Suddenly, everything was in screaming, blinding color. Red liquid seeped out from under her mother’s body, touching her bare toes. She wiggled them, like she was at the ocean’s edge and feeling the snow for the first time. People moved around the room, cursing and checking the beautiful, albeit dead, woman on the ground at her feet. Beautiful blue eyes looked up at her, fear still in them as all life had drained away into the puddle around her feet.

“Grab the fucking girl for christsakes.”

“What are we supposed to do with her? She’s bloody dead. We should just leave her. We don’t owe her anything, especially if we all end of dead as well – what’s the fucking point?” Gunshots continued to ring out around them, out on the large Wymberly lawn that she liked to build snowmen with her brother – when permitted, of course. Where was he? Where was Remy? He would know what to do.

“She died giving us this fucking intelligence and I’m not going to leave her daughter at the mercy of a misogynistic dictator.” The voice was deep, but feminine and held all the weight of authority. Strong arms wrapped around her and lifted her up and away, away, away. Instinctively, she clung to her mother’s hand, trying to use her strength to drag the limp body along. Someone was screaming so loudly, shrill and sudden. The sound was deafening and she wished it would stop. It was so loud. But, it was her voice. She was screaming. “Shut her the fuck up. We have to go. NOW.” A hand clamped over her mouth and everything squeezed tightly, forcing the air out of her lungs. Everything grew dark.

A deep inhale as she awoke, keeping her eyes firmly closed. Deep meditative exhale and slow, nostril focused inhale. The same nightmare, over and over and over. Rose had taught her the appropriate coping mechanisms, but nothing had ever stopped the dream from occurring. As a child, and even into her teenage years, everyone had insisted that they would stop eventually. The trauma had occurred when she was so young, so innocent – surely time would dull the pain and dull the sharpness of the memory.

Fuckers were wrong.

Clover – Azalea in a life long since dead – swung her legs off the side of her twin-sized bed in the small apartment above her shop. The routine of her morning was always the same. Brushing her hair and twisting the long, black strands into a tight bun at the top of her head. Deft fingers pinned down any stray strands. A splash of cold water on her face and a small smear of jelly against her lips to keep the moisturized in the crack-inducing winter air. A soft pair of cotton slacks in deep navy were draw over her hips and secured high on her waist. She tucked an oversized button-up top into the bottoms, before finishing the simple ensemble with a thick tan belt and matching knee-high boots. Looking in the tarnished mirror above the sink, she was pleased with how plain she looked. No muss. No fuss. Oversized clothes to

A single slice of plain toast, washed down by water that was relatively clean, if not a few days old from siting on the counter. She leaned against the frame of the large glass doors that led out to the porch that overlooked the street. It was a hazy day, winter looming on the horizon – no more than three months away. In the distance, the seamtress heard the practicing shots of the militia. Frowning, something moved against her elbow and stormy eyes flickered downward.

“Good morning, beast.” A loud meow filled the quiet studio apartment in response. “I already filled your damn dish with some leftover rockfish a patron gave me. So don’t act like I don’t give you your due, my liege.” She scratched the black cat behind his ears before picking up her keys. Thick brows furrowed momentarily as she scanned over her home calendar to discern the day’s events. Her scribbles and arrows were almost illegible, but with good reason. No one else needed to know how to read it, to truly decipher the meanings of the little symbols on it. “I’ll be late tonight. Some old cunt of a general needs a new fucking jacket. Not like he doesn’t already have a closet full of the exact same jacket.” The aforementioned beast gave another meow as it stretched and settled onto its perch on the windowsill.

Clover locked the door to the apartment behind her with a deft click, indicating a lock much stronger than it might initially appear. The wooden stairs down to the shop squeaked in protest at her heavy boots, before she opened the door and moved about opening for the day. She settled the fabrics that arrived the night before into their proper places on the display. Knowledgeable hands lingered on a particularly fine silk that instantly popped into her mind as a sultry chemise. A smile curled her lips. If there was any left over, she’d have to make herself one. Bernard would enjoy it, surely. Thoughts of her occasional lover filled her head. He wasn’t the best fuck she’d ever had, but it was enjoyable enough to seek him out when other options were not available. It had been a while, perhaps she would seek him out tonight after her final appointment. Imaging the rest of her evening in her head, she unlatched the outer door, at the same time as the cobbler across the street.

