Under the Dark - Crow Skyler's Writing

Unlike most of her family, she still goes back to Midgard. Not often, but often enough. The family have all but forsaken it, throwing up their hands and waiting for the end, but Lady Frigg, the Queen of Asgard, is patient. She knows that tides can turn; she’s seen it before.

In particular, she goes to a small little town on the eastern tip of a northern country, and she knows that the year is 1953. She also knows that the town will not be around for very long. It has a decade or so more left, and then it will erupt into blue light—and it will take all of its citizens with it. But for now, on a cold winter’s evening, the town is still and quiet. A small pack of children races around, their voices piercing the silence, pretending to be “Americans” and “Russians.”

One small girl sits apart from this, but not by choice. She has a crudely fashioned wooden helmet over her head, in the shape of something the vikings would wear, and a wide smile on her face. Frigg knows that the other children are forbidden from playing with this girl, whose hair is practically the color of the snow around her, but that doesn’t stop the girl from watching their antics.

“Hello, little one,” Frigg greets her, sitting down next to the girl in the snow. She arranges her green dress around herself carefully, so that contact with the snow will be minimal, and the girl looks at her with slightly wide eyes. They’re blue-grey—the color of the sea on a stormy afternoon.

“Hi,” the girl murmurs cautiously. She’s still smiling, though, and looks back to the excited children.

“I know what they’re playing, but what are you playing?”

The girl puffs out her chest a little, grinning and showing Frigg her wooden sword. “I’m Beowulf! I’m waiting for my dragon to show up!”

Frigg smiles back, gently, and folds her hands in her lap. “Doesn’t Beowulf die by the dragon?”

“Not in my version!” the girl insists. “He fights the dragon, wins, and continues to live in his big castle! And then there will be feasting.”

She laughs quietly at that, watching an ‘American’ fire warning shot at a ‘Russian.’ “Very good. Do you like the old stories, then, Meja?”

The little girl opens her mouth to reply, and then frowns in confusion. Frigg can practically see the wheels turning. But she doesn’t say anything, Frigg knows, because everyone in the town knows Meja’s name, and her not knowing someone else’s isn’t that strange.

“Yes,” Meja Urdahl murmurs. “Mother reads them to me when she’s not… when we’re going to sleep.”

Frigg squeezes the girl’s shoulder gently, imparting her with a sense of calm. Freya Urdahl has been sick for the past two weeks, and she will be sick for ten more years yet—before she will leave her family, leaving a hole that cannot be filled behind her. Frigg has come, on this night, to watch the last truly innocent smile on Meja’s face—tomorrow, her mother will be rushed to the hospital, and then everything will change.

“They will serve you well. I hope you listen carefully.”

“What do you mean?” Meja frowns. “Serve me?”

“You will understand, when you are older,” Frigg chuckles softly, before standing up. “I look forward to meeting you again soon, Meja. But the next time we meet, it will be a difficult time in your life.”

The five-year-old girl sort of shrugs, not really processing what the strange woman in the green dress is saying—which is how it should be. Her memory will be jostled up later, after the blue light. It will be after they speak again that Meja will remember this previous meeting.

“Are you leaving already?” Meja asks.

“Yes. Be safe, Meja.”

“Oh. Okay.” She waves with the hand not clutching her sword. “Goodnight.”

Frigg smiles. The next time they met, Meja would have a real weapon, and she would know how to use it.

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

She swallowed all of it—her trepidation, the trembling sensation in her right knee, the fear working knots in her stomach. It wasn’t easy to take a deep breath and exhale, willing all of the tension out, but she managed. But it was only a temporary fix. Later—if there was a later—she would yell and drink all of it out, and pound something into gravel with her fists. But for now, she felt back in control. She was the Rune Guardian, and she would get through this.

“Go,” said the towering giant on her left, a hulking man she didn’t know the name of. Some warrior from time forgotten, no doubt, from back when her ancestor had first made the deal with Odin. The deal he hadn’t known half of. The strange warrior was smiling grimly, as though dreading and anticipating what was about to happen.

Meja nodded, taking several long strides forward, and on the other side of the battlefield, Loki did the same thing. They want us to have a chat? Well, they’ll get one, she thought, and continued to move. As they walked, to meet in the center, Meja wondered why they were doing it. Everything had already been discussed. This was Ragnarok, the planet was breaking itself into pieces with each breath the respective armies drew; talking would accomplish nothing, aside from bruised egos and savaged tempers. He would probably try to demean her, as he had before, and Meja wasn’t looking forward to a chat with the trickster god. But if her troops wanted it, she would oblige.

