“Do you even know how to use it?” he demanded.
“Sure,” Keely said. “Hit her with the pointy bit.”
“I thought and I thought,” Scarlet said, stepping up and out into the rain with them. Once more looking the grown woman in her prime, she casually twirled the enormous axe like a weightless extension of herself. “The thing is, I don’t actually like tapestries. Sorry.”
With a scream of incoherent rage, Keely hefted the sword and ran straight at Scarlet. Unperturbed, Scarlet stopped spinning the axe, planted her feet, and braced to receive the charge. A part of Keely had expected she wouldn’t have time to actually feel the incoming blow, but what caught her really off guard was that when it landed, it came from behind and while Scarlet still stood twenty feet away. Baldassare’s sword skittered away and she hit the ground hard as Ulric landed heavily on top of her.
“You do not get to die doing my job,” Ulric shouted angrily, leaving her lying there gasping for breath as he stood up to draw his sword. Multiple pairs of boots splashed past her at eye-level—Evadne and Nolan charging to join Ulric, and Baldassare scrambling to rescue his sword before the shallow current could find enough purchase to slide it toward the pit. Then Elissa and Clay were at her side, trying to drag her away from the sound of ringing steel.
“No!” Keely screamed, struggling to rise, but at Elissa’s command Clay was holding her back. Keely’s eyes held a glazed, far-off look as if trying to take in a reality that gone out of focus. “Keely! Axy!” she screamed. “Run!”
Though outnumbered three to one, Scarlet actually looked to be toying with her circling opponents. She moved swiftly, fluidly, effortlessly, and decisively, with a constant awareness of her surroundings that by itself marked her as something other than human. Even when a blade came in from behind her, the only time it didn’t pass through empty air was when she knocked it artfully aside with the head of her axe. Any dancer at a king’s court would have gone mad with envy of such grace.
“I get it,” Elissa said fiercely, shaking Keely. “You think it should have been you that died. But you didn’t throw your life away then, and you don’t get to now. Stay with us, and do what you do best. You still owe me that.”
Jenilee closed her eyes to the nightmare replaying itself out in front of her and tried to muster her thoughts. “We can’t kill her, but we can buy time by hurting her.” Her words fell into a rhythm as though she were reciting a memorized speech.
“If we can buy time, we can take her cloak. I’m sure there’s power in her cloak. If we can take her cloak, I’m sure it’ll cripple her. We can’t hurt her unless we can touch her. We can’t touch her with a blade, because she can always outrun it. She couldn’t outrun Doryne’s crossbow, but we don’t have a crossbow. She wouldn’t be able to outrun a pistol, but all our powder’s been drenched and ruined. Unless Baldassare…?” Jenilee asked hopefully.
“No chance,” Elissa said. “We got drenched to the skin getting this far.”
“There’s powder downstairs!” Jenilee said abruptly. “Dry powder in the storerooms, remember? We’ve got to get past—” A shriek from Elissa drew her up short, and Clay’s grip on her arms went abruptly slack. The ringing of steel had suddenly stopped.
Jenilee opened her eyes, pulled herself halfway up, and followed Elissa’s horrified gaze to where Ulric’s head had rolled to a stop not five feet away from them. “But…I have to fix it,” Jenilee said feebly, staring at his unseeing eyes. “I have to fix it.”
“All right,” Clay said, carefully picking up the fallen head and carrying it to nestle in the nearest pile of rubble, where the water couldn’t carry it away into the pit. “It’ll be safe there.” Even Scarlet—who had stepped back theatrically from the fight to let the moment sink in—seemed a bit taken aback at the man’s complete detachment from the context of what he was doing.
“I have to fix it,” Jenilee repeated.
“You do not have to fix it,” Elissa hissed. “You have to get dry powder loaded into a pistol before she kills everyone fit to aim a gun.”
“Yes,” Jenilee agreed, less feebly.
“Do you need Keely for that?”
“Yes,” Jenilee nodded. And then she wasn’t Jenilee anymore. “All of you stop!” Keely screamed. “Get over here! Now! This is my job!”
“Hey, whichever order you feel like,” Scarlet said dismissively. “Talk amongst yourselves.”
