#Keltii what have you done

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Banner by @keltii-tea​

Chapter 26: A Lost Cause

Heisenberg's boots slammed into stone. The impact rang through him, echoing into the snowy darkness. He heard Mia's too-fast breathing, felt her warmth against him, her arms hooked around his neck, her face pressed to his scruffy cheek.

After a beat, her arms slid free, and she stood on her own, by his side in the darkness.

Around them spread the pit. They stood on a chunk of broken fortress, red brick seared black from the force of the bomb. Past its edge rang empty air, the depths of the crater. Where they stood, moonlight illuminated well enough to see, but in those depths there was nothing, no trace of light. Just the echoes of lycan snarls, the occasional clatter of falling stones, a deep, subsonic rumble that might have been rock shifting, might have been something else.

Water rushed close by, a gout pouring from a gap between two fallen pillars. It spackled Heisenberg's face with cold mist as he strode to the edge of the platform to shine his hip flashlight down into the dark.

It yawned below, endless and absolute. Mist and fog and a kind of grimy haze unfurled around him; each inhale stung with cold, and mold, and the smell of a place long-since removed from the sun. Usually, a big pit full of garbage was Heisenberg's idea of a perfect vacation. Less so right now. Chalk that one up to circumstance.

"I guess that's where we're headed," Mia muttered.

"Guess so."

She sniffed. "In sickness and in health, right?" she said, with a hiccuping little laugh. Then, in a kind of rush- "God, I miss him."

"Yeah?"

"Everything," she pressed. "Everything about him. You know- when I first met Ethan we were just a couple dumb college kids and I..."

Her laugh softened. "I thought he was unbelievably boring."

"Heh. No kidding."

"It was at this house party I didn't even want to be at, and he was in the corner with a red solo cup, and he was dancing to the music in the straightest way possible, I mean-" She demonstrated, holding herself stiffly while she bobbed her head and tapped her thigh in time. "But I didn't know anyone, and I ended up in the corner of shame with him."

"Let me guess. Love at first sight?"

"No!" she snorted. "It took like...three more accidental meetings before he awkwardly asked me to go get coffee, and he turned the brightest shade of red I've ever seen. And it was easy from there. Being with him. It was good. It was so, so good."

Her expression was lethal, like the sun was shining on her face. Hard not to notice her beauty, now, even through the hard days of grime and bruises and exhaustion.

"It crept up on me," she said. "Love. Little by little. That's how he was. You don't think about it, and then you realize what he's done. What he's been doing, all along. What he'd do for the people he cared about."

Her brief look of joy, lost in memories, faded.

"It was the big stuff I missed most, at first," she went on. "But now...it's the little stuff, really, you know? Redfield shuttled me from safe house to safe house after you took Rose, and I thought at first it would be a relief. Nothing to remind me of them, changing scenery, all that. But it's funny how losing someone works. You don't run away from it. The world remakes itself into the shape of that person."

She lifted her face, her profile limned with the red moonlight.

"He'd play piano, sometimes," she said. "Late at night. He always said he wasn't any good. But I'd stay up and listen without him knowing. I'd listen until he was done. Every time."

"He probably knew," Heisenberg said.

A faint smile touched Mia's face as her eyes turned, slowly, to rest on him. Heisenberg felt the weight of her gaze, its soft intensity, like she'd reached up to take his face in her hands.

"How long until dawn?" she asked.

"Hour, maybe."

"Then we're burning time." She cocked her rifle, checked its sights, gave a short nod. "Into the dark."

"And let's hope it doesn't fuck us."

The first few lycans jumped them as they skidded down the scree of broken masonry on the far side of the platform. Classic lycans, hairy wolf-men with makeshift weapons. Mia's rifle spat; Heisenberg crushed a couple skulls with his hammer. His Cadou wriggled inside him, sluggish as it struggled to metabolize the suppressant drug he'd been shot with. He kept his awareness engaged, but metal didn't sing; no hum or crackle of electricity. For the time being, he'd have to do this thing without the use of his power.

Fucking touche. Miranda had given him his powers, had twisted his body into a vessel for them. Typical that now he'd have to fight her without their help. He imagined her face, coldly beautiful. Her smile of calculated triumph.

Show me what you can do now, Little Karl.

Go on. I'm waiting.

One of the lycans lunged for him; he smashed it aside with particular force, splatting it against a block of cracked stone that still bore the paintings of dolorous, long-faced saints, rendered in faded blues and reds. Lots more red, now.

He twisted as gunfire cracked over his shoulder: Mia. The next lycan crumbled apart, its head and chest blown into chunks.

"I had it covered," Heisenberg drawled, shouldering his hammer as he flicked a fragment of crystal off his lapel.

"Uh-huh." Mia scanned the darkness, rifle trained outside their circle of light; howls echoed through the fog, but nothing leaped out at them immediately. "Anything here look familiar to you?"

"Nothing looks familiar to me, sweetheart, this place got put through a meat-grinder."

"That's not what I mean." She huffed a sigh. "I saw the explosion from the chopper. It...it went off in midair, not on the ground. The megamycete had lifted itself free of the cave system. If it blew aboveground, not below, the, uh- the-"

"Chunks?"

"...Sure. The chunks would have rained down on this place. Crushed it."

And Ethan below, Heisenberg thought. Mia must have come to the same conclusion, judging by the haunted look in her eyes.

"Your point?" Heisenberg prompted.

She gave her head a little, annoyed shake. "My point is that maybe there's something intact. Down below."

She pointed further into the pit. "Part of the old fortress, part of the old ceremony site...a cave system...I don't know."

"Could be."

Mia cocked her gun. The snap rang through the fog. "Let's find out."

The haunted look was gone as soon as it had come; now, Heisenberg saw the fever light of determination fill her gaze. That determination must have been what had allowed her to survive all these years, even with Miranda's ghost rattling around in her skull.

Had she known what it was at first? Or had she chalked it up to trauma, PTSD, what the fuck ever?

Of course, she was no stranger to voices in her head. She'd survived Dulvey, too. Three years under Eveline's control, three years of fighting the horrors inflicted on her by the child she'd helped mold into a monster. You had to emerge from that unfathomably strong, or completely insane. As Heisenberg followed her down the crumbling, makeshift pathway, spiraling deeper and deeper into the darkness, he wondered if she hadn't emerged as both.

More lycans. From all directions. They hit fast, hit strong. The smell of rot thickened in the air as Heisenberg and Mia descended, and between the bursts of claws and fangs and gunfire pound, Heisenberg caught sight of the various makeshift dwellings the lycans had fashioned from bits of the village, stacked stones, animal skins, antlers and gnawed bones. Even crude ornaments, dangling from entryways, crow feathers and pebbles, vertebrae and chunks of crystal.

What god did the lycans worship? Their memory of Miranda, and the Black God? Or some eldritch thing birthed from the dregs of their hive-mind, the kind of god only a feral predator could dream up?

Eyes glimmered from caves formed from collapsed pillars; one lycan, massive and musclebound, wore scraps of what looked like scavenged Soldat Panzer exoskeleton, a walking biomechanical wonder.

What an enterprising lad. Shame he had to die.

That was a group effort- Heisenberg swept forward and with a colossal swing of his hammer, smashed the front plate of its helmet off, exposing a scarred-up face twisted with rage. Mia sprang under his arm and delivered the coup de grace in the form of a bullet to the gob. As it slumped to the side, raining in shards into the darkness below, Mia paused, breathing hard, scanning their surroundings. Heisenberg did the same, but there was nothing. More lycan dens, more broken masonry, more blocks of cracked stone wreathed in mist.

A chorus of growls and snarls, the screech of claws in stone, scrabbled somewhere behind them. Mia pushed off; Heisenberg followed her. She was in charge, now, a woman on a mission. Her head down, she ducked under a gateway formed of blocks of fallen stone and into a narrow channel beyond, a ravine formed of rubble. Lycans advanced. She sprayed an arc of bullets, her lips drawn back from her teeth. When one collapsed at her feet, wounded, still crawling toward her, she drove her boot onto its head, crushing it to the dirt.

"Come on!" she yelled at Heisenberg, a few meters behind her, and headed into the fog again. "There has to be something- we just need to keep looking!"

"Mia," Heisenberg muttered.

"Don't you dare say my name like that," Mia snapped, glancing back at him. "He would do this for me. He...he already did this for me. I have to keep looking." "I know-"

"Then keep up!"

She rounded a corner and almost ran head-first into a knot of lycans. She stumbled back; her rifle came up, muzzle flash illuminating the fog in one, two, three bursts. Crystal shattered, bone reduced to hissing pulp under the anti-mutant rounds. Mia's scream filled the air as the lycans fell, as she demolished the next wave, and the next.

They were coming, and in force; Heisenberg glanced up at the ring of glimmering green eyes, the bared fangs, the rusty metal and pieces of broken antler clutched in clawed hands. With a little shake of his shoulders, he waded in. His hammer swung through the flashes of gunfire, through Mia's howl of rage as she fought them back, on and on until the air was as thick with gore as it was with fog, a bloody mist that clung in a pinkish sheen to Heisenberg's coat and dripped down from his hat brim.

The last of the lycans crumbled apart, ribs gaping to the sky. Mia stared at it, panting, eyes white-ringed and bright. She slumped against a block of ancient brick, closing her eyes.

"Mia," Heisenberg said, approaching her. He reached out for her arm. A gash had sliced through her sweater- a lycan's claw swipe- and bled freely down the thick material.

She rounded on him with a gasp, lifting her rifle. Its barrel knocked him in the middle of the chest; he didn't flinch.

"Do you understand?" Mia said. "I have to keep looking."

"I know."

"He...he's dead because...because I didn't tell him, because I...lured him there..." Her rifle barrel dipped. She shook her head back and forth, glazed and manic. "If...if I hadn't, he would still be alive. He would still be-"

"Eveline did that. Right? Not you."

A sob choked her. "You don't get it. It doesn't matter." She shoved back from him, stumbling through the rubble. "It doesn't matter. I-"

She drew a short breath. "I..."

She blinked.

"You what?" Heisenberg said.

"I recognize that," Mia said, staring over his shoulder.

Heisenberg turned. It reared through the devastation: part of a gateway, attached to a short, broken flight of steps. Heavy, blocky, chiseled from red-brown rock. The same bedrock the village had been built atop; the same stone he'd stared at for countless hours while Miranda indoctrinated him, or sliced into him, or rummaged around in his insides, trying to perfect him. He remembered the flicker of flame-shadows off its surface, the play of flashlight beams on its distant walls.

"Shit," Mia breathed.

She moved past Heisenberg and toward the gateway. It listed to one side, half-sunk into the earth, but it was still connected to something. Mia vaulted onto the steps and climbed up, pulling herself onto the lip of the gateway and balancing atop it to peer inside. Heisenberg followed, setting the head of his hammer against the frame, staring in after her.

Beyond-

A narrow cleft of darkness breathed frigid air across them.

"This was the entrance to the lab," Mia murmured. "I remember from when she brought me here. I remember thinking...it looked beautiful. Like an ancient temple. Something from a dream..."

"Yeah, well, bet she broke you of that opinion real fuckin' fast."

Mia sniffed, scrubbing her bloodied palm over her face. Heisenberg could hear her heartbeat, fast as a hare in a trap's. He knew what she was thinking, as much as if they shared a hive mind themselves. Miranda's lab had been built right below the ceremony site. The caves, too. The hallowed cathedral in the earth, the inner sanctum of the Black God.

Ethan had died right above the caves, and if they were still, in some way, intact, and the whole place had fallen in...

Well.

Mia was silent. No big surprise. Few words sufficed when staring down at the tomb of a loved one.

Heisenberg glanced at her.

"You gonna stand there all night?" he said.

She gave a small shudder, as if bracing herself, then shook her head. "No." And without another pause, she stepped over the edge and dropped into the darkness below.

Heisenberg was right behind her, clambering down the three-meter incline and into the passageway beyond. The cavern stretched beyond, a hallway chiseled of that same bedrock stone, torch brackets set into the walls, the floor scattered with chips of stone and a decade's worth of dust. Great cracks seamed the walls, but the place was intact, relatively speaking, the entire hallway tilted downward at a sharp angle.

In the explosion the entire cavern system must have just fallen into the earth, the tons of rock above it burying, yet also preserving, it. Like a mausoleum. As Heisenberg took a deep breath of the still, damp air, he smelled a familiar trace of incense, rich spices and musk winding its way deep into his skull, illuminating the century of memories locked within.

How many times had he walked this hallway? How many times had he strode between enshrined saints, hammer dripping with their devotees' blood? A traitor in their midst, an impostor saint, a false prophet's mongrel. They stared down at him now, statues of long-dead holy men anointed with dust, with the crystallized remains of their dead god.

He thought of Ouroboros' files on him, the rote, dry facts of his unnatural life that Mia had offered to him, and that he had refused. If the devout were right, these saints had seen those years, too, had whispered the litany of his life to the Black God itself, so it might dream of him forever. Did they remember him now, all the things he'd done, who he truly was, even if he didn't?

Didn't matter. Fuck them. Their god had demanded death, and if Heisenberg knew one thing, it was that everyone got what was coming round to them.

Mia's breathing quickened as the caves sloped down, and down, as they climbed over a stream gushing from a crack in the cave wall, as her boots crunched on broken glass, and crystal, and the remnants of a shattered gilt icon.

And when Heisenberg's flashlight beam struck the bolt-studded wood of a door, her gasp was painful, a blade-edge rasp on the edge of a sob.

It was warped in the broken frame, but as Heisenberg and Mia alike set their weight against it, it juddered open, spilling a cloud of dust and light into the broken space beyond.

Miranda's lab, Heisenberg thought.

The remains of her lab, anyway, the vaulted chambers where she'd conducted her personal experiments well-away from the eyes of the villagers. Couldn't have them believing she was capable of anything less than sorcery, after all. A column of ruddy moonlight filtered down from a rift in the cavern roof somewhere high above, filling the ruins with a bloody pall. A shelf of shattered specimen jars, each filled with a lump of crystal that had once been a Cadou, leaned drunkenly against a collapsed heap of brick wall. Shreds of decomposed papers and files were scattered like leaves; Heisenberg scuffed aside a damp-spotted photograph of Moreau without his overcoat. Crushed tables, and broken glass, and cell bars bent and warped from the bomb's heat. Everywhere, calcified roots burst from walls and floor, crushing the lab into a nearly-unrecognizable mess.

Above all loomed the broken remains of a statue. One of the Four Kings that had once ringed the ceremony site. His melancholy face was blackened on one side, a point of his crown snapped off at the root.

This was the ceremony site, Heisenberg realized, collapsed inward, crushed into this cavern space. He sent his awareness, all his enhanced senses, into the darkness. Searching for a trace, a flicker of hibernating essence, of a mutant in stasis.

Silence.

"Ethan?" Mia called. She pushed forward, stumbling over the calcified roots. "Ethan? Are you there?"

She bent and began to dig through the rubble with her bare hands. Stone clattered; dust billowed, thick and choking. "He's...he's got to be here...could he have regenerated? Like the others? Ethan!"

Her voice rang over the distant rush of water, the sound of crumbling stone, echoing from deeper inside the ruins. Heisenberg picked his way after her as she dug her way on, as she clawed at the broken masonry, her eyes wild, her entire body shaking.

"I know he's here," she said. "Heisenberg, you've got to...you've..." She took a sharp breath, jagged and choked. "He'll be so glad to see you. You saved Rose, after all- you're gonna..."

She cut off as she bent to drag aside a slab of flagstone floor. "We're all going to be a family again. Just like I planned. You'll see. You'll see..."

She trailed off. The echoes of her voice rang away and away, fading into dusty silence. Heisenberg caught up to her, watching the back of her head, the rise and fall of her shoulders.

