Night: Celia and the Sister Duo

Sister Zero (Scenes 1-5)

[Antonio]
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

—William Shakespeare,
The Merchant of Venice,
Act I: Scene 1

1

While the Red and White Queens continued their summoning curse at the corner of the hallway, Auna took up her position behind the partition around the next corner away from them, just out of their line of sight. She crouched to the floor and dug a hand into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out two rosaries and kissed the crosses on each, then pulled down her socks and wrapped each rosary above her ankles, then lifted up each sock.

She rose to her feet and manifested a semiautomatic pistol in her hand, took out a full magazine from her other pocket and loaded the gun, then said under her breath, “Saint Sebastian, look on me and have mercy. Speed my feet from the path of the wicked, from the snares of the sinful, and from my own sins, that I may fly the jaws of death. Amen.”

She made the sign of the cross, then pulled back the slide of her gun, chambering a round, and leaned against the wail with both hands gripping her gun and her heart beating in her chest—

And waited.

2

When the trio reached the patio of the house, Cooley opened the double doors into the dining area of the mansion and let Mara and Nico inside, then looked up at the churning clouds in the sky. Katherine was an emotional young woman, even when she didn’t show it, and Cooley saw it all in the skies. Under sunny skies, Cooley knew she was happy; under cloudy skies, she was upset; under rainy skies, she was probably crying; and under storming and thundering skies, she was angry. Yet the churning clouds Cooley saw now—not yet a downpour of sadness, nor yet a single angry thunderclap—harbored an unfamiliar emotion, somewhat akin to worry but deeper and more urgent and stretched super tight like violin strings.

And something else.

Something else she found difficult to tease out, as though the silence of this cloudy day hid a threat she couldn’t see.

She pushed these thoughts aside and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

Mara and Nico were already taking off their damp clothes in the dining area, and Mara was pulling off her shirt over her shoulders when she saw Cooley and paused.

“Excuse me, Ms. . . .” Mara said.

“Cooley,” the woman said, “just Cooley.”

“Cooley,” Mara said, “can you look away for a little bit. Nico and I are still changing.”

“Geez, you don’t have to make a big fuss over it,” Nico said, pulling off her shirt over her shoulders and then pulling her skirt down her legs and walking out of them. ”She’s another woman, so don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mara said, then remembered the Hearn sisters walking in on them inside Katherine’s private boudoir. “And I don’t appreciate you undressing me in front of people, either!”

“So you’re shy, are you?” Cooley said.

Mara blushed and looked away, but Nico shook her head and said, “Do you have a washer and dryer we could use?”

“Yes, we do,” Cooley said. “It’s—” She covered her mouth.

“Wait a minute,” Mara said. “What do you mean by ’we’?”

Nico added, “Is someone else living here?”

Now it was Cooley’s turn to get tongue-tied, as she thought of other calamities on the verge of happening, along with a solution to fix the unfixable.

One of which called out from outside the double doors, saying, “Cooleeeeeey, why are you taking so long? The spa’s ready to go. Do I have to drag you to the spa?” Then came footfalls rushing to the patio entrance, and someone pulled the double doors open, revealing a Madison look-alike in short shorts and a bikini top.

Now all was silent.

The Madison look-alike paused before the threshold, looking at the two undressed girls looking back at her in shock, then at Cooley, and then back at the girls.

“Cooley,” the Madison look-alike said.

“Um, y-yes,” she said, gulping. ”What is it?”

“Who are those two?” And the Madison clone pointed at Mara and Nico. “I don’t remember inviting them into our spa.” Then she gave Cooley a maniacal glare, saying, “Are you cheating on me?”

“No! It’s not like that! I can explain!”

So she crossed her arms over her ample bosom and said, “Then explain, or I’ll roast them in three . . .”

“Blaze, come on!” Cooley said, walking over to her. “I’m not—”

“Two . . .”