Dragging Ulric’s body, they came to her with the normally easy-going Nolan visibly tottering on the edge of the same unreasoning rage that had moments ago taken Keely. If she didn’t act swiftly and decisively, she knew he would die next and it would be the final straw to break the rest of them. She pulled the discharged pistol briskly from Ulric’s belt and pressed it into Nolan’s hand.
“You know where to find dry powder. None of us will be able to get to it faster or to load the gun faster, and I doubt any of us has a truer aim. You will get exactly one shot. If Bloody Scarlet takes a lead ball through the brain, I may still salvage something here. If she doesn’t, we all die tonight at the top of the Wolf’s Tooth. Do you understand? I’ll make the opportunity. Be ready to take it.”
Keely straightened up and brushed the rain-slicked hair out of her eyes. “Oh, and Jenny?” she said to Elissa. “Thanks for talking things out, but there’s one big flaw in your logic.” Without pausing to elaborate further, Keely reclaimed Baldassare’s sword and stepped forward grimly to face Bloody Scarlet through the pouring rain.
“Ready, dear?” Scarlet called, smiling as she gave her axe a twirl.
“Ready.” Keely nodded. “I just have one last question.”
“Sure.” Scarlet shrugged affably.
“What about ballroom dancing?”
Scarlet blinked. “Ballroom dancing?”
“Yes. What do you think about ballroom dancing?” Keely asked. “Have you tried it? Miles better than tapestry weaving, and the way you move…? You’ve got the knack.”
“Huh.” Scarlet pondered. “Can’t say I really know anything about ballroom dancing. Sorry.” She began twirling the axe again.
“I can teach,” Keely said. “I’ll never be as good as you could, but I’ve got the experience. I know the steps. What say? You, showing off all that grace in front of Seriena’s simpering nobles just before you seal the doors and start the slaughter? Imagine it.”
“Well…” Scarlet lowered the axe again, her face working expressively as she clearly did try to imagine it.
“Come on. One free lesson, no obligation. If you’re not thrilled with it, you go ahead and kill us. If you do like it, you let us live and I teach you everything there is to know about blending in among Seriena’s elite. Heads rolling. Blood everywhere. Entire noble lines wiped out. Entire kingdoms in chaos. Just try it.” Keely carefully laid down the sword where it couldn’t float away, then took another step forward and held out her hand toward Scarlet. “What do you say?”
“I…hmmm.”
“Come on.” Keely grinned. “Live a little.”
“You’re right.” Scarlet laughed girlishly as she dropped her axe with a careless splash. The heavy weapon showed no inclination to budge in the current. Scarlet took a few steps closer to Keely, holding out her hands. “So teach. How do we do this?”
“Well, first…” Keely closed the remaining distance between them and took Scarlet by the hand. The touch was electric—literally electric. Thunder cracked directly overhead and lightning lanced downward, striking both figures directly and blinding everyone on the summit of the Tooth. When vision cleared, though, neither of the women appeared so much as frizzled. The lightning had dissipated harmlessly around them, and Scarlet was actually laughing giddily.
“You…you’re…you’re…” Scarlet stammered.
“Leading,” Keely assured her, taking one hand firmly and placing the other on Scarlet’s hip. “Just follow me and try to move your feet with mine. Da da dum, da da dum, one two three, one two three…See? Anyone else would
be stepping on my feet at this point. One two three, one two three…”
“This is amazing!” Scarlet laughed.
“Knew you’d like it.” Keely grinned as they splashed together, spinning through the rain.
“No! I mean, yes! But you’re…”
“No,” Keely said, bringing the dance up short to tap Scarlet merrily on the nose. “I’m not. You’ve got me confused with Jenilee.”
“Jenilee?” Scarlet cocked an eyebrow.
“No one, really.” Keely sighed. “Just a girl I once was.” Before Scarlet could even try to make sense of that, Keely suddenly gasped. “Your cape!”
