Be Back Later

Village sat cradled in a shallow basin of the Romanian mountains, hemmed in by black firs. Snow lay packed in the seams between the cobblestones of the central square, gone grey from soot and boot-treads.

Houses leaned into each other on either side of crooked lanes, thatched roofs sagging beneath the weight of late winter, walls of timber and crumbling whitewash patched with whatever boards the men could spare.

Smoke curled from squat chimneys and was instantly snatched sideways by the cold.

To the west loomed the silhouette of Castle Dimitrescu stabbing the dog heavy sky.

At south the reservoir laid flat and oily, long straggling shacks of the fishing village clinging to the banks where Moreau's stink mucuses kept the water at bay.

Eastward, past the graveyard with its leaning crosses, that rusted bulk of Heisenberg's factory belched smoke that never quite cleared.

North, where the cliffs were highest and the trees densest, was the ceremony site itself.

A fifth Lord had come down beneath her wing and no one in the village knew his face or what he was.

Despite that, offerings had to go up the mountain path the same as always, into the dark where the new altar had been carved out of the old.

Everyone in the village understood the arithmetic of devotion by now.

Lady Dimitrescu would always hire girls that would serve at the castle, all reduced to slabs of meat hanging on a hook in the cellar by the next week.

Moreau took whoever he wanted for his experiments and half the lycans tearing through the woods at sundown still wore the rags of clothes their mothers had stitched.

Heisenberg's tithe came monthly, requesting always a small group of strong young men marched up to the factory gate with their hands roped together and all never came back.

You'd grown up with people who'd been swallowed by all of this, seen the faces of childhood friends frozen mid-stretch in the howling skull of a half-formed lycan, jaw still partway human, eyes still partway blue.

Tonight the lottery had come around again.

Luisa's house had been chosen because it was the largest with a fire still working. They cleared the table out, rolled the rug back and scattered ash across the floorboards in a wide ring.

Anyone in the village of a young age had been ordered to come; the freshest blood, ones whose offering meant most.

There were eleven as you knelt in the circle as well on the cold ash-dusted boards with your knees pressed together and your hands loose at the front. The girl on your right was crying without sound, just shudders running down her thin shoulders.

To your left a woman maybe a year older than you had bitten her bottom lip clean through, blood running down her chin in a single black thread.

In the center of the circle they placed a newborn, just barely old enough to crawl. tiny knit cap askew on his soft round head, fat little legs wrapped in wool, tiny fists.

He was Luisa's nephew, brought down from the high pasture for exactly this. They'd done it with a baby because this new sacrifice said only an innocent could feel the threads of fate pulling and a baby was the most innocent thing the village had left.

Small thing sat plopped on his bottom in the middle of the ring of ash and looked around with great big curious dark eyes.

He stuck his whole fist in his mouth and gummed it, drool shining on his knuckles before he gurgled something and laughed in a room full of people on the verge of crying.

On hands and knees, he started to crawl toward the girl next to you. M

She made a sound like a dying bird, a thin keening through her clenched teeth as her whole body shook violently as the baby crawled closer and you could see her chest hitching with the breath she could not get out.

He stopped a handspan from her knees and sat back on his haunches, drool pooling on his lower lip as he looked, head cocked slightly at her before his great dark eyes swung over and fixed on you.

There was no thought in those eyes, whatever moved through that small developing skull was not a thing anyone living could read.

He just looked at you before starting to crawl again, fat little legs scuffling through the ash until his tiny hands landed on your knees, warm and sticky as they pulled himself up your thigh, all soft baby weight and milk smell plopping right into your lap.

Looking up at you and letting out a loud delighted laugh, patting your chest with a wet palm.

Cold flooded down your spine all the way to your feet.

Someone behind you started weeping in relief, others made a quiet sick sound.

Luisa stepped forward and lifted the baby who reached after you with both arms and made a disappointed noise as he was carried out and the men were pulling you up off the floor by your elbows.

You don't remember why you didn't cry.