“Mornin’ Chloe! Looks like a storm may be abrewin’ out that way.” He said through his thick beard, dappled with white.

“It does! I sure do hope it won’t cause too much of a fuss. I have quite a few appointments today. Miss Terril is supposed to stop by for a new gown. She seeing you too?” Her voice immediately changed from the crude inner monologue to her charmed voice. It was well cultivated, this manner of speaking. Calm, quiet and timid. Never loud enough to draw any attention at all. Plain. Plain. Plain.

“Thinkso.” He turned his sign over from closed to open, as she did the same. The swirling script beckoned clients into Rose’s, whose larger sign hung above the door. Rose’s written there in clear lettering with red painted flower buds adorning either side. Beneath was carved Modiste. Alterations. Clothier. Clover’s – known to everyone as Chloe - adoptive mother ran the most coveted tailoring shop in all of Thebes, and Northam, if she wasn’t being modest.

She had also successfully run the largest Resistance operation in the country. Both of which she passed on to her daughter.

Clients came in and out all day, buying small things – hats, gloves, socks – but a few made appointments for finer items – dresses, suits, ties. Apparently, the bloody High Commander would be attending a small gala amongst Thebesian elite in four weeks time.  And if that motherfucker was going to be in attendance then everyone had to be dressed in their absolute best, and the best was always something extravagant and overpriced – fortunately for Clover. The noon bell at the center of Thebes chimed, ringing out twelve precise notes. In unison, the bell to her shop tinkled above the shop door. Gray-blue eyes rose to meet the bright face of her apprentice, a young boy with slender fingers and thick brown hair tied at the nape of his neck.  He limped in, having fallen out of a tree as a boy and it never was rightly set. It was the only thing that saved him from mandatory service and permitted him to take up his true passion, his true talent.

“Momma sent you a biscuit and ham for lunch, Miss.” He moved over to the long wooden counter and set down a neatly wrapped parcel. The smell of crispy ham, freshly pan seared, wafted up and she closed her eyes to inhale it deeper.

“That woman is a saint, Dennis, a saint.” Chloe said, smiling as she unwrapped her lunch.

“So you say.” Brown eyes rolled at his comment as he set to organizing the new buttons that had just arrived.

“And we know what we say about me, yeah?”

“You’re never wrong.” Dennis groaned in response, hoisting himself up on a bench.

“That’s it. I am always right.” She laughed, giving his shoulder a sisterly shove and setting to work on the biscuit. It was buttery and flaked across her tongue, sending an explosion of flavor through her. Clover hummed as she ate it, a little song from a time long before this life. The widowed Mrs. Boston crafted such delicacies from the basics that memories would occasionally drift through her mind. Her mother’s lullabies, her brother’s laughter and the merriment in his hurricane eyes.  “Mmm,” she wagged her biscuit holding fingers in his direction, “do you think you can close up for me tonight? I was hoping you’d get started on Mr. Keller’s white shirt. I have to go to the…” she leaned over as if inspecting her calendar, though she knew full well what her schedule was.  The pause lengthened.

As a child, Rose had made her memorize everything. Dates. Details. Colors. And she had to be so observant, so aware of everything that was going on around her.  At the same time, it had to appear as though she was disinterested, as though sewing and cloth were the centers of her small, plain universe. “The Belvedere estate. One of the generals needs another new militia uniform for something.” Dennis snorted in response and Clover smiled. He would make a good member of the resistance, when he was older, when he could be completely trusted.

The bell chimed again and eyes lifted from the few crumbs that remained of her lunch. They met striking emerald gaze, framed by long and flawless black hair. The owner of the features exuded elegance, grace and a magnetic allure that everyone was powerless to resist. Hell, Clover had even succumbed to the Terril woman’s wiles once, before deciding that it was not a dalliance she wanted to partake in long-term. A broad smile took over her lightly tanned face as she rounded the counter to greet the new arrival.  Dennis stiffened at the sight of her and then squirmed, focusing too hard on sorting the array of buttons.

