Aim For My Heart

[Victor Lark]

Even angels have their wicked schemes,
and you take that to new extremes.
But you'll always be my hero
even though you've lost your mind.

85 Fall, 511

His eyes seemed really disappointed: to be without her company would be the bane of his evening. “Leaving so soon?”

She bit her lip coyly, curling a rebellious lock behind her ear. “What if I am? I’ve no money left!”

“You can’t leave! You don’t need money to bet!”

“Yeah, you boys showed me that, didn’t you?” She looked at the men around her, their eyes poring through the cloak that hung from her shoulders. It was too warm, but she had nothing else to wear. She knew what they wanted, and she knew she could take her pick of them.

A girl’s giggle burst through the quiet darkness of the tavern’s early morning. A loud hiss cut it off, begging for silence. The downstairs door sang its usual squealing tune and two pairs of feet pounded up the stair. The same laugh loosed again from a clumsily stifled throat, and then the thump of a body struck the other side of Seven’s bedroom door.

With a short twist of the knob, they were falling through the threshold. The door slammed against the opposite wall. She snickered through her nose as she tripped to the room’s only chair. Despite her gauche display, there was an innate care in her steps which told of her pending sobriety. The dark-haired Ravokian stumbled in after her, muttering a low chuckle as he closed the door carefully behind him. He turned the lock and reached for the lamp.

“One more,” he pleaded, moving her hair so that the light reflected from the gold in her eyes.

“What would you play?” She turned away from him, blushing. “I hate cards.”

He looked away as if in consideration, but there was a joke on his lips that made her believe he already had an idea. “I bet I could hold my breath longer than you.”

She scoffed, rolled her eyes. “You think?”

“If you win, I’ll give you five silver mizas.”

The match struck; the oil sizzled; the room was full of light. As Victor dodged to the window to close out the moonlight, the girl stood and shrieked. She had dropped his velvet cloak and was clothed only in her underwear. She wrapped her hands around her body at the new cold that enveloped her, fingers reaching at her shoulder for hair that was not there. She had cut it all off instead of losing the last if her clothes to a game of Whore’s Blush*, leaving her with a serrated crop of tangled black waves.

“What is he doing here?” she cried, alarm blotting out her rage. Golden-hazel eyes glared at the bedded man from within a thin, street-hardened face.

“He lives here,” Victor explained. He did not bother to twist or bend his face to placate either of them; he was too focused on the way theirs moved. He shirked between them and looked down at his lover, raising a tickle of a touch to the back of his prize’s arm. “Roxanne, this is Seven. Seven, Roxanne.”

He turned his body to face her. Her cheeks glowed pink in the lambent firelight, without hope of matching the bright flush that Seven’s could achieve. He lifted the knuckles of his hand to her high cheekbone and brushed it gingerly. His words held a hint of a slur as he mentioned, “She’s a raccoon.” An animal. A thing. He admired her like an accomplishment. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“And if you win?”

He leaned in to breathe it at her ear. “I get to do whatever I want to you.”

With a sharp smile, she nodded. He turned her head to his, and held her in a breathless kiss.

*Strip Poker

[Seven Xu]

“You again.”

That putrid, eyeless countenance had occupied Seven’s unconscious for so many restless nights; whatever meaning it once held had decayed. It merely lied there on top of a severed neck, leering at him, giving no answers, but asking no questions. Beyond it, there existed only shadows: impenetrable, cold, oppressive. Seven reared forward, his voice dripping with bitterness too deep for words.

“I know who you are. You think I don’t, but I do. I’m not stupid, and you aren’t dead.”

It didn’t respond. It never did. That dry mouth would sometimes open and close, but no distinguishable sound would emerge. Its throat gaped in a permanent drooling red smile. And without really doing anything at all, it mocked him. Seven hissed, baring stunted fangs, but his display was cut short by a distant clap of thunder in the abyss. His lips slackened, and his wide-eyed gaze darted blindly for the source of the disturbance.

When an innocent thump turned into a screech, the sweat-drenched halfblood was roused from his slumber and yanked away from the judgmental cadaver, out of the darkness. Seven was in his bed again. He sat up. Sheets clung to his slim, clammy form, sticky venom dribbled down his bottom lip, and alabaster strands of hair matted to a shock-twisted face. He could still feel a growl rumbling his throat when he tightened his sagging bottom jaw, blinked a haze from twin points of scarlet, and turned his scrutinizing, half-conscious stare on a pair of interlopers; one familiar, the other a complete stranger.

