And (Scenes 6-13)
6
In the midst of Auna’s despair inside the Looking-Glass mirror, the dream world around her cracked and shattered to pieces and crumbled away into dust before dissipating into nothing, and for a time she stayed there. Yet her soul from out of that void became one with the universe, enfolding herself into the arms of another, feeling someone else’s words breathe warmth against her ear (“I’ll let you have more if you find me before they do.”), and kissing lips as if they were the lips of sweet death. And at those words and at that kiss, the image of a girl she had never met surfaced through her mind before dissipating into the slow-wave static of her dreams.
She then picked herself up and looked at the blank mirror before her and touched its surface, and the image of that same girl manifested in the reflection. For a time, she lingered on the face of this girl, looking at the expression of her eyes, and recognized a semblance that was just on the edge of her memory to pinpoint.
Wracking her brain for that elusive semblance, she touched the mirror again and saw someone else taking shape, an older woman who resembled the girl’s mother, but one thing escaped her.
“Who are you?” Auna said, and ran her finger along the cheek of this older woman’s face. “Have I met you before?”
7
Just ten minutes earlier, Kendra and Mara leaped and rolled out of the path of the Red and White Queens and whirled on their feet, both girls manifesting their weapons in their hands.
“Be careful!” Nico yelled into her earpiece, witnessing the opening seconds of engagement from her perch on the giant chandelier overlooking the purple section of the ballroom.
“We will,” both girls said.
“Just keep your eyes open,” Kendra said.
“Will do,” Nico said.
Nico kept her eyes on the pair of combatants below her, switching from one pair to the other as Kendra made a break for it into the white section toward the roadblock aisles, putting distance between herself and the Red Queen, then whirling on her feet and firing off three shots. The space resounded with three percussive echoes rising up to Nico’s position and messing with the balance in her ears, so she grasped onto one of the tethering chains. The action tipped the chandelier a bit, clinking the crystals below her feet, and almost made Nico drop the remote control detonator to the floor.
“Be careful, Nico,” she heard Mara say into her earpiece.
Nico looked down below her feet and saw Mara turn her gaze back to her opponent to parry another attack. She heard the clang of engagement, with Mara crossing blades with the White Queen before slamming her foe against the wall under a torrent of psychic pressure waves, then charging into a lunge with her kodachi fixed in her hands, ready to ram it into her chest.
Nico looked away, feeling bile rising in her stomach at the screaming, when another three shots echoed from the white section. Nico turned to the source of the gunshots and found Kendra in one of the roadblock aisles pushing the body of the Red Queen out of the triangle choke between her legs and onto the floor, where blood pooled from the head of her foe’s astral corpse.
Nico turned away and saw Mara below her feet pulling her blade from the White Queen’s sternum and letting her fall to the floor with a thud, like the thud of a casket shutting over the dead, and a pool of blood spread out from her stomach onto the floor. Nico put a hand to her mouth at the sight, feeling another spasm of bile reaching into her throat and filling her mouth with a bitter iron taste, and she threw up.
When she looked at her hand, she found not bile, but blood.
Then, as another wave of nausea flooded through her head from the depths of her churning stomach, she looked down on herself and saw blood welling up beneath the bodice of her dress, then pressed her hand against it and felt the razor sere of a stab wound churning through her insides.
Her then mind flashed on Kendra’s face, and she turned towards the white section of the ballroom where she saw Kendra on hands and knees, pressing a hand against her stomach that was bleeding out its contents through her fingers and into the spreading pool of it on the floor.
“Mara, Kendra’s hurt!” Nico yelled.
And Mara looked up at Nico, then at Kendra, then back up at Nico, and said, “Wait, how did you . . . ? What happened?”
“Go check up on her,” Nico yelled and threw up more blood, struggling to hold onto the tethering chain with one hand and the remote detonator in the other.
“But you’re—”
“Get out of range,” Nico yelled for the last time. “I’m gonna blow the doors open!”