“Elora. I take it you’re needing a new dress,” a pause, “for the Umstead Gala?”

“Of course. The High Commander will be in attendance.” She greeted the seamstress with a kiss on both cheeks in turn. “And you know how I feel about men in power.” A playful smile played her perfectly plum lips, the very same grin that had landed the tailor in the woman’s bed nearly two years ago.

“Mmm, the same as we all do, I think.” A soft giggle escaped her, the carefully polite laugh she used when anyone might be listening. Her real laugh often resulted in the occasional snort – it drew too much attention. “Now, what color were you thinking of?” And they set to work, sorting through fabrics and lace. Occasionally, Clover would beckon her apprentice over and instruct him in the proper fabrication of the desired dress and how to coordinate it with an appropriate fabric. He diligently wrote down the measurements that she called out, even though Elora Terril’s body had been the same perfect size for the last three years.

“Dennis, would you mind fetching the red lace from the back storeroom?” He hopped to his feet, favoring one leg slightly, at her request, taking a quick parting look at Elora as he went. Immediately, Clover straightened and met the heiress’ eyes. “What news?” Her tone shifted from honey-sweet the punctuated and neutral.

“The Belvedere girl is getting wed soon, so the gossip goes.” Elora turned her striking emerald eyes back to the mirror, examining her eyebrows to make sure no strand was out of place. “The old general has given his consent for their marriage, after a year of the poor Lane boy courting her endlessly. A slight step downward for a Belvedere but the rumor is it is a love match. Small time spice trading family towards the western border.”

“Are they to reside in Thebes? When is the wedding?” The black-haired woman gave nothing away, even to one of her closest confidantes.  Perhaps, the appointment at the Belvedere’s estate was for a wedding suit for the elderly general.  She wondered, briefly, if she would be hired to fashion a wedding gown. It had been about a year since her last white dress commission.

“All details that I don’t yet have, though they would be foolish to not invite the Terrils to the ceremony. I am certain reliable information with be available shortly. And undoubtedly there will be a bridal shower – perhaps I will volunteer to host it.”

“That could prove advantageous.” The seamstress mused, running through a plethora of scenarios in her mind.

“I’ll have Lawrence reach out to the groom. I bet they would not be opposed to making the acquaintance of such a large munitions importer from Espania.” Elora gave her friend a coy grin. Clover smiled back, briefly, mind too busy working out a number of different angles. The Terrils were one of the few that knew who she was. Maybe five people in total knew that she was the puppeteering mastermind of the Northam Resistance. Aaron Striker was one of the others and the figurehead she hid behind. Many suspected he was the namesake of the little shamrocks composing their widespread network. During his pause, Dennis reemerged from the stores in the back with two different red lace options.

“Oh splendid.” Elora’s face returned to her mask of beautiful elegance. Clover took the fabrics and held them against the chosen color. “Yes, I think this one will do nicely.” She fingered the darker, more sultry choice. “Well, I must be off. Perhaps you could bring the gown by when it is completed, Chloe darling. It was been ages since you visited.”

“I’ll see if I can pencil you in.” The resistance leader smiled, setting aside the chosen swathes of cloth and knowing that it was going to be a very long week indeed with so many important events looming on the horizon. She’d have to hire that god damned Jessica to help manage the workload. The girl had gifted hands but an attitude that rivaled the devils. The Amazonian woman sauntered out of the store and was offered a hand by no less than two gentlemen as she made her way across the street to have a new pair of heels fashioned for the Umstead Gala.

The rest of the day passed in easy fashion and she even had a little downtime to begin styling Elora Terril’s dress after completing the raunchy little number her favorite escort had commissioned. All of her clients had varying tastes and she came up with the most exciting lingerie that even Clover’s creative little mind could not have fathomed.  The time arrived for her to depart and she instructed Dennis clearly on what she needed and then left him the spare key, letting him know she would retrieve it on her way home this evening. The seamstress had two keys, and only two keys, to the shoppe. Being away from one for an extended period of time was worrisome and so they infrequently parted.