Maybe because the baby's laugh was still ringing in your skull and it had been such a clean small thing that crying felt obscene next to it.

They gave you a single hour to get ready, putting on the warmer of your two coats and lacing your boots twice.

The priest from the church mumbled words at you that slid off your ears before two men came to take you up the path.

Both of them were older by ten years. Stoica had a black beard going grey and a Mosin-Nagant slung over his shoulder, wood polished black with hand-oil, bolt sticky with the cold.

Andrei had a hunting rifle held across his chest and a long knife on his belt with a cracked bone handle.

They did not look at you when they tied a length of cord between your wrists and the back of Stoica's belt.

Both guns made small noises as they pushed you out the door into the dusk without even speaking.

The path north climbed out of the village and into the firs, snow much deeper, knee-high in places, branches crunching beneath human weight.

Your breath came white in front of your mouth as Stoica walked first, pulling you. Andrei stayed behind, rifle up, eyes flicking constantly into the dark between the trees.

The forest was full of teeth considering it was their resting place.

Your legs were numb halfway up, cord chafing your wrists raw and the cold made your fingertips throb, throat hurting from swallowing the same lump over and over.

A branch snapped extremely close, growls rolling out of the dark to the left of the path, an unmistakable corrugated rasp of a lycan throat.

"Stânga!" Andrei shouted and the rifle came up, muzzle flashing orange in the dusk and the report hit you in the ears.

Stoica was wheeling around firing too, working that bolt fast as his stiff fingers would let him and another shape was bursting out of the trees on the other side.

This was the opportunity you took to run.

Cord at your wrists going taut and then snapping, or Stoica's belt-loop tore, you didn't know which and didn't care as you were bolting sideways off the path into the snow and trees, Stoica was bellowing behind you, "Fucking idiot, I'll kill you!" and Andrei was screaming a different obscenity as the rifles kept cracking at the lycans approaching.

The snow was knee-deep where it had drifted, ankle-deep on the bare ground beneath the firs, treacherous everywhere with hidden roots.

You went down once on your left knee, hard, white pain forking up your thigh and you scrambled up and kept going. Your breath sawed in your throat, heart so loud in your ears you could not hear the pursuit but only the hammering of your own blood.

Ducking behind a thick fir trunk and pressing your back to it as you made yourself stop moving.

Behind, on the path, gunfire and a long ragged howl followed by wet meaty thuds of bodies hitting snow.

Much closer to your location you heard a low huffing snuffle from a lycan moving along the tree line.

Heavy claws compacting snow and crushing a buried root, the rattling exhalation of its breath full of phlegm caused you to hold your own breath until your chest hurt.

It moved past your tree and the hairs stood up on the back of your neck, arms and legs as you waited until you couldn't hear it.

Then you slid sideways off your tree, low to the ground until you were running again your hands up to ward off branches, going in the direction you thought was downhill but it might have been any direction, the firs all looked the same and the dusk had gone full dark now, only the moon glaring down through gaps in the canopy similar to long blue knives.

The forest opened and footing changed in sucking.

You'd come out into the swamp, reek of stagnant water hitting your senses.

Black pools shone here and there between humps of dead grass and rotting logs.

In the mist there were shapes of lycans by the way they stood hunched, sniffing the ground.

You crawled, cold black water soaked into your trousers up to mid-thigh and the cold of it made your bones ache as you kept the bulk of a fallen tree between you and the closest shape.

A lycan thirty feet to your right lifted its snout and snuffed at the air and its head turned, yellow eyes flashing in the moonlight as you froze with one knee in the muck, heart absolutely silent in your chest because if you breathed you would die.

Loud sound of a rifle cracking behind you and the lycan's head whipped around, it bayed in a hollow bone-rattling cry that made every other shape in the swamp lift its head as it bounded and the others followed it.

For one impossible miracle of a second you were alone and you took the chance to run.

Better say stagger ‘cause mud sucked at your boots and you had to wrench each foot up out of it.