Scarlet’s eyes went wide with alarm as the wind whipped the cloak from her shoulders. She spun and made a desperate lunge for the fluttering red cloth, only to find that it wasn’t there. What was there, just in front of her, was a gaping black hole plunging straight down into the heart of the Wolf’s Tooth. She landed two feet short of it and scrabbled for a non-existent handhold as she skidded the rest of the way, the water pushing her with it.
Whether from fear or simply from frustration, Scarlet screamed as the edge of the shaft crumbled beneath her and she vanished down into the dark pit.
“It’s okay!” Keely yelled after her. “I caught your cloak!” She whipped the sodden red material about her shoulders and carefully secured the clasp she’d undone when she reached up to touch Scarlet’s face, then looked up to find the others staring at her, stunned. “Well?” she demanded, fixing Nolan with a pointed gaze. “Gunpowder?”
“But…” he stammered.
“I’m a liar,” she said pointedly, “but we still need the gunpowder, and we need it fifteen minutes ago. Run!”
With Nolan in the lead, they ran—at least as much as anyone could and would dare to run through water cascading down a rail-less stone staircase directly beside a hundred of feet of nothing. He took the tunnel off the first landing they came to, charged through the open door, and skidded to a stop in front of a frozen tableau.
There, by flickering lantern light, Sister Shoshona stood with the knife in her hand pressed right up against the throat of Minda Haywood, while Minda stood with her back to the wall and a pistol pressed to Shoshona’s temple. At the sound of the running feet, a triumphant grin spread slowly across Shoshona’s face. Then Minda’s eyes flicked up to see who’d arrived, and she aimed one slow shake of her head at Shoshona as a grin of her own appeared.
With smile faltering, Shoshona shifted in an attempt to look over her shoulder. In that instant, Minda’s pistol cracked.
“Thank you so much for not being the Inquisition,” Minda said, using her own cloak to wipe the blood from her face. “This would have been a lousy time to spoil my perfect record of never being on the losing end of a standoff.” She stared down for a moment at what remained of the inquisitrix and shuddered.
“Are you hurt?” Keely demanded.
“Not really. Hey, is that…?”
“Yes. It’s Scarlet’s. Did you…?”
“All set,” Minda said. “She caught me after I finished. Now?”
“Now.”
“Then run! I’ll be right behind you.”
Back out in the stairwell, the storm had gone berserk. Lightning sizzled not merely overhead, but straight down the shaft. Over and over again it arced downward, each strike coming so close behind the last that the deafening thunder never found a chance to die away. The hurrying group found itself forced to descend the stairs with eyes turned to the wall and hands clapped over their ears.
At each landing they passed, Minda ducked briefly into the tunnel there before hurrying back to rejoin the others in their descent. The roar and the brilliance got so intense that none of them actually knew when Minda’s charges started going off. All they could say after the fact was that it had started late enough for all of them to clear the mouth of the tunnel at what had been the cathedral site and dive for cover beneath an overhang.
At the pinnacle of the Wolf’s Tooth, fire roared upward in answer to the lightning, and countless tons of rock began to collapse inward at the summit of the spire. Yet somehow, above it all rang the clear tortured note of one woman’s scream.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
After the Ball
The chill light of dawn found Keely, Elissa, and Minda standing on the newly lowered summit of the Wolf’s Tooth, surveying the rubble. None of the others had managed to fight their way back to consciousness yet after they’d collapsed from exhaustion.
“I told you I like it when things go boom.” Minda smirked.
“It was you tearing down the cathedral all along, wasn’t it?” Keely asked.
“I had help,” Minda said. “But yeah. I never agreed with my parents’ decision to kowtow to the church. There’s a lot of people around here who felt the same.”
“I was hoping maybe we could break loose a few big slabs on her,” Keely said. “This…wow. You know your demolitions.”
“She’s still not dead, you know,” Elissa said.
“You’re sure?” Keely asked.
“Listen.”
They listened and they heard it, faint but unmistakable. Filtering up through the crushing weight of a crumbled mountaintop came the tortured sound of a woman’s screams. Shivering—and not just from the damp and the morning chill—the three of them turned and started back down to where they’d taken shelter during the night.