“That’s not a raccoon.” The panting halfblood’s voice was heavy with indignation, but it kept its characteristic lofty, matter-of-fact tone. He threw back his heavy linen cover, swung a set of bare legs over the edge of the bed, and stooped to gather his trousers. Polished hardwood creaked beneath his toes, but he did not retreat entirely from the warmth of his mattress. “That’s a whore. I fear for you if you cannot tell the difference.”

“I’m not a whore,” the girl complained, arms knotting modestly across her chest. Late fall had crept into the bedroom with the onset of night and coaxed goose prickles from her skin. She hiccupped, and then exchanged a candid glance with her Ravokian counterpart. “He brought me here. And I am too a raccoon—I’d prove it, too!” The Kelvic’s face twisted into something between frustration and defiance. Even in her compromised state, she knew that changing forms just to prove a point was a foolish notion. “We were going to—but you—”

Seven stepped into the legs of his trousers and stood, hauling them over his hips. It earned him an unwanted blush and a drunken titter from the raccoon at Victor’s side. He’d met a Kelvic, once; his mind failed to consider that as well as it failed to acknowledge that the girl had a name. Something like jealousy stirred in the pit of the albino’s stomach; he gave Victor a hard look.

“Going to what?”

[Victor Lark]

Victor ignored the question. “She’s a Kelvic. You can see it in her eyes.”

He never took his own from her. The hand that had lingered beside her face directed it away from Seven, away from agitation, and towards Victor’s honeyed smile. At the sight of him, her own lips bloomed into previous pleasures, honored by the unintended compliment. He took her by the hands and she followed his lead; her remarkably deft fingers slid down his shirt and tripped open every button. He could see happiness dance between the brown freckles of her irises, petty offenses long forgotten for the sake of the moment. In other eyes, he could watch in wonder at some vague and distant sentiment, grasp at a thought he could only hope to reach and dissect...

But not in her. Not in a Kelvic. There was nothing beyond the surface, if there was anything at all. The creamy red cotton fell from his shoulders and revealed to the curious creature what had happened the last time he tried to provoke one of her kind: an arc of scars, as thick as the little fingers that traced them in astonishment, littered his soft chest, raised by an angry cougar’s claws. It was not anger he had taken from that one, in the end.

Frowning iron turned from where it scrutinized his own body to meet Seven’s glaring red, without granting the poor girl a reassuring glimpse. “Whores are too easy,” he reminded him flatly, “This one owes me a different debt. Darling,” He turned his attention to her without looking at her, taking her gently by the hand and leading her towards the bed. Seven had known the Ravokian long enough to recognize the hostility in the word; he only ever said it to seem impatient. She did not know; she could not. She obliged Victor as he said, “Why don’t you take a seat on the bed? It’s warmer there.”

As she sat, she appraised the strange white-skinned man from his hands to his feet to his groin to his eyes. It was plain on her face that she was beginning to suspect that he was to participate in their revelry. Her arms rose again to hug herself against the cold. With a glance at her acquaintance, she tried to smile at his friend.

Victor regarded them both in turn, but the cold metal of his eyes finally settled on Seven. “We’re going to have some fun,” he said. It was the truth.

A sudden flourish unsheathed the dagger that never left his hip. It winked at the firelight, shining and sharp. He pulled it before his eyes, considered it with both hands. Then he tossed it in the air and caught it by the flat end of the blade, to offer the hilt to that beautiful pair of sanguine circles. He could see them gobble up the black of pupils beside the glare of the lamp, and he was fixed on them for any hint of a reaction. “Kill her.”

“Wha- what?” Roxanne interrupted, starting. The sheets furrowed beneath her apprehension, but she did not leave the bed.

Victor did not look away. “For me.”

It was the dare.

[Seven Xu]

Seven’s vacuous stare was detained by laughing pools of tungsten, and for a measurable pause, his only response had been a set of fluttering blinks and a throaty croak. Finally, he found his voice. A snort escaped him, short and dismissive; his pale brows knitted together. Timorous laughter sang on his retort, and he finally managed to rip himself from that narrowed leer to roll his glance towards the reeling Kelvic. “You’re kidding.”

He tried to smile, but it was crooked; it flattened as quickly as he’d painted it on.