That was still weird to think of, her troops.

“Guardian,” Loki said, tone crisp, as they stopped. There were about four good strides left between them, and that was the closest that Meja wanted to be to him. Unarmed, at least.

“Loki.” She eyed him. “You look… well.”

He laughed, harsh and loud. “And you as well, Guardian.” His gaze went to her warriors, and to the dark, furry shape that was taking up a large portion of her side of the battlefield. “I understand that you have my son.”

“Fenrir came to me of his own accord,” Meja said, standing a little straighter. “As it turns out, we both have common ground between us.”

“Is that so?” Loki’s eyes grew colder and colder. “Well. We shall see which side he stands on, after today.”

She nodded firmly. “Yes. We will.”

“I would say ‘let the best man win’—I believe that is your phrase?—but it would be a lie,” the god admitted. “I have already won.”

“When has anything ever stopped you from lying?” Meja turned on her heel, calling behind her, “We’ll see about that.”

Halfway back to her own forces, her knee started shaking violently again. She took another deep, calming breath, willing herself to keep walking. These types of things weren’t her specialty. And especially not with everything up in the air like it was, not so much a prophecy anymore as a vague map with ripped up sections.

Fenrir whined at her, as she rejoined his and the now-grinning warrior’s side. Meja smiled up at the enormous, furry creature.

“Steady, friend. He’s just trying to mess with us. We’ll win this yet.”

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

It’s a stupid move, and an even worse memory to revisit. Dodging left when she should have dodged right. The mewling little club brat, barely seventeen and equipped with a fake ID, knows how to bury the pocket knife in the flesh of Octavo’s back. But she doesn’t know how to hold on, and twist. She backs off, as though the knife is something that will keep defending her after she’s disarmed herself, and looks briefly triumphant. But all Octavo feels is a blanket of rage, and the feeling intensifies with the pain in her back.

When her face is barely recognizable, and her clothes are rags that cling to her wiry frame, Octavo drags her into the car and then home. She sobs that her name is Diane, and that she’s sorry, and please let her go. Octavo’s dogs steer clear of her as she’s dragged into the house, just as they were trained to do. Diane starts screaming when Octavo rolls the carpet back and reveals the basement door. But like all of the others, when the tranquilizers kick in, the brat quiets; blood dribbles down her chin and pools on the cement floor.

Octavo removes her leather coat, and the vinyl shirt underneath. She makes a face. Ruined — by a shitty little knife that was just sharp enough for the job, and riffraff who should have been carrying mace. It would have been more effective. 

A crimson line has formed down the white skin of her back. “I’ll beat the price out of you, yet,” she murmurs at the unconscious form of Diane.

(Source: velvetdemon.net)

She didn’t used to, back when life was simple, but now she can hear it. The scraping of chains on stone and the hiss and dripping of venom into a bowl. And, just above it, the gentle hum of very powerful runes, keeping everything together.

How do you protect something that you can’t see?

How do you keep things away from it?

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

It’s a day or two before she wakes up again, and when she does, she asks about everything that happened. The nurses, to their credit, try to go easy on her. But she doesn’t go easy on them—the painkillers don’t work on her, and there’s a significant amount of glass still embedded in her arm. The doctor, when he responds to the nurses’ paging, explains that it’s a miracle her arm can still work at all, and that removing the glass might do more harm than good—for the present time.

Meja requests discharge papers, a phrase she knows well from her mother’s visits to the hospital, and is promptly refused. But the nurses discover, shortly thereafter, that they can’t do anything to keep her from leaving. Even trying to grab her and pull her back just results in them getting dragged along for a ride.

Her town is a four hour walk away, give or take, over treacherous terrain barely tamed by modern conveniences. And the explosion has had a rippling effect—power lines are down, roads are smashed up. As she walks, she sees airplanes for the first time since she was a little girl. Fighters patrolling for threats, as though the government still can’t make up its mind about what caused the explosion.

* * *

It almost looks as though a bomb caused it, were it not for the funny blue glow coming from the epicenter. But Meja doesn’t really think about that for a while. Her legs give out almost the second she gets a good look at the devastation.

“Shame, isn’t it?” says someone behind her, an emergency worker in a bright lime-yellow coat. “Almost no survivors.”