You found a bank of slightly drier ground and you went to hide behind a big mossy stone, clamping your hand over your own mouth to muffle the wretched sobbing from it.

Andrei’s hand closed on your upper arm hard and you had no time even to scream before he was hauling you upright off the rock.

Half his shoulder torn open through the coat, blood everywhere, a huge ragged bite ripping the flesh down past his collarbone, his wild and bloodshot eyes emanating rage. "Come here you stupid brat!" he snarled, and yanked you toward him.

You drove your elbow up into his throat and he choked, twisting in his grip to get one wrist free and you tried to shove past him into the trees but his other hand came up with the knife.

A cold hard punch low on your left side under the ribs, followed by a widening sensation when he stabbed you and dragged the blade.

The hilt ground up against your coat and he pulled the knife back out, warmth came with it, soaking down your trousers in a hot wet rush.

Your knees went soft, both hands flying to the wound and you felt the lips of it wet under your palms as you pressed harder to the point your own vision white out for a second.

"Fuck—" Andrei spat. He was looking at the dark stain spreading down your side, face twisting.

He grabbed you by the back of the coat and hauled you up over his good shoulder, bent forward under the weight and started moving.

The world swung upside down for you, trees blurring past, hand staying clamped on your side and you could feel the blood coming through your fingers in slow steady pulses that matched your heart.

Stoica came lurching out of the trees a few minutes later, left forearm a ruin of teeth-marks, skin in red ribbons and cuff of his coat black with blood.

He saw you on Andrei's shoulder and his face went white.

"What have you done you idiot!" He hissed.

"He’s still alive."

"We were supposed to do it on that damn rock!"

"He's still alive, Stoica! Just move the hell faster."

Their voices came in and out of your hearing, pulse becoming the loudest thing in the world inside your ears and behind your eyes.

Each beat was a wet liquid thump and each one pushed more warmth out through your fingers and into the cloth of your coat. You watched the snow go past in patches under Andrei's boots, streaked with red where his shoulder dripped you.

Cold came in as you started shivering and could not stop, teeth clattering together and you bit your tongue, tasting iron on top of the iron already in your mouth.

The path tilted up as they were running now, both of them, Stoica wheezing, Andrei grunting with each step.

There was a rock that rose up out of the forest floor in the middle of a small clearing and it was mossed, weather-cracked along black tendrils crawling all over it like roots and veins, thick fibrous strands of something not quite plant or flesh but pulsing very faintly in the moonlight.

The tendrils ran up the sides of the rock and wove a kind of latticework across its top, with iron rings hammered into the stone at four points where the lattice was thickest.

All air around the rock smelled like wet rot and something sweet like old fruit.

They threw you down on it, cold of the rock punching the breath out of you as they pried your hand away from your wound and Andrei grabbed your wrist, slamming it up against an iron ring at the upper left corner of the lattice and looped a length of chain around it three times, clipping it shut.

Stoica did the same to your right wrist and your arms were spread, legs laying loose on the stone, twitching weakly because you didn't have the strength to chain those too and they didn't bother.

The black tendrils touched the back of your neck.

They were warm.

Stoica drew the long knife from Andrei's belt because his hands were shaking too badly.

He raised it over his head with both hands and his eyes were wet, mouth a snarl as he was muttering prayers to Mother Miranda through clenched teeth.

He coughed, small at first.

Trying to keep the knife up he coughed again, harder this time as a thin black thread came out of his mouth and trailed down into his beard.

Stoica started coughing in earnest, doubled over, knife dropping out of his hand and skittering across the rock. He had one hand braced on the stone right next to your hip and you watched the veins in his hand turn black.

It happened in seconds, thin spidery dark lines ran up under the skin from his fingers to his wrist and up under sleeves as the hand swelled, fingernails going black and curling before he started screaming, gargling, choking on whatever was that black slurry mix gushing out of his mouth, nose and ears all at once.

He sank down onto his knees on the rock and his face was sloughing, bone underneath the skin going soft, eyes filming over and then sinking back into the skull itself collapsing inward where the eyes had been.

