They had to lure it away from the inn. Even without Osamu in the basement, there were actual guests at the hot spring, and they were all in danger. Siobhan crouched, scooping a palm-sized stone from the garden. Straightening back up, she wound up and pitched it like a fastball. It pinged harmlessly off the side of the angel’s head, but it most definitely got her attention, her perfect features twisting in pretty incredulity.
Siobhan waved an arm over her head and flipped the angel off before she took off into the woods, sprinting with all of her might. Up above, she heard the rustle of feathers as the angel followed her, and she could hear Jack’s footsteps behind her. She spared a glance over her shoulder to make sure Barton was still safe. He loped after them as they ran, but he fell behind quickly.
Siobhan kept running, even once she was well into the trees, her legs pumping like pistons to carry her farther and farther away from the inn and the people inside. Every so often, she cast a glance upward through the leaves, just to make sure the angel was still pursuing. For once in her life, she found herself actively hoping that someone was overly vindictive.
(It seemed likely, at least. She doubted the angel had ever seen anyone with the audacity to throw a garden stone at her before.)
As expected, though, the angel was only willing to passively pursue them for so long before she folded her wings in close and plummeted downward. She dropped through the canopy of the woods and landed in a crouch, her wings flaring out behind her dramatically as she stood up, straightening slowly.
Siobhan and Jack both ground to a halt, stopping so abruptly that the grass ripped up beneath their feet. Schooling her features into something suitably uninterested, Siobhan patted her hands together in delicate, polite applause. “Very impressive. Not melodramatic at all. Don’t you agree, Jack?”
Jack rolled his eyes and gave her a look like he was silently willing her to stop poking a bear.
The angel’s mouth turned down at the corners in distaste, and she rolled her shoulders, readying herself for a fight. She didn’t open her mouth to say a word, though.
“Are these guys, like, mute or something?” Siobhan wondered, lifting her hands defensively.
“They don’t think we’re worth talking to, I would imagine,” Jack returned. “Or they don’t want to give anything away again. One or the other.”
“Be fair,” Siobhan scolded mockingly. “It could be both.”
Jack nodded once, conceding the point that it could, in fact, be both (and likely was).
The angel’s eyes narrowed as they continued to carry on, and finally, she hurled herself forward, her wings flaring as she launched herself at Jack. He brought his hands up, catching the angel’s hands and holding her at bay. They grappled for a moment, only for the angel to retreat again as Siobhan ducked into the fray, landing one punch and then a second against a leather-clad torso.
The angel turned quickly, her wings spread, and Siobhan hit the ground with a grunt, all of the air leaving her lungs as one wing slammed into her midsection. Briefly, she recalled being told that swans and geese could break a full-grown person’s arms with their wings, and she wondered what the angels might be able to do with theirs.
For the sake of the humans they encountered, she was grimly glad that they had settled on dropping people as the most expedient way to be rid of them. Horrible as it was, it seemed kinder than some of the alternatives. She dragged herself back to her feet, ready to throw herself into the tangle again.
The angel stumbled two steps to the side as Siobhan collided with her side, followed by a grunt as Jack landed a punch to her sternum, and her head snapped back as his elbow collided with her chin. She hopped backward, her wings flapping once as she cleared a few yards before she landed again. Siobhan was more than a little disappointed to see that she still looked entirely unharmed. She was going in the right direction, though. As long as she kept getting farther from the hot spring, Siobhan wasn’t going to start worrying.
She stepped forward, intent on sweeping the angel’s legs out from under her, only for Jack to grab her by the back of her shirt and haul her back, just before a heavenly fist could collide with her face. Instead, the punch came up short, and for an instant, it almost looked like the angel was pouting at the missed strike.
There was no time to appreciate the sight, though, as the angel propelled herself forward with her wings, her next punch only narrowly missing Siobhan’s head as she ducked under the swing. She half expected the angel to start growling at any moment, but she supposed that would be too undignified.
Jack darted forward, took a punch to the shoulder, and kicked at the angel’s midsection. It wasn’t a particularly powerful blow, but it did distract her long enough for Siobhan to duck into the opening in her defense and slam one palm into the angel’s windpipe. She made a noise like a cat with a troublesome hairball and stumbled away, her wings flaring out and then folding forward as she did.
They actually had the angel on the defensive. Siobhan was more than slightly surprised, to say the least, considering she only had the bare minimum of training. (Two against one wasn’t exactly fair, true, but Siobhan wasn’t going to split hairs when fair could result in her being literally torn to pieces.)
The angel’s wings burst outward again, the wind from them sending leaves fluttering and loose twigs tumbling over the muddied grass. Jack dove out of the way, one hand raised to block his face, and the angel’s gaze focused on him, laser sharp and intent. She stormed toward him, giving Siobhan the perfect chance to duck behind her with an impish smile on her face.
Siobhan reached out, seizing a handful of feathers and started tugging. Her reward was a sharp grunt and a sneer, just in time for Jack to punch forward, his fist aimed for the angel’s throat again. It had worked well last time, and creativity was better saved for when there was a safety net.