The ruins, which extend several miles past the town, are covered in something that’s threatening to turn into a snowstorm. Meja closes her eyes and punches the snow as hard as she can; the ground cracks and rumbles.

She doesn’t feel any better.

“I did,” she mutters.

The worker turns pale. “I’m—I’m sorry—”

Her bandages are covered by her coat, and she shakes her head slowly. “Thank you for being here. Thank you for helping.” The words feel hollow and meaningless. She can’t even summon the sarcasm to add, but really, are you this tactful all the time, or am I just special?

“Look, you can’t really be here—they’re quarantining it after today—”

Meja snorts. “Try and stop me.”

He does. He doesn’t get very far.

* * *

It’s hard to tell where things were, exactly, as the wreckage is spread every which way, but she figures out where her house was. Honir sniffs the wooden planks, limping ever since being discharged—and unusually silent. Neither of them feels particularly wordy when they come across what was, without a shadow of a doubt, the lettering on the front of Meja’s home.

She stares at it for a while before she looks for other wreckage, but the town’s belongings are either shredded or layered on top of each other in chaos. Wood and metal.

Nothing remains.

It’s dark, darker than it should be. Meja sits down on a bare patch of snow as the wind begins to howl, the looming snowstorm finally gaining speed.

Honir brushes against her side, finding his voice. “We should go.”

“Why.” She lets her head loll back, stares up at the curtain of white. Her hands restlessly run over her face—the deep mark across her nose from yet another shard of glass, the small scar from where they dug out a thick splinter. “We belong here.”

“You need rest,” he murmurs, leaning against her. “We need to consider—”

Meja swears—faen også—and lurches unsteadily to her feet. “We are not considering Frigg’s…” She struggles to find the word. “Deal.”

Honir looks up at her, slightly shaken, and she realizes that she’s standing as stiff as a doornail. She deflates.

“We have to,” is his counter, gentle but insistent. “At least make inquiries on the Network, if nothing else.”

It’s an hour or two before she works through all of the immediate rage threatening to tip her over, and pulls her PHS out of her pocket.

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

They think she’s dead when they uncover her, just on the outside of the initial blue-hued blast—blood everywhere, a piece of glass ten inches long stuck vertically through her arm. But she proves them wrong when she starts mumbling, coughing up names they know from basic classes at college: Thor, Frigga, Odin. Her eyes don’t open when they carry her away on a stretcher.

* * *

She’s standing on a road of pale stone, at a crossroads, the second that the blue light hits her face. There’s a near-blinding amount of light, but she does manage to see a very beautiful woman in a dark green dress—standing not too far away, observing Meja with a small smile on her face. She looks middle-aged, but in a good way.

“Where am I?” Meja asks. It comes out hoarse and she spits up glass a moment later, enough to fill her palm. She stares at it a moment, dull from shock, before looking back up.

“Where do you think?” counters the older woman, walking closer. Meja notices that there are three other, similarly beautiful, women nearby. One with long blond hair, one with long near-black, and one with soft brown.

She swallows. “Lady Frigg.”

A hand is placed, affectionately, on her shoulder. Frigg, wife of Odin and Queen of Asgard, smiles at Meja like a proud parent. “Rune Guardian,” she murmurs.

“Am I dead?”

“Perhaps.” Lightning flashes across the sky, dark with storm clouds. “But not yet.”

* * *

The nurses, and a swearing doctor, are puzzled by her palms. They can’t stop the bleeding, and any use of adrenaline—or the defibrillator—doesn’t seem to have any effect on her erratic heartbeat. But she doesn’t die like she should be doing; she doesn’t dive and flatline. But she also doesn’t gain consciousness.

* * *

“Loki is freed,” Frigg tells her, in a low tone. “His cage is sprung.”

Meja stares at her, thunder cracking around them. “Wait—you mean the orb? The one that flew up after the…”

Those words won’t come. The one that flew up after the explosion. If Meja had been less tough, she wouldn’t have seen it at all before blacking out. And she’s sure that she’d be dead.

Frigg folds her hands together nervously. “Yes. That was his cage. He has escaped—we think to Jotunheim. You…” She hesitates before finishing, “You did well, Rune Guardian. No one but a god could have stopped what happened, and we were blind to it by Loki’s magic through Yggdrasil.”

For a moment, she wants to ask about how that’s possible, how he could work magic through a cage (it hadn’t been a very good cage, obviously). But she gets stuck on that last part. You did well? She’d done well at, what, taking an explosion to the face? Getting out-smarted by a caged trickster?