Andrei was screaming a few feet away, his back in the snow, kicking, clawing at his own throat. His chest was heaving and his ribcage was visibly rearranging under the coat, ribs pushing up against the cloth at wrong angles.

Bites all over his arm had gone black, racing up his shoulder and into his neck and his jaw now unhinged, dropping open and far past where any human jaw should hinge, tendons of it tearing audibly with little wet snaps.

Stoica's beard fell off in a wet clump, skin sloughed off his skull and slid down over his collar.

Underneath, a thick moss had grown, crawling with thin fibrous filaments of black fungus that moved on their own.

It covered his entire head where the face had been and there were no eyes or nose, the middle of the moss-covered skull was a vertical slit open, peeling apart and inside there were jagged and mismatched teeth, bone-yellow.

His arms had gone long, fingers fusing into three big talons, then four, talons dripping the same black slime that ran off all of him in slow ropes onto the rock.

Andrei in the snow was already past it, his body had crumpled in on itself and reformed, hunched and lopsided, one shoulder higher than the other, bitten arm now a great whip of sinew with curved black claws at its tip.

He rolled over onto all fours, mossy mouth where his face had been opened and let out a long wet retch.

You watched all of this from the rock with your wrists chained above you and the warmth still leaving you in slow pulses through your side.

It was bad the fact you could no longer feel the cold of the rock. Your fingers had gone numb, each breath was a small struggle that took longer than the last to start.

The two creatures had not noticed you yet.

Or they had and they were not interested as they moved with a strange shuffling purpose into the trees.

Footsteps were coming the other way.

You tried to lift your head and it was so heavy.

There was a shape at the edge of the clearing.

A tall man, lean and in a golden jacket. Underneath you could see a darker cloth and his blonde hair stood up even further in the moonlight, mouth pulled tight at the corners.

He stopped a few paces from the rock, eyeing the chains and the dark wide spreading shine of blood on the stone beneath you as you barely heard him curse under his breath and he was moving fast then, "—shit, shit, shit, no, c'mon, c'mon—"

His face came in close above yours.

Tired blue or grey, hard to tell for your drowsy vision.

There were dark circles under them.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, hey, stay with me. I'm sorry, I should've—I tried to get here sooner, I'm sorry, stay with me please."

His voice was soft, American and painfully relaxing to hear.

You tried to say something as your mouth moved but sound came, rather your eyes began to close completely.

"Don't," he said. "Don't talk. Just—" His hand was at the chain on your right wrist and there was a small metallic snap as it came apart rapidly.

He did the left one too and your arms fell heavy at your sides.

His warm and big left hand found your shoulder, right hand coming down on the wound, pressing flat over the slick wet hole and you felt something move under his palm.

A sort of crawling and slow searching for the torn edges of muscles and nicked vessels, beginning to weave them back together one fiber at a time.

It went deeper, reaching everywhere it could now between climbing up along the inside of your ribs and threading across the floor of your lung.

Instead of pain there was a strange dull peace where the wound had been and a smell rising off your own skin like wet moss and old earth.

Through the slits of your fading vision you saw all the veins on the back of your own hand turning black for a single heartbeat.

Blackness ran up your forearm fast and then it faded just as fast. wound under his hand sealing in a series of tiny tugging pulls.

He was murmuring above and you couldn't catch the words.

His thumb brushed across your cheekbone while he observed with an expression that your blurred vision considered grief.

The tendrils of the black moss on the stone reached after you as he lifted, brushing along your back, reluctant to let go.

He pulled you free of them without a word and held you against his chest.

You could hear his heartbeat through the jacket and blue hoodie below.

The last thing you registered before darkness came up to take you was his voice murmuring above your head, not to you, to himself maybe.

Consciousness comes back to pieces, first there was a single bar of dim yellow at the edge of everything before there were blurred shapes that smeared when you tried to make them still.

A low droning murmur of voices that bent and warped as if you were underwater listening to people speak on the surface. You tasted copper at the back of your throat along something earthy and sweet and a little rotten.

