12:12
Prairie’s response was a terse nod. Then she walked from the room with head high and tray higher. She walked down the hall, her hips taking on some sway as she approached the guards, stationed once more on either side of the door.
The guard to the left stiffened at their approach. “More?”
“There are a lot at the table,” Prairie said in her high light voice.
The guard grunted in what was probably agreement. He turned and looked at his partner who did the thing with the hand and door and then stepped into the room, indicating with a wave of his hand that Prairie, Kim, and Siobhan should proceed. Which they did. For a whole two steps before Kim’s feet tangled while her gaze widened on the scene in the room.
It was big. Really big. Dimensionally impossible. But such was much of the architecture in ARFA so really that was just a bit of a shrug. A wide trestle table stretched down the center of the room. To either side of it were similar tables but where the central one had chairs pulled up the bracing ones had benches. On maybe half of the – Kim did a quick count – forty chairs sat quantifiably the most stereotypical ruffians and thugs a story could render. She inventoried at least three eye patches, seven fancy head scarfs dripping metal coins, fourteen beards reaching to chests and she was pretty sure at least one of the people with those beards was female by birth.
After her gaze caught on something resembling a chunk of meat hanging from one of the beards, Kim forced her gaze to soften so she didn’t take in as much detail. Just the general shape of bodies clustered around the table in the act of eating.
Yes. She counted. Because it was better than looking at the head of the table. Even determined as she was to keep to counting and cataloguing and otherwise avoiding that Kim found her gaze drew inexorably down the wood to where the Bandit Queen – the person there had to be the Bandit Queen – sat.
At first Kim thought she had red hair. Then she realized it probably was a pale blond but it appeared to be red under the glow of the overhead chandelier because it was saturated with blood. So much so that there were trails of blood from her hairline, looking like tendrils of hair against her pale skin. As Kim stared uncomprehending the woman raised a hand to brush her hair back. A red glove covered the hand and the arm up to the bicep. But, no, that wasn’t a glove.
That wasn’t a glove.
The woman lowered her hand to lick her thumb then she moved her hand and plunged it into the chest of the man splayed out on the table in front of her. It probably sank to the wrist. At least it looked that way before the woman pulled back a handful of flesh. Intestine? Organ? Kim tried so fucking hard to make her brain stop puzzling it out, but her damned traitorous head just kept digging at the image of the grizzly vivisection and the hand groping within.
Before she could get out more than, “What the–” Prairie shot her a warning look.
“Stay here. I have this.” Prairie’s smile stretched her mouth in a grotesque way that emphasized the manic gleam in her wide eyes.
Kim was very prepared to remain exactly where she was. It was hard enough to not let instinct take over and send her screaming from the room. Only understanding that doing that would probably get the Queen’s evil, gleaming gaze locked on her let her wrestle the impulse down, shoving it deep down to swim around in her cramping stomach.
After shooting a staying look, Prairie lifted her tray up to rest against her shoulder and started swaying towards the head of the table and its grotesque bounty. As she walked she started a rhythmic chant, “Run little girl, run little girl, bang!”
She made short work of clearing the distance between where Siobhan and Kim stood frozen and the Queen. Steps slowing she swayed right up to the Queen.
The Queen lowered her chin and gave Prairie a smile made up of jagged shards of bloody tooth.
“Hello, dear, are you new?” Her smile grew, stretching her lips into something so utterly inhuman Kim felt her spirit pull back inside her. “You look delicious.”
Most of the bandits around the table didn’t stop lifting forks and knives to shovel what was clearly flesh into their mouths. Several turned to each other and laughed in a way that rattled their throats and raised the hair on Kim’s arms.
Prairie lowered her tray to the table, planting it next to the splayed body. Then she hoisted herself up to sit on the surface so she could lean forward dangerously close to the Queen’s charnel maw.
“Hello, Beatrice.”
The voice was a man’s. Low, deep, full of resonance. At first Kim looked around to see who’d said it before realizing it was Prairie. Prairie that voice emitted from.
The sound of it caught the attention of some of the bandits closest to the head of the table. They lowered utensils and stared at Prairie. One appeared about to rise. They pressed their hand to the blood slick surface of the table and lifted up the tiniest bit before Prairie turned her head to look at them and then waved a negligent hand in their direction.