But, no, that wasn’t what Frigg meant. Did she mean…

“We haven’t been guarding just a town, have we?” she asks, barely able to summon the words.

Frigg shakes her head slowly, her motherly smile turning bitter. “My husband charged your family to guard Loki’s cage, where he was put after being freed from his previous incarceration. I believe you’ve read about it: a certain snake’s venom, and the earthquakes.”

She’s too numb to feel anger, but at any other time she’d feel like flying into a rage. Queen of Asgard be damned. “He never told us. He just said—”

“Why do you think those creatures have been trying to get into your town, Meja?” Frigg interrupts, squeezing her shoulder gently. “Why did you think it was such a desirable place for them? Those creatures have alliances with him, and they have been trying to free him from his cage. But your family has stopped that.”

“Except for me.”

The numbness starts to fade, into despair.

“I let it happen on my watch.”

* * *

Her pulse takes a very small dive, but it doesn’t stop. The attendants stare at her, and then each other, wondering if they should call it. Nothing works. But the young  woman isn’t dying, exactly, and so they keep combing their options.

* * *

Frigg shakes her head firmly, watching the lightning above them. Every once in a while, they hear a panicked voice filter among the clouds. “Rune Guardian, your services are still required. You cannot give up now.”

“If they are, then why are you here? Where’s the Allfather?”

Meja doesn’t really care about seeming bitter, or entitled. All she knows is that her family’s apparently been jerked around for centuries, pulling guard duty for something they didn’t know existed, and the best that Odin can do is send his wife after his guardian collapsed from an explosion. An explosion that probably killed everyone in her town.

“He is ensuring that the other cages are secure.” Frigg smiles, but her patience is visibly strained. “Time is a luxury, Meja.”

She frowns. “What are you talking about? Other cages? What else is locked up?”

“The beginnings of Ragnarok, Rune Guardian. Loki, Jormungandr, Fenrir, and the heart of the World’s Tree. We have died before our time, some of us,” Frigg explains quietly, “and we cannot win Ragnarok anymore. So we have caged it.”

And the cages were breaking. Meja grimaces; the ruining of the world from nuclear radiation hadn’t even been the worst of it. But she can’t summon much more energy, and emotion, than that.

“You put a band-aid on it,” she comments dully.

Frigg purses her lips in disapproval. “I am here to present an idea, which I believe you will reject because of your… current situation. But I think we will come to agree on it, later, so I am presenting it to you anyway.”

There’s no room left for her to care, but she gives a light shrug. “Fine. I can’t exactly dissuade you right now. Being mostly dead and all.”

* * *

A nurse with a soft voice, and shaking hands, begins to disconnect some of the emergency equipment; the others are already filing out of the room. Nothing can be done about the young woman’s heart-rate, and they’re needed elsewhere. They hope, with time, that it will climb back up, and an attendant comes to check on her every ten minutes or so. As often as he can. The explosion has created a great urgency within the only hospital close to it.

* * *

“You cannot ask me to do that.”

Frigg gives a sad smile, her hand dropping from Meja’s shoulder. “I know. You have had so much taken from you. But you are the only one who can do it.”

“None of that is…” Sane. Plausible. Safe. “No.”

“As I said before, you will reject it now. But thank you for listening.” She glances upward, toward the storm clouds that are beginning to break up. “It is now time for you to return.”

“Hold on—” Meja squints at her. “If this is some destiny thing—”

Frigg surprises her by laughing quietly. Her attendants, the beautiful young women, smile. “You think that I’m giving you a speech about how you were born to do this?”

“Prophecy is everywhere,” she points out.

“No, Meja, this wasn’t decided for you. Thor did not die after defeating the World Eater, he died from treachery and malice. Víðarr died of a disease that claimed his life within hours, rather than going on to slay Fenrir.” She wrings her hands, tone brittle now. “We are making our own future.”

Meja shrugs. “In that case, are you so sure that Ragnarok will still happen?”

“Our enemies circle. The winter rages on. Sons kill fathers. You know the signs, Guardian.”

“I thought that there were supposed to be three winters. This is just two. Which,” she adds, shrugging, “I’ll grant as strange, but still.”

Frigg shakes her head. “The signs are nevertheless upon us. You will need to make a decision, and, I imagine, formulate plans.”

“I’m not going to do this crazy idea you’ve laid on me,” Meja insists coldly.