The dare lingered on Victor’s face. Jealousy curdled into dread that soured his gut; his watery reds dipped to pore over the blade that glistened between them, greedily lapping up orange-yellow light from a lantern purchased in a citadel across the sea. The bulbous lamp of metal plaiting glass had chased away suffocating shadows that plagued their former stone world—but that hole had never gotten as dark as the proposition that hung in the stale air between them.

“You’re not—you’re not serious,” trepidation dripped hot in Roxanne’s voice as she rang a feminine echo behind Seven. Released from Victor’s fleeting awareness, she was allowed a lengthy gawk at the weapon proffered to his half-clothed associate. She coughed back a sob. “Please.”

A guilt-laden gasp caught in her throat when a pale, bloodied stare plunged into her. The mattress itself seemed to want to keep her in place; the girl attempted to stagger backwards, but her limbs felt numb and heavy beneath the weight of Victor’s request and she only managed to jerk her stupid feet against a mass of white linen.

“He isn’t serious. He’s drunk.” A set of bony white fingers tangled around the hilt of the suspended weapon; Seven would attempt to slide the dagger out of Victor’s grasp before the Ravokian could change his mind. The muddied vexations in Seven’s voice dropped to a breathless plead, and his grip on the body-warm hilt tightened. “Tell her you’re drunk.”

[Victor Lark]

As the blade slipped smoothly from his hand, it glinted a threat to slice through his finger. Victor’s eyes flared, but then the light went out of it, resigned to the grasp of a killer who did not know what he was. Seven laughed, but there was no laughter in his eyes. Victor knew the two did not always have to match, but it took him a moment to remember why. A glimpse of a tongue emerged to fondle his contemplative upper lip. Levity, he realized. All games required some give and some take. He could give that much.

Victor laughed as well, a smooth burst of air that guessed at the secret joke they did not share. Happy tin descended upon tarnished gold, stroking the rising fright on Roxanne’s tense shoulders. “I’m not drunk,” he admitted, and it was only half a lie. He had been drunk enough that night to watch the pieces fall into place, but the ale was dripping quickly away, to Roxanne’s unluck and Victor’s delight. He parried another of Seven’s protests before it could be spoken, a sharp look feinting with mirth. “I’m not kidding.”

She was frozen in place. It was easy enough to take her by the wrist, to startle her despite the reflexes granted by her race. Though she whimpered as he pulled her close, hard-handed and gentle-eyed, she seemed inclined to obey. He thought she would have been as defiant as before, reluctant even, but somehow she trusted something that she should not have. Whether because she thought Seven would protect her or Victor would become the man she had met at the gaming-house, her bare feet padded forward until they dropped to the cold floor. With the hand that did not hold her, Victor fashioned a bare spot between the hairs before her face, drew a soft line to her chin, and bent to kiss her forehead.

She could not say he was not kind.

A finger tipped her gaze up to his. Instead of offering the condolence she sought, the human only flatly identified the plea. His falling hand traced the outline of her collarbone, her breast, her navel, raising whatever hairs the cold had not. Intimacy with her bred jealousy in him, and jealousy could mature into beautiful rage.

He would not relinquish her as he finally regarded Seven again. Curling a leg behind him, Victor leaned heavily to embrace him, pressing the hard pearl of a silver pendant against his spine and trapping him between them. Victor drew his hand to the lithe, bony digits that held the hilt of his dagger, perching his chin on a hard, clammy shoulder. Firm olive embraced tentative white, and Victor brought Seven’s armed hand up, led it to the girl’s peach-colored shoulder. Under Victor’s guidance, Seven’s dagger cut the thin cotton line that remained of her underclothes. Roxanne jumped, and was rewarded with a harsh squeeze on her wrist. Victor held her arm taught as the blade moved slowly downward.

“It’s easy,” Victor whispered in Seven’s ear, his tongue spiced with merriment. “Like an apple skin.” He pressed down, and slowly began to paint a bright red line down the Kelvic’s fragile arm.

She shrieked, jerked away, moaned pathetically. “Stop... stop!” she muttered, but he did not. The line grew to the inside of her elbow and she cried out again, her whole body writhing as her arm spasmed for a fruitless escape, but Victor was focused wholly on his lesson. His grip was full of resolve and absent of passion as it bore down on Seven’s, pulling the long blossom of blood towards her wrist. Every struggle bore the blade deeper, but every lull held it light again. “Stop!” Roxanne wailed on, “Oh gods, help!”