8
Mara wavered for another second, her stomach lurching when she spotted blood spilling from her sister’s mouth, but when Nico screamed for her to go, she sprinted towards Kendra in the white section of the ballroom, where she found her lying on her side against one of the roadblocks with her hand pressed against her stomach.
“What happened?” Mara said.
“What does it look like?” Kendra said, grimacing when Mara grabbed her hands and pulled her back into a sitting position, and when she felt the wound on her stomach, making her wince, Kendra grabbed her wrist, saying, “Don’t do that!”
“What should I do, then?” Mara said. “Tell me!”
“Stop the bleeding. Ugggggh, God,” Kendra said, squinting her eyes shut and grimacing at the residual effects of the stab wound in her stomach. “Stop the blood flow, or I’m gonna pass out!”
So Mara tore off several strips from the hem of her dress, dwindling it down to the top of her thighs, and wound it around Kendra’s wound and tied it the best she could, making Kendra wince and grit her teeth against the spasms of pain stabbing deep into her stomach.
“Uggggggh, fuck,” Kendra said, and began coughing up blood, while Mara kept saying that she was going to be okay, that she was going to survive this the moment she woke up from this dream.
Mara then looked up when she saw movement at the corner of her eye, only to find that—
9
Nico’s legs had buckled underneath her, and she lowered herself while still grasping the tethering chain, straddling the edge of the chandelier and rattling the crystals below her feet, as another wave of pain and nausea clawed through her stomach and made her throw up more blood.
Under her weakening grasp on the remote, she flipped open the cap and pressed the switch and blew the hinges and handles of the double doors in a blast of splinters and smoke, shaking the whole ballroom from floor to ceiling, kicking Katherine’s enchantment into gear. Under it, though the doors hung limp against each other beneath their ruined jambs, the enchantment still held firm and only shimmered in a kaleidoscope of colors around the gaps of detonation.
Nico cursed and doubled over in another wave of nausea churning through her stomach and washing through her head, then doubled over the edge in a wave of vertigo and double vision and fell from her perch—
10
Just as Mara broke off towards Nico’s tenuous position atop the shifting chandelier.
"NICOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Mara screamed, sprinting across the violet section of the ballroom like a gazelle, sprinting beneath the chandelier to break Nico’s fall with her outstretched arms, but she was too late.
Nico’s fall to the floor echoed with the crack of her head against the hardwood parquet flooring, cracking like a firecracker through the ballroom and splattering a halo of blood from her head onto the parquet floor. And that same impact knocked Kendra out cold where she lay slumped against the roadblock in dreamless slow-wave sleep, blood leaking from the same area of impact that Nico had sustained on the back of her head.
Thus, Nico and Kendra, connected in mutual grief over the dead, were laid low by the hand of chance, yet Mara couldn’t believe it, even as she crouched and held her sister’s limp body in her arms and looked into her blank eyes. Nothing stirred there but the glassy-eyed look of the freshly dead, the body cut off from its ghost yet still retaining residual traces of life slipping away for good. And the longer she looked into those eyes, into her doppelgänger’s face, the deeper she drifted back into those hellish moments on Rancaster’s stage with the sick crowd of onlookers beyond the limelight applauding the performance of two doomed sisters, applauding their mutual tragedy.
And for a time, she stayed there even as the astral corpse of her sister dissolved away into nothing, drifting away into the void of forgotten memories, forgotten to all except Kendra and Celia and Colbie and Mara and God, the Keeper of dreams from now till the end of all dreams—
11
As Kendra now fell and fell and fell for a time down through the rabbit hole of unconscious sleep, down through the slow-wave madness of repressed emotions flooding up her soul with fresh sensations of horror dancing on the edge of thought, down and down and down . . .
12
“You’re clever, Lady Amame,” Alice said and licked her lips, savoring the taste of another girl, “but I’ve got somewhere I need to be, and so do you. Get going.”
Yet Colbie didn’t go, at first. She looked at her unlikely ally and said, “What are you gonna do?”
“Meet up with Lord Rancaster in . . .” And here she checked her watch and said, “It’s twelve minutes after six o’clock. He should have been here by now.”
