He stepped aside, Coma moving back into the fight.
The killer doll took out six or seven clones before one finally bested her, and then she was back on her feet not long after, again holding her own.
“Ever thought about making yourself a weapon like that?” Ava asked Roman, stepping to his left as Coma continued engaging clones. His teacher gestured toward her arm. “You could do something like that, but you’d have to be careful.”
“I haven’t tried reconstructing a hand or fusing anything, especially with all the nerves, blood vessels, bones,” he said.
“You’re right, that would be hard to do.”
“Come on!” one of the Williams said, clearly the real William Bottorf by the way he was getting annoyed with his own clones. “She’s just a doll!”
Ava and Roman exchanged glances, his teacher eventually laughing. “A few more details about tomorrow,” she said under her breath. “We will have the ceremony, and then there will be people you have to meet.”
“And what about Margo?” Roman asked, the cheerfulness in his voice suddenly draining.
“We will have people look into it, but like I said, there are too many civilians there. We may have to lure her away.”
“Just let me know how I can help. I know you have your own way of wanting to go about this, but she…” Roman shook his head. “She’s done something to my wife that I will never be able to forgive. And I want to look her in the eye…”
“No,” said Ava. “She won’t let you live if you try something like that. Roman, you have to listen to me when I say that I don’t think you understand what Margo is capable of. Imagine what you are capable of, and then add years and years of experience fighting fucking vampires to that. We’re going to have to send in an exemplar that matches her power, or a team to take her out quickly. So it’ll take some time, and we have people monitoring the place now, so if she leaves, we will at least know where she has gone. Do you trust me?”
“I do.”
“Then be patient.”
Chapter Fourteen: Creating a Monster
“You aren’t welcome here,” Kevin Blackbook told his fatter brother, who stood before him surrounded by his cat girls and a guy in a beanie that Kevin didn’t recognize, looking like a real asshole with his arms crossed over his chest.
Fat Kevin scoffed. “Is that a way to treat family?”
“Do you want us to do something?” Turquoise asked the large man, her eyes narrowing on his brother.
“Keep your fucking cat girls on a leash, dammit! I have gone above and beyond when it comes to dealing with you, and I’ve lost my goddamn eye in the process,” Kevin said, glaring at one of the cat girls.
He was so angry that he couldn’t recall which one had ripped out his eye, and it didn’t really matter at this point. He also didn’t believe his brother had been able to break the healer out from Prison South.
But he’d read the reports; it was miraculous his brother was still alive.
Kevin knew that if the right exemplar ever started investigating the prison break, it would eventually come back to haunt him; he had let out some of the info and he was, in a way, an accomplice.
And that was without knowing that the hooded woman had also come to him for information.
The situation was going to turn sour sooner rather than later, and this was why Kevin had a wrist guard under his desk, active, waiting for his moment. Kevin was going to kill his fatter brother, and the cat girls may get him before he could fire on them, but he damn sure was going to try anyway.
That was, until his arm came out from under the table on its own accord, moving up until his fist was pressed into the side of his head.
“I believe your brother was trying to kill you,” said the man in the beanie. “And to confirm, it was your brother here who told the hooded woman of our plans. He sold you out.”
“He did what?”
“She visited him, and he told her of our plans.”
“Thanks, James,” Fat Kevin told the man. “Is it true? Was that your intention?”
“It was my intention,” Kevin said, a voice at the back of his mind telling him he had been compromised.
Kevin knew in that moment that the man in the beanie was the telepath; he had gone through enough telepath trainings as part of his job at the State Department to know that there wasn’t much he could do at this point.
He hadn’t been on guard, and once a telepath latched on, that was it.
“It’s a pity,” Fat Kevin told his twin. “And here I thought we would be able to work together on this. How do you suppose we do this?” he asked the cat girls.
“Is there really any other way?” asked Obsidian. “It looks to me like it will be a suicide.”
“It does look like a suicide,” Fat Kevin agreed. “It’s too bad, really. But you all don’t know him as well as I did, and he struggled with some things. He was also having an affair with my wife, which probably led to some guilt, especially after I died and then miraculously came back to life. Yes, a suicide seems like a good way for you to go, brother.”
“Kev…” his brother gasped. “Are you serious here!?”
“Let me finish. We came here because we wanted you to act in some way, through the government, of course. But then we found out that it was you who betrayed me—all of us—leading to the death of two of our dear friends.”
“Please…”
“Stop begging. You purposefully told that woman what we were doing, and she could have killed all of us. She could have killed her,” Fat Kevin said, pointing at Obsidian, anger rising in his voice. “And I can’t have that. You are a threat to me. And in this line of work, I’ve learned there’s only one way to deal with threats.”
“No!” Kevin cried, his eyes going wide with terror as his finger pressed on the wrist guard’s trigger.