“Those two . . . Uh!” And Cooley lost her train of thought, so she grabbed her shoulders, saying, “Geez, calm down, will you?”

“One . . .”

Then, just before she roasted anything, just before Cooley said another word, and just before Mara unleashed her psychokinesis, Nico said, smiling, “Wow, you sound a lot like Maddy.”

“What? WHAT?” And the Madison look-alike gave Nico a murderous glare and flooded the patio and dining room with growing heat, turning the air around them arid and hot, making Cooley take her hands off her shoulders to shake away the blistering heat. “How dare you compare me to that bitch!”

“Wait,” Mara added, “does that mean you know her?”

“I sure as fuck wish I didn’t!”

“And why’s that?” Nico said, giving this woman a glare of her own. “Did something weird happen between you and Maddy? Or did you decide to just up and leave?”

At any other moment, this Madison look-alike would have exploded and burned everything around her within a fifty-foot radius, but Cooley had had enough. So she slapped her across the face and said, “Blaze, get a grip on yourself! You don’t even know who those girls are, and you’re already judging them!”

“So what?” she said. “I have a right to pass judgement, don’t I?”

“Not till you know what they’ve been through,” Cooley said, then turned to the girls, both of them undressed (save for bras and panties) and holding their wet clothes folded in their arms. She pointed out Nico, saying, “Take a good look at her, and tell me what you see.” It was not a request, but an order.

So Blaze came up to Nico, who dropped her clothes and clung to Mara’s waist, and the closer she got to this Nico person, the more she realized what she did not see before.

“Where’s your life force?” Blaze said, reaching out her hand and pausing it just before her chest. “There’s no heartbeat.” Then she looked into Nico’s eyes, peering deep into those windows, wherein she gleaned the truth, and said, “No way! No fucking way! Are you actually—”

She paused, because that’s when Nico began to cry, letting all her strength and courage and stress flow through her tears, and clung to Mara as though she was clinging to the only thing keeping her from disintegrating into nothing.

So Mara dropped her own clothes and wrapped an arm around her sister’s bare waist, and with her other hand, she grabbed Nico’s hand and pressed it to her chest, where her heart beat warm and strong against her palm, beating for the both of them. And she whispered pretty nothings to her sister, saying, “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

Blaze turned to Cooley. “What happened to her?”

Cooley merely motioned her hand back to Mara and Nico.

“What happened?”

“She died,” Mara said, and her eyes clouded with images of that horrible moment on Rancaster’s stage. “I watched her die. And I know who killed her.” So for the next few minutes, she told them everything.

3

When Celia and Madison appeared in the summoning circle, forcing the Red and White Queens to evade, both sisters began stamping away at the glowing circle, trying to smudge it out and break the spell, yet the summoning seal remained intact. The magic circle still glowed on the carpet beneath their feet, still connected to Auna’s blood summoning spell, still pulsing to the heartbeat of that girl leaning against the wail out of sight on the other side of the hallway, waiting and waiting and biding her chance as she gripped her gun tighter.

Celia glared at the White Queen and Madison at the Red Queen, as both queens took up new positions some paces away, side by side, one white and one red.

Eyeing the White Queen and the Red Queen in turn, Celia said, “Can you handle these two on your own?”

“Leave them to me,” Madison said and turned up the heat, and waves of it flooded around herself and Celia in a blistering sphere, expanding it outward and backing both queens further away from their original position over the summoning seal. ”Go find the other one and break the seal.”

So Celia crouched to the floor and lowered her palm on top of the summoning seal, feeling Auna’s spell surge through her arm and into her mind’s eye, and when her eyes flashed upon Auna’s location around the next corner, she said, “I found her,” and threw another seal below her feet and blinked out of sight.

“Now then,” Madison said, sending her own seals along the floor of the hallway between herself and her foes, ready to explode them the moment they moved forward, “which one of you bitches wants to go first?”

Both queens traded glances before looking back and smiling at her, then stretched out their hands and manifested a knife there and took up positions close to the walls.

