by Randi Darren
“If you don’t mind me asking, why leave it with you?” Vince inquired, shifting in his seat.
“Never gotten a voucher before, huh? Must be new. Good for you.
“As to why, it’s because it’s unsigned. Since they’re meant to be used anywhere, they’re magically sealed, and little else. Which means whoever has it, owns it.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” The darkly dressed masked man walked away swiftly, leaving Vince still in his chair.
“She really took a toll on you. Sure she wasn’t a Succubus too?” came a male voice from behind him. “Come on, let’s get your voucher. Your slave is already there. We put her collar back on. Any previous commands you gave her will still be there.”
Looking over his shoulder, Vince found a small group of red-uniformed guards.
Standing up, Vince realized he was hanging free. Tucking himself back in, he zipped up his fly and re-buckled his belt.
As he did so, Vince cast his mind about, trying to find Seville again.
Strangely enough, it felt like the man was behind him. Watching him, even.
The Elf was a bonfire of rage and hate, the emotions directed at everyone around her. With the briefest of touches, he looked into her mind and found she was no slave at all.
She was here with Seville voluntarily and wanted to be here.
Her mind started to shift as if she’d noticed his intrusion. Elves were sensitive to him probing a bit more deeply, it would seem.
Now why would they be here, of all places, if she isn’t a slave?
Chuckling, the guards started off as soon as it looked like Vince had himself squared away.
Wordlessly, they walked him out of the great ballroom and into a side hallway. From there he was escorted through a few winding corridors and finally into the basement.
Two guards with automatic pre-Wastes weapons waited for them at the bottom of the stairs, in front of a locked and barred iron door.
Apparently they meant business, as those weapons were very rare, and very expensive.
The guards with him turned and immediately frisked him. One took the gift he’d forgotten he was carrying, while the others began checking him inside and out for anything that could be used as a weapon.
“Sorry, security this evening is on high alert. It isn’t every day there’s enough vouchers in one spot to bankrupt a country. Not to mention we’ve had reports that that damn terrorist group was planning to hit us tonight,” said a guard quietly to him as he rifled through Vince’s pockets.
“Not a problem,” Vince replied, his mind speeding ahead. “Terrorist group?”
“That ‘Free the Wastes’ thing. Enslaving monsters is wrong and should be illegal, blah blah. Same song and dance. Next they’ll be telling us we can’t keep dogs or cats.”
“I heard,” said another guard as he lifted Vince’s pant leg to check his socks and shoes, “that even the king is involved. Apparently he’s a sympathizer. Him and that ambassador of his.”
The man looking into Vince’s jacket scoffed at that and took a step back. “All clean.”
Vince could feel Seville and his Elf closing in on them from behind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw no one.
No one was there. Nothing. Vince could feel them, though.
Could they have figured out it’s me? That’s farfetched, but… maybe?
Looking ahead again, Vince nodded to the guards and moved forward when they opened the door for him.
Stepping inside, he immediately found Petra waiting in the corner. Her head turned at his entrance and latched on to him. She made no move to join him, however, and merely watched from the corner.
His gift box was handed back over to him with a grunt.
The guards closed the door behind him and remained there on duty.
The room itself had several large black iron safes against a wall and little else other than a desk.
Sitting in front of that desk was a bald, fat man in muted browns with a sweaty face. Watery blue eyes peered at him from amongst the pudgy folds of his face.
“Welcome, welcome. I hear you’re the owner. Apparently your lass here put on a show while breaking all previous records.”
“That she did,” Vince agreed with a plastered-on smile.
“So, here’s your voucher, then.” The fat man slid a rectangular piece of plastic towards him across the table.
Vince picked it up and flipped it over. The back of it was decorated with multiple authentication markings written in rune script.
There would be no counterfeiting this.
You’d have to have these to make them worthwhile. This single room seems more like a bank vault than…
They’re here to rob them. They want the vouchers! They’re unsigned and might as well be cash!
Smiling at the fat man, Vince did something he hadn’t done in a long time. Instead of passively monitoring thoughts and memories, he pierced the man’s mind with a heavy set of thoughts.
Vince’s goal was simple. The location of the vouchers and for him to see nothing, hear nothing, and think nothing.
Immediately, the man’s eyes glazed over. Then Vince had what he wanted. They were stored in a rectangular box just inside the left-hand drawer, meant to disguise their purpose by looking the part of a simple box that one would see filled with chocolates.
The safes behind him were filled with fake vouchers that would explode upon getting a certain distance from the mansion.
Fatty didn’t move or twitch from his place.
“Petra, open the inner left desk drawer and pull out the box,” Vince said. Looking down at the box in his hands, he realized it’d probably be wide enough, but not long enough.
As gently as he could, he fingered open the edge of the wrapping, doing his best not to destroy the shape the wrapping paper had taken on.
Tilting the present to one side, the contents slid out of the gift wrapping.