“Stay.”
The bandit froze. Their arm visibly shook as they appeared to fight whatever compulsion held them in place. Once it was clear they were not moving, Prairie turned her attention back on the Queen and with a speed that was almost too fast to follow, she reared forward and smashed her forehead into the Queen’s face. Her placement on the surface of the table put her at just the right level for maximum force.
The Queen, Beatrice, reeled back with the power of the hit. Before she could even twitch, Prairie was off the table and planting her knees on the arms of the Queen’s chair. With a snake-fast twist she drew a dagger across the woman’s throat. Blood sprayed. No, it fountained. Too much blood. Too much even with the woman’s throat cut with such force and precision that her head tilted back like it was on a hinge.
The blood pulsed with the rhythm of the dying Queen’s heart. Blurp. Blurp. It went blurp. Fast at first, forceful, then slowing as the Queen’s form crumbled inward and back against the high backrest of the thronelike chair.
A scream butted at Kim’s clenched teeth. She clamped down harder, fingers tightening on the tray she somehow still held. Not steady. She didn’t hold it steady. The glasses on it rattled and one fell from the side.
Siobhan panted beside her, drawing her attention.
“What the fuck?” Kim mouthed.
No sound came out. Maybe because her brain was screaming to draw no attention to herself. At that point all the bandits at the table were focused on the Queen and the blood and Prairie crouched in front of her like a murder goblin.
Prairie pivoted, revealing a countenance painted in blood, and shouted in the man’s voice. “Feast, my friends!”
From the floor, the ceiling, the walls, maybe even from the ether Spirits poured out. They were in various shades of murdered. Some had gaping abdomens like the body on the table. Others lacked limbs. An arm here. A leg there. Some missing more than one.
Seeming to move in perfect unison the Spirits flowed over the bandits. The bandits froze in whatever position they’d been in while trying to respond to the Queen’s murder. No. Slaughter. The Queen’s slaughter.
The bandits screamed. And screamed. And screamed. And Kim finally shook off her shock and lunged for the table.
“No!” The denial from Prairie in the deep male voice resonated down to Kim’s core. She froze, eyes wide. Next to her Siobhan jerked a look at Prairie. Her fingers curled in the strap of her bag, feathering over the looped vials there.
“This is justice!” The voice from Prairie announced. Then her head tilted to the side. Too far too the side. Too far for human constraints. She turned back to the Queen and started stabbing. And stabbing. And stabbing. Both daggers flying with such speed it was hard to follow them. As she stabbed and twisted and stabbed more she chanted, “Run litle girl, run little girl!”
The Spirits attacked the frozen bandits with equal fervor. Clothing tore under invisible claws, revealing flesh in various shades. Not that they were different shades for long. As the Spirits pulled and ripped all the bandits forms became red with blood. The Spirits tore gouts of flesh from the bandits, flinging them into the air and the floor.
An orgy of violence. There was nothing else Kim could think to call it.
And through all of it the bandits screamed. And screamed. Long ragged, jagged, impossible screams. Like their souls were leaving their bodies via their mouths. Blood flew from their mouths, projected by the expulsion of air. Kim lifted her free hand, pressing it to her mouth, realizing as she did so her lips were parted in a reflection of the bandits’ agony.
A spirit turned from its bloody feast at Kim’s movement. In a blink it was across the space and was seizing Kim’s shoulders in its ephemeral grip. It leaned forward, mouth agape, and cold like nothing she’d ever felt before flowed from Kim’s shoulders, down her arms, through her torso, freezing her in place faster than she could blink. Faster than she could call fire.
Without her will three fire dogs flared into life and lunged for the Spirit. They passed right through, knocking into Kim’s legs and almost taking her off her feet before they altered their substance so they could flow through her. As they did heat rose from her legs and coursed up to her core. Kim physically fel the clash of the Spirit’s cold and Fire’s heat within her chest. Her heart surged, stuttered. She pressed her hand to her chest, like she could make her heart beat or maybe claw the tempest from within her core.
Then the cold just stopped. The Spirit pull back. And Kim looked over to Prairie with her hand raised. Her hand dripping blood. “Not them!”
The Spirit hesitated. It turned and focused its terrible gaze on Prairie for a moment then shifted to flow back to the bandits.