The Red Queen said, “Don’t get cocky now—”

“Or we’ll make you regret it,” the White Queen added.

And before Madison exploded her seals, before she could even curse, she saw both doppelgängers running up onto the sides of the walls and charging at her in a blur, ready to slice at her with their knives. So Madison focused all of her fiery energy into her fist and slammed it on the floor like a meteorite crashing into the earth, shaking the hallway on impact and blinking out the ceiling lights and caving in the floor and the surrounding walls in a spreading explosion of hellfire, blowing the Red and White Queens off the walls and sending them some paces away.

When the lights came back on, Madison saw both queens already getting to their feet, cursing at her and saying that she played dirty. Yet Madison always played dirty when she could, remembering her seals on that part of the floor. So she exploded them like land mines, rupturing the floorboards under both queens in a mass of detonations going off at once, shaking the hallway again and filling it with a cloud of debris spreading towards Madison’s position at the end of the hall before dissipating.

As the cloud fully dispersed, she stood up with her ears ringing from the mass detonation, but she saw no sign of either of the queens there, nor any sign of gore on the walls. Only long splinters and pieces of floorboard lay scattered and broken over the tattered remains of singed carpeting. Much of the paneling of the walls on either side of the mass detonation had been jarred loose from their recesses and lay on the floor or pockmarked into more splinters, and even a few of those splinters had been lodged into the ceiling above.

She then surveyed the epicenter of the shallow crater she had created, its carpeting burned away, revealing a circular depression of ash and smoldering embers in the center, long charred splinters on the edges of the depression, and burnt floorboard pieces scattered from the origin of the blast. The recessed paneling had been depressed into smoldering splinters where the brute impact of the explosion had created two circular depressions in the intersecting walls of one corner and depressed the adjacent corner into a smoldering black edifice. And the ceiling above the explosion, which had shorted out the ceiling lights before they came back on, had a blackened corona of charring above her head.

Yet in the middle of this destruction, Madison noticed the glowing circle of light—the summoning circle—floating just inches off of the caved-in depression she was standing in. She crouched down and passed her hand through the glowing circle that seemed to defy reality, now blinking to a peculiar rhythm that reminded her of heartbeats, before it dipped itself out of sight into the floor.

“That’s weird,” Madison said, but when shots fired to her left around the next corner, she took off sprinting towards the source of the sound. “Celia! CELIA! Fuck, fuck, fuck, you better be okay! God damn it, you better be okay!”

4

Moments before the explosions, Celia appeared around the corner and got right in Auna’s face, grabbing her gun and trying to wrest it out of her hands, while keeping the muzzle away from her legs, away from her stomach, away from her face, shoving Auna back against the wall and raising the gun towards the ceiling. Yet even as she was controlling the gun, she felt herself tiring as if she were wrestling with Kendra, struggling to keep the gun up against Auna’s strength and the force of gravity.

“Let go!” Celia yelled, straining just to keep the muzzle of the gun raised far enough, so she wouldn’t get shot in the face. “Let go, you fuck!”

“Sure,” Auna said, and to Celia’s surprise, she let go of the gun and let her have it, backing away a few steps with her hands up and her palms empty. “There. Are you happy now?”

Celia just stood there, winded with the effort she had expelled just to wrestle Auna for the gun, and she had given it up without further contest. Then she noticed the weight of the gun in her hand, which felt cumbersome and uneven in her grasp, and it was all she could do to hold it steady in her hand. Judging from first impressions, Celia guessed this girl was around her own height and weight and build, but she had a grip strength rivaling Kendra’s and might even be able to stand up to her in a fight.

Then the hallway shook with an impact that sounded like a meteor hitting the earth, blinking out the ceiling lights overhead before coming back on, and moments later, the hallway shook again that sounded like a mass of detonations going off at once.

“Maddy!” Celia said, doubling back past the corner and noticing a cloud of debris coming towards her before dissipating, but when she looked back and saw Auna turning tail and running down the hall, Celia ran after her, yelling, “Where are you going?”