[Seven Xu]

Trust was an oft-misplaced thing, and his was habitually tested with an unspoken game of limits; Seven had let more than he could realize slip away beneath the Ravokian’s charismatic pull. He let a persuading knee gather the pieces Victor had only recently scattered across the deaf floorboards, if only to separate a union that had lit a covetous green fire in the recesses of his gut.

Unnatural irises regarded the girl, criticizing her nudity beneath mismatched eyelids. Whore, he wanted to hiss, fool; blazing contempt steadied a willing hand, Kelvic. Seven hardly noticed the vibrant claret line being drawn down Roxanne’s arm, only the pain that twisted her face; pain the harlot deserved. His nostrils flared; under a limp veil of white hair, a film of sleep-sweat caught the orange-yellow glow of a persistent oil lamp.

“It scratched me!” A wailing screech broke out beneath rivers of tears and a runny nose.

Plump white fingers lashed out at a hissing maw of yellow-white teeth in an attempt to grapple with the offending feline, but the animal proved swifter than the child’s arms could react, and it was off like a black arrow into a dusty street.

“You provoked it,” a measured reply came from above; a hand descended on a mess of alabaster tresses in attempted comfort. “It is only an animal, Seven. It does not have a tongue to lash out with; it has claws.”

The boy choked back a sob, appraising four white lines across his knuckles that had begun to speckle with blood. “It hurts.”

“Lots of things hurt, boy. Not everything that hurts you requires a response. Come, your mother will tend to it.”

The blade’s deep iron bite on the Kelvic’s wrist roused another scream; it sent a hot wave up the pale column of Seven’s neck. A sob tripped in his throat as his wits returned with thin rivulets of warm red that tickled two sets of knuckles. “Victor, stop.” He tried to loose his fingers from the offending hilt, only to have a thicker hand squeeze his fist closed again. His shoulder shook, trying to knock away the prickling breath and press of an angular jaw. “This is wrong,” Seven’s voice cradled his rediscovered reason; “she’s only an animal.”

Roxanne’s mouth opened and closed, but nothing intelligible came out. Tears stung the corners of her freckled eyes and drew silk streams down her round cheeks, drawing with them dregs of thick kohl that had been carefully drawn there.

Victor’s grip on him was unrelenting; when Seven struggled, he was met with a firm jerk that only served to plunge the dagger deeper into the crook of Roxanne’s wrist, coaxing another sanguine torrent that stained their mutual hold and spattered over clean hardwood. She screamed again, a ragged wail that threatened to wake a dozing vagrant on the first floor. Seven barely registered a distant, rhythmic thump, an approaching drum. His arms thrashed, heaving an annoyed growl. “Let go of me, gods be damned!”

For a moment, he was free. Victor had abruptly surrendered his splintering hold on Seven’s hand when the halfblood’s voice evinced his frustration. That resistance that once held him back had been lifted and an incarnadine blade sang through the air.

The dagger’s carol was short lived; its last chorus a plaintive whimper.

Bony white fingers recoiled from the weapon that was now only a hilt, the rest of it planted firmly beneath a set of pink ribs. Empty honeyed eyes swam in lakes of white, and Roxanne succumbed to the heavy pull of the blood-stained floor and crumpled to her knees.

[Laszlo]

"Life's not that bad, Ned." Laszlo tossed a bored glance over to the drunken lump in the far corner, huddled over his favorite table with arms lovingly wrapped around a long empty mug. His name probably wasn't Ned, but Laszlo had recently developed the earthly urge to know the names of everything, and everyone and thus humanize his surroundings.

Like many of his earthly cares, it lacked any real use or proper identifiable reason, other than it simply made everything that bit easier. Since Ned had never fit introductions into his busy agenda, Laszlo had assigned him a label at random. By tomorrow he'd forget what it was, and pick a new one.

A slender, fiercely clawed gray hand halfheartedly pushed a knotted, ragged towel over the smooth surface of the bar. Laszlo watched his dim sepia reflection in the polished surface, noting a clear lack of amusement in his sharp features, even though he was trying to forge it in the dulcet, nearly melodic roll of his voice. Who was he trying to convince? Ned would probably still be out cold even if he were awake.

"Take me," Laszlo mumbled, breaking eye contact with himself and continuing the circular sweeps of his towel. "I probably have more reason to be melancholy than anyone. Not only did I lose everything that I truly valued, but I have to put up that man's antics." He was of course referring to Victor Lark and the giggling, stumbling hussy that he'd lead through the bar just a short while earlier. The Ethaefal hadn't bothered to ask, mostly because he didn't want to know. It was the brunet Ravokian's business, what did he care? "That's probably the worst of it."