“You led her to us,” Fat Kevin reminded him. “And the guilt you feel is a good reason to do what you are about to do. James, let’s finish this up.”
“Are you sure?” James asked, but not with the tone someone would ask another person whether they were certain they wanted to kill their brother. It was merely a question, James just wanting to confirm that Kevin was giving an order here.
“I’m sure,” Fat Kevin said as he turned away, Turquoise’s paw coming into his hand. “Goodbye, brother.”
“Good morning, Paris,” Margo said with a yawn.
She had actually slept soundly in Roman’s bed, which was practically unheard of for her. The deadly woman from the Western Province couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full night’s rest. It was disorienting, and it took her a moment to understand where she was, to remember how she had ended the previous night.
There were two bodies in the bed with her, both dead in their own way, but it was Paris who had really struck a chord with her.
She was looking at the doll now, her hand on her cheek, their eyes locked for a moment, and Margo was sure she had imbued everything she liked about the real Paris into the doll. Her skin was almost warm to the touch, unlike Celia, who still seemed cold, the disadvantages of being a corpse.
It wasn’t the first time Margo had experimented with corpses.
Once she animated them, there was no real decay she’d yet to notice. There had been a time a few years ago where she had kept a corpse alive for a couple of months, needing to use the Western Province ladyboy for espionage purposes, but her skin had never warmed again. She had noticed that.
And Margo felt no shame that they had grown close during that time, even if she was the one who was controlling the ladyboy’s brain.
A body was a body, an object an object, and while most people in Centralia—and in her own country, for that matter—didn’t quite understand this, or possibly would frown upon the relationships she’d had, they also didn’t have the power to animate anything they wanted.
And what a power it was.
It had first come to Margo when she was five, playing with her
dolls. She had grown up poor, and an older boy the neighborhood had run by, reaching for her doll’s arms. Margo had grabbed its legs, the inevitable playing out.
The doll was torn in two.
And while Margo was too young to fully understand that her family wouldn’t be buying her another doll anytime soon, she did get the sense that they had less than most, and that this was the only doll she’d get.
And it was then that her power took shape.
As the boy ran, his hand still holding the top half of the stuffed doll, white stuffing trickling out of its waist, the doll came alive and began climbing up his arm, the boy screaming once the doll made its way to his neck, trying to choke him, trying to bash him with her stuffed head.
The boy was able to get the doll off, tossing it to the street, Margo’s poor doll landing in a puddle of mud.
Five-year-old Margo watched as the doll’s upper half dragged its way out of the filth, moving in her direction while the lower half of its body twitched in her hands.
She dropped the doll’s lower half, and the legs walked over to the top half of the torso, the doll pulling itself up, its body stitching back together.
And she didn’t know at that moment that she had been controlling this. All she could do was scream and run away.
She was too young to fully comprehend what had happened; she only knew that something was different, and from that moment forward, she came to better understand her power.
It was when she was ten years of age she got angry with her family, her power making itself known at the dinner table, the legs flattening and twisting upward, the plates stretching, the silverware lifting and bending.
Her father took her to be classified as an exemplar the very next day, and at first Margo thought they were abandoning her, taking her to an orphanage or something.
She cried the entire way there, objects around her coming alive as they walked—the disheveled sidewalk, the windows on a shop shattering, rocks lifting from the soil and striking her dad.
The last thing she remembered from that day was her dad hitting her so hard she passed out.
It was the only time he would ever strike her, and while she was sour about it during her teenage years, looking back, she realized that it was the only way to stop her at the time, that she was putting everyone around her in danger with her actions.
When she woke up later that day, she found herself in a government facility, scientists going over some of her blood work.
Her father was paid a small sum, and he left, ignoring her cries as he turned away from the room.
Margo was left to the state, the Western Province government knowing almost immediately when they classified her power that it was something worth holding, shaping. She was put in a boarding school with other exemplars, many of whom would go on to die in the intense years of the Western Plague, which nearly destroyed some of the Western Province cities.
Her peers had interesting powers as well, from being able to manipulate the cold to advanced telepathy. The rumors that the powers in the West were stranger than in the other countries were true, and Margo saw some very odd powers during her time in training, grotesque transformations, abilities that defied logic, like the woman who could open up small dimensional holes that she could use to eavesdrop and kill instantly.
But none of the powers had as much potential, at least at a large scale, as Margo’s powers.
Others began to take notice, seeing that she could modify her cell-like room in any way she wanted, that she could craft things, take control of objects in ways that were both comical and beyond deadly.
And that was where she spent her teenage years, away from her family, honing her ability.
And there was a time in the future that she would return to see her family, a time in which she would kill them all and animate their corpses, having one final family meal with them, her father at the head of the table, a dead look in her eyes as he shoveled food into his mouth.
But that would be in her early twenties, years after she had finished training, when the pressure from the vampire hunt had finally made her snap.