“You tell me,” she yelled back. “I’m new to this place!”

And the girl ran and ran without stopping, seeming to run on a full tank that never emptied, while Celia was feeling the burn in her legs as she tried to keep up. And with the gun still gripped in her hand, she felt like she was running with a dumbbell, throwing her strides off kilter enough to slow her down. That’s when Celia realized the girl’s tactic all along. She hadn’t been trying to shoot her face off, nor was she running away out of cowardice: she was trying to tire her out.

Celia slowed to a halt and raised the gun in both hands, trying to keep it steady, and said, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!”

Auna slowed to a halt at the end of the hallway and faced her, a mere twenty feet away, and said, “Then why don’t you?”

“I’ll shoot if you force me to,” she said, struggling to keep her aim true, even as muscle fatigue burned in her arms. Hell, if Kendra was here, she’d be screaming at her to keep her wrists locked and her eyes on the target.

“You have the gun,” Auna said, raising her hands up with her palms forwards. “Why don’t you use it?”

That’s when Celia realized her own mistake: she had been suckered into fighting by Auna’s rules, so she discarded the gun, letting it thud onto the floor, and said, “I’m through messing around,” and she blinked out of sight—

And got up in Auna’s face with a swing at her jaw, but she missed, throwing herself off balance and into Auna’s hip toss. And before Celia knew it, she found herself flying head over heels and landing on her back and crumpling up in agony. As Celia scrambled to her feet, she caught sight of Auna manifesting her gun and aiming it at point-blank range.

Just as shots fired, Celia blinked out of sight—

And appeared behind Auna, clipping her waist from behind and locking her hands together on her stomach, trying to prepare her for a suplex from hell, but Celia’s reserves were now running on empty. All of Auna’s tactics have drained Celia’s strength before the tussle began, so she found herself checkmated in two moves: the first was a WWE hip toss; the second was MMA ground and pound.

All of her efforts blew up in her face, because Celia had underestimated her opponent the moment she played Auna’s game, because Celia’s arsenal was nowhere near that of Auna’s or Kendra’s, because all Celia had were her teleportation seals and her grandmother’s blood spells.

Thus, she had no contingency plans for when those strengths became her weaknesses, nothing to fall back on when Auna broke her hold and wheeled around behind her and pulled her to the ground and rained blows on her head. Thus, Celia couldn’t help but cover up her face, nor could she help herself as Auna gained a full mount on top of her, straddling her stomach and manifesting a gun aimed at her head. But for all of her shortcomings in close quarters combat and her terrible decisions leading up to this point, Celia knew what danger looked like.

Celia grabbed at the gun, even as Auna had her pinned to the ground beneath her. She kept the muzzle of the gun away from her face, even as she was losing her grip with Auna leveraging her weight and shifting and wrenching and pressing the muzzle closer and closer to the side of her face.

Celia kept trying, even as Auna said, “Die, you bitch!”

And even as the gun went off close to Celia’s ear, buzzing her head full of static, filling her nostrils with the fume of gunpowder and stinging her eyes with it, she held on, tenacious and desperate, straining against Auna’s leveraging strength, squinting her eyes full of tears against the inevitable if she didn’t do something.

Anything! she thought, flooding her mind with a flurry of interiors inside Katherine’s mansion, then summoning her seal through the mental clutter and releasing her spell and taking Auna with her to God knows where.

5

After the Cairns twins gave the short version, Cooley and Blaze were thunderstruck, but both took it differently. Cooley was horrified, placing a hand over her gaping mouth, but Blaze was fuming, gritting her teeth and clenching her hands into knuckle-white fists. Cooley looked at her fuming friend and the two Cairns twins in turn, then came over and picked up their damp clothes and said, “Blaze will dry these up for you, so don’t worry about them.”

“What am I, a house maid?” Blaze said.