Before her, the column of moonlight glimmered off milky crystal.

Ethan's body lay at her feet.

He was broken. One arm missing, shattered off at the shoulder. His face had cracked down the middle, his single remaining eye closed. He knelt there, head lowered, his body half-buried, his hand clasped to his heart.

The crystal there had warped in strange, intricate patterns. In this light, they almost looked like roses.

Mia made a small sound. She edged forward, one step, another.

"Is he..." she whispered. "Is...is there..."

"No, Mia," Heisenberg said. Weary, weary. "There's...nothing. Nothing left. He's gone."

She reached out with a trembling hand. "It's okay, baby." She smoothed it over his cheek, thumb tracing his lips. "It's okay. I found you, didn't I?"

All at once, she fell to her knees, holding his face, holding him. Her shoulders curled in; she shook under the weight of her tears. Terrible, wracking, like they'd been torn from deep inside her. She buried her face in the broken crook of Ethan's neck and sobbed, her hands in white-knuckled fists, clinging onto his body as if that would prove enough to bring him back.

***

Mia's sobs wound down into silence, and the hush crept in. Still she held him. Heisenberg leaned on his hammer, eyes lowered, watching the dust dance in the moonlight.

Saints and gods, sacred words whispered in the dark. There was nothing holy here anymore. Nothing sacred. All of it had died with Ethan, with his last kiss pressed to little Rose's head. All of it was gone with him.

At last, Mia let Ethan's body go. She crawled away, into a corner of the rubble, where she sat, slumped over her knees, staring into nothingness.

"I think part of me always knew," she said after a while. "All this time. All these wasted years." She gave her head a little shake. "I was so stupid to think I could save him. To think I could make this all better, make all this go away. I already got my chance for that."

Heisenberg made himself speak. "Yeah, you did."

She closed her eyes, bowing her head.

"Doesn't mean he loved you any less." Heisenberg approached her. "Doesn't mean you get to give up now."

She laughed, emotionless. "Too late."

"No. No." He swooped to one knee at her side, grabbing her face in his hand. He turned her head, away from Ethan's body, toward him. "No, Mia. You don't get to. Because if you do then so do I. You understand?"

He gave her a shake. He felt her tremble under his glove, her face so close to his he could see the tears clinging to her lashes, the blood spackling her mouth.

"You don't give up, Mia," he said. He ran his thumb over her lips, taking the bloodstains with it. "I'm not gonna let you."

Slowly, he released her face. His fingertips left red welts against her skin. "We might have failed Ethan," he said. "But Rose is still out there. And we. Won't. Fail. Her."

She blinked. A flutter of lashes. Then something seemed to leave her. Mia's head slumped forward, against his chest, one hand curling into his shirt, pulling herself closer, against him. The other brushed the scar crossing his throat, the scruff at his jaw, a lock of dirty gray hair.

Heisenberg hesitated. She was so warm against him. He felt the pressure of her breathing on his skin. The gentle pulse of her heartbeat.

Another long moment of silence, of dust and ruin around them. Just two horrible people, kneeling together in the dark.

Then he lifted his hand and ran it, slowly, over her hair. It was just as filthy as his. Something kind of sweet about that.

"I think I already failed her enough," Mia murmured, as he stroked her head. "Ethan...Ethan would want me to live. To keep fighting."

"Yeah, probably."

"Are you gonna be any more comforting than that?"

"Sweetheart. We've spent the past few days in each other's fine company. Surely you know better by now."

"Right, right, fine."

"Besides. We still have enemies, even once the other Lords deal with Ouroboros," Heisenberg went on. A snarl entered his voice. "Don't you want the chance to destroy that bitch Miranda for good after what she did to you?"

"You're such a bad influence," Mia told him. "Ruining all my aspirations toward achieving a moral high ground."

"Cool your jets, Winters. You managed that all by yourself." He pressed his forehead to hers for a moment, then pulled her to her feet. "Any bright ideas on how we can deal with that big, bad artillery unit topside?"

A dark light entered Mia's eyes. "I'm sure I can think of something."

She pulled from his hands and went to Ethan's remains, kneeling once again at his side. The moonlight filled its facets, made it seem to glow softly from within. Mia brushed her hand over his crystallized hair, as if to straighten it. She clasped his hand, stroking her thumb over the ridge of his knuckles.

"Goodbye, my love," she whispered to him, and leaned forward, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "I promise I'll come back for you."

***

Another burst of flames lit the sky as Heisenberg and Mia emerged from the crater depths. Even down here, the air smelled like ashes, cutting over even the overwhelming reek of lycan and rotting flesh.

"What's your power situation?" Mia asked.

Heisenberg splayed a hand, then shrugged, the movement accentuated by the hammer propped on his shoulder. "Still suffering from projectile dysfunction."

"Of course you are. Ugh..." She was checking over her weapons, taking stock. "Shit. I'm almost out of ammo."

"Then make what you've got count."

She glanced up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, dark circles so pronounced her face had a faintly cadaverous appearance, a new sharpness. Something inside her had set, and hardened. He heard it in her voice, too. "If I can get to that lab with the lycans, there's gonna be an antidote. It should get your Cadou metabolizing fast enough to work through the suppressant."

"Uh-huh." He'd barely heard her after she said the words lab with the lycans. "Now there's an idea."

"I'm almost afraid to ask."

"Are you, though?" He grinned at her. "I'll explain on the climb up."

Another artillery shot blasted the skies as they reached the lip of the crater, Mia sporting a couple new scratches courtesy of the lycans. If she was in pain, she didn't show it. She scrambled to a rock shelf behind a copse of trees and crouched down, rifle at the ready like some kind of black ops guy from one of the shitty action movies Heisenberg had binged with Rose.

He ambled behind her, squinting over his glasses at the camp. With Regan and company gone, the amount of soldiers was cut down significantly. Still, he could see the black-armored figures ringing the artillery, moving in and out of the prefabs, keeping the lycans back from the fence as, above, the Rose monster dived and strafed through the clouds, the pressure of its wingbeats driving spikes of pain through his head.

Well, fuck me, he thought, a little impressed despite himself. Somehow, the artillery fire was keeping her back.

And maybe something else was, too.

Keep fighting, kid. I'm coming for you. I told you I would, didn't I?

Still, Ouroboros knew what they were doing when it came to holding off giant flying bioweapons. And he had little doubt Regan had left orders to shoot them both in the head if they showed their faces in camp without Ethan in tow. And he wasn't about to suggest Mia bring his corpse back up to use as protective coloration.

Well. He might have. Her face if he did would be something to behold. But right now, it would only waste time.

"There," Mia whispered, pointing. One of the lycans had wriggled partway through a gnawed gap in the fence; a bullet drove it back, and it hightailed, but the loose scrap of fence lingered. "Through there, and to the lab."

"After you."

Mia gave herself a little nod- then darted. She streaked through the shadows, little more than a flicker of movement, a scatter of snow, ducking and rolling through the fence before the artillery unit's searchlight swept the area. Heisenberg shook his head in approval and followed, somewhat less gracefully, shoving his shoulders through the fence and into the camp in a clatter of metal. Fuck this, he thought, grinding his teeth. The second he got his powers back, he was taking this whole goddamn camp and crushing it like a car compacter.

Pressing into the shadows cast by an old house, he and Mia watched the flurry of movement in camp. Soldiers trooped by; a temporary munitions stand had been set up alongside the Maiden of War, gunmetal and carbon-fiber at odds with the crystal growths and painted wood surrounding them. The heat from the artillery unit shimmered in the air, melting the snow into a glassy sheen over the ground below.

Heisenberg eyed the artillery, assessing it with a flick of his eyes. Simple enough. A lot like the ones he'd spent decades playing with back at his factory, mounting them on anything stout enough to hold them purely for the fun of seeing how the vehicle in question held up under fire. Pop a couple wires here and there, and the whole weapon would be dead in the water.

First things first. He jerked his head toward the lab with brows raised.

"Hang on," Mia whispered. She stared toward the group of Moreau-aficionados still huddled on one side of the square. They had all joined hands and were singing in old-tongue, some ancient prayer to the Black God for protection. "We need to get them out."

"Seriously?"

"Yes!" she hissed. "Moral high ground, remember? Shut up and follow me."

They ducked through the ruined house itself and came up behind the prisoners. A punch from Heisenberg launched their guard straight into unconsciousness; he yanked him backward into the house, leaving him in a heap on the kitchen floor.

The girl with the shaved head gasped as Mia shook her shoulder, then blinked, her pale eyes widening so far they looked as if a good slap might knock them right out of her head.

She flung herself to her hands and knees as best she could in her shackles. "Lord Heisen-"

"Shut it," Heisenberg growled. "And listen."

"We're gonna get you out of here. This place is about to turn into a shitshow," Mia said. "You need to get as far away as you can before-"

"-Before I release all the lycans in that lab over there on the poor, unsuspecting fools you see before you," Heisenberg cut in.

The girl's mouth opened in a perfect O. "The lycans?" she echoed.

"That's what I said. Now how do these cuffs-"

The girl babbled over him. "Lord...Lord Moreau prophesied this. He in his infinite wisdom...he saw that this day would pass, that there would come a time when I, and his other loyal followers, would need to walk through the ranks of the monster wolves themselves, and emerge unscathed from the other side!"

She launched into rummaging through the mess of amulets and charms she wore slung about her neck, her skinny fingers trembling. At last she came up with a phial attached to a long piece of cord. It was made of old, yellowed glass, sealed with a gob of wax. Inside swirled a thick black substance.

"This holy relic will protect us against the lycans," the girl said.

"What is that?" Mia squinted at the stuff.

But Heisenberg grinned, with as many teeth as a lycan itself.

"It's spores," he said. "From the Black God. Take too long to get into the science, but this shit's what the megamycete seeded its hosts with to maintain control, stop them from slaughtering one another. Anything with this stuff on them will read as one of the lycans. They'll smell it on us and ignore us."

He chuckled. "Well, well. Moreau, you clever bastard. There's hope for you yet."

"It won't last long, so you must hurry," the girl said. She had already popped the wax and was busy smearing the other cultists with the black spores.

"Nag, nag, nag, buttercup," Heisenberg said. The girl pressed the vial into his hand, holding on for a moment. He tugged his hand away before she might start kissing it or whatever. "Get ready to run along to the reservoir. Your- uh, Lord Moreau's down there."

Elation lit the girl's eyes. "Black God bless you, Lord Heisenberg."

He didn't bother pointing out the Black God would probably rather eat him than bless him. He rubbed a streak of spores on his wrist, then did the same for Mia.

The monster strafed by; it swept through the clouds, the backdraft from its wings blasting through the camp. The timbre of its roars had changed- they now were an enraged, thunderous bellow, each strafe growing lower, lower, shaking the ground like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

Was Miranda winning?

Hang on, Rose.

Shouts filled the air as Heisenberg and Mia burst from the ruined house, Mia peppering the snow with suppressing fire, keeping back the few soldiers who weren't focused on the black-feathered monstrosity circling ever-closer. One of its tentacles lashed down, tearing a gash from the roof of a dilapidated house, then furling back into the clouds. Heisenberg's hammer cracked skulls, shattered firing hands, sent the door guard sprawling aside as they ducked into the lab.

The sterile air hit him like a punch to the teeth, light burning his eyes. The researchers within all sprang to their feet, scrabbling for the peashooters at their belts. Mia stuck her rifle under the first guy's chin.

"Get out of here," she growled.

The gun would have been enough, Heisenberg figured. But Mia's whole look- ragged and bruised and splattered with lycan gore- sure as hell didn't hurt. The scientists scattered. Mia pushed a rolling chair aside and tapped at a computer, its pale light illuminating the lines on her face. Behind them, the rows of lycans clawed at their cages, desperate to get out.

"You got the accelerant?" Heisenberg said.

Her eyes flickered back and forth. "I...I don't see it-"

Shouts echoed outside the lab. Heisenberg leaned alongside Mia. "Come on, it's gotta be there somewhere-"

"I-"

Gunfire pounded the air. Heisenberg ducked over Mia, bringing them both down against the console as the air filled with sparks and the rattle of bullets against metal; the lab door hung crooked, half-torn-away by gunfire. They were coming in.

Heisenberg saw it, now. There was no time. They'd run out of options.

All except one.

Fuck it, he decided. "Mia."

"What?"

"Release the lycans. Then get to the big gun."

"Huh?"

"I'm going after Rose. Fend her off with the artillery so I can draw her away."

"Without your power?"

"I don't need my power for this. I know Rose. And Miranda." He pressed his finger to his temple. "I can fuck with her head just like she fucked with mine. Now you get your ass out the door and into that gun or we're all screwed."

She rounded on him, the small of her back pressed to the console. For a moment he thought she would protest. For a moment he thought she'd try to stop him, spare him, like she'd fought so hard to spare Ethan. Her face was hard, the look in her eyes bright enough to burn him alive.

He heard the hiss of her breathing through her parted lips, made out the tremble of her lashes as her eyes held his.

Slowly, Mia slipped his glasses off his nose. She lifted her face, her knuckles to his chest as she gripped his shirt in both hands, as she pulled him down, as her mouth canted, desperate, devastating, to his.

A hesitation-

A brush of her mouth, a lilt of her lips over his-

And then she was kissing him, and her fingers were tangled in his hair; his hands found Mia's face, her waist, the soft press of her hips into his. Her lips were chapped, were bitter with blood. For a moment he was lost, adrift, nothing in the world but the feeling of her mouth on his, of her grip on him, her knuckles pressed hard to his chest, just over his living, beating heart.

Her face fell from his, her mouth from his, her face brushing his cheek with a rasp of scruff to skin. The cold twined between them again. Heisenberg's heart pounded, his Cadou pulsing in time; pressed to him the way she was, Mia probably felt that as much as she felt everything else. He didn't care. He traced her cheek with his thumb, not wanting to pull away, not wanting to let her go.

"We can still cut and run," he murmured. He cocked an eyebrow. "Last chance."

Mia snorted. She nudged her forehead to his, kissed the delicate skin just under his jaw. All too soon, she pulled back.

"Go," she told him. She returned his shades to his face. "Find Rose. Get her back."

She stood from him, gripping the cage control on the console- a big, red handle surrounded by warning signs. "For Ethan."

Heisenberg gave her a single nod, his hat brim dipping. "See you around," he said. "Winters."

Her small returning smile would stick with him a long, long time. "You, too," she told him. "Karl."

He swung his hammer back onto his shoulder with a clang.

Mia turned the handle.

With the screech of hinges, every cage in the lab swung open at once. The lycans lunged out, a seething tide of matted gray hair and savage, starving eyes, claws and twisted muscle and teeth asnarl. Moreau's spores did the trick- none of them paid any attention to Heisenberg or Mia. As the creatures leaped for the exits, tearing great holes in the prefab walls with tooth and nail, as they hit the Ouroboros soldiers outside hard and fast as a lightning strike, Heisenberg strode out after them, rummaging in his coat for a cigar.

Just like old times, he thought. Practically nostalgic.

By the time he ducked back into the camp, it was in chaos. Gunfire lit the skies, muffled under screams, snarls, feral howls as the lycans clambered atop buildings and vehicles, as they took down commandos three to one. A couple of the beasts tore through the fence, collapsing it under their weight. More lycans surged in from outside, tangling and tumbling over one another in their greed to get in at the fresh meat.

The screams began to die, began to be replaced with the sound of tearing flesh, of bones snapping and crackling from their joints.

Heisenberg lit the cigar with what appeared to be the last of his matches as he left the camp, as he ascended the rise beyond. If he was gonna die today, might as well do so feeling like himself. The cigar tasted a little stale, a little moldy, but it was better than nothing.

Besides. A good Cuban was a good Cuban, and- even better- it looked like it was gonna be a nice morning.