And the rustling and murmuring of the masqueraders lapsed into silence when the click of a door latch resounded through the space, and another door like the one Kendra and Nico and Mara and Colbie had entered now swung open by Alice’s side. In stepped the man himself in a soiled white suit that was torn at the seams, who shut the door behind him with a thud echoing throughout the simulated ballroom.
“You’re late,” Alice said.
“Fashionably so,” he said. “It didn’t take long to find the entrance into this place, but the seals protecting it are absolutely barbaric.”
“You’re Rancaster,” Colbie said.
“That’s Lord Rancaster to you,” Alice said, stalking up to Colbie and pointing her finger in her chest. “And don’t you forget it. Now get going, I say!”
“Now, now, Bambina,” he said. “We’re guests here.” He then turned to Colbie and snatched her hand before she could pull away and kissed her knuckles, then said, “Darling, I’ve seen your fight with Alice, and I must say, you’ve shown yourself to be a brave and honorable woman. I just have one question.”
Colbie pulled away and said, “What is it?”
“When I entered your place, it was in shambles,” he said. “What happened there?”
“A party,” she lied.
“Must have been a hell of a party,” he said. That’s when Alice pulled him down to her level and whispered something into his ear, and he turned to the masqueraders who shook beneath his gaze and said, “I see.”
Then Alice said, “Go now!”
But Colbie shook her head and raised a finger to her lips and smiled at her in a mocking way, saying, “I wanna stick around and see what happens, don’t you?”
That’s when Rancaster and did a double take on their exchange, before leveling a demonic glare at the doorman in particular and saying, “Come over here, Mr. Foster.”
“But, sir, I can—”
“I said, come over here!” Rancaster yelled.
So the man came over, while Rancaster met him halfway, and kneeled on one leg before his judge and executioner and said, “I’m at your command, sir.”
“Remove your mask,” he said.
So the man removed his mask and placed it before Rancaster’s feet, and the expression on his face showed fear beneath his seeming fortitude, but Colbie noticed something more. Out of all the masqueraders present, he was the only one without a weapon of any kind on his person.
“Turn around and kneel on the floor,” Rancaster said, and when Mr. Foster did so, Rancaster manifested his sword-cane and unsheathed its blade and looked around at his horrified audience and said, “Let this be a lesson to all of you. I will not accept anything short of excellence from my retainers. Do you all understand?”
All the masqueraders remained silent, none of them daring a word for fear of incurring Rancaster’s wrath, so they proved their understanding with their actions. They all sheathed their weapons and kneeled before him.
“Good,” Rancaster said, “but I’ll make doubly sure of it.” And he grasped his sword in two hands and rested it above the man’s neck, then raised it above his head and said, “Any last words, Mr. Foster?”
Mr. Foster had now lost his composure and looked to Colbie, sweat dripping down his face, and said, “Lady Amame, I have met your friends a long time ago. If I was a braver man, I would—”
The man cut himself short, leaping to the side just as Rancaster’s swing of his blade clinked against the simulated herringbone parquet of the ballroom and rolling into a crouch, drawing a gun from a leg holster and aiming. But just as he was about to fire, Rancaster moved in a blur, pirouetting with his blade and catching his gun in mid-swing and tumbling it from his grip, continuing through his arc and leveling his blade on Mr. Foster’s neck for a decapitation—
Just as Colbie teleported in a lunge towards Rancaster, grabbed his arm and shoulder-tossed him to the floor, whereon his body thudded and his cane-sword clanged and skittered. Thinking quick, Colbie tackled Mr. Foster and teleported well out of range of the enraged masqueraders as Alice ran to Rancaster’s side, then imagined the collective realm of her last dream dive with her friends and manifested Oriental double doors and shoved Mr. Foster through them.
Colbie looked back as the masqueraders dispersed after her, looked back at Alice through the moving sea of bodies charging after Colbie—
When Alice said, “Stop!”