Cooley then gave them to her friend, saying, “Come on, hop to it!” But when Blaze folded her arms over her ample bosom and glared at her, she said, “When you’re done, come to the sauna,” and she walked through the double doors leading Mara and Nico outside.

Blaze just stood there, sighing in irritation, and took out her frustrations out on their damp clothes but tried not to roast them.

Meanwhile, Cooley led Mara and Nico along the colonnaded patio walkway, leading to the entrance of a recessed shed attached to the house, sliding the door open and inviting them inside and showing them where the cubby holes were, so they could retrieve their clothes afterwards. She then scampered back up the walkway and stripped off her clothes, till she found Blaze still fuming as she took the twins’ clothes with her.

Cooley said, “Please don’t tell me you burned their clothes!”

“I will if you keep pestering me!”

“Give them to me,” Cooley said and took the twins’ clothes in her other hand, while Blaze pulled down her short shorts and walked out of them. Afterwards, both women proceeded to the sauna, where they stuffed the twins’ clothes as well as their own into the cubby holes just by the sauna entrance.

They slid the door shut and found Nico lying on one of the benches, resting her head atop Mara’s lap.

Mara and Nico looked at the two older girls and just sat there, Mara saying, “Uh . . .”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” Cooley said, sitting on the opposite bench. “Blaze and I do that all the time.”

Blaze smiled at Cooley’s words as she was checking the furnace, using the bellows to blow more cool air into burning cinders of pinewood, filling the sauna with a pine-scented fragrance. As a new wave of warmth and fragrance filled the sauna, Blaze joined Cooley on the bench facing the Cairns twins and said, “Cooley and I take it to another level at night.”

“Blaze,” Cooley said, deadpanning, “don’t corrupt them.”

Nico raised herself from Mara’s lap and smiled, saying, “Oh, we’re wayyyyy past corrupted!”

“Nico!” Mara said.

Cooley whistled, saying, “Ooooh, what a naughty girl you are.”

“And coy, too,” Blaze said.

Mara deadpanned, while Nico added with a grin, “And she takes the lead, too.”

“Ugh, please stop!” Mara said and tried to change the subject: “Cooley, can you check on Kathy’s private room?”

“Wow, you really are forward, aren’t you?” Cooley said.

So Blaze leaned forward and said, almost in a conspiratorial way, “Hey, just between you and me, Cooley likes assertive partners.”

“Ugh,” Mara said, getting up from the bench, “stop trolling me, or I’m leaving!”

“Okay, okayyyy,” Cooley said. “We’ll stop.”

“For now,” Blaze said.

“STOP!”

“Okay, okayyyy! We’ll stop,” Cooley said and summoned a body-length mirror that reached to the corner of the floor on the sidewall between them, then placed a finger on the reflection and peered into it as it shimmered to life. “Kathy’s got a lot of private rooms, though, so you need to be more specific.”

“It’s the one that has her one-way mirror,” Nico said, “not the one with all the dildos and smut and stuff.”

Mara blushed.

“I’ll take you there later if you want,” Blaze said.

Mara glared.

“All right, I’ll stop,” Blaze said.

Cooley concentrated on Katherine’s position in her dream mansion and said, “Okay, I think I know which room you’re talking about,” and she brought up the image onto the reflection showing an unconscious Katherine Hearn lying face down on the floor. “Oh my God!”

“What happened?” Blaze said, standing up from the bench.

Nico and Mara were speechless looking on in horror.

“You two stay here,” Cooley said to the twins and walked through the reflection, warping the image during her passage, and Blaze followed after her through the reflection, warping the image again before it settled back onto the interior of Katherine’s private boudoir.

Nico and Mara got up and peered at the moving image before them, looking in on the scene of Cooley and Blaze crouching, of Blaze turning Katherine over onto her back, of Cooley putting her head down over Katherine’s mouth and placing her hand over her bosom (checking her breathing and her heartbeats) and giving instructions to Blaze on what she should do next. Then Blaze looked at the body-length mirror beside the vanity table and walked over to it and touched it, then jerked her hand away and said something to Cooley.