At the edge of the horizon, past the mountains, a faint trace of gold lit the blizzard. Dawn. It illuminated the monster, illuminated the impossible span of its eight wings, the rain of mold sheeting down from them as the artillery fire ceased- gunner dead or tossed out on their ass, courtesy of Mia. As the monster wheeled round, coming back in his direction.

Heisenberg took a deep drag off his cigar, let the smoke twine through his lungs- one last time, heh- then flicked it to the snow and crushed it under his boot.

He lifted his arms to the monster.

"Miranda!" he yelled. "Remember me?"

And in a rush of darkness, the beast that was Miranda, that was Rose, fell from the skies, wings spread, talons open and aimed straight for him.

[a-girl-of-few-words]

My first Subnautica fic!!! Inspired by @keltii-tea 's Baby Al-An AU. Enjoy! <3

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by @keltii-tea

Chapter 28: Epilogue

"Hey. Boss."

Chris Redfield looked up, his mug of green tea half-raised to his mouth. Tundra- Emily- stood in his office doorway, her forearm braced against the frame. Her dark eyes flicked up and down, taking in Chris's hunched position over the desk, his tea, the thin laptop he'd been staring at with brow furrowed, the stacks of papers heaped all over the desk, and the shelves, and the floor.

"Am I interrupting something?" she said, after a beat.

"Someone's always interrupting something," Chris said.

"Something important, though?"

Chris's mouth quirked in a smile. "What have you got for me?"

"All business, Chris." She stepped into his office and immediately crossed to the window to pull open the blinds. Chris squinted in the wash of gray sunlight, weak and rain-filled though it was. "Jesus, boss, this plant is barely clinging to life."

She'd turned toward the struggling money tree set atop an overflowing filing cabinet in the corner of the room, giving its dry leaves a flick.

Chris groaned, finally tearing his eyes away from the laptop in front of him. "Take it if you want. There's not really room for it in here."

"Nor water?"

"No water. Only caffeinated beverages and protein shakes."

"You need a life."

"Find me the time, and I'll get one. Come on." He beckoned to her. "Show me what you brought."

Emily kicked the door shut with her boot heel, cutting the sounds of the BSAA European HQ down to a murmur. The huge glass-and-steel edifice was uncomfortably modern, and made Chris feel like he was in some kind of biohazard research facility, or, God forbid, an Umbrella lab. But he'd got used to it, like he'd got used to a lot of things. He had to.

The work wasn't over yet.

Six months had passed since the events of the village. The second events, specifically, and one had to be specific when dealing with the BSAA bureaucracy. Chris longed to get back out in the field, dispense with this endless paperwork, but it was necessary for this latest project, this latest mission. Its parameters were simple:

Locate Rosemary Winters, the second host of the Romanian megamycete.

Easier said than done. Once the dust settled and the sphere of impenetrable mold-roots Rose had summoned around herself and the other Lords collapsed, it was empty.

Not surprising. She had found her family. She probably wanted more than anything to be alone with them. Time would tell whether that was a good thing- or an apocalyptically terrible one. Still, Chris reasoned, she'd been able to keep Heisenberg in check, albeit by a thread. As for the others...well. At least she wasn't Miranda.

The BSAA was there within a few hours, called in by Hound Wolf Squad to evacuate the townsfolk from the neighboring valley. They swept the area, the destroyed village, the great pit his bomb had blasted into the landscape. Chris hadn't seen Mia Winters amongst the Lords. Most likely she was dead, murdered by Heisenberg or one of the others in retaliation for her crimes against them. Or, knowing them, just for fun.

That was probably the tidiest solution, but Chris sure as hell hoped it wasn't how it had gone down with her. Mia had done terrible things over the course of her involvement with bioterrorism, and not to mention withholding Ethan's death and resurrection from him, but she'd still been his friend. They'd shared experiences. They'd shared grief. And in the end, all she'd wanted was to get Ethan back and maybe-

Maybe-

Begin to make things right.

And had she? Chris commandeered Hound Wolf Squad as BSAA choppers circled overhead, had searched the village ruins and delved down into the pit, lycan activity at a low thanks to the oncoming day. Ethan's remains would be down there, if they were anywhere, and he searched the crater all day, through the evening, past moonrise, into the beginnings of another night.

Nothing was there.

If Ethan's body had somehow survived the blast, if it had somehow lingered in some extant form, it- and he- was now long gone.

***

Emily tugged a chair over and sank into it, leafing through the thick file in her hands. It was bursting at the seams with documents, smaller folders, photographs and faxes and print-outs. All the compiled evidence from their operatives also on the mission, as well as documents sent from other, smaller BSAA hubs.

"Where shall I start..." Emily's red brows shot skyward. "Aha. Here's a good one. Okay, get this. In the underground alternative and industrial music scene of Berlin, Germany, a woman reports having seen a band play with- and I quote- 'supernatural skill and mesmerizing sexuality'. She goes on to describe the lead singer, bassist, and drummer: a very tall woman, a young blonde, and a man covered in scars who reportedly made the entire sound system levitate, much to the delight of the audience. And here's the kicker: this band's name? Black God Death Cult."

"False lead."

"Huh? Really?"

"Claire's seen them. Multiple times. They're clear."

"Oh. Uh, okay, then, still on the subject of music-" She ruffled some papers. "How about this. A black metal band in Iceland called Gear Torture whose aesthetic revolves around rust, decay, horror imagery-"

"Nah."

"What about Iron Stallion Sixty-"

"Em, I don't think the Four Lords are going undercover as a metal band," Chris interrupted.

"Iron Stallion Sixty-Nine isn't metal, Chris," Tundra said dryly.

"Please move on."

"You sure you don't want to hear about-" Her voice dropped into crime-show-announcer tones. "-the Monster Catfish of Lake Baikal, Captured on Video? Could be the fish-man. There's a YouTube link."

"No."

"Right. So here's an interesting one. An entire convent of nuns in Samokov, Bulgaria described to one of our operatives their strange and entrancing visions of dead relatives that plagued them for hours before dissipating. Their water supply tested clear, as did their food, but a peculiar organic particulate lingering in the air raised questions with the investigation team whether young Lady Beneviento had come to call."

"A convent of nuns."

"That's what this says."

"Had a bunch of visions."

"Correct."

Chris leaned back in his too-small chair, rubbing his hand down his face. God, he was tired, and the green tea wasn't doing shit to change that. Maybe he should swap back to coffee. Maybe he should go have a cigarette. "Maybe they should call an exorcist."

"Boss, are you taking this seriously?"

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Em." He let out his breath and straightened up, reaching for his now-lukewarm tea. "Keep going."

She watched him through her lowered lashes, fox-like eyes sharp as ever. "Do you even want to find her?" she asked, quietly.

Chris met her gaze. The silence between them lingered. He could hear the rain beating against the window, the traffic twenty stories below, the hum of the building around them, the conversation in the hall that grew louder and faded as it passed his door. This place, this world. All the people in it, alive and breathing because so many like Emily and the rest of Hound Wolf Squad- like him- like Piers, and Ethan, and all the others who had given their lives- had sacrificed so much to keep the monsters back. To keep them from the door. To decide, sometimes in extremis, where the line must be drawn. How far he had to go to keep the darkness at bay.

And six months ago, whether he liked it or not, he'd crossed that line. Rose had become...he didn't know what. A new Miranda? He hoped not. A new host for the megamycete was his official take, but he knew it was more than that. The megamycete...the Black God...was more than that. Archival memory, spanning thousands of years. Power he could scarcely fathom. Power that organizations like Umbrella, like the Connections, like Ouroboros, for all their dreams of conquest and grandeur, could only scratch the surface of.

Sparrows, thinking because they felt the sunlight on their wings, they knew the true heat of the sun.

Rosemary had made her decision. She had stood with the other mutants, open to his fire. He should have taken her down. He could have. Cult leader or not, she was flesh and blood. But he hadn't. He'd lowered his rifle.

He'd let her go.

And even now, he couldn't be sorry about that. He thought of Heisenberg, of all people, and what must have transpired in the days after the village's original destruction to make him into what he had become. A far cry from the great Lord who'd served Miranda, that was for damn sure. When you can't bend, you break. And he couldn't deny Heisenberg and Rose were survivors.

And, maybe, though it chafed to admit it, though it went against everything he'd fought for all these years-

They were people, too.

Time would tell if they became decent ones.

So he looked at Emily and shrugged. "'Course I do," he told her. "Any more cryptids in that file of yours?"

"Nah. That's it for now. I'll come back when there's more."

"I'll take a look. Make sure Black God Death Cult isn't a front for Karl Heisenberg's newest cyborg army scheme after all."

"Sure thing, boss." She tossed the file onto his desk. It landed with a weighty smack. "Hey. Come to dinner this Friday? My wife's making that one stir fry thing you like."

"If I can get out-"

"Come on, Chris."

He smiled again. "Okay, Em. See you later."

She left with the money tree. The door clicked shut. Chris stared at the file for a couple seconds, then reached out for it.

Something was sticking from the papers within- a corner of stiff cardstock. Chris frowned and tugged it forth. A postcard. A little dented, a little battered. The front showed a generic seaside scene. The back-

He read it once, twice, without comprehension. Then it struck him. A rush of cold and hot, crackling through his nerves. He didn't move from his place at the desk, his fingers locked around the postcard with its single message, written in bubbly letters.

Wish you were here.

His head jerked up as the door to his office opened again and Emily stuck her head through. "Sorry, boss," she said, a little breathless. "You got a visitor."

"...Who is it?"

"You'd...you'd better come and see."

The tension radiating from the waiting room was thick in the air, even before Chris and Emily strode in, Em snapping effortlessly into Tundra-mode, her hand resting lightly on her holstered sidearm. They made it down the stairs and into the waiting room, as modern as the rest of the building, its glass exterior wall cutting out in sharp silhouette the half-dozen plainclothes operatives with pistols pointed at the solitary figure between them. The receptionist had her hand on a panic button; relief filled her eyes when Chris and Emily entered the room and stopped outside the circle of BSAA ops.

"What's going on here?" Chris said.

"Sir." One of the operatives nodded at the stranger, who wore a hooded jacket, a large, heavy-looking duffel bag open and on the floor at their feet. Their hands were raised, their head down. "She just came in. Asked to see you. Then showed what was in the bag."

Chris kept his eyes on the stranger. He couldn't see her face- just a glimpse of chin and a couple strands of gray-brown hair. His hands lifted, palms out, he stepped past the gun barrels. The stranger didn't move as he bent, as he moved aside the open zipper of the bag.

The light gleamed off milky crystal. A collection of broken limbs. And a familiar face.

A smile touched Chris's mouth.

"Thought you were dead, Mia," he said.

Mia Winters pulled back her hood. She looked about as tired as he felt, dark circles stamped under her eyes, her brows furrowed together. But he saw hope in her gaze, and in her voice when she spoke, vivid and undeniable.

"Not yet," she said. "And...I'm hoping...that's two of us." She glanced around at the other operatives, then back to Chris. "I heard you have access to something miraculous. You call it the MARS, right? A mold recombination system?"

She paused, and there was something brittle in the silence, a yearning so strong it seemed to shimmer from her, from every tense movement. Her lips fluttered; she licked them, then took a short breath to speak again.

"A means of resurrection?" she asked.

Chris should have ordered her immediate arrest. Should have ordered Ethan's remains whisked away, stored in containment somewhere until a thousand and a half tests could be run on the calcified biomatter.

Could have, should have, would have.

This time, for the first time in nearly sixteen years, his full smile felt real.

"I think," he told Mia, holding out his hand for hers, "we can talk."

***

Sunlight, fading.

A brush of warmth on her skin, just as fast stolen by the wind.

Another day, ending.

"Eyes on the road, kid."

"I know." Rose opened her eyes, focusing again on the long, curving single-track road ahead of the range rover wheels. The vehicle had once been painted green; now it was more rust than paint, the entire body rattling ominously each time she accelerated, but Heisenberg had souped up the engine to breathtaking levels. Now, it ran like a luxury automobile, albeit with more glowing exhaust ports and clouds of black smoke than most.

Rippling fields of grass spread to either side, golden in the fading, liquid light of afternoon. Cloud-shadows moved over the expanse of moorland like great beasts just beneath the surface of still water, the land itself flowing like the sea until it broke off, suddenly, and plunged to the waves themselves, the world ending in favor of the water.

Here and there, patches of purple heather or jutting rock formations broke the expanse of green-gray and blue-green and peat-brown, but the splendor of this place was in the sky, unbroken by tree or building or mountain, echoing on and on forever.

Rose had never visited the Highlands during her and Heisenberg's brief stint in Glasgow; neither had he, and, glancing sideways at him in the passenger seat, Rose could see the way he drank it in with his eyes, even behind his round shades. Every new place must still seem like a wonder to him; two decades wasn't so long to be out, not in comparison to the long life he'd led before. He did a pretty good job covering up his true feelings with brash remarks and cocky bravado, but in the end, he did have a heart.

Rose knew. She'd literally seen it.

He wasn't driving. He was forbidden to after they'd been pulled over eight times in England and southern Scotland for driving all over the center line and yelling threats at the other drivers that included suggestions he'd remove their limbs and sew them on backwards, a feat which, Rose also knew, Heisenberg was fully capable of. They'd had a drawn-out argument which ended in Rose stealing his glasses and hiding them until he one- bought her a coffee and two- gave her sole driving privileges. Though, Rose reasoned, if he really, really wanted to, nothing was stopping him from taking control of the entire metal body of the car and doing something, uh, uncool.

Now, silence had fallen, save for the sound of the tires on the road, the low, hazy music on the radio, and the wind whistling through the cracked window. A new place. Each hill, each dip in the land, each ancient stone tower standing sentinel against the sky, each meter of road racing beneath them, each was new.

They were out.

They were free.

All of them. Even Moreau. They had retreated from the carnage of the village after Rose's dramatic little declaration to Chris, and Moreau had insisted, with his newfound confidence, the Lords go and check on his followers down by the reservoir.

They were there, all right, the group of robed cultists shivering in the frigid dawn, bare feet blue in the snow. They were used to castle life, after all. But Moppet bounded toward him with a squeal of delight and threw herself into Moreau's arms, raining kisses down on his face and slimy lips while Moreau held her.

"Your holy relic saved us, Lord Moreau!" Moppet said, between kisses. "The phial you gave me so long ago? It spared all of us from the wolves!"

"Thank goodness," Moreau mumbled. "Thank goodness. If...if I had lost you...if I had lost you for good..."

His eyes were squeezed shut, the contentment on his face undeniable. Rose thought of the glimpse she'd seen of him before, the earnest love on his face as he'd spoken to Miranda and Eva. The face might look a little different, but the love was the same. Better, now. Moppet looked at him exactly the same way.

At last, Moppet stood back, flushed and giggling, and Moreau faced Rose and the Lords once more.

"Come with us," Rose urged. "Your followers, too. You're always a part of this family."

Moreau gave her a look of gentle melancholy. "No, Rosemary," he told her. "I...I will never...never be...welcome out there. Beyond. Once, maybe, I..." He paused for a moment, staring hard into the distance. "A long, long time ago, maybe, I would have...wanted. But now...no more. No longer. I have found something...something...better."

He glanced at Moppet. "And where...I belong."

"Okay," Rose said. She swooped forward and gave him a little peck on the cheek. "You know best."

He touched his cheek, then bobbed his head up and down in a firm nod. "I will see you..." he said, then seemed to ponder. "Again," he decided. "Perhaps."

"Good luck, Salvatore," Rose told him. "All of you."

"See ya, fishstick," Heisenberg said gruffly, elbowing Moreau in the side. "Take care of the dame, now, won't you?"

"Forever," Moreau said, taking Moppet's hand, holding it tight between his own.