In a flash, the angel lifted one hand, her fingers closing around Jack’s fist before it could connect. She pulled him closer by her grip on his hand, and his eyes went wide as she grabbed him by the throat and hauled him off the ground like an oversized rag doll. As if he weighed nothing at all, she threw him.
Jack slammed into a tree, a portion of the bough splintering. He crashed to the ground in a heap, and for a moment, Siobhan felt a burst of vicarious terror as the angel bore down upon him, powerful enough that it almost brought her to her knees. She was running before she could even process it, launching herself at the angel like a tiger pouncing upon its prey.
There was an outraged shout as she crashed into the angel’s back, and in an instant, the angel began to rise higher into the air. Siobhan felt a moment of fear, echoed by Jack’s own, as the angel broke through the canopy and began to rise higher.
And then she remembered she was strong now, and her expression hardened as she stomped down her fear. She clenched one hand around the base of one of the angel’s wings and pulled, heaving on it with all of her might, and the angel screamed. It was not an attractive sound. There was nothing pretty or beautiful about it. It was like shattering glass and wind through dead branches, and it pierced Siobhan to her core, but she kept pulling until she heard a thick, meaty snap, and the angel began to plummet.
The angel hit the ground with a reverberating impact, landing on her front and inadvertently cushioning Siobhan’s fall. Jack had scrambled back to his feet by then and was at Siobhan’s side in an instant, and as one, they both hauled back on the broken wing, until with a wet squelch and a spray of a glimmering, transparent fluid that had to be blood, they separated it from the angel’s back.
She writhed beneath them, screaming like a broken music box, her one remaining wing beating wildly at the air and the grass, gleaming white feathers flying loose in her panic, until finally she clobbered Siobhan across the face with the wing and knocked her aside. Slightly less encumbered, she rolled, tossed Jack off her, and scrambled back to her feet.
Jack climbed back to his feet and offered a hand down, hauling Siobhan back upright. For a
moment, there was a standoff, the wild-eyed angel regarding them as they watched her in return, waiting for her to falter as blood poured from her back, pooling around her feet and turning the ground into a shimmering star field.
Nobody moved, at least not at first. And then there came the quiet sound of underbrush crunching, just before Barton surged out of the trees, his front paws meeting the angel’s back. She shrieked in pain, and Barton clamped his jaws around the broken off mound of bone and pulled, only letting go when the angel’s screaming got too loud and he had to retreat to paw fitfully at his ears.
It was enough of a distraction, though. Siobhan and Jack lunged forward in tandem, slamming the angel to the ground. She splayed out on her back, thrashing like a wild cat on a tether as Siobhan sat on her chest and pinned her arms. The angel’s heels dug at the grass, and her single wing squirmed beneath her. Blood coated everything, slathering over the grass and coating Siobhan’s arms up to her elbows. Siobhan wasn’t sure how long she would be able to hold her down, but it turned into a moot point soon enough, as Jack got his hands around the angel’s neck.
With another heavy snap, he twisted the angel’s head sideways. Her mouth opened to scream, but the sound never came out. Her expression went slack, and her cheek settled against the grass, the glow of her eyes dimming.
Siobhan and Jack stayed where they were for a moment, and then Siobhan’s grip on the angel went slack. With an explosive sigh, she flopped back to sit on the grass, heedless of the blood getting all over her pants. “I just helped kill someone,” she observed after a moment, in a small, far away voice.
Jack sat down beside her, his legs splayed artlessly in front of himself and his weight behind him on his hands. “To keep from getting killed yourself,” he pointed out. “You did well. So did you,” he added as Barton slunk over to them, still shaking his head in lingering discomfort.
“He’s a good boy,” Siobhan agreed, lifting a hand to scratch the top of her dog’s head. His fur stuck up in minuscule spikes from the blood on her fingers, and Siobhan brought her hand up in front of her face to observe it. “Why do they bleed glitter glue?” she asked eventually. “I mean, it looks like the expensive sort of glitter glue, but still.”
Jack shrugged, the motion lethargic and tired. “Beats me,” he sighed. “I’m not a biologist. I don’t even know if angels would adhere to anything like normal biology.”
“What happens if I eat it?” Siobhan asked, giving it a curious sniff.
“Please don’t,” Jack groused, rolling his eyes. “Maybe it’s harmless, but I have no idea and I’d rather not find out it’s deadly.”
Siobhan scowled at him but scrubbed her hand off on the grass regardless. “Fine,” she agreed with a huff. It was, admittedly, a valid concern, though she was going to continue to privately hope that someone else would try it so she could give it a whirl herself. ‘Drank the blood of an angel’ sounded like a pretty great super hero origin.
“At least tell me what that was back there,” she tacked on, waving one hand loosely at the wreckage of the trees around them and the carpet of fallen leaves and branches surrounding them. “The angel threw you, and I was almost floored because you were scared. Why wasn’t it that bad before?”
True, she had been feeling his emotions to some extent since he’d turned her, but they had always been quiet and tucked away, like she was just observing them through a sheet of glass. That had been the first time she had truly felt one of his feelings, as if it was her own.