“What are they talking about?” Nico said.

“I don’t know,” Mara said. “Do you think it’s serious?”

“I hope not,” she said.

“Me, too,” Mara said.

The scene in the mirror continued with Cooley getting up and walking over to the body-length mirror and putting her hand on the surface, then pulling away and saying something else to Blaze. Then Cooley walked over and began lifting Katherine up by her armpits, and Blaze lifted her up by her legs, and both girls carried the unconscious woman towards the mirror, warping the image as they carried Katherine into the sauna.

“Make way, please,” Cooley said.

So Nico and Mara made room for their passage, getting out of their way as Cooley and Blaze carried the unconscious young woman past the sauna benches towards the entrance and laid her onto the wooden floorboards. As Cooley checked on her patient again, Blaze came up to Nico and Mara standing near the sauna entrance, saying, “Get dressed,” and reached for her cubby hole and pulled out her short shorts and a blouse she had placed there beforehand and got dressed.

So Mara and Nico got themselves dressed.

Nico said, “What’s going on?”

“Katherine’s mansion has been compromised,” Blaze said.

“WHAT?” said Nico and Mara.

“She’s been put under a sleeper curse,” Cooley said.

“You can’t be serious?” Nico said.

“Oh, I’m damn serious,” Cooley said as she was checking Katherine's vital signs, repeating the same process of placing her ear near Katherine’s mouth to check for her breathing and placing her hand on her chest to check for her heartbeat and sighed. “She’s not in any immediate danger, but if she doesn’t wake up from this curse by dawn, she might stay this way. That’s why it’s called a sleeper curse.”

Nico gulped and said, “What about Maddy and Celia?”

“I checked Kathy’s mirror myself,” Cooley said. “Someone’s been tampering with it, so I can’t detect her sisters’ locations anywhere in the mansion at all. Mara, Nico,” she added, pointing to the mirror against the side wall between the sauna benches, “I need you to take Kathy to the basement and stay with her.”

No sooner had she issued those instructions when the reflection of Katherine’s private boudoir in the mirror changed to that of an underground vault beneath Cooley’s own dream mansion. So Nico and Mara got to work and lifted and carried Katherine off the floor, Nico carrying her by her armpits and Mara carrying her by her legs, and entered the mirror.

“Look after her, you two,” Blaze said.

“We will,” Mara said and entered the mirror, carrying Katherine’s body through it.

While Nico added, “Be careful out there,” and entered the mirror, warping the reflection.

For a time, Cooley just stood there in silence, steadying her breathing as she clenched and unclenched her hands, till Blaze came over to her and placed her hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes, saying, “Kathy’s gonna be okay. Don’t worry.”

But Cooley shook her head and dropped her show of strength from her face as tears welled up in her eyes. She said, “It’s all my fault.”

So Blaze hugged her close to her, letting her cry over her shoulder, and said, “Hey, don’t think that way, because it’s not. When we find out whoever did this to Kathy—”

But Cooley regained herself, pushing Blaze away and wiping her tears, and said, “That’ll have to wait,” and she stretched out her hand and summoned another mirror and placed her palm against it, concentrating on the locations of Madison and Celia in the hallways of Katherine’s mansion. “We need to find Maddy and Celia first, so they can bring Kathy back to their place. . . . Wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Blaze said.

“I sense five— . . . No, three— . . . What?” she said, concentrating on what was going on in her mind’s eye over the sudden change of movements. “I’ve lost track of Celia and whoever was with her.”

“You’re kidding,” Blaze said.

“I’m not,” she said. “I can’t sense them anymore, but I’ve locked onto Maddy’s location, along with two others.”

“Two others?” Blaze said.

“Yeah,” Cooley said, “but they’re fast. It’s hard keeping track of them from this distance. We need to get closer.”

Tsuzuku