And, later, Rose stood by as Moreau led his people to a cleft in a rocky cliff, a cave mouth leading down and down into darkness. One by one, they stepped through, Moppet holding aloft a lantern, her back laden with a pack full of supplies, each of the other cultists now outfitted for the journey- to where, Rose had no idea. A better place, perhaps, than Moreau had ever known. A kinder one. A crystal city, far beneath the earth.

A paradise, where they would be safe forever.

It wasn't her place to know. She simply watched as Moreau's followers vanished into the darkness, as Moppet's lantern bobbed, a ball of light, then a point, then a pinprick, then gone altogether.

Dimitrescu, too. Once Moreau and his followers set out, the rest of them, bruised and exhausted and starving, had trooped up to the castle to huddle in the dark, dank, dusty rooms and rest as best they could. The first floor, and the entry wing to the castle, was still crusted with Moreau's slime- pretty wrecked- not to mention the ominous pool of dried gore that covered the cracked floor of the main hall.

Dimitrescu merely smiled at this.

"My dinner," she said, "disagreed with me." and extended a single nail to pick at some invisible scrap between her clean white teeth.

Past the first floor, however, Rose couldn't help but gasp at the splendor. Glossy white walls covered with ornamental gilt, sconces molded in the shapes of flowers, gleaming mahogany and priceless artworks. The layer of dust and grime over it all couldn't disguise that this place totally freaking ruled. Rose decided to not ask to have a look at the basement. Preserve the illusion, and all that.

Dimitrescu vanished somewhere in the maze of corridors, leaving Rose, Donna, Angie, and Heisenberg to pass out on one of the gargantuan four-posters in one of the castle's many bedrooms, to hide from the sound of helicopters outside, to stuff down as much preserved meat and tinned goods and priceless wine as they could scavenge from the kitchens.

Eventually, days later, Dimitrescu re-emerged. Rose had looked up from her book, from which she'd been reading a story to Donna and Angie. Her eyes got big. If Lady Dimitrescu had been intimidating before, fixed up and dressed to the nines she was nothing short of breathtaking. Swathed in shimmering silver silk jersey, in smoke-gray furs soft as snowfall, rope of pearls at her throat, black hat perched on her fresh, gleaming curls, she set a long cigarette holder to her crimson lips and exhaled blue into the gloom.

"Fuck, Alci," Heisenberg said, as a wave of expensive amber-musk perfume rolled across them. "Something die in here?"

"Shut up, you disgusting little rat," she snapped, and took another drag on her cigarette. She seemed to gather herself, then turned with a smile to face Rose.

"Child," she said. "I wish to offer my most...sincere thanks for your involvement in the reclamation of my castle. And I wish to convey how deeply sorry I am that I must, now, say farewell."

"What?" Rose closed her book. "You're leaving, too?"

Heisenberg let out a bark of triumphant laughter.

"Indeed," Dimitrescu said, with a glare toward him and a slight edge to her voice. "I know you and your...caretaker...will be wanting to travel together, and that simply will not do for me. Besides. The events here...our brother's regeneration...my own...and yours," she added, nodding to Donna. "All of it has made me consider...mmm...future paths I thought had been closed to me."

A distant look filled her eyes, her self-satisfied smirk fading. "Future paths I thought were long gone," she went on.

"Your daughters?" Rose asked.

Dimitrescu looked down on her again. "Indeed."

"They...they might not have regenerated, like you did," Rose said, tentatively. "They weren't Lords."

"No," Dimitrescu agreed. "But consider this, child. When your father slaughtered them, and sold them, and smiled at my misfortune, all hope was lost. And I was lost with it. All things, shattered. All loyalties, tested. Now, there is hope again. And though it may end in blood and tears for me...for them- for my darling girls- I will risk it."

She took up an oxblood traveling-case- stamped, Rose noticed, with the House Dimitrescu crest.

"I will return," she said, casting her gaze about the heights of the room, about the castle beyond. "Rest assured. But for now..."

A feral glint entered her eyes.

"...I must have words with the Duke."

***

Donna, meanwhile, was fast asleep in the back of the range rover, impervious to the bumps and jostles in the uneven road. Rose glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She'd shed her usual eyepatch, her hair down around her shoulders, and though she still tended toward gothy shades and heeled lace-up boots, she'd begun to branch out a little from mourning clothes.

Now, for the special occasion, she'd worn a long embroidered skirt, a brooch at her throat she said had belonged to her mother, and a gray woolen coat she'd made herself. Her arms were curled loosely around Angie, and at her side, tucked for safekeeping under the other seat belt, was an intricately-wrapped box tied with a ribbon.

"Heh. Honk the horn," Heisenberg said.

"Oh my god. You are evil."

He made a wild lunge for the horn. Rose cracked her elbow right into his face. Donna slept on. The moors rolled past, and eventually Rose and Heisenberg quieted down again, and the silence came in, and the wind, and they caught their first glimpse of the sea.

It came up fast- one moment the land seemed endless, and then it broke away, and the ocean spread before them. Vast; endless. Heisenberg leaned forward a little, tipping his glasses up on his head. He'd never seen the ocean before leaving the village with her. What an impossible wonder it must have seemed. What sheer emptiness. Rose wondered if that first sight had been exhilarating to him, or terrifying. She didn't ask. She didn't want to break the silence.

She didn't ask, either, about Mia.

She'd vanished from the chaos. She'd never turned up at the castle. Maybe the BSAA had taken her. And maybe- after what Heisenberg had told her during their several days hiding out in the castle- she'd had her eye on a different goal. Even now, thinking of her, a boil of vindictive heat twisted in Rose's guts. After all she'd done, she'd get away without incident? With Ethan's body? Still. Rose couldn't exactly hold her crimes against her, not for long. How could she, when she'd done what she did for the Four Lords?

They were out, now, free in the world. She'd given them all the means to do what they'd done under Miranda, to be monsters anew. And what monsters they'd once been. A village, destroyed. Decades of pain and suffering, nightmares inflicted on the innocent. Nightmares the scope of which she couldn't truly understand, could only witness through the dreams of the dead. And there was no accounting for that. No true forgiveness. Not unless the dead returned. And that wasn't possible, not for everyone.

But it could end. And now, maybe, it had. And that was all she had. She could only hope it would prove enough.

The road ended in a small car park, empty of other vehicles. Rose parked and killed the engine, dropping down to the dusty pavement. Donna stirred as Rose rapped on the window, then followed Heisenberg out past the pavement, wading through the golden, knee-high grass, all the way to the place where the world ended.

Seagulls mewed and tilted, tossed on the high breeze. The waves crashed at the cliff foot, great sprays of freezing spume and swells of deep, dark blue. The color of the ocean wasn't constant; it shifted, one moment a vivid glass-green, the next a deep, pensive gray, fading to mist out at the point where sky met sea.

Even in early August, the chill of the sea wind was sharp, biting through Rose's jean jacket and into her skin. She shivered. Heisenberg shifted closer, knocking his warm shoulder to hers.

"Happy birthday, kid," he told her.

"Don't mention it."

"Why this place?"

"Ah." She lifted an eyebrow. "You are looking at what will soon be the most beautiful sunset in Britain. According to this one article I read online, anyway. I thought...y'know. Not to get mushy, but I thought it'd be a good place to...begin. Again. Formally. You know, since it's my birthday, a big marker, kind of a nice symbolic breaking-off point-"

"Yeah, I get it."

"Okay, okay." She shut up, watching the waves. "Thanks."

"...Yeah?"

"Without you, I wouldn't be here to turn seventeen and stare at the stupid water."

He smirked. "And don't you forget it."

Rose snorted and rolled her eyes, then looked back at Donna by the range rover, struggling with the hamper.

"Guess we should help her or something," Heisenberg muttered.

"Could just stand here and watch her."

"Careful, kid. You're starting to sound like me."

The three of them together set up near the cliff's edge, spreading a blanket over the grass, weighing it down with jars of honey, cheese and bread, Romanian dishes with pronunciations Donna coached her through. A thermos of tea, full of rich spices that melted on the tongue. And, inside the intricate box, jewel-like pastries so delicately-made they could have only come from Donna's hands. Angie tore at one like a starving raccoon, while Rose marveled at the chocolate tarts and honey-and-walnut mucenici, savoring each bite. She opened presents- a handmade blouse, jacket, and trousers from Donna, embroidered with black and gold roses, and from Heisenberg-

"Since you lost your sword, and all," he said as she lifted the knife from the grease-stained paper grocery bag he'd crumpled around it in place of wrappings. Its blade flared deep-blue in the dying sunlight, and when Rose took its hilt, it fit her hand like she'd been born with it there. She ran her thumb over the thorny vines worked into the crossguard.

"I..." she started. She had to cough and start over. "...I didn't know you were capable of making anything this pretty."

"Shut up and say thank you."

The sun began to set. It sank toward the sea; it melted, and set the wind afire, painting a river of gold over the tops of the waves. The bite of the wind sharpened, and Rose and Heisenberg and Donna and Angie ended up huddled together, like they had been in the castle.

Rose rested her chin on the tops of her knees, staring out toward the horizon. Ouroboros was still out there. She'd take it down, it and so many monstrous things like it. The BSAA, too, and Chris, and her mother. But that was all for another day. For now, she could sit and watch the sunset, taste the wind, the scent of endings bitter on her tongue.

The end of another day.

The beginnings of a new one.

She shifted. Heisenberg looped his arm over her shoulders. She tipped her head sideways against his shoulder, her fingers loosely interlaced with Donna's.

"Drat," Donna said, softly.

"What is it?"

"I think I may have left the stove on in that...strange little house we stayed in."

"Broke in," Heisenberg said.

"Hm. Well..." Her expression became sly. "...I hope they don't mind."

Rose snorted. "You're the coolest aunt ever."

Donna turned bright red, hugging Angie. The doll gibbered at her, and Donna turned up her sleeve, made a small nick in the dead-white flesh of her inner arm, and allowed the tendrils of the Cadou within Angie's head latch onto the cut and feed on the blood. Rose watched, fascinated. Coolest aunt ever, indeed.

"Aha," Heisenberg said, suddenly. "Almost forgot." He reached inside his coat and pulled forth a folder, thin and sepia-stained and tied with twine, stamped with the Ouroboros serpent. Rose lifted her eyebrows as he held it up.

"Did-" she started.

"Did Mia send me this via that weird airmail envelope that courier handed me last week? Yeah. Dunno how the fuck she got ahold of it, but, uh..."

A small black and white photograph was paperclipped to the front. A little boy, facing front, dressed in an old-fashioned collared shirt and V-neck sweater. His round face and bowl-cut hair were those of a stranger, but Rose knew his eyes all too well.

"It's your file," she murmured.

"Sure is. The real deal." His whole life. All the lost decades of it, pieced together by Ouroboros researchers in some distant facility. His past, there in his hands.

"Are you gonna open it?" Rose asked.

Heisenberg considered. Then, in one movement, he tossed it. It spun into the air and over the edge of the cliff, gone in an instant.

"Nah," he said.

He settled again by Rose's side. The three of them watched the sun, watched it sink beneath the horizon, watched the shadows creep long over the sea.

Rose felt a stirring of dread at the darkness, so like the depths of the Black God, the depths of Miranda's grief. She still didn't fully understand what she'd inherited, what it meant for the future. She'd probably never understand it, not unless she lived, as Miranda had said, a long, long life.

And as to who she was?

Maybe there were no real answers.

Heisenberg must have sensed her discomfit. He gave her cheek a light poke with his thumb. "You okay, kid?"

"Yeah. Just..." She let out her breath. "You'll always have my back, right?"

"As demonstrated."

"Good."

"Good?"

She looked up at him, and Donna. And yeah, they were terrible. And yeah, they'd done some really, really bad shit. And yeah, they were all mutant monsters.

But so was she.

It filled her, then, with a pang so strong it was close to pain. That she was so she was who she was, in this place, in this body. That they were there with her.

She leaned into Heisenberg, squeezed Donna's hand. "Good that I found you again."

It didn't matter who she was. She'd figure out everything she needed to know herself. And she wouldn't be alone, not even if the night grew dark and the wolves began to howl. They would be with her every step of the path.

"Not gonna get sick of us monsters, kid?" Heisenberg said.

"You're not just monsters," Rose told him. "You're worse. You're family."

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by keltii-tea

Chapter 10: A Heavy Burden We Saints Must Carry

Teodora listened to the whole explanation without interjecting. They'd left the ruined town behind and headed for a nearby hillside, toward the broken double-prongs of a crumbling tower built on its forested slope. The silent walls enclosed them, the ruins a maze of shadow and fallen walls, niches still gleaming with the remnants of gilt and sacred imagery, long-faced saints, wolves snapping at them as they gazed skyward in prayer.

"So you've come back now to- what? Rescue him?" Teodora said, darkly. She held up her hand, stopping Rose and Donna and Chris short.

"Pretty much," Rose said.

"And you expect to go up against these people all on your lonesome?" A fine wire stretched over their path, strung between twin pillars that must have at one point joined overhead in an archway. Teodora fiddled with a small explosive pack on one side; a red light blinked off, and she gestured the group forward.

"Not exactly," Rose said. "Uh-" She glanced back at Chris, whey-faced and limping, but for the moment patched together. "We were kind of hoping you could help us."

"I have enough to deal with here, as you'll see." She refastened the tripwire and shrugged her rifle strap higher on her shoulder. "We're grateful to you two. Immeasurably. But-"

"That's not quite what I mean."

Teodora looked over her shoulder at Rose, then glanced at Donna. "Tell me once we get inside," she said, after a pause.

"Inside?" Chris rasped, his brow deeply furrowed.

They'd reached a thick section of keep wall. This place must have once been a fortress, one of hundreds of ruins that dotted these mountains. Enclosed within a niche was a statue, its feet scattered with candles and offerings.

A newer statue, not pitted and worn like those of the other warding saints Rose had seen. It showed a beefy man in a long coat holding a young child. A sprig of leaves was clutched in the child's hand, a grenade in the man's. With a jolt, Rose realized-

"Is that me and Heisenberg?" she said.

Teodora smiled a little, showing the points of her teeth. The Cadou that Heisenberg had implanted into her fifteen years ago to save her life seemed to have done a number on her. "That's what happens when one of the Four Lords of the Black God's valley deigns to rescue your town from monsters. You'd better get used to it."

"Did we rescue it?" Rose asked, her voice small.

Teodora's smile faded. She reached for the stone Heisenberg's hand and pulled down on it. With the grind of gears, the niche swung open, revealing a narrow passageway and a flight of steps beyond.

The door ground shut again behind them, trapping them all in a moment of absolute darkness. A moment later, and Teodora clicked on a flashlight, the beam illuminating stone walls for a few yards, then natural cave walls.

They began down; Rose's breath was visible in the air, the cold in here somehow deeper even than the night outside. She stuck one hand deep in her pocket, the other clutching her sword strap, as if to remind herself it was still there.

"Something happened after we left, didn't it?" she asked after a long stretch of silence.

"Doesn't it always?" Teodora's voice was weary. "We were peaceful, for a time. A long time. A year or so. I...changed. I became stronger...faster. My wounds healed within minutes. I prayed in thanks to all the saints before me that Lord Heisenberg gave me a piece of his gift. I could protect the town, now. Better than ever before."

"But?"

"The lycans...got worse." She lifted her head, the light glistening off her brittle gray curls. "Each winter, more of them. Bigger ones. Stranger. I tried to venture into the next valley, into the heart of their territory, see if there was an alpha I could kill, but...they were too strong for me. I had to retreat. If I died, who would protect the town?"

They reached an old wooden door. Teodora gave it a swift knock. "Open up," she said. "It's me. I brought guests."