The Belvedere estate was not located in central Thebes – none of the Northam “nobility” stayed in the city proper unless it was at one of their misstress’ apartments. The common folk lived above shops, considered middle class if there was still such a thing held over from the twentieth century. The poor lived on farms surrounding it and worked at the pleasure of others. They did not own the land they cultivated, tilled, and managed. It would be nearly impossible to walk if she wanted to arrive within the next week. For fall, the snow was light but there was still a decent three inches covering the ground outside of Rose’s. Sighing, she surrounded herself in her jacket and trudged towards the nearest carriage station.

The ugly carriage driver eyed her suspiciously when she requested the estate, clearly thinking that she was not appropriately dressed to be a consort. He said nothing and charged her before even climbing onto his seat, like she wouldn’t be good for it when they arrived. Fucking prick. The price was steeper than she knew they would charge someone else, but she was timid and had to maintain that façade. The moustached Belvedere general would see that cost added into their bill, certainly. Chloe the seamstress dwelled on old memories, of times long passed, as the carriage bumped along the roughly cleaned streets. She remembered the general, with his upturned nose that hovered above the thin moustache and his angry brown eyes. She had seen him frequently as a child at Wymberly, as a favorite of her over-bearing father. The man had not made her uncomfortable with his glances, as a few of the other military men had, but he certainly was difficult to look at.

Arriving, Clover exited the carriage without a hand from the driver. Retrieving her bag, she held it on her bent arm as her weight shifted to one side. Her jacket’s hood was up around her head, keeping small flakes of snow from melting into her black hair. The estate was not large by Wymberly on the Marsh standards but certainly to someone that lived in a single bedroom loft. Stormy eyes roved over the exterior of the house, worn brick and nearly six bedrooms if she judged correctly. Everything about the place immediately registered in her steel trap of a mind, from the tall evergreens on either side of the door to the fact that only the curtains in the upper right window were open to allow in the fading evening light. Swallowing, the seamstress ascended the steps and rang the bell. The house was wired for electricity, unlike her bedroom, and a loud bell echoed throughout the house. Removing her gloves, she drew down her hood under the protection of the awning. Slender fingers drew down a short strand of hair in front of both pierced ears. Simple gold dots resided in her lobe and a small cresent moon in the helix of her right ear, perfectly covered by the carefully placed strands.

“May I help you?” An older gentleman with a large scar running from his forehead to his neck opened the door. Before she averted her eyes, she noticed the dismissive way his eyes roved over her form, taking in her plain breeches and pulled back hair.

“Miss Paice, sir. I’m the seamstress, for General Belvedere.” She kept her eyes downcast, not meeting his gaze. Timid. Plain. Timid. Plain. They were her mantra. Yet, as much as she tried to hide it – successfully most days – Azalea Gabriella Evelyn Walther was anything but plain. Dirty blonde hair was routinely dyed an onyx black and her face remained unadorned by makeup. Eyebrows were thick and plucked only enough to have a passable shape. Her nose curved upward just slightly and her jawline was strikingly sharp. She caught many an eye of men and women, but not enough for them to become obsessed, not enough to draw too much attention.

“Of course.” The man sniffed, as if expecting a man or someone much more pleasing to look at. “He is expecting you this evening. He will be returning from the Beloit shortly. Please, follow me.” He closed the door behind her and her intelligent eyes quickly scanned the entrance. A pair of stairs led directly up to the second story landing, four rooms exited immediately off of the dining area and she suspected the fifth door at the end of the short hall was the servants’ quarters. Quiet steps followed the butler up to the second story. Gaze swept across the oriental carpet beneath her feet at the top of the landing. “Wait here, Miss. I’ll come for you shortly.”