The frayed towel skipped when a woman's muffled yelp and a dull thump resonated through the ceiling. Glancing up briefly, Laszlo only rolled his violet eyes. That would be Victor and Seven's room, of course. All manner of noises came from there, none of which Laszlo was keen on identifying. The tavern was quiet in the early morning hours, however, and whatever creative activity those two found themselves engaged in was happily broadcast downstairs.

Laszlo should probably find somewhere else to be for a few hours. The sun would be up before long, and Alvadas would be rousing with a new day's itinerary of tricks and hoaxes. He couldn't leave the drunk vagrant alone, however. Employing the usual, insistent hypnotism would get him up and moving him.

"You should probably be going, Ned," Laszlo voiced with a djed-infused compulsion. The vagrant moaned and shifted, but he would need more pushing. Finishing with the bar, Laszlo slung the towel over one shoulder, then turned toward Ned with his arms crossed at his chest. "Come on, up up. We both know it's only going to get worse."

As the vagrant slowly pushed himself to his feet, the woman's dulled voice sounded from the mosaic again. Was that a… cry for help? The lithe, ashen thing leaned backward, aiming a concerned narrow stare at the glassy, tiles. Moving bodies of gray-blue across a slowly illuminating sky matched the hazy light coming from the yellowed window, but it offered no answers.

Another moment of silence was allowed to pass before a bone-shaking shriek pierced the air. Laszlo winced. A sick sensation of dread began to claw at the pit of his stomach. He pressed his lips into a grim line. "Leave, Ned."

Shutting the door behind the vagrant, Laszlo quickly locked the tavern's doors, and briskly made his way toward the stairs. The woman screamed again, and once more, convincing the Ethaefal that these were not the throes of pleasure. The dread growing, he quickened his paces until he arrived in the upstairs hall. Taking three steps toward a closed bedroom door, Laszlo knocked modestly against the heavy oak. Experimentally, he tried the handle. Locked. No surprise.

"Victor? Seven? I hear screaming. What's going on in there?" Laszlo called sternly through the door. This wasn’t the first time he'd had to ask that exact question. He doubted it'd be the last. "Who's the woman? Is everything all right?"

[Victor Lark]

An animal. That was what she was. He had been fooled by the mask of humanity countless times, despite all the evidence against it. She was instinct; she was superficial. She was everything Victor already knew, and a few things he wished he didn’t. But Seven was more than all of that: he felt and he knew and he told. If anyone had a soul, it was Seven, and he was Victor’s. That soul was his to explore, his to bend. He could enter through those proverbial windows; he could swim in the endless depth of those twin pools of hot red blood; he could drown in them, and yet breathe better than he ever could alone.

That was where the fury sparked. He could see it. He was watching for it. His hands were the flint and her blood was the steel. It flared in Seven and Victor thought he could feel the red flakes of tossed embers catch in his throat. He released his fool, if only to bear witness. He ignored the inhuman girl and her suffering. He grasped at the flame and ached to be burned.

But Roxanne still existed to the eyes that watched her spill into a puddle of herself. She doused the flame with her agony, turned it into something Victor could not be bothered to recognize. He scowled, reaching for the fleeting anger as if he could somehow transplant it into himself, but found only familiar frustrations. He watched her withdraw into herself, her hand wrapping around the protrusion from her gut. He watched her sob and groan and seize for pain. She was pitiful, but he could not let Seven pity her. Gently, so as to rekindle dying envy, he reached between her weak limbs and plucked her fingers from the dagger’s hilt. His arm jolted suddenly; she emitted a startled whine of hoarse relief. Victor rose briefly, the weapon in his hand weeping thick sanguine tears. He shoved its black leather body into a stunned white fist, ensuring Seven held it before his hands retreated.

With that, he bowed to her again and snaked his hands over her heaving ribcage. A few carefully placed touches of affection coaxed her delicately to her feet. She could not stand straight, would not look up at him, only clutched her stomach and said, “Please...” And he tried to be rough, to mimic the hostility of more honest lusts, but even Victor could not pretend something so intimate. He shook her face upward and thrust it against his, holding her in an apparently impassioned kiss—

“Augh!” Victor cried out over the hesitant inquiries from behind the door, falling away from her and stumbling backwards. His hand tested his lip when he tasted the metallic sting of his own blood; she had bitten him in some final attempt at rebellion, and he was offended by the gall more than any pain. Weak and light-headed, Roxanne staggered and glowed with the only djed she knew. “No you don’t,” her captor commanded, reeling for her. Before she could summon up the energy to shift, he drove his fingers into her mouth and clutched her by the jaw. She yelped, unable to shrink into the rodent she was, and reflexively bit down on him again.