The door swung wide, manned by a nervous-looking woman holding an old shotgun. Firelight spilled over Rose as she and the others stepped into the cavern beyond, vaulted chambers of stacked stone, braziers on pendulous chains hanging from the apex of their ceilings, filling the air with welcome heat.

A tomb of some sort, then; doorways led off into other chambers, other burial-vaults. Now, though, this place had become a refuge not for the dead, but for the living. The complex was filled with people, huddled around the braziers, laying on cots, busy at cookfires or mending or caring for wounded.

All were grimy, dressed in ragged clothes, eyes downcast and dull. An altar was set up in a corner, candles glimmering before painted icons, but no one was praying now. People looked up as Teodora entered; a few kissed their saints' medals, little coins of silver hung at their throats or wrists.

"Teodora," asked an old woman. "We heard howling. Is all well?"

"For now." She squeezed the old woman's hands. "I scared the lycans off. These people are-"

She glanced back at Rose as if trying to gauge whether or not she wanted her identity revealed. Rose gave her head a little shake.

"...travelers, Delia," Teodora went on. "They require our care and protection."

"They don't look like ordinary travelers," said a man with a mass of bloodied bandages taped over his eye.

"No one gets left to the lycans," Teodora snapped. "No one."

Rose stayed at the doorway, frozen. She tried to count the number of people in the room- thirty? Forty? There had been more than this in the churchyard alone after Lady Dimitrescu had flown off.

"Is this it?" she whispered.

Teodora glanced at her. "Yeah," she muttered.

"Wait." A woman with a baby crept closer. "You look...familiar."

"I-" Rose began.

"Yes," Delia said. She shuffled over. "Older, yes, but-"

"The holy child," whispered the woman with the baby. A little boy clung to her skirts, staring up at Rose with big eyes.

"I'm no holy child," Rose stammered, but before she could back off, more people were getting up, looking toward her.

"You and Lord Heisenberg warded off the great Lady of Blood, mad with grief," Delia said, her voice hushed and reverent. Rose's face flooded with heat. Teodora stood off to one side, watching Rose. "Where is Lord Heisenberg now? Will he come and bless us again with his power?"

"I-" Rose said.

She glanced at Teodora, who gave her head a small shake, much like Rose had just done for her.  Rose got it. These people were at the end of their rope. They wanted to believe Rose and Heisenberg were holy creatures, wanted to believe there was a power looking out for them. Who was Rose to take away that hope?

"Yes," she said at last. "Yes. He's...away, now. But I'm here." She lifted her head, looking into pair after pair of wide, frightened eyes, bright with desperation.

"I'm here," she said again. "Me and my...friends." She gestured to Chris, who cocked an eyebrow in return, and Donna, standing still as one of the painted icons, her pale face lovely in the firelight. "We...we won't let you down." "The saint has spoken," Teodora piped up. She stepped closer to Rose, dropping her voice so only she and Chris and Donna could hear. "C'mon. We've got food if you're hungry."

They passed through the crowd. The townsfolk bowed their heads, reached out to brush fingers against Teodora's lycan-fur mantle, Rose's sheathed sword. Chris politely waved away the hands outstretched to him, but Donna moved through the people like a specter, her spine ramrod-straight, her eye wide, as if in surprise.

Rose watched her as she passed through the crowd. Had she ever been regarded like this before? Had she ever been viewed as a marvelous being, or had she known nothing all her life but fear, both others' and her own?

They retreated to a collection of battered tables and chairs set up by the altar. Teodora brought over bowls of some kind of stew; Rose's stomach gave a hideous snarl as she realized just how starving she was. She couldn't make herself eat. Her guts chewed at themselves.

"Lycans did all that?" Chris was asking Teodora. He looked her up and down with suspicion- Rose wasn't surprised, considering just how obvious Teodora's mutation was. Rose had given him the rundown on her Cadou implantation, but, still, maybe he was expecting her to start drinking blood or vomiting slime. "Out there?"

Teodora nodded. She hadn't gotten a bowl of stew for herself; maybe there was something to the blood-drinking theory after all. "Year by year. Lots of folks hung on a while, thought they could fight off the raids. But- uh. They didn't last long."

"What about the catacombs under the church?"

"What do you think?" Teodora said. "They dug us out."

If we had stayed, if we had stuck around to protect them- Rose cut herself off. No; she couldn't think like that. She couldn't blame herself nor Heisenberg for moving on.

She hated herself for wanting to know, but she couldn't hold back.

"Is Emilia here?" she asked, tentative.

Donna's spoon stilled, midway through picking at her stew. Chris frowned. Teodora lowered her head.

"Oh, no," Rose whispered.

"She was part of the group who brought supplies in from the main road," Teodora said. "Too risky to leave in our full numbers, so we'd send out a small bunch to get the food and medicine we needed and bring it in. My sister, six years ago, she-" Her voice crumpled. "She didn't make it back."

"Your sister?" Chris echoed.

Teodora nodded.

"I'm sorry," Chris said. There was a pained look in his eyes; Rose wondered who it was he was thinking of. "I'm so, so sorry- agh-"

He winced. Teodora's head snapped up in alarm.

"Don't worry." Chris peeled up his trouser leg. His wound had begun to bleed again. "Must have gotten me deeper than I thought."

Chris's med-injector had stopped the worst of the bleeding, stopped, according to him, any chance of mutamycete infection and subsequent lycan transformation. Still, a mauling was a mauling, and they had to get mobile by morning.

Teodora got out her med kit, removing the pertinent items with care from a carved wooden box. "Let me get that closed up-"

"Let me."

Teodora jumped a little as Donna spoke. It was the first time she had done so in Teodora's presence. Donna paused before taking the curved needle and gut thread from Teodora's hand and immediately bent to Chris's leg.

"I am sorry if this stings," she told Chris before setting to work.

Donna Beneviento sewed the finest and most meticulous stitches Rose had ever seen. She began to hum as she worked, a song Rose recognized from her high school foreign-language classes- Promenons-nous dans les bois. Spooky, in this context. Let's stroll in the woods if the wolf is not here. Her eye flicked up and caught Rose watching.

Rose gave her a little smile, the most she could muster. After a beat, Donna gave her one in return.

"So," Teodora said. "Why are you here, then, if it's not my rifle you're after?"

Rose drew a breath. Her eyes were warm, but she made her voice stay steady. "You said the lycan attacks got worse."

"Right."

"Did anything else ever attack? Any old friends?"

"You mean the Lady of Blood," Teodora said. "Don't you."

The shadows seemed to pull in; maybe it was Rose's imagination, but the conversation throughout the rest of the refugee vaults died down a little, as if everyone had quieted down to listen. The veins of crystal on Teodora's face crackled a little as she set her jaw.

"Lady Dimitrescu," Rose said. "Yeah."

"She never attacked again. Never stole another girl. But after she flew off, I tracked her down. I wanted to keep tabs on her in case she ever decided leveling the town once just wasn't enough."

"So you know where she is?"

"Yes," Teodora said, cautiously. "Why do you want to know?"

Rose glanced at Donna, finishing up Chris's leg. "Feel better?" Angie chattered, pressing her nose up against the clear dome in her backpack.

"A lot," Chris said. He paused. "...Thanks."

Donna nodded, prim.

"Because this is Donna Beneviento," Rose said. "Of House Beneviento. One of the Four Lords of the Valley."

Teodora snorted. "You're kidding. Her?"

"She look any less lordly than Heisenberg?"

"Kind of, yeah. Heisenberg had..."

She paused for a long time, her face a little flushed between the veins of crystal splitting her skin.

"Presence," she said at last.

"Okay, sure, but-" Rose took a short breath. Her heartbeat sloshed in her ears. Here goes. "Donna has the Cadou, same as he does. And she's agreed to help us. Now, she's not exactly the fighting type, but Dimitrescu is, without a doubt. If I can get her on our side, we stand a chance against Ouroboros, and against the lycans overrunning the village."

Teodora looked dumbfounded. "And once you awaken the Lady of Blood, you expect Beneviento to convince her to help you? Seriously?"

"Yes," Donna said.

She straightened from Chris's suture, her delicate fingers spotted with blood. Slowly, she reached up to the eyepatch covering her mutation and pulled it aside. Tentacles writhed; flesh pulsated, slowly and sickeningly. Angie tittered inside the backpack, the sound raspy and sinister as the scrape of porcelain against porcelain.

Donna replaced the patch.

"I am a Lord," she said, simply. "As much as my siblings. And I wish to see my brother safe again, the same as Rosemary. You understand, in the last moments of my life, I thought my siblings would follow my fate, would die with me. Now I learn some of them didn't. And...to them...I want to make amends for our mother's actions."

She took a short breath.

"If it will see my family reunited," she went on, "there is nothing I will not do."

She fell silent once more, dabbing Chris's suture with herbal paste.

Chris, for his part, gave a shrug. "You heard the lady."

Rose looked at Teodora with brows raised. Teodora ran her hand over her mouth, her eyes lowered. At last, she gave a small sigh.

"Hell, I'd give anything to see this over," she said. "We leave at dawn."

***

Rose found Donna in one of the distant chambers of the tomb, far from the central room with its relative bustle. She stood before one of the many altars, fussy with wreaths of dried flowers and garlic braids, framed icons of saints and far too many candles. Donna stood with Angie in her arms. The doll was still for the moment, candlelight glimmering off her porcelain skin.

"You guys okay?" Rose asked.

"Shhh," Angie hissed. "Donna's doing some thinking."

"Oh." Rose came to stand by her side. She held her tongue for approximately thirty seconds before- "About what?"

"She made us hate each other," Donna whispered. "Because she could. Because it was...easier to control us that way. She told me...she told me she was...protecting me. Making me afraid of them all. So I wouldn't get hurt again. I had suffered enough, she said..."

"Miranda?"

A small nod. "She said I should...hide away...like I used to hide in cupboards...here comes the wolf, papa said, he's going to eat you, mama said...when they were gone I hid the dolls but it was never the same. I knew where they all were."

"Alci and Sal and Karl would have eaten Donna alive if not for Miranda," Angie said, matter-of-factly.

"That's what she told me." Donna's eye reflected the flames, shifting colors in its dark depths. "But Heisenberg never hurt me, I said. That's because he's patient, Miranda said. He'll come back for you. In the end."

She lifted her hand. In it rested a scrap of yellow silk ribbon, embroidered with flowers. It was exquisite, so finely-done the colors seemed to shimmer, the stitches indistinguishable. Something she made, undoubtedly.

"And now..." Donna said.

She fell silent. Rose came around to lean against the altar, to look her in the face. "Now?" she prompted.

"I told the others I can help. Those people believe I can. What if I can't?" She looked at Rose, worry in her single eye. "What if Alcina does not listen to me?"

"Then we're all screwed," Rose told her. "Listen...whatever happens, I'm not gonna abandon you. I won't let you down like that. Okay?"

"Really?"

"Yeah. Really."

A hint of a smile. "Thank you, Rosemary," Donna said. A hesitation, and then she set the ribbon with its beautiful flowers upon the altar.

"Look," she said, her voice soft.

Rose looked. Amidst the other icons rendered in rich shades of blue and gold stood a pair hinged together, like a book. On one was painted Heisenberg cradling little Rose, the two of them haloed in stylized bolts of lightning. On the other was Teodora, a rifle over her shoulder, black tears dripping down her mournful face.

These people had taken them for saints, once. The Lord who sang to metal, the girl with a god in her head, the warding saint who had died for them and returned anew. They had come, when all seemed lost.

Now, they'd come again.

Whatever had happened, whatever horrors had occurred here in their absence, she'd leave this place better than she'd found it. She couldn't be cowed by despair. Not now.

"You feel like getting some sleep?" she asked Donna.

"No."

"Me neither."

A pause. "Will you tell me another story?"

"Sure, Donna. What do you want to hear?"

"Something with a happy ending. Something where everything will be all right."

"I..." Rose sniffed and shook her head. "I don't know any like that."

"Then tell me later," Donna said. "When you do."

Footsteps echoed off the rough stone walls. Rose turned to see Chris approach and give a little cough.

"I want to speak to Rose," he said. "Alone, please."

Donna nodded, then left, skirting Chris's massive form in the doorway. After a pause, he moved into the vault. He examined the icons on the altar, then leaned against a wall, watching the crowd in the main room as the townsfolk began to bed down for the night. He got out a pack of nicotine gum and peeled a piece free of its foil.

"First green tea, now gum?" Rose said. "You're really trying to kick the habit."

"Yeah, well, I, unlike some, don't have regenerating lungs."

"Nice frown," Rose told him.

He gave her a flat look. "These people worship the monsters," he muttered. Teodora moved throughout the room, stopping to kneel by a child's bedside, speak softly to one of the wounded. Somewhere, someone was singing, a soft, eerie song in no language Rose recognized. "They follow her like some kind of savior."

"She is some kind of savior."

"She has the Cadou, doesn't she?"

Rose paused. "And?"

"The only supply of them I saw was a shelf of 'em in Miranda's lab and one specimen in Moreau's nasty little rec room. Those things were supposed to be destroyed in the explosion that took out the megamycete. All of them. How the hell did she-"

"Heisenberg cut a chunk off his Cadou and stuck it inside her to save her life after she got fatally stabbed by her mutated little sister who'd been transformed into a surrogate daughter-puppet by Lady Dimitrescu fifteen years ago," Rose said in a rush. "Basically."

"Right," Chris said.

"Clearly, it worked out and didn't kill her or turn her into a lycan. Why the hell should you care?"

She knew why, and she knew he knew, but Chris wasn't about to give up on a chance to give her a lecture. "It's been my life's work to eliminate and contain bioweapons the world over," he said. "I've been betrayed over these things, over power, prestige."

The candlelight moved in his eyes, throwing darts of gold through them. "Been forced to witness such terrible things done along the way. I've seen so many people hurt. So many dead. Friends...people I thought were friends. And always, always, monsters. It's been...a long time since the first. Too goddamn long. And now-"

He stopped.

"Now," Rose supplied, "you're working with them?"

"Basically," Chris echoed, gently teasing.

She lightly kicked his ankle, making sure not to jog his wound. "How's your leg? Donna's stitches too scary for you?"

"Rose..." He let out his breath, brushing a strand of hair from her face. "She'll have to be contained after this is over. All of them will. You understand that, right? I have to let the BSAA know what's happened up here."

"Yeah, I figured."

"Are you gonna stop me?"

Rose looked up at him. He looked, levelly, back.

"No," she said at last.

"I'm counting on that, Winters."

"I know you are, Redfield. I'd expect nothing less."

***

Morning came, bleak and gray-gold, the first of the dim winter sunrise stretching pale fingers across the landscape. Far away, Rose could make out the curtains of snow that signaled another oncoming blizzard, but for now the air was clear, the crunch and snap of snow under her boots the loudest sound in the world.

She kept her grip tight on her sword's strap, kept close to Donna. Even Angie stayed unnaturally-quiet, curled up in her backpack as if against the piercing cold. Chris backed the group, while Teodora hiked ahead, her lycan-skull mask and fur hood once again in place. With them on, Rose would catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of her eye and flinch, thinking one of the monsters had come for them again.

"Relax," Teodora said, when she caught her doing this. "They don't like to come out in the daylight."

"I know that. I guess I'm just on edge."

"Considering who you're hunting down, you'd have to be touched in the head not to be." Rose caught a glimmer of green through the skull's eye sockets as Teodora looked her up and down. "Nice sword, by the way."

"Oh- yeah, thanks, I'm...not great with guns, and my mold powers don't always work the way I want them to." She reached up to touch the hilt. "Figured slicing and dicing does the trick just as well."

"Heh. We'll have to add it to your icon on the altar."

"Shut up," Rose muttered. "I'm not a saint, okay?"