The silence, being utterly alone, permitted her the chance to explore everything without moving from her location. There were two, maybe three, servants present in the house from what she could hear. There were two obvious entrances, the front door and the back that led through the servant’s chambers. The resistance operative suspected, however, that there was another exit – a private one. These large estates usually did, for a variety of nefarious reasons – the most common being an entry point for mistresses of high-ranking militiamen. Suddenly, there was quite a ruckus. Clover managed to catch sight of a man in military blues dismount a horse through a far away window. She was unable to see him clearly through the window. Minutes passed and she turned towards the front door, expecting someone to enter and finding only silence.

Behind her, the butler cleared his throat. “Miss Paice.” Clover jumped, pretended to be startled by the arrival she had heard coming almost the moment the man had been instructed to retrieve her.

“Oh, oh, my apologies. It’s just such a lovely view.” She apologized, keeping her eyes down and letting a blush dapple her cheeks. That had been a difficult skill to master, the purposeful blush. Let’s get this over with. Fucking old bastard was likely going to comment on her physique, mention that she’d look so much prettier if she gave him a smile. The ancient individuals that the High Commander surrounded himself with were the worst of the whole lot.

“General Belvedere is ready for you now.” His voice was calm, neutral. She shuffled after him, keeping her head down and moving at a respectful pace. The butler led her to the room at the back. It was large, with a sitting area and a four-poster bed far against the wall. It was extremely tidy, the kind of neatness that came with a military upbringing. A large mirror rested beside the window, ready to provide her with ample light. A man stood beside it, clothed only in a white shirt and tight-fitting boxer-briefs. It was the standard uniform for the militiamen beneath their wool clothes. Something was immediately off. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. “Miss Paice for you, sir.” He directed her with a wizened hand to a chair in which to place her bag. Frozen, she noticed his feet first, bare and obviously young. The skin along his legs was tight and covered perfectly formed muscles.

Clover’s eyes traveled slowly up the man before her. Every single muscle was chiseled from fine marble, no, they were flawlessly sculpted from a deep tan clay. All of her training, since she was seven years old, flew out the window to her left. Before her was no grotesque old general with a tiny moustache that looked like a pen smear on his upper lip.

Someone was going to die for this. They had told her General Belvedere needed a new tailored suit, not what resided before her now. The old, loyal General Belvedere who had to be nearing his eighties. The one that she expected to swallow her gags as she measured his inseam.  Someone was going to pay for this misinformation.

Because before her stood the most fuckable man she had ever seen.

God damn. How was it fair that anyone was that fucking attractive? Soft lips parted as her eyes met his. Molten gold gaze captured hers and belied the intelligence he held there. His lips were full and inviting, leading her to wonder what they would feel like against the inside of her thigh, right above her serpent tattoo. Heat coalesced in her core and without meaning to, stormy eyes flickered to the large bed in the corner. Ah fuck, this was not going to go as seamlessly as she planned. Turning away from him, she brushed back one of the little strands of dark hair in front of her ears. She opened her large pack and withdrew a folding stool. She opened it and set it down before the mirror, feeling the heat off his body as she leaned over. Fuck.

“If you wouldn’t mind stepping up on the stool, please, General.” Clover was careful to keep her voice extremely soft. She might have faltered when she first looked at him, but the professional in her quickly took over. “My notes indicated that you needed a new set of dress blues. Is that correct?” The seamstress couldn’t help herself and met his gaze again. A bolt of electricity shot through her and ignited a low fire in her stomach.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

by Simply

The world ended on December 28th, 2067 – well what most people considered to be their world. This day marked the nuclear holocaust that wiped out nearly 95% of the world’s population. It didn’t happen right away of course. No, most people got sick from the radiation and began to die from the complications of the radiation effects. Then the climate shifted, slowly at first and then more rapidly. The ground grew cold and the air grew thick. It was often times hard to breathe those first few years after the end of the world. No one today could really remember how the war started but it did and then it ended lives, hundred of billions of lives.

The major cities were hit first – Tokyo, New York City, Mexico City, Dallas, Los Angeles, London, Madrid and many more. New diseases began to spread, as well. People became infected and died. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Governments collapsed. Small groups of people began to band together and travel to remote areas to attempt to survive. Electronic communication ceased to exist. Cars only ran when gas was stolen from other cars. Food stopped growing and animals grew scarce.