You blinked, eyelashes scraping against each other like they had been gummed together with old sleep.

Blinking again, a vaulted ceiling slowly stitched itself together above you, dark beams crisscrossing high overhead, candle smoke drifting in lazy spirals up toward them.

Voices began to resolve, one of them belonging to a woman, smoky and aristocratic.

"—do not see what use a single man-thing could possibly serve. My daughters love to entertain themselves and a man's blood is so much richer than these scrawny village girls. Surely the new little Lord would not begrudge me one paltry creature."

A gurgling laugh answered her that went on too long and it ended in a phlegmy snort.

You tried to turn your head, muscles in your neck answering slowly as you forced your eyes to focus.

The room was huge, stone walls hanging with columns gone black with age. A long table somewhere off to your right, half-glimpsed at the edge of your sight. You were on the floor, on cold flagstones, kneeling-slumped with your hands held in front of you and a great heavy weight pressing them together.

Two figures stood close to one another.

For a second you thought one of the two was a child before the shape clarified and your stomach turned over.

It was a doll the size of a five-year-old girl, perfectly proportioned, dressed in a wedding gown of white lace that ran in tiers down to her tiny black shoes. The lace was old and the white of it stood out against everything else in the room because everything else was so black.

Face made of porcelain, tiny hands folded in front of her.

It turned its head with a faint clicking sound and her little mouth opened and a high giggling voice spilled out, the voice of an excited child.

"He's awake!"

Every muscle in you contracted at once as you jerked and scrambled backward on your knees and elbows, bound hands scraping the stone, getting maybe two short shoves of distance before something yanked you up short.

A massive block of dark iron had been clamped around your forearms, wrapping them together at the wrists in a single solid mass with chains running off it to either side.

The chain rattled when you pulled and it rang against the stone with the dull resonant sound of old metal that had been used for a very long time.

Every head in the room turned.

The doll squealed in a delighted shrieking sound and clapped her tiny porcelain hands in front of her chest while the abomination of a thing next to her made noises as well

"Both of you shut the fuck up!" A man's voice growled from somewhere off to the side with real menace. "Christ. Donna, can't you keep your little wedding cake from squawking?" The voice swung its weight in your direction. "And you. Hey. Kid. Don't try and fuckin' run. You won't make it three feet."

Your eyes tracked sideways, the thing standing beside the doll, who you'd missed at first because the doll had taken all of your attention, was something out of a nightmare you had not yet been allowed to wake from.

Short and hunched, body bulbous and slick with a thick layer of mucus that dripped off him in slow strings onto the stone.

His mouth hung half open and inside it you could see needle teeth set in receding gums, two thin wisps of grey hair clung to the dome of his skull.

"Hhh-hello," he managed.

You scrambled again, away from him this time and again the chain caught you.

The doll turned and walked, small joints moving with the click of a clockwork inside her and the hem of her wedding dress whispered on the stone as she went straight to a figure standing in the dimness, a woman with no skin visible anywhere on her, head wrapped entirely in a black veil that gave her no face at all.

The doll climbed up the woman's robes and the veiled woman lifted her without a sound, settling her against her hip. The doll watched you from there with her chin propped on the veiled woman's shoulder.

The slimy creature shuffled forward, stopping beside another figure you had not yet allowed yourself to look at properly and now you had to.

A man with a hammer, dressed in a battered long coat and small round dark glasses pinched the bridge of his nose. His hair was long and grey, falling around his face while a cigar smoldered between two fingers of his left hand, ash drooping.

In his right hand, balanced on his shoulder casually was a sledgehammer the size of a grown man..

He grinned at you and there was no humor in the grin.

"Sleeping beauty's up, kids."

The slimy one, Moreau, the village had whispered that lord’s name for years, scuttled sideways a half-step but stayed close.

“You mean you wanna screw around with him in private?” the man asked the towering woman and he jerked his thumb toward you.

“Where’s the fun in that?”

A grin spread across his face.

“Give him to me. I’ll give everybody a show that you all can enjoy.”