Prairie turned and watched the Spirits tearing the bandits apart with a macabre smile that was wholly foreign on her gentle friend’s features. The screaming intensified. Shouldn’t the bandits be dying? How could they still scream?
As Kim watched a haze formed around the form of one of the bandits. Prairie, or what passed for Prairie, focused on it like it was a magnet and her gaze was iron. Her lips pulled back from her teeth.
“No. Vengeance is not served.” She waved a hand and the haze drew back into the bandit like it was drawn by a vacuum. “Pain for pain. Scream for scream.”
The bandit’s eyes grew so large Kim could see the whites all around the irises. And the pitch of the bandit’s screams changed. Became higher. Like a whistle. Like a cutting wind that could tear houses down.
Wind. She shifted her gaze between Prairie staring at the feasting Spirits like she was watching the most entertaining play ever to the Spirits ripping and tearing and tossing parts around like confetti. Like horrible, bloody confetti.
And something inside Kim snapped. Almost in a daze, she focused on the air leaving the bandits’ mouths. Demanded it come to her. Fast. Hard. She called on the Air in its enormity, undefined and raw, and pulled it to her.
The screams cut off. All at once. And then she was buffeted by a wall of air. Next to her Siobhan was swept off her feet and flung back towards the entrance. The open entrance.
A very small part of Kim noted that open doorway. Wondered where the guards were. Why the door was unguarded. Maybe they fled. Maybe they were among the feast of souls.
She didn’t have the energy to focus on the question and fight to brace her legs, to open herself so the essence of her went indistinct and the combined release of the bandits’ final breaths surged through her. Her hair blew back with the punch of air, but otherwise she remained unaffected; her cells seeming to separate so that there was space between them that let the air flow through, out, and away.
Well, her body was unaffected? Her psyche? Her psyche was recoiling, pulling back from her skull and huddling in the depths of her mind. She imagined it a small child, knees up, arms wrapped around them as she rocked with the horror of what she’d done.
The bandits’ bodies all dropped to the ground. The Spirits stood, staring, confused at the empty vessels that had once been forty people.
In the silence it was easy to hear as the remainder of their friends came charging to the unwarded door. Siobhan shook her head then rose, hand on her temple, and threw herself bodily in the way of the stampede.
“No! Stay back!” She braced her hands against the doorframe and took the hit as Dempsey collided with her, shield forward. It had to take a lot of determination to remain standing and blocking the door after that hit, but Siobhan managed it. Go Derby Girl!
“No! No one needs to see this!”
Too late. Dempsey was at least a head taller than Siobhan so while she kept him from entering the space she could do nothing to stop him from seeing the carnage. His eyes widened and he whispered, “Fuck!”
The U was real drawn out. “Fuck,” he repeated like it needed to be said. Many, many times.
He shuddered as someone impacted his back but he held firm. His considerable size made for a very good bulwark.
Thank the elements for that. Siobhan was right. No one else needed to see this. If she could, Kim would unsee it but there was no unseeing and that was just the hard facts.
She gulped down a wave of nausea and pressed her hand to her stomach as the stench of blood and evacuated feces and whatever else came out when someone was eviscerated made itself tantamount. Her head spun and her vision ` blurred but then the smell was gone, replaced by a wave of air from her back.
She looked back at the Lady clinging to her arms from behind, almost colliding with the face poking over her shoulder. The Lady pursed her lips and blew and what remained of the oily stink of violent death flowed away from Kim’s face.
The serene expression on the Lady’s face offered absolution. Air didn’t worry itself with regret. It moved on. And that expression told her to do the same.
Kim blinked back tears and whispered, “Thank you.”
The Lady kept blowing, but she did nuzzle her head against Kim’s neck.
Siobhan turned her head to look where Dempsey looked. And then she snapped Kim a look, “Prairie!”
Siobhan’s yell had Kim’s head snapping around to the front of the room and the nearly decapitated queen and Prairie swaying next to the chair on which her victim slumped.
“Sio–” Prairie’s eyes went wide. She lifted one gore-covered hand and pressed it to her chest. Then her eyes rolled back and she slumped to the floor, boneless. In the silence of the room the impact of her heels on the floor as she twitched twice then lay still echoed like a scream.