Again, they paused at her command, but one was antsy enough to say, “My Lady, this is ridiculous! Ever since we got here, you’ve been—”
“Don’t raise your voice at me!” Alice yelled, getting up and stomping towards the protester. “I’ve set the rules for your test, and you and everyone else here are to follow them without question! Do you understand?”
Her outburst quelled the ruckus for a moment, just long enough for Colbie to say, smiling, “I’m glad you kept your word, Alice,” and without waiting for a reply, she stepped past the threshold into another part of the Phantom Realms.
After Colbie’s departure, Rancaster got back to his feet, sheathed his sword-cane, and said, “You have some explaining to do, Alice.”
Alice cringed at the sound of her name on Rancaster’s lips and said, “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Play that game, are you?” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair to me or my retainers here present, should you not explain the meaning behind your actions.”
At those words, Alice deflated somewhat and looked towards the now-disgruntled group of masqueraders loitering at the Oriental double doors, casting accusations that she had betrayed the trust of their Lord Aaron Rancaster with a kiss. Gritting her teeth at these accusations, Alice looked at Rancaster and said, “That Colbie Amame charmed me, and I fell for her ruse, but my heart still belongs to you, my Lord.”
“Are you sure you’re speaking the truth?” he said.
“I am, believe me!” Alice spat, then turned her back on him. “Or don’t believe me, if that’s what you want!”
“Indeed, I am a just and awful judge,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist and whispering into her ear, “but I am also a merciful and forgiving man.”
Alice looked into his eyes and said, “Are you sure?”
“Tell you what,” he said. “While they’re chasing after those two saboteurs, why don’t we both go to the ballroom and have ourselves a little dance?”
She smiled up at him, but said, “Not yet. I want to make these imbeciles squirm a little longer under their punishment.”
“You’re a cruel child, Bambina.”
13
Colbie charged through the doors into a familiar scene, the same back alleys of weird Little Tokyo or Little China of her previous dream dive, only this time on the twilighted cusp a westering dawn, where floating sky lanterns still lit the sidewalks, and various yokai and yurei shoppers and lingering dreamers were walking the cobbled streets and casting glances her way.
“Where are we?” Mr. Foster said, looking around.
“A public dream dive,” she said, and placed both hands on the double doors and manifested barrier charms and said, “Empódio!”
“I’ve never been here before,” he said.
“No time for sightseeing,” and she grabbed his hand and said, “My charm won’t hold for long,” and teleported herself and her newfound ally down the alleyway towards a T-bone intersection, where a phantom rickshaw runner slid to a stop (“Kuso!”) (Shit!), almost tipping his passengers out of their seats.
“Oi, kisama!” (Hey, you assholes!) the yokai runner yelled.
Colbie took a quick bow, saying, “Sumimasen!” (Sorry!)
“Sorry, my ass!” he said. “Watch where you’re going next time!”
“Sumimasen,” (Excuse me) Colbie said, then pulled an apologizing Mr. Foster with her down the street, then sighted the roofline of a three-story building at the end of the street and teleported again towards it, balancing her feet on the ridge of the roofline and keeping the man from tottering over.
Colbie then threw her gaze across the rooftops of several buildings and housing complexes towards the skyline, where she spied the residual glow of street lamps and neon lights moving like snakes made of spectral fire against a westering sky. The festivities were just winding down before the break of dawn.
When the man regained his balance, clamping his hands on his knees before looking up at Colbie, he said, “Thank you for saving me back there.”
“Listen, buddy,” Colbie said, grabbing onto the man’s arm as she remembered Kendra and Nico talking of their exploits in the ballroom earlier. “I don’t even know who you are, but did you mean what you said?”
“Mean what?”
“What you said about my friends before I saved your sorry ass,” she said. “Did you mean what you said, or were you just making shit up?”
“I meant every word, trust me,” he said, then stood up and fished for his wallet from a pants pocket and showed Colbie his I.D. card. “I’m Detective Specialist Ronald Hamilton of the Phantom Office.”
“But Rancaster called you—”
“Working undercover,” he added, “as in—”
“Ugh, forget about that,” she said, shaking her head. “What did you tell my friends?”