People killed other people over a bag of chips. Men stole and raped and killed for the thrill or for necessity. Cruel men rose to power and stockpiled weapons, ammunition and tools. They formed small armies and grappled for control of areas of land. They fought each other and more men died. Children were rare and prized. Often the men in power would steal young children approximately around the age of seven and brainwash them. They raised them to be fighters if they were men and whores if they were women. The rest of the population hunted, fished and attempted to farm the land. It was a new attempt at being civilized but it was nothing like it used to be.

Madison was born seventy years are the world ended to a young couple who had managed to find a small slice of land to sustain themselves meagerly. They worked hard on a semi-fertile crop and hunted when they were able. Small game, like squirrels and occasionally a feral cat would creep up and foolishly step into their traps. When Madison was born, it was a miracle. Most women could no longer bear children due to the contamination from the radiation but somehow Emily Gallow conceived, carried and bore a young girl into the world.

They lived comfortably for the time, if comfortable was still a word that was used. They had enough food to provide for Madison and they had a hideaway space for when the military men stopped by to collect whatever stores the Gallow family had set aside. Madison spent hours down there on occasion, trying to listen to what was going on but never heard anything. Her parents made sure of that. When she would be allowed to come up, her mother’s eyes would be swollen from crying and she’d have changed her dress. Her father wouldn’t be around. He always went out hunting shortly after the military men left.

The days following, since she turned six, he began to teach her how to defend herself. Arms up to block. Don’t be afraid to kick a man where it would hurt him most. Break a nose like this. Throat. Eyes. Inner knee. Every day she helped hunt, collect food, cook, hide in hole, take care of the horse, and learned to fight. Once a year, or what they would consider a year, her father would go into the nearest “town” and buy supplies and what he could. Once, they managed to save up enough berries and nuts that he returned with a beautiful, thick scarf. He gave it to Madison as a present when she tracked, killed and skinned her first deer. She wore it every day since with her bear-fur lined jacket. Her mother was quite adept as sewing and she made most of their clothes.

On a bitter cold day, the militia came. She was told to hide in the basement, as she always did but something was wrong. She could hear her father arguing this time as she crept closer to the hidden door in the floorboards. She craned her neck to hear, this woman who was close to twenty. Then a shot. BANG. And another. BANG. Madison jumped and she felt her heart begin to pound in her chest like the hooves of her first deer kill against the ground. She heard noise above her and rummaging and then there was nothing. Tears streamed down Madison’s face but she didn’t move.

She didn’t moved because someone would come and get her. Her mother would open the door, dressed in a new outfit with her eyes slightly puffy but everything would be fine. Madison swallowed hard and waited and waited. Time inched by or it flew, she wasn’t sure but no one came. Finally, after what felt like multiple hours, Maidson let herself out. She shoved the wooden planks up and crawled out. She looked around their small kitchen with the firewood stove. Crystalline blue eyes saw blood trailing in from the large room they shared as a common area and bedroom. Her heart stopped.

Both of her parents lay dead on the floor. They were covered in blood, soaked with it. It stained the light wood of the floor and Madison fell to her knees. The blood seeped through her pants and she felt it against her skin. Sobs racked her body and eventually she couldn’t breath and slammed her palms on the ground. Madison didn’t know how long she cried.

That was nearly three years ago by any estimation. Madison left their home quickly. She packed what few stores they had in a large pack. She carried her bow and arrows, a hunting knife strapped to her leg and another against her abdomen. She traveled and sold what she caught in exchange for other things. Her goal was to find the men that killed her parents. She didn’t know how she would or if she would ever manage it, but it gave her some sense of purpose.

The nearest sign pointed to Atlanta within fifty miles. Pursing her lips together, Madison didn’t like the idea of a city. Cities meant more people – cruel people, horrible people. The idea made her stomach turn but she needed to find some more med supplies. She had a few bandaids, a few antibiotics (equitable to gold from the old days) and some small bandages but if she could find some antiseptic in exchange for the large squirrel she had gotten…it might be worth it. Biting her lower lip, she looked at the road ahead. Multiple cars stood rusty and abandoned with doors open and tires stolen off parts of them. Hesitation rose in her chest and she turned off of the path and headed into the nearby woods.