Dempsey shuddered and then slammed into the doorframe and a moment after Ivan was shoving through the small space between Dempsey and door. Siobhan’s arm barricade stood no chance against a determined Ivan. She fell back with a cry and then righted herself and pressed her hands to his chest.
“No! We have this!”
Ivan made it a total of two steps into the room before his feet tangled and he nearly fell. Pretty much Siobhan’s hands on his chest were what kept him from tipping to the floor. His Adam’s Apple bobbed as he took a gulp that Kim both heard and felt. His eyes widened, much like Dempsey’s had, and then he blinked and pivoted his head left and right. His expression said he was trying to make sense of the carnage.
Kim could have told them there was no sense in it. Vengeance. Rage. Horror. But no sense.
She could tell the moment Ivan’s gaze found Prairie’s slumped form. Immediately the expression of horror and confusion smoothed. He squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and then gently removed Siobhan’s hands from his chest.
“What’s going on?” Gwen’s voice emerged from behind Dempsey. He turned and settled his shield to effectively block the view of the room. If the shield didn’t do it then his broad shoulders certainly did.
“You don’t want to see that,” he rumbled.
“I’ll decide what I want to see, buddy!” There was a thump that was probably Gwen’s palm on Dempsey’s shield. “Move!”
“No.” There was no moving him. His tone made that clear. His stance made that clear. He turned his head to look at Siobhan and Ivan. “Do what you need to. I’ve got this.”
A few more thumps, like Gwen was drumming her fists against his shield. Dempsey turned back and looked down with an indulgent expression. Again he said, “No.”
The thumping stopped. Kim turned to follow Ivan’s progress as he moved through the room, his pace steady, adjusting only slightly as he lifted his long legs to step over fallen bandits rather than skirting them and slowing his forward trajectory toward Prairie.
Convinced Ivan thoroughly had this, and that getting in his way which trying to help would probably be perceived as, was a very bad idea, Kim hurried over to Siobhan. She ran her gaze over her friend, who had her hand pressed to her head again.
“I’m okay.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah.” Siobhan gulped and laid her hand over her eyes. “Yeah.”
Kim frowned. “Which vial?”
Siobhan raised her free hand and fumbled with one of the vials on the strap of her bag. Kim gently brushed her hand aside and pulled the vial free then popped the cap and held it to Siobhan’s mouth. Her friend tipped her head back and swallowed then blinked her eyes slowly. Kim watched as Siobhan’s pupils went from dilated to normal. That was some strong potion!
“Head hurt?”
“So much.” But that didn’t seem to stop Siobhan from turning to watch Ivan finish his approach to Prairie. Kim turned to watch as Ivan fell to his knees and gently cradled Prairie’s head in his big hands.
“Hey.”
Prairie didn’t respond. Ivan lowered his head, took a deep breath, then scooped Prairie’s limp form into his arms before rising to his full height and cradling her against his chest. If he was affected by the gore spattering her he didn’t show it.
The movement must have jostled Prairie enough to rouse her slightly. She turned her head slightly and looked up at Ivan. “The daughter.”
“What?”
“Cage.” Prairie paused. She lowered her head against Ivan’s chest and closed her eyes. Then she continued in a bare whisper. “Under the table.”
By joint agreement, Siobhan and Kim wended their way through the dead bandits. Siobhan looked down at one of the splayed forms and whispered, “You killed a lot of people.”
Kim gulped. The enormity of what she, and Air, had done hit her with the full force of a collapsing building. Being in the moment she’d staved off the guilt and the horror but now, with time to think about it and Siobhan bringing up the raw subject, the hard truth of her decision to end the bandit’s pain was impossible to suppress.
Tears pricked her eyes and her vision went blurry. Siobhan lifted a hand then stopped with it a short distance from Kim’s shoulder, patting the air instead of her arm.
The big knot in Kim’s throat threatened to cut off her air. The irony of it didn’t elude her. She drew a hard breath in through parted lips, sorry for it as the miasma of death Air had been deflecting rushed in on the inhale.
Maybe it was an indictment of what she did. Maybe it was a justification. Because that blood was not on her hands. And if her decision to snatch the breath from the bandits meant a little of the guilt Prairie was bound to feel when she came fully to herself was diverted? She’d own some of that burden.