The slighted human roared. He hurled her head to the side and her body followed limply, colliding with a thud against the door. She moaned a long, throaty whimper and rose desperately for the doorknob, pawing uselessly at it when her numbing fingers could not find the lock. He grabbed the girl by her injured arm and she shrieked as he flung her at the bed again. Blood followed her like rain on the floor, the wall, the door, the sheets.

“This is not your business, Laszlo,” Victor called out finally, with a harsh tone that did not match the buoyant charisma of their usual exchanges.

Roxanne curled into herself again, hugging the white linen as she looked up at the half-blood with tears on her dirty yellow eyes. “Please...” she repeated. Her kind were not capable of much, but Victor knew that they could fathom fear, and he thought he could see its conception in her. Fear and rage: they were what he needed, so that he could feel whole, so that he could be real. Begging for them both from behind his mask of flesh, Victor stood between the bed and the door and looked down on Seven. He repeated the rules of the game with a wordless glare.

[Seven Xu]

Through it all, Seven stood in stunned silence. There’d been another deliberate embrace, his eyelids parted and his jaw tightened, but he stood stoic; not even when Victor reeled away from an unwanted bite did he flinch. He wanted to cry; tears clawed at an alabaster case of dread and jealousy. He wanted to balk; but the want was buried too deep, and the heavy pull of the floor kept the halfblood planted dumbly in place.

As Laszlo attempted to force himself into the fray, Seven knew the trail of blood that littered blame across their floor was on his head. He’d stabbed her—unintentionally—reassurance that did little to placate the black tendrils that wrapped his lungs and made the stale air thick.

Trembling fingers plaited the bloodied leather hilt of a dagger that had been thrust back into his possession. His wordless scarlet plea had been ignored, but he couldn’t manage to let the weapon go. Seven’s free hand rose to his face, simultaneously wiping away a patina of sweat and painting his jaw, his cheek, and a gathering of sticky bangs with a smear of murky crimson. The same bloodied fingers tripped across his lips, drawing their telltale lines on his tremulous chin. Seven rasped at Victor’s endless assault, his stomach tightening. “Stop.”

“Please,” she had said; she murmured it again, and again, until the word had lost meaning to the ears they incessantly drummed. The sheets beneath her gathered the sweet life that poured out of her gut, her attempts to squeeze the drooling gash closed and prayers for life going unheeded by the gods, by merciless white linen. Black wool tugged at the edges of her heavy eyelids. Sweet salvation thumped against a door too thick to break; the silken voice had been rebuked by a sharp, angry trill. Help might as well have been a world away, and a cold pain surged through her, numbing, biting, and nagging.

A plea for life turned into a desperate need for an end; another set of syllables croaked from her throat as her head lolled towards a spark of white.

“Kill me.”

Blood red snapped and poured into thin honey rings that surrounded desperate black pupils. Tears had come, burning like vinegar, tracing white lines down blood-blemished skin. “No,” Seven croaked, mustering what defiance he could grasp beneath a mask of pathetic fear. The stench of blood and death had filled the room, clinging to Seven’s nose and lingering even when he violently exhaled in an attempt to deny the inevitable. “I can’t. I won’t!”

“Please.”

The word was grating, as if someone had taken another dagger and twisted it against his ear. A hard gaze turned on Victor, ablaze with that libation he so desired, but cold resentment festered behind it. “Why did you do this? Look at her! She’s going to die!”

“Please!”

Another thump resounded against the tall oak door. Its hinges whined beneath another groan from the Kelvic that lay dying on his bed. Seven’s hand trembled; lantern light giggled across the iron blade; Victor’s steely gaze bore holes into the side of his head; and Roxanne moaned another pathetic please.

[Laszlo]

The door rattled noisily, as if in retaliation to Laszlo's persistent beating, as something heavy fell against it from the other side. The Ethaefal lurched backward with a muted gasp, stumbling until the opposite wall stopped him. His wide, keen amethysts were trained on the door, undoubtedly pregnant with dark secrets. An insipid, wooden rectangle that failed to hide the noises inside that slipped past it; the cries, the growls, the shuffling of feet tapping and slipping across a wet floor. Laszlo could hear bodies moving, struggling.