As she walked, quickly, Madison ran her finger back and forth over the ring on her right hand ring finger. It had been her mother’s. It was a simple white band. It was…she closed her eyes and focused on the memory. Platinum. It was platinum, that’s what her mother had told her. It steadied her nerves until she heard something in a small clearing ahead. She froze and withdrew an arrow from her against her back. Notching it, she held it at her side and lowered into a hunched position. Carefully she stepped closer. It might be game or it might be prowlers – men who worked for hire at times to kill other and gain valuables. Often times they worked with the militia but were given a certain amount of freedom not permitted to soldiers. They raped, tortured and killed without a second thought. Madison was not prepared to die today.

The road that unspooled beneath the sunless, starless sky was long and bleak, a pale surgical scar scoring the corpse-gray earth. Ash rain fell relentlessly with all the delicacy of snow, as if pieces of the sky were flaking and crumbling away.

There was no differentiating night from day here. There was no color. There was only gray, the non-color, the bastard child of black and white, and that was all they were left with. And there weren't many of them left.

A small band of travelers trudged through the filth along the road. The ash congealed into mud beneath the soles of their feet; only half of them wore shoes. There were roughly a dozen of the hunched figures, all with hoods or hats drawn down over their gaunt, hungry faces, and they were identical in their gates and postures: all of them appeared to be caving in on themselves, slowly and inevitably, beneath the weight of starvation and fatigue; all of them stumbled, regardless of footwear, although some did so more than others.

Leading the slow procession towards the front was a man in his thirties wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt. There was a rifle strapped to his back. The man halted suddenly, raising a thin arm in an impromptu exercise of his authority, and the procession drew to an obedient, if uncoordinated, stop. Several detached themselves from the group and disappeared over the side of the ditch to relieve themselves, while others still sat down where they stood, unable to or uninterested in standing any longer.

"Where's Roark?" the man in the lead demanded, eyes scanning the crowd as he took a silent headcount of those present. His inquiry was met with several dismissive shrugs.

"I think he wandered off somewhere a half mile back," one of the women mentioned. "He'll catch up. Doesn't he always?"

"Who cares if he does?" a gray-faced former lawyer interrupted. "He can fall off the side of a cliff for all I care. You're not planning on waiting here for him, are you?"

"He has our water," their leader hissed through clenched teeth.

Further back the way they had come a lone man made his way through a sparse forest, having diverged from the main road almost an hour ago. The trees all around him stood dead on their roots, stripped of their leaves and still gripping the ground as if locked in rigor mortis. The world was as still as a graveyard, the only sound to have trespassed there in months the sound of the man's steady footfalls and his labored, unselfconscious breathing. He stopped long enough to draw out a canteen, sipping cautiously from his own rations as he took a moment to gaze disinterestedly about himself. Unlike the others, his hood was drawn back, retired between lean, powerful shoulders, revealing a human face to the unforgiving landscape. He was a man entering the years of middle-age where time begins to stand still, where features and body cease to reveal the exact number of birthdays they have lived through. He had a head of thick copper hair that distinguished him violently from his monochromatic surroundings; he raised a hand to his scalp now to thoughtlessly shuffle his fingers through it and dislodge the ash that had settled there. His eyes were a bright, cunning blue, although their color always dimmed significantly when he was in the company of the others. Now, they scanned the tree line with a raptor's intensity. In the distance, the black, crumbling spires of what had once been a city rose up like the spines of some eldritch creature dredged up from an ancient ocean, from a time when the ocean had still been a thing to support life. Capping the lid on his canteen, the man pushed onward exhaustively towards it.

John Hughes, the self-proclaimed "brains" of their outfit, was the biggest fucking idiot he had ever met—and Roark had had the distinct pleasure of knowing a lot of idiots in his lifetime. But it didn't stop there, because being an unreformable idiot in their decaying corner of the world also meant being an enormous liability. The others who trailed unwaveringly in Hughes' footsteps weren't much better off in the brains department: they followed Hughes because he was still relatively young and charismatic (the latter being relative), with the added bonus of being especially vocal.