“They were already dead.”
Siobhan just nodded and then lowered her hand. “I think you’re right.”
“They were suffering.”
“They were. I’m sorry I said you killed them.”
“But,” Kim shrugged and forced herself to stop staring into the dead eyes of one of her victims, “I did.”
Siobhan pulled up short. Kim halted to look at her, edging her foot to the side when it almost landed on a limp hand.
“They made the choice to eat people. You were the consequences of their choices. Prairie was the consequences of their choices.”
Kim blinked hard, fighting the burn of a fresh wave of tears. “Being the hand that wields the ax doesn’t absolve me of the guilt.”
“You ended their suffering. They weren’t surviving what the Spirits did to them.”
“I never thought I’d have to make a choice like that. I build paper houses for fuck’s sake!” The answer came out harder than Kim wanted. Siobhan barely blinked at the thrust of her anger.
“And I teach kids how to sing. And yet–” She waved a quick hand over the room. “We also seem to have been called to be heroes. Strange world.”
“Really fucking strange.” Kim swallowed around the lump in her throat then fixed her gaze on Prairie, still cradled against Ivan’s chest. His splayed leg stance suggested he could stand there forever, but Kim didn’t want to make him. The sooner they could finish here and be free of the reminder of the choices they’d made the better. “Let’s look at this cage.”
Siobhan nodded and they continued their slow way among the corpses, passing Ivan and Prairie before crouching to look into the shadows under the head of the table. Kim kept her gaze firmly from the top of the table and its grizzly contents.
She did spare a glance for the almost decapitated Bandit Queen which, in hindsight, was a mistake. Bile rose up, burning her throat. She gulped it back down and turned her attention to the shadows rather than replay that moment when her small, sweet, healer friend slashed the woman’s throat hard enough to do that kind of damage. A whimper rose from them.
Siobhan scrambled in her bag and pulled out one of her alchemy torches, cracking the rod so a green glow illuminated the area under the table. It was probably good she did that. Kim could have called fire to light the area but the urge to burn the entire space, the corpses, the body on the table, the very fucking walls was fighting for dominance with her nausea.
Later, she whispered, whether to herself or the fire that lived inside of her. Later. This entire place would burn. But they had someone in a cage, arguably an innocent, to get out of there first.
“Hello,” Siobhan called in a soft voice as she duck-walked under the table to a cage situated deep enough it wouldn’t have interfered with the Queen’s feet while still being close enough she probably could have kicked it without much effort.
In the unnatural green glow of the torch the fingers woven into the mesh of the cage stood out a stark white. It was the kind of cage you’d put a dog in. Or livestock. Kim gulped the new wave of bile down as she considered how terrifying it had to be confined that way.
“Help!” The cry was weak, barely emitting from the interior of the cage.
“Are you injured?” Siobhan asked.
“No.”
Just the one word. Said in a thready tone. “Please. Get me out.”
Siobhan rattled the large lock on the door of the cage. Then she looked back at Kim. “We need Ben.”
Kim eyed the lock. They did need Ben. Lockpicking was not in her wheelhouse. It certainly was in his.
As Siobhan started duck-walking backwards and away from the cage the hands gripping the mesh separated and a face was pressed between them against the metal. “Please!”
“We need someone to open the lock. We aren’t leaving.”
At Siobhan’s reassurance, a small sob came from the person in the cage. “Please.”
Kim pulled away from the edge of the table, giving Siobhan room to emerge from the shadows. Siobhan lifted her hand to grip the table but her hand hesitated when her eyes locked on the vivisected victim there and the blood making the surface of the table an abstract painting of pain.
“Here,” Kim rose to her full height and offered Siobhan her hand. When Siobhan took it she yanked her friend to her feet.
Ivan remained standing next to the table. Siobhan pulled a vial from her strap, then pulled another. She approached Ivan, her gaze searching Prairie where she huddled in his arms.
“Her energy is depleted. Give her these. Leave. We’ve got this.”
From the doorway Dempsey called, “Need help?”
Siobhan hesitated. She lowered her head then swallowed visibly while shying her eyes from the bandit staring at her with dead eyes who lay within a short distance of her feet. Then she drew a deep breath through her nostrils, squared her shoulders, and called back. “Ben. We need Ben. And Ivan is exiting with Prairie.”
