter what she put me through, all for the sake of a crusade we both believed in. For love of me and of Jenny and…and ‘Hero’—however he fits into all of this—she is going to get herself back here right now and fight. Because that’s the rules!”
“Ow.” Regula winced.
“Well it was supposed to hurt,” Elissa said. “Now get in there and get her.”
“In where? Get who? And for go’ss sake, what did I do to deserve that sucker punch?” Between voice, mannerisms, and context, there could be little doubt that this was Keely sitting there, rubbing her jaw.
“If you really don’t remember,” Elissa said earnestly, “just trust me that you earned it.”
The inn had been too crowded with refugees to hold a proper council of war at, and Keely had been too conspicuous without a wig at hand to hide her hair, so they’d wound up holing up instead in the attic of the village stonemason who lived on the edge of town. As a friend of Ulric’s and the owner of a major grudge against the Inquisition, the mason had no qualms with harboring a few fugitives long enough for them to get cleaned up and sort things out.
Evadne had managed to get through the crowds to reach her luggage, and she had also raided the luggage of her traveling companions, so the four of them didn’t just look clean at this point; they looked like clean gentry, in visiting from the Heartlands.
The attic had one window, looking out in the direction of the forest. Most of the locals that hadn’t become casualties of the skirmish with the Inquisition or taken prisoner after it were currently sequestered in their homes, praying to escape the Inquisition’s notice, but what few did dare to venture out seemed to be queuing up in small knots to stare off at the trees. They could be seen whispering among themselves, speculating abo
ut the distant, unnerving laughter drifting out from beyond the forest hedge. The deadlings hadn’t come rushing out into the settled lands, but did seem to be massing just back among the trees.
“So, Lady Doryne is gone.” Keely sighed. “Hero is out of the fight and Conrad is looking after him. Nolan, Minda, and Baldassare should be okay in the castle but would seem to be trapped there by the Inquisition. That’s everybody who’s not here accounted for, right? It’s down to the four of us to sort this mess out.”
“And I’m not sure how much good I’m going to be for anything,” Elissa said. “I hobbled this far mostly on willpower.”
“For that matter,” Keely said, “I seem to have pushed the whole shape-shifting thing to its limits and beyond. That’s another resource we’re out. So we’re looking at two battered and fatigued warriors, a scholar who’s more or less off her feet for the duration, and a trickster everyone knows not to trust. With that, we take on both a small army that makes whole kingdoms cower and a sadistic, unstoppable madwoman.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much the size of it,” Ulric agreed. “And if I’m any judge of these things, Scarlet will be holding off ‘til nightfall for maximum chaos when she lets go the leash of her deadlings, and so everyone can get good and on-edge listening to them all day. We’ve got no longer than that to figure this out.”
“If you’re trying to talk me into grabbing a horse and riding out of here,” Evadne said, “keep talking. You’ve got my attention.”
“I won’t ask you not to,” Keely said. “This isn’t really your fight.”
“Actually, it is,” Evadne corrected her. “I can’t give up on Sabina, and—if only for her sake—I can’t abandon Baldassare. If I don’t see this through, we’ll never be able to mount a proper search. I’m just waiting for you to give me some thread of hope to clutch at.”
“Hug away,” Keely said, pointing Evadne toward Elissa. “There’s our secret weapon.”
“Me?” Elissa asked, managing to sound aghast.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 45