She had been laughing and happy just a short while earlier, the woman that Victor had walked to his room. There was no mistaking it now; she was not happy, and she wanted to leave. They weren't letting her.

Cold dread came to a boil in Laszlo's tightening chest as he began to believe what he didn't want to think could possibly happen, not here.

Seven, was Laszlo's first thought. For a moment he saw a flash of that white face, softly bathed in yellow lanternlight, punctuated by two red points of pure unfeeling intention. There had been no soul there, just pure instinct and a long-incubated drive to carve his vengeance. It hadn't been the face of the bloodthirsty, murderously jovial Ulric. That was the face of calculation and emptiness, so far from the endearingly awkward albino whom Laszlo had grown comfortable with.

But… no… that wasn't Seven's voice snarling through the door, hissing at someone else in the secret space, and urging Laszlo to leave. If Seven had snapped again, Victor wasn't in danger. He couldn't be… watching? Helping?!

What was happening to that poor girl…?!

Pressing back against the heavy door, Laszlo silenced himself, forcing his breathing to be still. He pressed his pale, gray ear to the coarse, unyielding wooden barrier.

"Why did you do this?" Seven. He sounded terrified. It was Victor? He was responsible? "She's going to die!"

Goddess, no.

"Victor!" A balled, but meager fist assaulted the heavy, thick door, but the latch held fast. "What are you doing to her?! What the fuck is going on?!" The door shuddered under another attack. Desperately Laszlo tried to remember the woman's face, her dark, wild curling hair, her… her eyes, what did they look like? She seemed at ease, happy. Now her horrible cries echoed in his head as he tried to hold onto that image, wondering if it was the last time she would ever look so beautiful. Her cries had gone quiet now. He could almost hear her moaning. "Seven! Seven, tell me what's happened!"

Laszlo clasped the cold door handle, giving it several futile turns. If he were in his day phase, he might consider trying to break through the door, if not by shattering the wood, then by ripping through the thin, brittle wood that cradled the door latch. In this frail body, however, he'd risk shattering his shoulder or breaking his foot if he tried. There were chairs downstairs that Laszlo could retrieve and use to ram open the lock, and possible again as a weapon, but he was hesitant to destroy anything he might have to pay for.

A Hypnotist, however, is never out of options. "Victor! Seven! Open the door!" Laszlo commanded, pushing so much djed into his words out of desperation that just speaking them made him sick. The door shook at the mercy of a clawed, thin hand.

"Victor!" Despite what Laszlo had heard, he had no reason to believe the Ravokian was previously a murderer, and so assumed him as the safer choice. "Do as I say and open this door!"

The oblong rectangle surrendered and gave way, swinging easily inward. Laszlo stumbled into the room, quickly recovering his graceful posture as he aimed a harsh glare and bared his teeth at Victor in frustration.

His peripheral vision alarmed him, but for an instant he didn't know why.

Automatically Laszlo' sharp eyesight flitted to the brightest spot in the room: a head of alabaster waves and its pale, shirtless body. The pervading lanternlight glinted off a blade smeared in red.

Laszlo's voice stuck in his throat.

The woman. She was in a limp heap, sprawled across their bed. Completely nude, she could almost appear to be sleeping, but for gash splitting open her abdomen, interrupting the smoothness of her graceful body. Pained mewls noised from her throat, wet and gurgling as what looked spilled wine bled through the sheets and mattress.

The Ethaefal wasn't sure what he expected to see, but he couldn't have prepared himself for this violence. He staggered as his knees failed, reaching out for the adjacent wall to rescue his balance.

He flinched as his fingers pressed into something wet. Somehow he wrenched his stare away from the dying woman and turned to the wall. A dark spray dotted across the smooth wooden plants, arcing across the room. Unable to stop himself, Laszlo's violet eyes followed it, his mind trying the map the events that could hurl liquid in all these directions.

"What… nnh…" Laszlo found himself fixed on the thick puddle across the uneven floor, slowly seeping along the cracks between the floorboards. "What is this…?" he whispered, too afraid to look at either Seven or Victor. "Why have you…"

Instead, Laszlo turned to the woman, desperate to know what she'd done to deserve what had happened to her. "This is mad… Why did you do this…?"