The goddess gives another laugh, though this one has her brittle tone and her eyes are bright. “My dear girl, we’ve already been over this. Wake. We will talk again soon—when you have made your decision, you will know how to get a hold of me.”

And then she blinks, and there is pain in a flash of purple and black.

* * *

To his credit, the attending nurse only shrieks a little as Meja jerks upward, gasping, her arms like rubber. The room, to her, is only half illuminated, the rest of it darkened as a stage might be. And the light above her head is blinding, intolerable, though its unpleasantness is outmatched by the feeling of fiery pain in nearly every part of her body.

“H-hi,” he stammers. “Miss Urdahl. I’ll, uh, go let the doctor know that you’re awake, okay?”

He leaves quickly.

Fear begins to creep into the pain. She’s in a hospital, and judging from the decor it’s the same hospital she spent ten years in when her mother was sick. Her most hated place on the planet Earth. The place that gave her a phobia of anything white and filled with doctors. Even the medical wing of the Observatory is borderline panic-inducing.

But the pain begins to creep up on the fear, overcoming it, turning it around, and the rest of the hospital room fades to black.

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

“Hey, look, we’d like to talk to you, if that’s all right,” the pretty redhead notes. She doesn’t bother with batting her eyelashes or being overly friendly. Meja feels better about that, and stops closing her door.

“What about?”

“I’m Pascha Ivanski, and this is Gisli Helgarson.” She gestures to the burly, frowning man standing at attention next to her. They’re both wearing nice clothes—clothes they don’t sell anywhere around where Meja lives. “We’re from Oslo.”

Meja half-smiles. “By proxy, I assume.” Pascha has a thick Russian accent, and from the muttering she heard earlier she’s guessing that Gisli is from Iceland.

“Well, yes. We’re following up on genetic lines for the university, for a history project, and we came across yours—we’d like to ask you a few questions about what you know of your ancestry, if that’s okay.”

She can’t help it; she involuntarily takes half a step back from the door. “I don’t know very much about that,” she lies.

“Anything would be useful.” Gisli blinks at her slowly. “Anything at all. Is there someone else we can ask?”

“No,” Meja admits. None of the townspeople know anything of importance, and they like to fill in the blanks with snide remarks. “I’m, uh… all that’s left.”

For a moment it feels like some rabid, angry animal inside her is trying to claw its own throat out, the same feeling she always gets when she talks about her family with strangers. Her momentary good cheer vanishes in a heartbeat. Leave me alone, she thinks, but doesn’t say.

“Just five minutes?” Pascha pulls the charm out now, smiling ear-to-ear. It just makes the rabid animal claw worse. “Not a second more.”

“Sorry, I’m kind of busy at the moment.” She forces a very unnatural smile onto her face. “Maybe later.”

Gisli puts a hand on his companion’s shoulder and nods at Meja. “Sure, sure. Thanks anyhow.”

He steers her away. Meja can hear them arguing quietly together, but shuts the door quickly. The animal starts to feel better.

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

She lies awake with the girl’s name on her lips, staring at—beyond—the ceiling. Honir lays against her side, the silvery lynx quiet and thoughtful. She hasn’t seen Inga in a year or so. Her mother, even after Meja had rescued the girl, had forbidden her from a friendship. But even so, sometimes there are notes left for her in the mailbox. Pieces of paper torn from used envelopes. Small snippets of the girl’s life—and always ending with, I wish mother would let us talk.

Inga is still alive, she reminds herself. It’s only in the dream that she’s dead.

* * *

It’s the view that makes everything worth it, at least until the sun sinks beyond the edges of the sky. The glistening towers, the giant focusing lenses, the bustling sounds of Asgardians going about their evening. Back on Midgard, sunsets were never this spectacular. Reds and pinks and oranges glint off metallic surfaces and make the ruling seat of Asgard look like a painting.

Her helm feels particularly heavy today, a gold thing once worn by Odin but now passed on to her—for ten years. A deal created to help the Asgardians with the empty ruling seat problem. Taking Thor’s place in Ragnarok hadn’t even been the start of her problems. Living through it had been something else entirely.

Honir nudges her hand with his great, striped head, the white tiger’s blue eyes fixed on hers.

“You really think I can make this work?” she asks him, dully. She’s the new boss of a lot of tricksters and chronic backstabbers. She doesn’t think highly of her own survival chances.

“You will,” Honir murmurs. “I’ll see to it.”