"I get it. It's a heavy burden, belief." She nodded at the sword. "You must understand. That's made from the hammer, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Well. One of them. He'd bust them up, remake them over the years. But..."

"It's like having a part of someone still with you."

"Pretty much."

She couldn't see it, but from the sound of her voice, Rose guessed Teodora had given her a soft smile. "Way he was around you, even back then...yeah, he'd be proud. Might have wanted to throttle him the whole time I was around him, but he loved you."

Rose's throat tightened. She looked down at the snow.

"How the hell do you do it?" she said.

"What?"

"Keep fighting, when everything's crumbling down around you. I'm..." She drew an unsteady breath. "I can't..."

She trailed off. After a moment, Teodora's gloved hand settled on her shoulder.

"Let's keep moving," she said.

As sunrise strengthened into day, they hiked through scrubby woods, fields of boulders like looming giants, crowned with the broken ruins of ancient towers, with statues of unknown gods and unknown saints standing sentinel against the lightening sky.

Around daybreak they crossed a great, frozen river, spray lunging against jagged rocks standing from the surface of the dark water like the teeth of some great beast. Teodora balanced on the rocks, leaping from point to point, nimble as a deer. Rose and the others took a little more time while she stood guard, rifle lifted, sweeping the mist in case they were followed.

They broke through the treeline somewhere during midmorning, the sun hidden behind descending snowclouds, the cold sharpening to a point. Each inhale seared Rose's lungs; she buried her face in her scarf. The expanse of mountainside before them was a clean stretch of snow and dark seams of rock, the mist rolling down from higher up, so that the valley below was soon hidden in dense, pale fog.

All sound rang back muffled; Rose's breathing seemed too-close, the crunch of the group's feet in the snow overloud in this weird hush.

"This is great," Chris muttered.

"She's close," Donna whispered, leaning in to Rose.

"Huh?" Rose stammered.

"Quiet."

This was Teodora. She stood stock-still in the mist, her hand raised, the other poised at a hunting knife in her belt.

"Follow me," she said. "Single file. Don't make any excess noise."

"Were we tailed?" Chris muttered.

Teodora shook her head. "It's not the lycans I'm worried about now."

Rose's pulse began to pound. It grew stronger as they approached a cluster of rocks ahead. Amidst them: a cleft in the rocks, a great, icicle-hung cave mouth that gaped in the snowy landscape like a wound in reality, its interior so dark she could not see in more than a few inches. Frigid air breathed over them as they approached, as they stood on the threshold of that darkness, unmoving, staring into its depths.

"In there?" Donna whispered.

"Yep," Teodora said. "Everyone, remember what I said. Quiet. We don't want to wake anything up."

"Wait," Rose said.

The others looked at her. Chris's frown was so deep she could have lost pennies in the lines on his forehead. "What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing. I-" She drew a short breath. "You two wait out here. Okay?"

"What the hell, Rose?" Chris stepped forward.

"Chris, trust me. She won't respond to you or to Teo. Us though?" She reached out and took Donna's hand. "We can do this."

Teodora settled back on her heels. "Hey, I believe it," she told Chris. "Have you seen the stuff this little girl can do? Wild."

Chris's eyes were full of desperation, wild with a kind of loss of control. He was fighting with himself, Rose saw- with the truth of what she was saying and his own natural instinct to keep her safe, to fulfill his duties to her parents.

At last he let out his breath, his eyes sliding shut. "The second I hear anything," he told her, "I'm coming in."

"Okay. Sure."

"And take this." He thrust a flashlight at her. "In case. You don't want to get caught in the dark."

"Thanks." Rose glanced at Donna, who stared ahead, her face rigid, her single eye bright with fear. It would be fine. It would be fine.

And if it wasn't-

Well, they'd just have to battle a huge freaking vampiric dragon, now, wouldn't they?

With a squeeze of Donna's sweaty hand in her own, Rose stepped over the threshold of the cave, into the darkness beyond.

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Banner by keltii-tea

Chapter 12: A Midwinter Gift

Later, much later, Miranda thought a lot about endings. About how when things were good, they seemed as if they might last forever. A world, recast in amber. An unstoppable stirring of love. But when the good times were gone, and the wolves began to howl once more outside her window, they seemed as if they had passed in a heartbeat. And there was no good in the world, not ever, and would never be again. All that was good was gone. And the only way to reclaim it was to find it again, somewhere in the darkness.

***

The stranger came wounded, hauled to the village in the back of the jolly merchant's wagon. The merchant always came at the end of winter, and the clamor of his bells and pots and pans clanging from their hooks on the sides of his wagon was as good as music, as uplifting to the soul. It was as much a sign of spring as the first of the crocuses or the singing of birds, and Miranda always looked forward to it, a tentpole of hope throughout the long, bleak cold.

Miranda was nineteen. An image of her mother, the old women said, though of course it was difficult to tell from the ancient daguerreotypes of her parents' wedding, so age-spotted the face of her mother was almost wholly unrecognizable at all. She didn't have much time for taking pictures of her own, nor for mirrors; most days, she was hard at work. Little Sal was now Salvatore Moreau, apprentice surgeon to Dr. Nicolescu, who himself had studied in the high cold halls of natural philosophy in Bucharest. Miranda, with her keen mind and clever fingers, worked in the surgery as a nurse.

Nicolescu had scoffed at first- what was this girl doing in his surgery? Wasn't she better off learning wifely ways?- but Salvatore insisted.

"You don't have to do that, you know," Miranda told him one day as they were rolling bandages.

He'd blinked at her from behind his spectacles. He'd grown into his gawky looks, and had even begun to preen a little, combing back his dark curls with his fingers in front of every mirror they encountered, standing a little straighter when village girls whispered and giggled on their way past, when they hung around the surgery, perching on gurneys to kick their legs and ask him endless questions. All of which, of course, he answered. Little Sal was well on his way to getting an ego.

"Do what?" he asked, all innocence.

"Defend me."

"What if I want to?"

"Well...don't."

He'd slowed his bandage rolling, his eyes downcast, his brows drawn together. "I'm going to be the surgeon of the village, one day," he said.

"Yes, I know."

"I...I'll be successful. Wealthy, like Dr. Nicolescu. I may even leave the village one day-"

The words ripped a red bolt of terror through Miranda. At least, she thought it was terror. "No. You can't leave, Sal."

"...I mean, I don't..." He drew a shaky breath. "Miranda, I know you...you can't forget...what happened all those years ago...that this isn't what you want. But...once I'm done with my training, I would make for a very good husband."

He'd reached out. His fingertips settled, light and gentle, on the back of her hand. "And you'd make an excellent doctor's wife."

Miranda kept on rolling bandages. She kept her eyes on her hands, on the bandages, the clean white linen gleaming on the tabletop.

"I know you don't love me," Salvatore said, his voice soft. "That I'm too young."

"Yes."

"Will you...will you think about it?"

"You know I can't, Sal."

He nodded in her periphery. "I know," he echoed, and fell silent, the only sound the scratchy gramophone playing in the far room. Every time it hit a scratch in the record grooves it skipped. Again, again, again.

"Miranda!" Nicolescu's voice echoed from the front of the surgery. Miranda snapped to attention. "Girl! Are you there?"

"I'm here, Doctor."

"Merchant's coming." He'd taken to watching from his front room with his telescope, waiting for the day when the wagon trundled its way up the deeply-rutted road that led into town. "You and Moreau go and get me the...ugh, where is it...the things on this list..."

There was much banging around and clattering. At last the old man limped into the room and thrust the list at Miranda.

"And be quick about it," he muttered, retreating back to his study to pore over his books and drink good brandy, thinking no one noticed.

Miranda pushed past Salvatore, his face flushed, his mouth open as if he was going to say something.

"Come on, Sal," she called, unhooking her cloak from its peg. "We don't want to be late. All the good stuff will be gone."

They hurried from the surgery and through the snowdrifts, toward the village square overlooked by the Maiden of War. Already a good crowd had gathered, women wrapped in their bright embroidered shawls, men with pipes, the air full of the haze of sweet blue smoke.

"Closer, closer! Don't be shy," the merchant called, a massive man portly in the extreme, gesturing with beringed fingers across the trove of wares spread before the open wagon doors. "Indeed, shyness is an insult, in my profession."

He let out warm laugh. He held a cigar between two of his fingers, its smoke adding its own note to the aromas rising from the wares. Miranda pushed between the baker's wife and old Mrs. Dalca, Salvatore at her side, his eyes wide as hers as they together took in the plethora.

Gemstones and lengths of blue silk like the reflection of the sky in clear water. Long, spiraling tusks of what Miranda knew to be ivory, cut from the mouths of strange beasts in distant, frozen seas. Books- Salvatore gasped at these- bound in hide and in paper, in rich suede and in thin pieces of wood carved all over with strange symbols. More humble wares, too- bags of grain and seed, tanned leather, silk thread and silver needles and bottles of spices and olive oil, come all the way across the mountains from the far south.

"Saints," Salvatore said, lifting his eyebrows. "How'd he get all this up the mountain, then? Must've found some hardier horses."

"Would you look at all this, Sal?"

"I know. Makes me wish Nicolescu wasn't so stingy with his stipend." He flipped mournfully through one of the books.

"Makes me wish he gave me one in the first place." Miranda reached out to run her fingers over a silk sash, black and glossy as a crow's wing. As she did, she heard the sound of paper crumple in her apron pocket.

Ah, yes. The list. She fished it out and looked up at the merchant.

"Excuse me," she called. He swung round to face her with a serene smile. "I'd like these supplies, if you have them."

"Of course, of course, dear girl. Now, let me see here..." He pored over the list. "Ah! Is my old friend Nicolescu finding his store-cupboards a touch bare?"

"Most likely," Miranda said. "It's been a long winter, and, er-" She smirked back at him. "He runs out of the laudanum first."

The merchant laughed again, looking her over thoughtfully. "We all have our wicked ways, don't we? Now, my dear, I'll get these wrapped up for you- one moment, please..."

"Let me help." She knew how exacting Nicolescu could be. She hurried over to the side of the wagon as the merchant heaved his bulk into its interior, vanishing behind a long, aged set of brocade curtains. She glimpsed him through the windows, glimpsed the cozy, close inside of the wagon, heard the merchant's lowered voice, and, to her surprise, a second in answer. Curious, she peered in through the window.

She only had time to glimpse a figure sprawled on a narrow bed, the merchant bent over him, pressing a damp cloth on his forehead, before the figure looked up, and so did the merchant, catching her staring. Miranda ducked out of the way, her cheeks ablaze, but the damage was done.

"It's all right, my dear!" The merchant didn't sound angry. "I'm merely tending to my guest. Join us, would you please?"

Miranda let out her breath before pushing through the low door and into the wagon. The smell inside was just as cozy as it looked, rich spices, cigar smoke, something that might have been a musky perfume, something that reminded her of the cinnamon buns her mother used to make. Her father- dead now these six years, a broken man- had sworn they were what had made him decide to marry her, and her mother had swatted him with the wooden spoon even as she laughed.

The merchant's bulk took up much of the interior, but there was still room in the lamplight to make out the figure on the cot built into the wall.

Miranda crept forward as the merchant dabbed at his forehead. The man on the cot didn't look so much older than her, his skin blanched and sheened with sweat, his dark hair combed back from his forehead. His bare chest was heavily bandaged.

"I'd...I'd get up," he said, "give you a bow, but..."

He waved a hand down at himself and gave her an apologetic smile.

"Awfully rude, I know," he said. "To not properly greet such a pretty girl."

This time, Miranda's blush wasn't of embarrassment. She blinked, then said, "What happened to you?"

"Wolves in the pass," the man said. He winced as the merchant began to carefully tend to his bandages. "Agh-"

"My apologies," the merchant said. "My hands are more dexterous than you might think, but- ah, unused to the sacred work of the physician, I'm afraid..."

"I can help," Miranda said at once.

Two sets of eyes settled on her- one, as always, calm, the other, the stranger's, wide. "Are you the town doctor?" the man asked.

"No, but- I'm a nurse. I work in the surgery." She drew herself up to her full height, unimpressive though it was. "I assist in procedures, too."

The merchant gave a suitably-impressed gasp. "A lady of science, of accomplishment! Please, please! Be my guest."

Miranda settled into a stool at the stranger's bedside, taking the cloth. It smelled of bitter herbs. With a smile, the merchant retreated, leaving her to her work.

"Wolves, hmm?" Miranda asked. She took over the work of the bandages, rolling them back so they might be replaced.

"Yep. A whole pack of them. Strangest wolves I ever saw. Some of them looked...well. Like they were on two legs."

"Lots of strange things around here." She peeled back the bandages and arched her eyebrows as she exposed the wound. It was beginning to heal, but even so, it was dire- a ragged gash torn from his pectoral muscle, weeping clear fluid. "Oh, my. Was this treated after you were bitten?"

"Yes, the merchant, the Duke-"

"The Duke?"

"That's what he told me to call him. He gave me a tea to drink, made with these strange red herbs."

"Good. No wolf-sickness for you, then."

"Wolf-sickness?" He watched her as she rolled up her sleeves with quick, deft movements and set about cleaning the wound. Miranda tried not to look at his face, but she couldn't help it. He had a face that begged to be looked at. He had the bluest eyes she'd ever seen. Their color was richer than the silk on display. She tried to not be a poetic sort anymore, to focus her attention on practical realities, but even so all she could think of was the deep velvet blue of the sky just past dusk, the stars beginning to come out.

She nodded to hide her discomfit. "Some say that if the monster wolves bite you, you'll die, and rise again as one of them. You'll run with their pack, you'll live in the woods, you'll be strong and fast and immortal, all the thoughts of the gods echoing in your mind. But you can never return home again. You can never be human. And forever, you'll yearn for human flesh."

"My, my," the stranger said, a smile playing around his lips.

"Some say." Miranda reached in her pockets for a phial she knew was there. "Your benefactor did a decent job of patching you up, but this will help even further. May I?"

"Of course."

"Good." She paused. "You'll have to stay in the village, of course, until this heals."

"Will I?"

"Yes. Dangerous, this time of year, to go wandering the snows."

"Well, if I stay, I'll be seeing you a lot. I'll have to call you something, won't I?"

"Probably."

"What's your name?"

"Miranda."

"Elios," the stranger said. "It's good to meet you, Miranda."

And Miranda marveled, that Salvatore's touch had not stirred her a bit, but the stranger's voice did, just the sound of it, whispering her name.

***

He stayed.

Spring would come early that year. With it came new experiences. Kisses, endless kisses, time stolen from days to pelt from the surgery and her duties and down to the river, to strip off clothes and plunge, shrieking, into still-icy waters. The way the mountain valley came alive for her, afternoons spent hiking the desolate reaches of the hills, searching through crags and peering into caves to search for ancient ruins and treasures beyond compare. Miranda told Elios all her father's old stories- the crystal city destroyed by ancient apocalypse, the warding saints and the holy monsters, and he marveled at them.

Other stories, too, eventually. Painful stories. Her mother's transformation. The resurrection, denied. The baby that was not a baby.

Sometimes, Salvatore accompanied them. He'd surrounded himself with quite the cadre of admirers, girls from the village who followed the whole group up into the hills, lugging bottles of wine and spirits and sweet buns to carouse until dawn, weaving wreaths of spring flowers, plucking tunes out on fiddles, dancing until they became too drunk to whirl around without vomiting, then collapsing arm in arm, spent and warm and sweating.

It was here she and Elios stole away from Sal and the girls, to be alone, to be in the dark together, hungry and desperate.

"Your scar's fading," Miranda told Elios, once, after. They lay on a bed of their abandoned clothes, the wind soft in the trees. Far below, down the cliffside, the village lights twinkled through the night, but here they seemed distant. A world away.