The deadlings hadn’t politely fallen still and silent when the Wolf’s Tooth came down on Scarlet, but had all vanished one way or another before dawn. Where they had been swarming across the construction site, it was now hard to tell they’d ever been there. Of course, it was hard to make anything out of that mess.
The unfortunate horse Keely had spotted wasn’t the only one to be found dead amidst the rubble in the morning light, and there were human remains as well—mostly in the livery of the Inquisition, but not all. Some of the dead could have been left there from the battle the day before. Others clearly hadn’t been—at least, if you knew what you were looking for.
They paused on a rock overlooking the devastated construction site, staring out at the damage and the blackened landscape beyond.
“Is this my fault?” Keely asked pensively. She wasn’t actively crying, but a few stray tears had managed to find their way unnoticed onto her cheeks. “Did I do this? I practically begged the Inquisition to come here.”
“It’s your fault the Inquisition was here,” Minda said, “but where would they have been if they weren’t here? What would they have been doing? I won’t lie. I’m still trying to absorb what’s happened, and I know I’m going to be in a bad way when it sinks in, but I don’t blame you. You could as easily blame the whole thing on me. Sister Petra wasn’t supposed to die. We didn’t even know she was up here before the walls started coming down that night.
“But she did die. That’s on me and my carelessness. My arrogance. Up ‘til then, I thought it was all a game I was playing with the pontifine. An innocent woman died because of me, and you never would have lingered here if not for that. So don’t go there.”
“The Inquisition was already hunting for the Grimm Truth before you got involved, Keely,” Elissa said. “And there’s no way you could have accounted for Scarlet getting involved. No one could have.”
“Think about it,” Minda said, “every one of those skulls crawling over the Wolf’s Tooth last night probably represented someone Bloody Scarlet killed personally. Between us, we just managed to lock away one of the worst murderers in the history of…history…in her own personal dungeon. It doesn’t undo the wrong, but start counting the skulls, then imagine a future where the woman who did that is wandering free. If preventing that future’s not a serious start on atonement, I don’t know what is. I’ll try to cut myself some slack if you will.”
“I’ll try,” Keely said. “No promises.”
“It sounded like Jane Carver was still alive the last time Scarlet saw her,” Keely said. “Do you think she got ou
t?”
“Either way, it’s trouble,” Keely said. “If Jane got out, she’ll be trying to take credit for vanquishing the most horrible witch ever. If she didn’t get out, her next-in-line will be painting her as the fallen miraculata who vanquished the most horrible witch ever. Either way, we’ve got to get moving and find a way to steal her thunder. I didn’t go through all this to lend justification to the abuses of the Inquisition.”
“Hey there, Hero.”
Tobias hurt everywhere, but he’d managed to piece together enough memory to be pleasantly amazed he was alive to hurt at all. To find Keely’s concerned-but-smiling face hovering over him made opening his eyes seem nearly worth the effort.
“Hey,” he managed. His jaw ached horribly, but at least it didn’t seem to be broken. Based on how much trouble someone had gone to to immobilize various parts of his body, he was sure he owned several major bones he couldn’t say that about. From the look of things, he was recuperating in a private room of an inn somewhere. “How long have I been out?”
“About a week,” she said. “You’ve tried to wake up a few times before now, but I’m not surprised you don’t remember it. That’s the first really lucid sentence you’ve managed. I’m very glad you made it this far. I’ve been assured you’d live if you did.”
“My body may yet have other ideas.” He grimaced. Then his eyes lit on her cloak. “Is that…?”
“Oh, yeah.” She grinned, stepping back and twirling for him to show off the brilliant red cape. “We won. You were a big part of that, even though you checked out early. Your adventure is sorry she nearly got you killed.”
“It’ll look amazing with that red dress of yours,” he said.
“It will, won’t it?” Keely’s grin broadened, and she leaned down to kiss him gently on the lips. “You keep that dress safe for me, and I’ll promise to wear it to another dance with you. But for now, there’s like a million things to do, and it’s going to be weeks or months before you’re up to any of them. Looks like Jane Carver’s still at large and still looking for the book. I’ve got to beat her to it, or none of this matters. Okay, ending the thousand-year murder spree of an insane goddess matters, but you know what I mean.”
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 50