Jack’s next shrug verged on helpless. “Usually I keep my end of it locked down to some extent. But I sort of panicked when it looked like she was going to rip my heart out of my chest, so the connection opened a bit.”
She punched his shoulder. “We’re lucky it didn’t knock me on my ass,” she grumbled. “Can we do something about that? Like teach me how to block it out myself? Seems like it’d be a bit more convenient that way.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “We’ll take some time to go over all that after we deal with Osamu. When we’re on the way to the next Lord,” he offered. “Sound good?”
“I’ll take it,” she agreed. Beside her, Jack finally hefted himself back to his feet, and she accepted his hand when he offered it to her and let him drag her back upright. “What about this?” she asked, gesturing to the angel’s corpse. “What do we do about this?”
Considering everything that had just happened, she was rather hoping that it would just melt into the ground or dissolve into glitter or something like that. It was an angel’s corpse. She could buy it if it was self-disposing. She doubted she was going to be that lucky, though. Life didn’t seem to go in lucky directions lately.
“We killed it,” Jack pointed out, “so I think someone else can take care of the cleanup.” It was a compromise Siobhan could definitely live with. “Let’s head back to the inn before something else decides to go wrong.” He crooked his fingers in a follow-me gesture and set off toward the hot spring again. Siobhan jogged after him, pausing as she did to pick a few fallen feathers off the ground.
The edges of them still glistened with angelic blood, but the feathers had survived the scuffle reasonably well, and the ends were curiously sharp. She tucked the bundle into her pocket for the time being. An entertaining souvenir. She had earned it, she figured.
“You think they’re going to make us clean up again?” she groused, catching up with Jack to walk at his side, Barton trotting along behind them.
Jack snorted out a laugh. “We did just save all their asses,” he reasoned. “We can probably use it as some sort of leverage, don’t you think?”
It was a cheering thought, all things considered. It put a spring in Siobhan’s step all the way back to the inn.
*
As Minako and a young man who hadn’t stopped to introduce himself disappeared into the woods to deal with the angel’s corpse, Noriko briefly fussed over how grimy Siobhan and Jack had gotten during the fight, but she was talked down easily enough. With a final huff, she led them down a winding staircase, down and down and down, until it bottomed out in a simple, narrow room.
She ushered them into the room and summarily disappeared back upstairs, not bothering to explain anything. Siobhan couldn’t say she was surprised. They ventured into the room with likely undue caution, but after the evening they’d had, it seemed warranted.
The room was not quite what they had been expecting. It wasn’t especially large. There was no bed, or any furniture at all, in fact. There were just…walls. Admittedly, that was cause for some interest and confusion on its own.
“What is this?” Siobhan sighed, staring at the wall in front of them. In theory, the next Vampire Lord was sleeping soundly on the other side of it, but there was no true door. There was nothing that even looked like a door.
Instead, there were a series of long horizontal and vertical slots in the wall, all of them interlocked in a manner much like a maze, though all of the slots converged in one long, horizontal slot toward the bottom. There were eight pegs at the top of the maze of slots, each one with a glass orb jutting from the wall, each orb gleaming like a rainbow.
“A puzzle, I guess?” Jack hazarded, rubbing the back of his head. “Dask’iya relied on being remote to keep her hidden. I guess Osamu relies on a puzzle.”
Siobhan heaved a sigh. “Great. The others upstairs already let us through. We already killed an angel. Why do we need even more permission?” She folded her arms, and her shoulders rounded as she hunched. “I feel like I need a field trip permission slip at this rate.”
Jack patted her shoulder consolingly. “You can complain about it later. Until then, let’s figure out what we’re supposed to do.”
Nodding once, Siobhan reached up, very delicately closing her fingers around one of the glass orbs. She gave it a tug, and the entire peg slid downward, following the slot it was embedded in. She continued pulling it down toward the long slot at the bottom until it stopped abruptly, stuck fast only halfway down. She tug
ged at it insistently, only letting it go when her temper was in danger of breaking the glass. “What, are they too old?” she scoffed, tapping the orb with the tip of one finger.
Curious, Jack drew another peg down, guiding it along its track until it came to a halt at the very bottom. “It doesn’t seem like age is the issue,” he observed.
Siobhan squinted at the orbs, as if she could convince them to speak to her if she stared at them long and hard enough. And then, her eyes widened. “Wait, wait. So this one,” she tapped the peg she had moved, “is blocking the path of this one.” She reached up toward a peg at the top, and then let her finger trace its track down to where her first peg was stuck. “But this one,” again, she tapped the stuck one, “is sort of tie-dyed, while this one,” she leaned down to tap the one Jack had moved, “and this one,” she tapped the one her first peg was blocking, “are both solid colored.”
She trailed off, humming to herself, before she mused, “So, what if only the solid colored ones make it to the bottom, and the tie-dyed ones only make it partway there?” She guided her initial peg back to the top as Jack reached up to guide the next solid colored orb all the way down to the bottom.
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