Meja rubs at her collar bone idly, still not used to his new appearance. But then, she should have expected him to change shape. Her soul had gone from human to Æsir in less than a year—and it had hurt like nothing she’d ever felt before. A burn, like magma at her very core, out to the very edges of her essence. Even if it hadn’t hurt, watching Honir go through it had been unbearable. But she hadn’t gotten a choice in the matter. Hel had made sure of that.

“Ten years. Ready, check, go.”

* * *

Her father’s head disintegrates with a wet sound, and everything inside of her screams and falls silent at once. Nothing slips past her lips aside from a nearly inaudible whimper, almost a whine—words that can’t find themselves.

But still, the troll looks up from his very dead previous problem and to the new problem at hand. The teenage girl doesn’t have much meat on her bones, but he doesn’t care. He’ll eat almost anything. He takes several crashing steps forward and raises his club.

Meja closes her eyes. She wants nothing more to do with any of this.

* * *

“Then you’ve never seen this girl before?”

Her suspect shakes his head; the movement is too fast, too nervous. “Never in my life, Inspector Urdahl.”

“That’s Chief Inspector Urdahl.” Meja swallows, her eyes narrowing. “Mister Wrolstad, I advise against lying to me. I happen to know for a fact that Inga is your daughter.”

Jorgun Wrolstad’s face dissolves into anguish, and then wrath. “If you know that, Inspector, you’ll also know that I haven’t seen her in ten years. Her mother won’t let me.”

“I do know that,” Meja agrees. “I’d be careful. Lie to my face once, and I won’t know whether you’re telling the truth about anything else.”

“I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

She gives a thin-lipped smile. Honir, sitting invisibly next to her, licks at her sleeve; his wolfish ears are trained on Wrolstad.

“We’ll see, Mister Wrolstad.”

(Source: runeskin.dreamwidth.org)

By the time she scrambled to the Thirsty Coyote, most of her endurance flown to the wind, Red was feeling the burn of repairing five broken bones and numerous bullet holes. They weren’t a problem—she was tough, if anything—but they were taking longer to heal. The weapons in question had probably been tempered with silver; Jogi seemed like that kind of psychopath.

Eastwind, in his old man guise, stared at her and then poured her a rum and coke without saying anything. She pulled herself onto a stool, grimacing as a bullet popped out of her collar bone. She could feel the bones meld back together, the dull and familiar flaring heat.

“Rough night,” Red sighed, gulping down some of her drink. “Has my mother been here?”

“Nope.” Eastwind looked her over thoughtfully. “Seekers?”

“Ex-Seeker. Very nasty piece of work called Sayed Jogi. Heard of him?”

“Yeah, him I’ve heard of.”

Red snorted, flexing her right hand; it was taking forever to mend. That was the nice part of having some fae blood, though. Eventually, it would mend.

“Bastard got to my object before I did—again. I have half a mind to put a bullet in his brain just for kicks. Humans. The audacity of them.”

Eastwind chuckled. “I’ve been saying that all of my life. You should find your mom, though. Get your next job sorted out. Jogi’ll keep—or someone else will kill him.”

(Source: velvetdemon.net)

“I don’t see why you’re worrying,” Red murmured, gritting her teeth as she re-located one of her fingers. Her guns lay on the bed, lamplight glinting off them, along with the rest of her ‘toys.’

Mme Voclaine gave her a look of sheer disbelief, tempered with exasperation.

“Okay, okay, so he beat me up a little.” She sighed. “I’m going to get that sonofabitch this time. You know me; I don’t admit defeat.”

“Sweetie, if you play your cards wrong, that human monster“—she barely choked out the words—“could kill you.”

Red, putting one of her guns into its holster, grinned at her mother. “He wishes. I got sloppy. That damned ex-Seeker hasn’t got a real chance.”

“Maybe we should withdraw—”

“No.”

Silence reigned for a long moment. Voclain stared at her daughter, the disbelief returning. Red shook her head slowly.

“Just… let me work, mother. Stop worrying.” She squinted. “Did something happen at the shop? Why are you so…”

“Nothing happened at the shop,” Voclain sighed. “Just… be careful. You’ve heard what he does to fae that get in his way.”

Red grinned, confidence oozing out of every pore. “Relax. I’m gonna put a hole in his shoulder, and his liver, and his head… and his left palm, just to make sure.”

She didn’t.

(Source: velvetdemon.net)