Cracking open the lid, he was smashed in the face with the heady aroma of chocolate. Expensive chocolate in a rather elaborate red box.
Opening it, he took two of the chocolates out and damn near swallowed them whole. Tilting the top of the container against it, he set it up to look like the paymaster had been given a box and had started to dip into them.
“Here, Master.” Petra handed him the box he’d asked for.
Opening the top, he found a number of vouchers inside. All identical to the one he had in his hand.
Dropping his own into the pile, he closed it up again. As delicately as he could, he slipped the box into the wrapping paper. The height was almost too much for it, the width just right, and the length all wrong.
Setting it down on the table, Vince heard a subdued thump, grunts, and the crackle of electricity outside the door.
Time was running out.
Easing the box to the other side of the decorative paper, Vince managed to line up the edges and reseal it. So long as he held it right there, and never touched the other side of it, it’d look exactly as it should.
“Quick, in the corner,” Vince said, gesturing behind himself.
Petra glided over there and looked to him for further instructions.
Vince pressed his back up into her and then held up his hands in front of him, the present quite visible in his left hand.
Petra’s arms slowly closed around him and her chin pressed into the back of his head.
“Do nothing, say nothing,” Vince murmured. Reaching out with his mind, he mentally flicked the switch on the paymaster to awaken.
The fat man jolted in his chair. Looking to Vince and Petra, and then to the commotion going on outside the door.
Shouting something unintelligible, the man clapped his hands together around what had looked like a pen holder on his desk. A deep, brassy alarm started to buzz all throughout the building.
Then the door exploded inward with screeching hinges and stinging smoke. Screaming across the room, it smashed into the paymaster and crushed his head against the w
all. With a wet crunch, his skull popped and he collapsed on the floor as the door clattered and clanged in a different direction.
Seville and his Elf strode into the room. Both turned to regard Vince, assessed him, and then dismissed him.
Seville leapt over the desk and grabbed a hold of the twitching corpse. “Damn. Bust the safe doors open. As little damage as possible.”
The Elf said nothing, but strode over to Seville and laid a hand on the closest safe. A single tick later and the door popped open with a muffled thump.
Seville traded places with her and started scooping out false vouchers by the handful while the Elf did the same thing to the second and third safes.
As soon as the Elf was done with the safes, she ripped half the tunic off the corpse, dunked it into the dead man’s missing head, and began to scrawl on the wall.
“No time for that. Let’s go,” commanded Seville, bolting out of the room, a few vouchers fluttering behind him.
The Elf took a few moments more to finish what she was doing and then followed after him.
“Master?”
“Do nothing, we’re guests. Guards will be here shortly. We simply explain exactly what we saw, minus what we did with the box.”
“This one understands,” Petra murmured, her hands pressing into his chest.
A minute crawled by before armed guards in bright red armor stormed through the broken door frame. Two marched right up to Vince and Petra and secured them while the rest scoured the room.
“A man and a woman did this. I think the woman was a Waster. They-they killed everyone, took something out of the desk, blew up the safes, then left.
“The woman wrote something on the wall,” Vince explained, pointing with his right hand at the bloody whatever it was on the wall.
A guard with more decorations on his shoulder nodded at that and then stomped over to the desk. Opening the drawer that Vince knew would be empty, the man then checked the safes.
“You said they took what was in the safes?”
“Yeah. And a box,” Vince affirmed.
Grunting, the officer turned and looked at the other guards.
“They… they mentioned something about the king. I don’t think they noticed we were here. There was a lot of smoke from the magic they used to explode the door,” Vince said in a voice that he tried to inject some fear into.
The guards in front of them looked to their officer. “Double time, down the boulevard. We can cut them off at the gate. You two,” said the officer, looking at Vince and Petra. “Stay here for further questioning.”
Then they took off at a dead sprint.
Apparently that had been the right thing to say. Reacquiring what had been lost took precedence in the man’s head over securing any possible witnesses.
“Out we go. Let’s not wait here any longer,” Vince said with conviction, dropping his hands to his sides.
“This one knows of an exit. There are hidden corridors the handlers use,” Petra said.
“Lead on, then. I’m afraid I’m the damsel in distress at this point, so I’ll rely on my white knight,” Vince quipped, stepping to the side for Petra to get by.
Petra set off, exiting the room and moving into the hall.
Splattered on the walls and ground were limbs, blood, and gore. There had been no fight here. It had been a slaughter.
Petra lifted the hem of her dress to step through the mess, which seemed odd to Vince, and guided him to the back of the stairwell.
Lifting both hands, she positioned them awkwardly on two different bricks that were a fair distance apart.
“What are you—”
“Shh. Listening, smelling.”
Vince nodded and fell silent, watching.
Petra slid her hands across the bricks, her fingers pressing into the edges. Finding what she was seemingly looking for, she shoved her hands forward.
The two bricks she had pushed on sunk into the wall a fraction. The wall to their left swung away from them.
“My hero. Does this lead out?”