Not everyone who suffered from an intense, psychotic episode was able to classify it as such, to accept it for the fact, but Margo was.
She knew when she’d snapped.
And she had stopped being ashamed for what she’d done after, from killing her parents to going on a rampage that was barely stopped by a few of the same peers she had been in boarding school with.
And they could have killed her there, too. Her peers should have killed her there, but the government had spent a lot of money training Margo, and even with her growing mental disorder, she had respect for the Western Province, a bit of pride too, and they still saw potential in her.
So she was rehabilitated and made her way into spying, and when she became too violent at that, she oversaw spies.
Oddly enough, this was the job she was the best at, managing information, keeping track of others, and meeting with them to crosscheck data. Margo was allowed to live her life the way she wanted, without the pressure of building a relationship with someone just to get information from them. She was too impatient for that part of spying; she would rather just torture them and get the information.
But a good handler she was, and what she had started doing now was something that would probably create some blowback from her own government. She had already received a mental message questioning where she was, asking to confirm rumors.
And while she knew this would all come to a head in the future and she would likely have to fight back again, she really couldn’t blame them for being concerned.
“How are you feeling this morning?” Paris the doll asked, interrupting Margo’s train of thought.
“I’m feeling well rested for once,” Margo said.
“I hope I was able to pleasure you enough last night.”
“Trust me, that was more than enough,” Margo said as she brought the woman in and kissed her. “I’m going to kill Roman as soon as he gets back, but I must say, he has figured out an impressive way to use this power.”
“Is that your way of telling me you like me?” Paris the doll asked.
“It is,” Margo said. “I have a feeling that you will become my favorite creation.”
Chapter Fifteen: Getting Hitched
“So, cosplay café?” Roman asked Celia and Coma as they left the diner. There was a cosplay café nearby, a new one that was powered by wind turbines, and Roman knew it wouldn’t take long to get there, just a few blocks.
“It would be so fun,” Celia said, “but I don’t know if you’ll like cosplaying…”
“Whatever makes you happy,” Roman told her. “Coma, too. Coma needs to be happy, too.”
“I’m already happy,” Coma said. “I got to kick a bunch of clones asses today.”
“That you did,” Roman said, adjusting the collar of his jacket.
A cold breeze had whipped up from the south, and Roman wouldn’t be surprised if there were snow flurries at some point in the night. Nothing would stick, though; while it snowed sometimes in Centralia, it usually melted by midday.
“And you don’t mind?” Celia asked.
“No, I need to do something to get all this off my mind,” he said.
“It really has been a strange week,” Celia said as they continued down the street. She was in her superhero get-up, with three dots painted under each eye that she’d applied in the women’s dressing room. As usual, Coma had gone for the Gothic Loli look, this time wearing her mask with black mesh over the eyeholes.
“I keep waiting for someone to ask what I want to do,” Casper said from Roman’s pocket.
“We don’t care what you want to do,” Roman told her.
“There’s no need to be an ass,” she said, and Roman felt a thump against his chest as she kicked him.
“You know, for such a small person, you are really violent.”
“What does size have anything to do with being
violent?” Casper asked. “Would you prefer I was like Coma? Your perfect violent doll with her mysterious mask who always agrees with what you want to do?”
“I don’t always agree with him,” Coma said.
“Yes, you do,” Casper snapped back. “When was the last time you told Roman no?”
A couple passed in front of them and glanced over at Roman and the dolls, trying to locate where the little voice was coming from and ultimately failing.
“He just does things I already want to do,” Coma said with a shrug. “Have you forgotten that we share a mind?”
“Oh, please. You two don’t share a mind, he gives you some of his mind. It’s not really a two-way street.”
“Can you deanimate her for a little while?” Coma asked sweetly.
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Roman started to say.
“Hey, I will be heard!”
Celia laughed. “I don’t know what part of Roman you are, Casper, but I like it. So sassy, such a rude one. Maybe that’s it. Maybe you are Roman as a kid—a cute, rude boy. Were you like this when you were a kid, Roman?”
“I don’t really know how to answer that question.”
“Yes, you do,” Casper said, this time elbowing him in the chest. “We all know how we were as kids.”
“You were never a kid,” Roman reminded her.
“Just because you gave me life and I haven’t been alive for more than a week doesn’t mean I don’t have a childhood. In this case, my childhood was last week. And Coma’s and Celia’s, the week before. We all have childhoods. It’s just the word we use for the start of one’s life.”
“Then my childhood was kind of strange,” Coma said.
“Gee, you think?” Casper asked with a snort. “What was it like to be his first?”
“It was…” Coma looked at Roman, but of course he couldn’t see her red eyes behind her mask. He merely shrugged, not knowing what kind of answer she was looking for.
“Well?” Casper asked again.
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