“Ben!” Dempsey called. A moment later he stepped back and Ben oozed around him and into the room.
He made it less than the two steps Ivan had earlier, before his feet faltered. He visibly shuddered. Even from the distance separating them Kim could see his dark skin go gray. And then he turned his head, took two stumbling steps along the wall before leaning over and puking.
It went on for a long time. He had to heave at least five times. By the third heave he hit his knees. On the fifth and final one he braced his hands and rested his head against the wall. His shoulders visibly shook and the sound of his ragged breaths carried in the quiet of the space.
While he was emptying the contents of his stomach, Siobhan and Kim carefully picked their way through the corpses to join him. Better for him to focus on them once he was done heaving then on the carnage.
Siobhan tapped his shoulder. When he turned she thrust a vial at him. “Here. Drink.”
Ben turned from staring at the wall to stare at Siobhan. It was super clear he was keeping his gaze firmly pinned to her features so he didn’t take in any more of the scene all around them. “What the fuck, Siobhan?”
Somehow Kim didn’t think Ben’s question was about the potion.
Siobhan waggled the potion at him. “It helps if you breathe through your nose.”
“Does it?”
“A little?”
“How can you be so,” Ben gulped and pointed to her left and then to her right and then, for good measure, at the ceiling. Kim shifted her attention up there to see if there was any blood or viscera clinging to the wooden beams. There wasn’t. Probably he’d just used that gesture as an all-encompassing one.
Siobhan forced a smile. It looked painful. It definitely did not look reassuring. And Ben clearly took it for what it was worth.
“I’m just thinking happy thoughts. Happy, happy thoughts.” Siobhan forced the last out through gritted teeth.
“Was it like this when you got here?”
“No.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s a woman in a cage under the table. She’s locked in. We need you to open the lock.”
Ben cracked his neck then rose to stand next to Siobhan. His gaze shifted, like he was looking for any oasis from the carnage. Kim could have told them there was none. Except for the ceiling. And if he kept focused on that he was going to trip over bodies. Not ideal.
Again, Ben cracked his neck and then he gulped. “The end of the table?”
“Yes.”
“With the body?”
“Yes.”
“The sooner begun, the sooner done,” Kim offered.
“Yeah.” Ben squared his shoulders “Breathe through my nose.” He picked his way slowly towards the nearer end of the long table, carefully avoiding the splayed bodies. “Do I want to know what happened?”
Kim rolled her lips over her teeth which was a big mistake because instinctively she took a big breath which lead to huffing the miasma of death. “Do you?”
Ben got to the end of the table. He braced his hands on it and took a breath. Through his nostrils. Like a smart person. “Maybe. Not now.”
“Good call.”
He dropped down onto his knees then crawled under the table.
Kim frowned. “It’s the other end.”
“The end with the dead body? Yeah. I’m going to go this way. Less blood.”
Kim looked down at her legs. More specifically at her knees of her cargoes, which were saturated with blood. Then she looked at Siobhan’s skirts, which were in a similar condition.
“Good call.”
“Hey,” Ben’s voice carried from under the table. By the sound of it he’d reached the cage. “My name is Ben. What’s your name?”
There was a softness to his tone that was foreign to him. Like he was talking to a scared animal or child. Kim didn’t think the daughter in the cage was a child. Fuck she hoped she wasn’t. But she could understand Ben’s impulse to speak in that soft way. Kim found her shoulders relaxing as she listened, and it wasn’t even directed at her.
“Terra.”
“Terra. That’s a nice name. Like the earth?” When the woman – please be a woman! – didn’t respond Ben continued. “Well, Terra, this is a pretty complex lock. It will take me a mero or two to get it opened but then we’ll get you out of there.”
“Oh–” Terra’s voice broke, “Kay.” A sniffle accompanied the response.
Ben started singing under his breath. That pineapple song. Seemed to be his go-to.
It was just over a mero, not the two he predicted, when there was the clunk of metal hitting the stone floor.
“I’m going to reach in my hand to help you, okay?”
“Okay,” Terra’s answer was shaky.
Ben’s “No. We aren’t going out that way.” suggested he was going to lead the freed woman out the way he’d come under the length of the table to avoid the massacre at the front. Made sense. Even if it was the Bandit Queen who locked her in the cage it was real doubtful Terra would take the sight of what Prairie had done to her mother well.