“Your friends?”
“Nico and Kendra,” Colbie said. “Are you even listening?”
At first, the man blanked on their names for several moments, irking Colbie’s impatience to no end. So she teleported two blocks towards the roof of a low-rise hotel, then teleported another two blocks towards the roof of another building overlooking the lingering festivities. She figured they were at least five blocks away from the Oriental double doors housing the masqueraders, five blocks of bustling streets and crowds separating them from their current position.
Colbie turned back to Mr. Foster and said, “Nico and Kendra, what did you tell them?”
The man paused in thought, then his eyes lit up in recognition, and he said, “I do remember them asking around about strange happenings in the Rancaster district, but that was just before the start of the War between the baronetcies. I thought they looked out of place.”
“Wait,” Colbie said, looking at the young man before her from head to foot. “That was over a century ago. How old are you?”
“Don’t ask,” he said. “I’ve been dead for nearly as long.” He then fished out a glass hip flask from the inside pocket of his dress coat and undid the lid, then handed it to Colbie and said, “Drink this.”
“I’m under-aged, you know.”
“It’s not alcohol,” he said, pushing it into her hands. “It’s meant to relax fraying nerves.”
“But alcohol does the same thing.”
“Just drink it, okay?”
So Colbie took it and looked at the contents, then said, “It’s not poison, is it?”
“Just drink it!”
So she drank it down to half of its contents and handed the flask and the lid back to him, feeling the liquid filter down her gullet into her stomach, filling her body with a newfound vigor and her head with a clarity of thought and emotion she had never known before.
“Whoa,” Colbie said. “What is it?”
“It’s a potion I got from Amelia Hearn,” he said. “You may have heard of her, I think.”
The girl gaped in front of the man, saying, “You met her? The Blood Rose Witch, are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding,” he said. “And yes, I’ve met her. Twice, in fact: once in her shop for a consultation just before meeting your friends, and once more in a jail cell for a kiss just before meeting my executioner.”
“You’re weird,” Colbie said.
“C'est la vie, mon ami,” (Such is life, my friend) he said and reattached the lid and lifted the bottle up to his eye-level. “Rancaster had me executed afterwards in front of everyone, including Alice, but I still had a fresh supply of this stuff and went incognito and eventually reemerged in their ranks under a new guise and became a mole for the Phantom Office.” He then waited for the liquid in the bottle to refill from the inside and said, “I was an undercover spy for Detective Edmund Tellerman, an honorable man himself, God bless his soul.”
“You knew Kendra’s father?” she said.
“I did, and I even met his partner, Roy Dolan,” he said, “but I never met his daughter. It wasn’t until tonight when I recognized her throwing bombs at the other end of the ballroom that I made the connection, and then you swooped in and saved me.” When the glass flask filled up to the top, he undid the lid, raised his flask to Colbie in a toast, and added, “Here’s to saving me, kid! I owe you one,” and he downed the flask.
“Ew,” Colbie said. “I just drank from there.”
“And sweet taste, too.”
“Ugh, stop it!”
He grinned at her, putting the lid back on and putting the flask back in his inside dress coat, then fished out a small vial and cupped her hands around it.
“What are you doing?” Colbie said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Think of the place you want to go, and I will bring you there.”
So Colbie thought of the ballroom, where she left Nico and Kendra and Mara, but then thought of Katherine inside the double doors of the grandfather clock at the end of the ballroom, instead, and said, “Thought of it.”
Ronald then took the vial and threw it against the concrete roof of the building, whereon a swirling kaleidoscope of ever-shifting images manifested before their feet. He said, “You go, and I’ll delay them as long as I can.”
“But they’ll—”
He put a finger to Colbie’s lips and said, “There’s a reason why I made you drink that potion,” and before Colbie’s eyes, Ronald’s form glowed and shifted into Colbie’s double. “Now get going!”
That’s when an uproar of voices arose from several blocks away, rising from the normal hubbub of dwindling festivities just before dawn, so Colbie ran towards the portal and jumped in.