“This one believes so; she can smell and feel an outside current. Follow, Master.”
Petra disappeared into the dark tunnel and Vince followed behind her, closing the wall behind himself.
Grateful for his night vision once again, Vince followed Petra easily as she led them down a maze of tunnels and forks.
She’d stop at times and scent the air, or touch the walls. Each time she did this, she came away more confident.
Vince could only assume they were making progress. To him, it felt like they were running endlessly and aimlessly.
Almost as if to clarify that thought, ahead of them Vince could see a man fumbling with something at his waist. He was standing in front of a wall and was attempting to push what looked like a small rod into a crack in the bricks.
Before Vince could see anything beyond that, Petra snapped the robed man up in both hands and leaned her head back. She also suddenly grew quite a bit taller as she clearly extended her legs.
Her jaw unhinged itself, and her mouth opened wide. Out snapped a pair of scythe-like mandibles. The last time he’d seen them, Petra had buried them in Fes.
In nearly the same second that they slid out, Petra closed them tightly around the man’s throat.
A heartbeat later and her stinger was swinging forward from under her dress. It slammed into the man, piercing him easily.
Struggling in vain, the man squirmed and gibbered as Petra held him off the ground.
A minute ticked by as the man slowly stopped fighting. His hands no longer pushed at Petra’s head, his feet no longer kicking the air futilely.
He hung there. Twitching.
Petra dropped the man to the ground and then stabbed him with her stinger again, this time in the chest. Right where his heart should be.
Turning her head to face him, he was struck by the sheer monstrous quality of her appearance. Her mouth was open, the bones clearly dislocated in her jaw to allow for those pincers to slide out.
From where, he had no idea. They looked like they’d simply retract back into her jaw itself. As if they simply retracted into the bone somewhere.
They’d flipped out in under a second, and the retraction had taken as little time as well previously.
She watched him, her eyes studying him. Drool pooled in her mouth and dripped from her lower lip.
It took Vince a second, but he finally realized she was waiting for him to react to her visage.
Truth be told, her previous comments had made him think about her situation earlier. She was the least human of his companions. The least human by far. This would be her most inhuman look.
Her most vulnerable.
It wasn’t in his nature to flirt. Not really. But in this moment, she needed more than he could normally give.
Stepping in close to the extremely tall ant soldier, he reached up and grabbed the top of her dress and pulled her down to his height.
Planting a kiss on her cheek, he then patted it.
“Put your fangs away, Petra. You already showed me what you can do with your mouth earlier. We can experiment later, now’s not that time.”
Not waiting for an answer, Vince leaned down and started to rifle through the man’s belongings and pockets.
Pulling free the metal rod the man had been fooling around with, Vince heard a solid pop behind him.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw only Petra. She had a hand on her jaw as she watched him.
“Experiment?”
“Well, if your jaw opens that wide… an interesting thought, no?” Vince gave her a feral grin and turned back to the corpse.
“Ugh, I hate it when they do that,” Vince grumbled as the corpse shat itself. Frowning, Vince found something cold and heavy in one of the pockets.
Pulling it free, it looked more like a metal stamp than anything.
“Collar,” Petra hissed.
Looking back at her, he found her staring at the metal stamp in his hand.<
br />
“This thing?” Vince asked.
“Collar,” Petra said through clenched teeth.
Shrugging, Vince stood up and then pressed the stamp to the front of her collar. It sizzled for a second and then nothing.
“This one thanks her master. The collar has no power now and she is free to discuss what she now knows.”
“Handy. Seems we’re not the only ones who can break a collar. Makes sense when you stop and think on it,” Vince said. Pocketing the stamp, he turned back to the wall.
His eyesight was considerably better than this man’s, as he could clearly see where this rod with teeth went.
Sliding it into the dark hole next to a point where three bricks joined, he smiled. Reaching the end of the keyhole, he rotated the rod around.
With a click, the wall parted and moonlight could be seen through the crack.
“Looks like we found our way out, then. Petra, I think it might be time to ditch the dress. If you’re up for it, I think the best course of action is me riding you out of here.”
Vince reached up and pulled off the mask he was wearing and dropped it.
“This one agrees, though regrets the loss of the dress. She felt more human in it. No one stared at her.”
“They stared at you for other reasons while you were wearing the dress. With or without the dress, you’re still Petra.”
“Yes, Master.” Petra reached down and shucked the dress over her head, and then dropped it lightly atop the corpse. Pulling the mask free, she dropped that as well. Her eyes stayed on the fabric before looking back to him.
A quick moment of rifling through her armor bag and she was wearing her normal clothes again.
“This one is ready.”
Vince nodded and then slid up onto her as he had done previously.
Cautiously, Petra opened the door and peeked out. Then they were off into the night.
Chapter 17
Clambering over the wall, they made it into an adjacent alleyway without a problem.
“I should have known,” came a soft voice.
Vince snapped his head around towards the voice, his senses scrambling to who was there.