The towering woman standing opposite him didn’t even react, she merely regarded him with visible disgust.

Heisenberg looked over your head, at someone behind you, and his grin widened. "Hey, Lord-of-the-Manor. He's awake. Why don't you come on over here, get a little closer to your present? You're being awfully quiet over there."

You twisted, block of iron on your wrists scraped against the stone, sending up a sharp clatter as you craned your neck around as far as the binding would allow, finding a man already looking at you.

He was standing maybe five paces behind against a pillar, his shoulder leaned against the stone in a way that read as exhausted more than casual.

Hair a pale dirty blond, a clean jaw with the suggestion of stubble, straight nose and a mouth that pulled tight at the corners. His eyes were a pale blue-grey.

His right hand, folded into the crook of his other elbow, was the strange one. Bare to the wrist where the jacket fell back and pale, almost waxy, fingers a little too stiff in the way they curled.

Both of your eyes met his and held, something in them softened before he looked away.

His gaze slid past you, up, to the figure in the center of the room that had been there the whole time.

You only saw her now because you had finally let yourself.

Wrapped in enormous wings that fell from her shoulders and pooled on the floor around her in pleats of glossy black feathers, layer over layer, dozens upon dozens of feathers, each one tipped with the faintest oily iridescence in the candlelight.

Where a head should have been there was instead a cage with thin slats hiding the face within.

A high collar of more feathers framed the cage at the throat and a single golden ornament hung at her breast.

You did not need to see her face, having heard her voice in your nightmares since childhood and you knew it now even before she spoke.

"Ethan."

The blond man behind you breathed out through his nose.

"Yes?"

"You brought this one in yourself. You have not yet said why." Her veiled head tilted slightly to one side. The cage glinted. "What is it that you would propose?"

You twisted further around, chains rattling as the block of iron weighted your forearms toward the floor and you had to brace your weight against it in order to see him properly.

He had not moved off the pillar, arms still folded and eyes back to you for a flicker of a second, eyes dropping down your face to your throat and back up on Miranda.

"I found him up at the rock. The two from the village were already gone. They'd—" his jaw worked, "—they'd cut him open and run. He was bleeding out and I patched him up before him here."

His voice was tired, voice very calm as he spoke though, unknown to anyone, there was an undertone of seeping wrath at memories of what those brute men had done to you .

"I want to ask," he continued, "if we could stop this ritual thing. I get that there's tradition here and uh… people scared. But killing each other to get to me before I'm even in the picture, considering I never asked for any of that, is something I'd like to stop."

In your skull a series of small wires connected to each other.

He was the new Lord that you had been sent as a sacrifice for, he had saved your life and lied about how he brutally turned two men in terrifying monsters.

The fifth Lord beneath Mother Miranda's wing that one no one had ever seen.

A startled wet laugh exploded from Heisenberg's chest at the concept of Ethan finding dead corpses in his area worse than cats with mice.

Lady Dimitrescu's voice cut across the laughter. "If the little Lord finds the rituals so distasteful, then by all means, divert them. Send the lots to my castle instead. I will gladly accept what he cannot stomach. My girls would be thrilled."

"Oh, sure," Heisenberg snorted. "Of course Her Royal Big-and-Hungriness wants more food, you'd eat your way through the whole damn village if Miranda let you."

The temperature in the room dropped.

"So gauche," she said and her voice wasn’t shy in hiding contempt, "if you speak to me in that manner one more time, I will personally see to it that your insides are decorating the rafters of your own factory. Are we clear?"

"Shut your damn hole. Go look for your food somewhere else."

"You stay quiet and let civilized people talk—"

"ENOUGH."

The single word rolled through the room as Miranda's wings flared, opening outward in a great rustling cascade of feathers, four enormous black sails unfurling from her back, two and two, layered over each other, blotting out the candlelight behind her.

A single moment she stood there, framed in her own wings.