She trailed her fingers over the puckered scar tissue on his chest, the only evidence he'd ever been wounded at all. Their first meeting in the Duke's wagon seemed so long ago now. He'd taken a room in the village, over the bakery, and once he'd learned of Miranda's affinity for cinnamon buns he brought her as many as he could. The baker let him work for his keep, and seemed overjoyed at the help. The baker's wife pinched his cheeks, her own pink as Elias flattered her. A man embraced by the village.

Not for the first time, Miranda wondered just how long he planned on staying. Forever, she urged him, as much a prayer as she could muster.

"It'll be gone soon," she went on.

"I wish it would stay."

"Why?"

"Reminds me of you." He bent his head to kiss her on the nose. "You and your clever fingers." He pressed another kiss, slow and melting, to her mouth.

It was a while before words intruded again.

"I want to ask you something," Elios went on. He began to stroke her long, fair hair, spread about her head and shoulders like a halo. By now, the stars were out. In the winter, stars here glittered cold as diamonds, but now they seemed to glow, ripe as fruit.

"Anything."

"Marry me."

Miranda blinked. A surge of heat rippled through her nerves, and now all things seemed still. Was he joking? He couldn't be serious. She crushed hope back. Always, hope, such a traitor.

"What?" she said.

"Marry me."

"Why?" she burst out.

He laughed. "I love you," he said, like it was that simple. For Miranda, it could be. It was. For now.

***

They were married in the chapel, mere yards from where Miranda's mother had ripped herself from the coffin, from the dirt, where her silver-severed head had struck the graveyard ground. Miranda had no white gowns; instead she made hers from blue silk, embroidered all over with feathers, for the springtime birds that had sung Elios' arrival.

***

It was the same silk gown she tore to pieces in grief and in rage when he left her, when he walked out the door of their small house, and never came back.

***

The surgery was no place for a mother. That was what Nicolescu said when she came to him, begging for her old job back, her hands pressed over the gentle swell of her belly.

"I won't have a squalling baby distracting me from my work," he snapped, and slammed the door in her face.

Miranda stumbled back, into the freezing mud. She blinked; heat pushed at her eyes. Don't cry. Don't cry. She hadn't at her mother's funeral. She hadn't when Elios left her. She wouldn't now. But hunger gnawed at her, sharp as a wolf's teeth, and she felt the first hot slip of tears down her face, stinging with salt on her lips.

What would she do? The house she and Elios had shared was barred to her, the money long since run out. She'd learned, after, that he'd robbed the baker blind and made off with a small fortune in lei and irreplaceable family treasures, so there was no hope in returning there. Her father's house was sold. There was no one else, nowhere else she knew.

Her mind turned to fancies. The castle, perhaps? Could she steal in there, slip through a crack in the wall, live like a cursed princess in a cradle-song, huddled in the dust, starving to death even as the walls soared overhead, painted with gilt? Perhaps she could steal something from one of its dozens upon dozens of rooms- a silver goblet, a priceless painting- but then if one of the custodians caught her, she would be whipped, and then what about the baby?

The baby.

She'd discovered she was pregnant a week after Elios left. She'd suspected it before- her period was late- but a quick visit to a hedge-woman confirmed it, and now here she was, hungry, alone, begging an old drunkard for her old job.

She thought about banging on the door again. Begging him. Anything, she'd plead. Anything. But she didn't.

Just as she was about to turn away, a voice behind her said her name.

"Miranda?"

She whirled.

Salvatore stood there, a package under his arm, his face red with cold. He blinked at her through his spectacles.

"Miranda!" he said. "I thought- I haven't seen you for-"

His eyes dropped to her stomach.

"Miranda," he said for a third time, soft as down.

"Hello, Sal," Miranda said. She knew what he must be seeing- her broken shoes, her ragged clothes. Her ragged face, cheekbones sharp against her too-pale skin.

"What are you doing here?" Salvatore said.

"Asking...um. Asking Nicolescu for my job back."

"What?" He stepped toward her. "Why didn't you come to me months ago if you were in such dire straits?"

She flinched back from him. "I'm not a charity case, Sal."

"I know, I know-" He took a short breath. "But, Miranda...a baby."

The words hung in the air between them. A baby. A new thing, sleeping within her. She wondered what it might be dreaming now. She remembered a long-ago bed of blood, a long-ago cry of pain.

"I know you're too proud to accept anything from me," Salvatore went on. "But...Miranda, I want to help you. I don't expect anything," he added, quickly. "Just...let me help you. Please let me."

He was so kind, so desperate to make sure she was all right. And Miranda, tears streaking her face in earnest, felt herself break apart inside. To survive, she told herself, though a part of her just wanted to lie down in a place that was safe, just wanted someone there, someone to love her, something to hang onto, even if it wasn't real.

And so that was the way the world went.

And for years, it went well.

In midwinter, like a gift, came Eva. A tiny, squalling thing; Miranda rocked her in the single small window of Salvatore's tiny flat. The flat was above the luthier's workshop, so that even on nights when the coal was scarce and the air grew dead with cold, always, always, such sweet music. When the sound of violins faded and Miranda's housework was done, she rocked the little girl in her arms and sang her stories. Crystal and cataclysm. A paradise, an exodus. She sang in old-tongue, the language that was endemic to the village, as much a part of the villagers' everyday lives as their heartbeat. Lost in the forest, poor little lamb. Witches and wolves await your sweet flesh. Stumble and bleat, but the briars grow swiftly. Home is faraway, and you are so lonely.

She helped Sal around the house in return for their keep. He was, always, respectful, cleaning out what was once his study and cramming his desk and books into the sitting room so that Miranda and Eva could have it as their private bedroom. He even took their portrait on his brand-new camera, a device he'd ordered specially from the Duke and kept babbling about with unreserved excitement for weeks on end.

Miranda feigned annoyance, but she kept the photograph- herself cradling baby Eva- by her bedside, a candle burning beside it, like a small altar.

His books were open to her use, of course, as they'd always been, and many nights she spent, the lamp burning low, poring over the strange texts he unearthed from saints-knew-where. Treatise on the Black God; poisonous mountain flowers of the region; the odd yellow-papered novel or two; lives of the saints; histories and folk tales and diaries of boyars who had heard of the strange heretics who lived here, and came to see such wonders for themselves.

Eva grew up on these tales, and moved with Miranda and Salvatore, house to bigger house as Sal grew more and more successful. He was soon not only the village doctor, but a teacher, educating the village's young people on the sciences.

Educating Eva, when the time came and she was five years old, a little girl with long blonde pigtails, a yellow ribbon tied on the end of each.

"You look pretty as a flower, Evie," Miranda told her as she tied the bows tight. She pressed a kiss to the little girl's forehead, right in the middle. "And smart as a whip."

"I don't wanna go to school," Eva groused.

"You have to. You want to be clever and accomplished, like Dr. Moreau, don't you?"

She rolled her eyes. "All the other kids are gonna make fun of me because I live with the teacher."

"Well. All the other kids are just unlucky that they won't be able to ask for help with their homework, now, aren't they?" She'd spun the child around and gave her a gentle push down the front steps of the house. "Go on, now. I love you. I'll see you in the afternoon."

The house rose around her, fine and strong and grand. Miranda's father would have loved the carvings, the craftsmanship; her mother would have loved the comfort, the beautiful furnishings and windows set with panes of stained glass the color of barley candy. Miranda stood with her shawl wrapped around her, watching the familiar sights of the village square before her. She smelled mint and spices, wood polish and tea. The distant smoke of an autumn bonfire. Somewhere past the Maiden of War's swordpoint rang a school bell, calling the children in for their lessons.

She thought of the books in the house behind her and realized that for a long time those old tales had drifted to the back of her mind. They were Eva's stories, now, tales for children. She had asked the priests at the old church about the strange baby that had failed to save her mother, and was told it was an ancient thing, stored for decades beneath the altar, some relic of the Black God dug up a long time ago. An artifact of the past. This place was real. This life was real. And this life was good. For the first time in years, the memory of her mother's death and resurrection seemed just that, a memory, terrible to be sure, but eclipsed by the splendor of the present.

Maybe, yes, Salvatore would always watch her, just a moment too long, his gaze lingering on her face in the candlelight. And she would think, just for that same moment, whether or not she wanted to lean toward him, to meet his mouth with her own.

And maybe, yes, there would always be that question. Of comfort, or of devotion. Kindness, or passion.

But the moment always passed, and his hand always slid back from hers, and they were friends again, linked together forever by that one now-distant memory, already fading backwards into time. And she was content.

And so, she thought, was he, watching him flirt with girls around the well, watching pretty Eliska with the shining black braids straighten his spectacles.

But time, as it always would, passed by.

And with it, as ever, came death.

[saintsofwarding]

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by keltii-tea

Chapter 9: A Fox in Sheep’s Clothing

By the time Mia started to wake up, Heisenberg had just about run the gamut of every insult he could fling at her.

While she lay unconscious he'd paced back and forth, muttering under his breath, shaking his head, stumbling on the jagged fall of rocks the helicopter was currently strewn over. It lay there, a beached, gutted whale, spitting black smoke once the engine caught fire.

Heisenberg had stood, staring at it, yearning for a cigar, pawing through his pockets as if one might materialize, and when one didn't, he spent a good thirty minutes ripping apart the remains of the burning helicopter with his power and smashing the pieces into fragments of metal.

Now, he collapsed on a rock, breathing hard through clenched teeth, and waited. The sky was pale and hard as a sheet of ice, a light snowfall dusting the mountainside and stunted, twisted pines surrounding the crash site. The furrow of dark earth carved into the ground by the crashing helicopter had already frozen solid.

The wilderness rang around him, vast and silent.

For now, anyway.

He hunched down into his trench coat, hands deep in his pockets, eyes narrowed as he stared at Mia Winters, unconscious before him like a soldat seconds before its reactor kicked in.

Mia lay sprawled on a piece of metal scavenged from the helicopter. Her gray-brown hair was tangled around her shoulders, her lips slightly parted, blood dripping from a gash on her forehead. Her bullet wound had already sealed up, just a pucker of scar tissue over her sternum. Heisenberg leaned over his knees, watching her, waiting.

He could make out, faint as a wasp's hum, her heartbeat. His Cadou turned over inside him, a restless movement, echoing his own impatience.

He wanted to be proved right, and he wanted it now.

How'd you hide that secret from Chris, then? he wondered. But then again, they'd never cottoned to Ethan's little mold problem. Maybe the BSAA weren't as all-seeing and thorough as they liked to pretend to be.

To be fair, neither was he. His plans, inevitably, fell apart at the seams, carefully-constructed though they may be, and he'd had to get good at improvising. Easy, when one was as fond of explosions and rusty buzzsaws and spectacle as he was.

Now, there was no chance of buzzsaws or spectacle. This place was bleak as an old bone. As for explosions- well. The helicopter flames were already dying out.

Soon, the cold would get in.

Mia stirred. She twitched. Her lashes fluttered. Heisenberg didn't move from his rock as her eyes opened, as she stared up at the pale sky.

"Wake up, Mia," Heisenberg said. "You fucked up big time."

"Heis..." she rasped.

She gasped, then scrambled onto her hands and knees, reaching for her back. She touched the ragged hole in her sweater and froze.

"Yeah," Heisenberg said. He spread his hands. "What's with that?"

She put her hand down and, slowly, sank onto her haunches. "Get the hell away from me."

"Nothing doing. You owe me one, sweetheart. I saved your life."

"I don't- I don't want your pity, okay?" She shot a fiery glare at him, her hazel eyes bright in the frozen sunlight. "I'd rather freeze."

"Nothing so nice," Heisenberg said. "You would've been picked back up by Ouroboros. What, I wonder, would they have done to you when your dumbassery led to their pet Lord of the Village getting loose?"

He hooked a thumb toward himself and flashed her a grin. "Hm. Maybe you have a point. I'd sure as hell rather freeze than...whatever that would be."

"Oh, god," Mia whispered, bringing her hands to her face and running them through her hair. "Oh god. I did fuck up, didn't I."

"Yep."

"And now?"

"...Now?"

"If you're gonna kill me, kill me."

"You think I want to kill you? Mia. If I wanted you dead I'd have carried out my threat, broke your neck while you were unconscious."

"Why didn't you?" She tilted her head. A challenge. "After everything I did to you?"

His grin widened. "You were useful, weren't you? It's not every day a hostage falls right into your hands."

"Then why not leave me after you got to the helicopter?"

"Because Ouroboros doesn't get to kill you," he said. "Anyone gets to, after all the shit you pulled, it's me."

Mia stared at him for a good five-count, her face blank of expression. Then she gave a weary snort.

"Go on," she said. "Do your worst."

"Seriously? Thought you were a fighter. After hearing about your three years at the Baker estate, I assumed...well. Maybe I pegged you wrong."

"No." Mia faced him, climbing shakily to her feet. "No. That was a threat, Heisenberg. Go on. Do your worst. Can't be any worse than what you've already done-"

"Eh, you've got a point there."

"You stole my daughter." She staggered forward, her face hollow, her eyes ablaze. "You...you let me and so many others get tortured-"

Another step, her hands curling into fists. "You murdered my husband!"

She flung herself at him, the word fraying into a guttural howl. Heisenberg grabbed her by her wrists as she took a swing; she jerked to a halt with a little snarl, twisting against his grip. She was pretty strong- all that terrorist-organization combat training, he assumed- but he still had the Cadou on his side. He flung her off; she stumbled on the rocky ground, but came up with fists raised, the blood from her head wound streaking down her face and matting her hair.

"Mia-" Heisenberg said. He jerked to his feet, ducking her next punch. "Mia, I didn't fucking kill Ethan."

She stopped, panting. Blood dripped from her chin, her eyes bright with tears. "W...what?" she said.

"I didn't kill Ethan, all right? I was trying to get a rise out of you, and you fell for it like a bitch. I didn't fucking- dammit, Mia, Miranda killed Ethan. She and Redfield's huge-ass bomb that splatted her and the megamycete over the whole valley. Ethan was crystallizing. Dying already. Wanted to make the end mean something. For you. For fuckin'- everyone."

He paused. "For Rose."

Mia still breathed hard, slightly crouched. She scrubbed her knuckles over her mouth. "You're lying."

"Believe what you want to, sweetheart."

"He would never...give Rose to you."

"Desperate times. Redfield was off holding back the lycans. No one else was there to give her to." He couldn't resist another grin, showing off a hint of incisor. "Besides, Mia, don't I look the trustworthy type?"

Mia gave him a black look, but she backed off. She slumped onto a rock.

Heisenberg sidled over, standing on the edge of the slope, watching the snowfall creep closer and closer by the minute.

"So," he said.

She gave no response.

"Miranda did a number on you, didn't she?"

Nothing. He glanced sidelong at her.

"Oh, come on, Mia," he said. "It's just you and me. No one else to pour out your dirty little secrets to. No one else to overhear."

"You're despicable," she muttered.

"Yes, and?" He paused. "You embarrassed about it or something?"

"I'd rather not think about it."

"Sure, sure. I get it, Mia, I really do. When Miranda took a bonesaw to my ribs I didn't like to think about it either. I was just a kid, though. Maybe. Details are fuzzy. But I do remember what it felt like when she reached inside me and took parts of me out. And when she put something new inside. Something that wasn't me. I remember the way it moved and settled and curled up inside me. Like it was always meant to be there."

He stopped. His voice had dropped to a low, raspy growl. Mia was looking at him, now. He couldn't tell for how long.

"You were a little boy when she gave you that...thing?" she asked.

"The Cadou. Means-"

"-Gift," she finished, with a small, bitter laugh. "Yeah. I definitely looked that one up on google translate."

"I bet you did. So what about you?" Heisenberg said. He faced her fully again, hands stuffed deep in his coat pockets. "She didn't implant the Cadou in you, that's for sure. But she did something, all right."