“No. Don’t look over there.” Ben said. “Just keep going. We’re almost at the end.”
A few mikros later a mop of brown hair, swaying with the crawling motion of the woman, emerged from the end of the table nearest Siobhan and Kim. She lifted her chin once she was far enough out not to catch her head on the bottom of the table, revealing brown eyes wide with fear in a face that may have been pale from shock or might be naturally that shade. Kim’s money was on a combination of the two. She’d say naturally pale but the woman’s lips were bloodless which suggested shock. And she was a woman. Thank the fuck for that. If a child had emerged from under that table Kim might have lost her MF mind.
As if drawn by her invocation of its name MF materialized out of the air, forming quickly and dropping its little ass on the top of her boot. It looked up at Kim with cocked head. She shook her head in the negative and murmured, “Wait.”
MF bumped its head against her leg and then there was a slight tickle as something happened on the bottom of her boot. She lifted the boot MF was not sitting on and saw a small curl of smoke where MF had apparently burned away the blood.
Smart Fire, very smart. She nodded to MF then focused on Siobhan and Terra.
Siobhan crouched down to eye-level for Terra. “Hi. I want you to keep looking at me. No need to look back. We’re going to get out of here. Okay?”
Terra bit her lip then nodded. Ben extracted himself from the table and took a stance to Terra’s right. Siobhan offered her a hand to rise. As Terra scrambled to her feet her head turned like she was going to look around.
Siobhan halted that. “No. Remember. Look at me.” She offered a reassuring smile. “It’s just a few steps to the door, okay?”
“Okay.” She focused on MF sitting on Kim’s foot. “Is that an elemental?”
“It is,” Kim said.
“Oh. Okay.” Terra bobbed her head then focused on Siobhan again. “Leaving?”
“We are.”
Siobhan took Terra’s hand and, walking backwards so her gaze commanded Terra’s focus, she lead the woman from the room with Ben close at Terra’s side blocking the view at least of his half of the space. Luckily there were no bodies in the short distance from the end of the table to the door, so no dodging was required and there was nothing to draw Terra’s gaze from Siobhan.
“Dempsey, please move,” Siobhan said as she approached the large man’s back.
He complied without question and Siobhan lead Terra from the room. Ben did not hesitate to jet from the space hot on the stranger’s heels. Once everyone except Kim and the dead were in the room, she let loose her control on her Magick. As she did so she yelled, “Close the door!”
It was a testament to their shared experiences that Dempsey didn’t hesitate for a mikro. He just nodded and slammed the door closed.
Fire blossomed to life around her, the wave as indistinct as the air she’d called to take away the bandits pain. Except for a small circle of safe space encompassing her and MF, still planted on her foot, fire consumed the room. She’d say consumed what was in the room but what came to life around her was more than fire eating combustible materials. No, it burned the very air, stopping just shy of the wooden beams in the ceiling.
The table disappeared. The bodies, gone. The chandelier melted under the intense heat, metal cascading from the air before hitting the wall of fire rising from the floor. That fire was so intense the metal disappeared, the only indication it had been there a drift of soot standing out for a mikro against the living flame before it too was consumed.
Kim knew if she didn’t have the protective buffer provided by Fire the air in her lungs would have seared. Her flesh would have as well. The fat under it would have melted. Fire was determined to erase everything from this space except the memories which would linger in Kim, Siobhan, Ivan, Ben, and Prairie’s minds. And she had to wish that she could erase that as well, but such delicacy was not the nature of fire run rampant as this was.
As it was she felt the heat. Not oppressive, though she had no doubt anyone in her position would have found it very much so. The mikro before they immolated. To her it felt hot, but hot in the good way like the sun feels on your eyelids when you lay napping on a warm day. It felt good. It felt right. And when it died down, leaving nothing behind except bare stone floors and walls, she knew it was right.
It was right for fire to cleanse this space. Of the evidence of the evil that had happened within it and, she liked to think, of the evil itself.
Buoyed on a sense of righteousness, she bent down, scooped MF up in her hand, and practically floated to the door, intact only because Fire had heeded her request and left it intact to protect her friends in the hallway.
Enter The Woods 