The next, she was gone and a cloud of crows erupted where she had been, great boiling mass of black bodies and beating wings, all of them screaming at once as the cloud surged forward toward you and you flinched back hard, chains going taut as a feather brushed your cheek.

She appeared in front of you. The cage of her head loomed two feet from your face and you could feel cold coming off her.

Walking slowly around you, the hem of her feathered robe whispered on the flagstones as you followed her with your eyes as far as you could, twisting at the neck.

"Ethan," she said, conversational, almost gentle, "you mentioned that he was wounded."

"Yes."

"I see no blood on him." She circled past your left shoulder, head tilted as if she were studying you. "I see rent in his clothing but no pallor of a body that has lost a dangerous amount of itself. Curious."

"He's bandaged."

From the flagstones at your knees a long black ropy tendril burst up from between the stones with a wet thick sound and you jerked so hard that the iron block clamped on your wrists cracked against the stone.

The tendril rose up in front of you, sleek and pulsing, its surface glistening with the same slimy black moss you had last seen growing on the bodies of two men in a clearing.

Fibrous, made by millions of tiny filaments that pulsed faintly.

It bent toward you and touched the hem of your shirt with an almost shy little hook of its tip and it lifted.

The shirt rode up your abdomen.

Around your middle, wrapped in a clean spiral from just above your hip to just below your ribs, ran a band of pale linen bandage.

No blood had soaked through, cloth perfectly white without a single rust-colored seep.

Miranda was silent for a long moment.

"Mmm," she said at last, somewhere between a hum and a doubt.

She had seeded the village, she knew exactly what a knife wound from one of her own peasants did to one of her own peasants and she knew that a wound that put you on a man's shoulder bleeding through his coat was not a wound that closed up under a wrap of linen by the time you woke.

The tendril let your shirt fall back into place and slid back down into the stone, vanishing entirely between two flagstones.

Miranda stood there and tilted the cage one way before turning and addressing the room.

"Keep him, then. For all I care."

"Mother—" Lady Dimitrescu began.

"My decision is final. There will be no argument." The voice rose again and the wings stirred. "Remember from whence you came."

Silence.

Heisenberg's jaw worked as he took the cigar out of his mouth and tapped a long curl of ash off it onto the flagstones.

He muttered something under his breath that was almost certainly obscene.

Miranda's veiled head turned toward him alone.

He sighed in a long theatrical sigh.

"All right. Take your toy, Ethan Winters."

He raised his right hand and it glowed, faintly, an inner blue light that ran in thin pulses from his palm out along his fingers.

The block of iron clamped around your wrists shuddered, chains shuddering with a scraping protest, peeling away and flying through the air toward him in a sudden rush of metal. He caught it on the head of his hammer without even glancing at it.

Your hands fell free and you drew them in close against your chest, rubbing at them slowly with the pads of your thumbs.

You felt very smaller than you had ever felt in your life while staying between all those lords.

A large hand settled gently upon your shoulder and the touch immediately drew your attention upward.

Lord Ethan Winters stood close enough now that you could make out details missed before like the worn stitching on his jacket, small scars along his hands.

His expression looked softer and less guarded, a small smile rested there.

Somehow the sight eased something inside you, strangely abruptly.

Whenever your gaze settled on Ethan, some instinct buried deep inside seemed to relax and it confused you considering how you barely knew him.

Trust him

The feeling settled somewhere beneath conscious thought.

Subtle but persistent.

A quiet pull that grew as Ethan’s thumb shifted slightly against your shoulder.

Those pale blue eyes glowed faintly in the dark place, like moonlight buried beneath ice.

The strange light flickered behind his eyes for only a second before fading again.

His expression softened further.

“Come on.” His voice emerged gentle. “We should get back.”

Ethan’s hand never left your shoulder but instead it slid carefully toward the upper part of your back.

His eyes remained fixed on you for another long moment to the point that you found yourself forgetting about everything else.

None of it seemed quite as important beneath that unwavering gaze.

Concern and relief conquering his expression along something deeper that he was trying very hard not to show.

“Can you walk?” He asked quietly.