"What tipped you off?"

"Besides you surviving a gunshot wound that should have cracked your sternum like an egg? Huh, how about your remarkable anti-aging regimen?"

She touched her cheek.

"She experimented on me," she said, after a pause. "She...injected me with...I don't know what was in that syringe. I thought I saw it wriggling under my skin, but...it could have been the drugs. I'm not sure. She kept me sedated some of the time. The rest, when I was more alert...she didn't talk to me. I was like..."

"Like an animal?" Heisenberg said.

Mia lowered her head. She hugged her arms around herself. The last of the flames from the burning helicopter died down, and the snow began to fall in earnest, blurring even the closest trees to gray shadows. Heisenberg had his coat, and could withstand the cold pretty long, but Mia just had her sweater.

"Listen," Heisenberg said. "Do what you want. Stay here if you want. I'm gonna go clean up your mess."

"Take on Ouroboros alone?"

"Yeah."

With that, he began away. He heard Mia scramble to her feet. "You won't get far," she called.

"Uh-huh."

"You know what this is?"

Heisenberg looked back. She'd lifted her arm, showing off the fancy-looking electronic watch thing she'd controlled his harness with, back on the ship. A small red light pipped on it.

"I don't know that shit," Heisenberg said.

"Among other things, it's a distress beacon," Mia said. She lowered her hand. "Ouroboros has a fix on us, now. It'll be a while in this snow, but they'll come for us-"

Heisenberg snapped the watch from her wrist and brought it hovering into the air between them. Mia didn't flinch; maybe she'd expected the move.

"I wouldn't," Mia said. "Break that, I mean."

"Oh, yeah?"

"When I injected you on the helicopter-"

"Knocked me the fuck out, you mean?"

"I did more than that." She lowered her head. Her tear-worn features, in the deepening shadows, took on a sly cast. Heisenberg began to see just how Mia Winters had evaded years upon years of consequences for all the bad shit she'd been a part of. A wolf in sheep's clothing, indeed. Or, maybe, a fox.

"That syringe was full of a slow-acting necrotoxin," she went on. "Developed to maintain control over bioweapons we loaned out to our various clients. We injected the creatures with that substance before sending them out. If the bioweapon wasn't returned within the agreed-upon timescale...full system meltdown."

Heisenberg's pulse hammered, his Cadou giving little spasms of anxiety in time. His mouth was dry. The necrotoxin, already beginning its work? Or just the sickening acceptance that someone had gotten one over him?

"You're lying," he said.

Mia smiled.

"Believe what you want to," she said. "Sweetheart."

"So- what? What's your play?"

"Ouroboros has the anti-toxin. They pick me up, alive and well, they'll administer it to you."

"You're sure about that?"

"I think it's you who should be worried."

Heisenberg advanced on her, stopping just short of running straight into her. She looked up, into his face. Even through a hostage situation, a gunshot wound, a helicopter crash, and a fistfight with a magnetic mutant on some godforsaken Romanian mountainside, she still smelled pretty damn good.

Fuck her. Fuck all of this. Little shards of metal rose from the rocks, orbiting around him as he stared down at her.

"How long?" he said.

"A few days."

"Good." He eased one of the metal shards forward, letting it draw a fine line down the smooth skin of her cheek. Her lips trembled, but she didn't back down. "Plenty of time."

He turned and began away, letting a few metal shards slip into his pockets before dropping control over the rest.

"Plenty of time for what?" he heard Mia yell from behind him.

"For me to get to the village and do what I need to do! I know it's tough, Mia, but do try to listen when I say things!"

The sound of crashing metal came from her direction. He looked back in time to see her emerge from the remains of the burned-out, smashed-up helicopter with a sleek, strange-looking rifle. Loaded, no doubt, with more of those anti-BOW rounds.

"Gonna shoot me?" Heisenberg called.

"No. Ouroboros would really make me into buzzard bait if I did that. You, unlike me, are a valuable asset."

"A valuable asset you just pumped poison into. You're betting the farm on this whole distress call maneuver, aren't you?"

She blew a plume of ash off the rifle barrel, watching the black dust swirl into the breeze. "And you'd better hope I win."

***

They set out into the wilderness.

This was familiar, Heisenberg thought, getting into the swing of things. Mia hiked along with her shiny new rifle shouldered and her affect grim, doing a good job to not look affected by the cold. While neither he nor his siblings could leave the valley boundaries, the ancient saintly statues Miranda had enforced as the perimeter- the limits, perhaps, of her power- there was plenty of wilderness between them and the village, plenty of woods and chasms, caves and cliffs to wander through.

As much as he'd craved the drowning, single-minded oblivion of the work he did in his factory, weeks or months on end of arms gloved in corpses and steaming piles of organs replaced with polycrystal and metal, he was a creature of extremes, after all, and he craved silence when the work at last grew too much, and the engine of his brain turned to scrabble and scrawl.

Oh, there were recollections of hunting, too, blood in the snow, lycans leaping and tearing alongside him, striking down sorry souls at his command, but here and now the memories rising to the top were ones of peace.

Necrotoxin must be getting into my temporal lobe, he thought, giving his head a little shake. Need to give myself a hard electric shock, stave it off for as long as possible. If only there were some jumper cables around. Peace wasn't in the cards for him. He couldn't think that way now. Maybe never.

He paused at an outcropping, squinting at the mountains visible through the mist.

"You on the right track?" Mia asked him.

"Yeah." He put out a hand, gauging the distance between two peaks. If he turned his head- yeah, that was it. He'd spent countless hours in the field of waist-high grass outside his factory, perched on the rusted treads of some old tank or heap of scrap, smoking a cigar and listening to the wind through the dry stalks as he stared toward the mountains surrounding the village. He knew them by now, knew them like the smell of sunsets around this place. The sting of each sun slipping below the horizon, another day longer in captivity.

Another day in the factory. Another corpse gutted. Another heart torn loose and machinery coiled in. A foreign thing, forced inside.

The work was endless, but it was all he'd ever known, and he'd loved it because it would set him free. In his darkest moments, in the black pits of his grief and rage and despair, he'd thought to himself will I ever be free, would I even recognize freedom even if I felt it.

Now, like in the factory, there was a job to get done, and he'd do it no matter what it took.

Is that what you want, Mister Heisenberg?

It didn't matter. Not now.

What about after?

But there could be no after. That was the way the world worked. Maybe Rose had a point, in her yearning for a human life- denial of self was the only way to find peace. And he would never be human again.

After the village, he thought what he'd done- saving Rose, saving himself- was redemption enough to spare him from the world. He saw now how it all came back around, how the end was as ever like the beginning.

There was no peace for him. There was no freedom for him.

Right?

Afternoon slipped stealthily into night. Mia kept her rifle at the ready. And when the howl filled the cold air, Heisenberg was almost relieved. Finally, he didn't have to do anymore thinking.

"Lycans?" was all Mia said.

"Yeah. Stay close."

"I've got this, Heisenberg-"

"I don't doubt your skills with that potato shooter of yours, Mia," he told her. "I'm saying stay close in case one blitzes us and drags you off." He looked her up and down. "Believe me. They're gonna go for you first."

She didn't argue, just pressed in, her shoulder brushing his back, her finger poised alongside the trigger. Another howl joined the first in chorus. Heisenberg searched the trees, but saw nothing- no lycan pack, no eyes glinting from the shadows. No reek of blood. Were they hunting other prey?

No.

He saw it, suddenly- the form loping alongside them, keeping several yards back. Small, ungainly; it seemed to shamble along, then pause, then keep shambling, its head bowed.

Mia's brow furrowed. "What the hell is that?" she muttered.

"Looks like a small one."

"I can get it from here-"

"Hang on." Heisenberg put his palm over her barrel. "Lycans are like sharks. You get blood on the ground, they go into a frenzy. Don't want to draw a whole pack on us."

"Oh, you couldn't handle that? I thought you were supposed to be a big deal around here. You certainly acted like it, once upon a time."

"Yeah, yeah, save it, sweetheart."

The shape shuffled around them, letting out the occasional small yip. Heisenberg stopped as it crawled ahead of them, behind a cluster of rocks jutting from the snow. He brought his hand from his coat pocket, levitating a palmful of scrap around his hand and wrist. It glinted in the half-light.

Mia inched forward, rifle trained on the rocks.

"Careful-" Heisenberg warned.

The shape emerged from over the rocks. Small, skinny, one leg withered. Its long hair fell in tatters over its face, coarse and gray. He made out the fangs jutting from its lips, and, too, the remnants of the dress the small lycan wore, an apron tied around its waist. It saw them, big eyes bright beneath its hair, small fingers curled on the snowy rock.

"It's a child," Mia whispered.

"A child lycan," Heisenberg said, with a laugh. Now that was fucked up.

"Oh, god." Mia's hands shook on the rifle. The lycan gave another little yelp, crawling over the rocks and dropping down to the snow. "No, no-"

"Mia!" Heisenberg barked, in warning, as the lycan's haunches tensed, bringing up his hand, electricity snapping between the metal shards.

The lycan leapt with a snarl; Mia stumbled back; the muzzle flash lit the trees, gunshot going wide.

Gotta do everything my goddamn self, Heisenberg thought. A hum of power blasted through the forest, shaking snow from the branches. Shrapnel pinged off the tree trunks, the rocks; the lycan fell, steaming, thrashing and clawing at its multiple small wounds before going still. Mia was on her knees, breathing hard.

"C'mon, get up-" Heisenberg grabbed her shoulders and hauled her to her feet. "We gotta move. Others will have heard- ohhh."

A half-moon of bite marks glistened on her forearm, shredding aside her sweater sleeve. As Heisenberg watched, the wound pulsated.

"Oh," he said again, this time with intrigue.

"Hurts," Mia managed. "Agh-"

She convulsed. The wound seemed to throb in time; there was definitely something in there. Heisenberg glanced at the child lycan, crumbling into crystal. Inside its open mouth writhed tentacles, as if in some grotesque last gasp at life.

He remembered his conversation with Mia onboard the ship. Miranda's little show and tell in the stronghold. So the lycans had in fact mutated without her interference. Fascinating.

Mia began to shudder under his hands. The wound rapidly blackened, flesh turning necrotic as he watched. No time to waste. He heaved her into his arms.

"Giving up already?" he said. "So disappointing."

"Y...y'dont...want to observe...this...?"

"Another time, Mia." He pulled her hair out of her face so she could see him as he grinned down at her. He gave her a little pat on the cheek. "I need you alive, don't I?"

She grew heavier as he hurried through the snow, as he broke through the treeline and onto a slope. The howls echoed louder, closer, a looping, overlapping wave of them from all directions. There. He spotted it against the otherwise-unrelenting expanse of trees and mountain: a ruin clinging to the mountainside, a single crumbled tower crowned with what looked at this distance like a stone angel. Some kind of church, then.

Good. Nice thick stone walls.

Heisenberg skidded down the slope, Mia jostling in his arms; the black putrefaction bubbled and grew as he watched, leaching the color from her skin.

Snarls filled the woods.

He picked up speed, ducking through the stone archway of the collapsed wall around the church. Claws scythed the air at Heisenberg's back; he let go of Mia as he swung around and drove his fist into the lycan's face. It snapped back with a shriek.

"Bad dog!" Heisenberg roared.

The church doorway was just beyond. A kick sent the rotted, iron-studded door banging open, blowing a cloud of dust into the gloom.

Mia gave a pained cry; black fluid oozed from the corner of her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut, lids black-veined, lashes damp with rot.

Heisenberg sent the door slamming shut, yanked two of the bolts out, fused them together into a makeshift latch. Impact shuddered against the door a few moments later, claws screeching down the aged wood.

Holding it shut with his power, he shoved aside a few of the moldering pews aside and lay Mia down on one of them. After a beat, he stuck an ancient velvet kneeler under her head. No point in concussing her- for now, anyway. Dust filtered down from the rafters as the sound of lycans crawling over the church roof echoed through, graying her hair even further. A single shaft of moonlight fell from a hole in the ceiling, giving Heisenberg enough light to work by. As the midnight moon rises on black wings...A scrap of old prayer drifting through his head. Was it still a prayer when it was spoken by God herself? Glory to...glory to...

"Dumbass," he told her. "That wasn't a kid anymore."

"I...I know that- I'm not stupid-"

"Why the fuck did you freeze up, then, huh?" He tore the shredded material of her sleeve open, exposing her arm to the air. Black veins twisted down it to the elbow. The wound itself had swollen to the size of a grapefruit, the flesh soft and mushy to the touch, pulsing with a cardiac rhythm.

"...Scared...thought...I was, I was, back in...nightmare..."

She was losing it, and fast. Muttering, Heisenberg fished the remainder of his scrap metal from his pocket and sent it swirling together into a long, pointed shape. A flexion of his power pressed it together, molding the scrap into a makeshift scalpel. Its edge shone blue-white, razor-sharp.

He floated it above his palm. He'd be more dexterous using his abilities for this. He gave Mia his belt to chew on, held her down by the shoulders as she thrashed and spasmed under him.

"Don't- move-" he ordered.

She screamed around the belt, a grating sound propelled from deep inside her guts. Fan-fucking-tastic. This was why he preferred to work on the dead. At least Teodora had done him the courtesy of laying still while he cut her open.

He lowered the scalpel to the swelling. The first cut sank in as if through butter; black fluid spurted out, hitting Heisenberg in the face. He spat it aside- tasted rancid- and kept going, splitting the growth open like a rotten tomato.

A shriek came from the wound. Nestled inside the growth, latched into Mia's arm, was a curled, tentacled thing, fetal and shapeless, screeching as the air hit it.

"Intriguing as you are," Heisenberg told it, "I need this arm attached to this body."

He jabbed the scalpel down. It skewered the parasite; the thing's keen was ear-cracking, setting his teeth on edge. With a twist and a flick of the scalpel, he ripped it off her arm and sent it splatting to the flagstones, where it oozed, trying to crawl away by its long, trailing tentacles.

"No hard feelings," Heisenberg told it, and brought his boot down on it, crushing it into sticky goo.

Mia had stopped spasming and lay, as before, sprawled, her chest rising and falling in short, quick pants, his belt trailing from her mouth.

She let it go with her teeth as he took it from her.

"Ow," she whispered.

He bent her arm up so she could see the wound, and made the hand give her a jaunty wave. "You had a little friend."

"Better...better company than...you..." She was fading fast. Heisenberg busied himself with her arm, draining the black fluid from her skin, cutting away the excess rot. But Miranda's augmentation did its job, and even as he cleaned up the wound, like he would with the rot that had infested the  bodies of so many of his prospective soldaten, it began to clot and scab itself over.

"Look at that," Heisenberg said. "You'll be all plugged up in no time."

"No..." Mia mumbled. "Don'...wanna be..."

"What was that?"

"Don't wanna be...a monster...not, not again..." She gave a little hitch of a sob. "Everyone's counting on me..."

She fell silent, her head lolling to the side. Heisenberg gave her face a poke, then made a small "Hm." of dissatisfaction.

Curious, he gave the scalpel blade, covered with her fresh blood, a lick. Hm. Didn't have the taste he usually associated with megamycete infection. What the hell had Miranda done to her?

Questions for later. He finished all he could now, then sank to the floor, leaning his head back against Mia's hip on the pew. She was out cold, far as he could tell. Probably for the best. He listened to her breathing, then tipped his head back to look at the hole in the ceiling, the scrap of sky visible beyond.

A few stars had come out, the clouds parting to show a sliver of moon. Stars didn't look like that anywhere else but here.

You're back home again, Karl.

What do you think you'll find, in the place that destroyed you, in the place you destroyed in turn?

Yeah, well. Like he'd said. It all came back round eventually.

He'd worry about it in the morning.