And they continued to follow Hughes—even after he had stupidly misplaced their supply of morphine, possibly by emptying it all into his own veins—even after he had led them right into an obvious trap set for them by one of the roaming cannibal tribes, ignoring the protests of those who wanted to detour and refusing to take responsibility after the fact, after three lives had been lost—even after that pregnant woman had wandered off a week back, only to be discovered lying by a ditch days later, dead and already partially decomposing, with no sign of the baby anywhere—

A half hour later the man took his first step out onto blacktop, having left the dead wood far behind him. He had finally breached the city's perimeter. Hatred was a potent fuel, one that burned slowly and fired the forges of his body better than anything Caloric, and it was one that kept him going even now, when he was far beyond the brink of human exhaustion. He was entering the abyss, but as he felt like a void himself, vacant of anything but hatred, he would make a nice home for himself there.

It was better than being afraid.

The man stopped in the empty parking lot of a grocery store and quietly considered the glass door standing ajar. His stare seemed to be directed inward, or elsewhere, or even into forever, which may have explained why he didn't take better stock of his surroundings in the moment. If he had been paying attention, he would have noticed the footprints left in the ash he trode over now were not months or even weeks old, but fresh; he would have noticed that the wreckage and refuse in the lot had been tactfully rearranged and moved aside, as if someone within the building had established a perimeter.

... Hughes was a first-class bastard and there was no doubt about it. The sentiment repeated itself over and often and was fast becoming the man's private mantra, the thing that drove him to increasingly sever himself from the pack and seek sanctuary elsewhere. The man leading them didn't understand that supplies had been dwindling for days without being replenished, and Roark doubted Hughes had any real concept of what it would take to keep the remainder of them going. Maybe the others could subsist on pretty words and promises, surviving solely off the last mangled vestiges of their hopes and dreams and optimism, but Roark needed to choke down something semi-digestible in the next ten minutes or he doubted he would have the energy to find his way back. Not that there'd be any love lost between him and the rest of the—

There was food inside, yes, some of it even nonperishable. But there was also someone else in the store.

The man bared his teeth in anger at being taken by surprise, drawing his pistol from the front pocket of his coat with more swiftness than he had thought himself presently capable. His movements were sluggish, but his nerves were fraying, which more than made up for what he had lost in motor function. Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, elevating the hand that clutched the firearm and tensing his muscles in preparation, although he doubted now that he would bring himself to fire, not when it was a girl staring down the barrel of his gun.

But his nose lost its sensitivity to it after a while. His lungs adapted. His senses dulled, until he was as deaf, blind, dumb as any runt born to a long-perished litter. He didn't spend much time outside the city, not anymore, to know if the deadening was permanent. He feared that it was. Fear was its own stink, and a permanent perfume when it was his own.

He knew that he was no longer a wolf. But he wasn't human, either. He was something chimeric in between, a nightmare of self-preservation and unfulfilled instinct. His loyalties were jumbled, if they existed at all. Now, he gazed dully around himself at the bar, at this kennel of humanity: at the one-armed barkeep, professionally removed but constant in his temperament and in the quality of the information he dispensed; at the discordant pianist too far-gone on cheap scotch and soda to differentiate the white keys from the black; at the slender woman in the skin-tight red dress, her presence familiar enough that he sometimes allowed her to sidle close, but never enough to touch; and she never tried, not anymore.

"You picking up what I'm laying down here, Gray?"

The drink before him glimmered undrunk and diluted in its glass, and it wept down its sides. Always bourbon. The smoke musk reminded him of wood-fire he had once known on the mountain, back when hunters' encampments had served as a reminder of encroaching humanity and not a nostalgic lapse. "Laying down." Spoken in a gruff echo that might have come from a world away. It did come from another world, one they had both shared, once, though the man sitting beside him had no way of knowing it. "Aren't you getting tired of laying down?" He had an image of the man beside him, Saul, on his back with his belly exposed. It was absurd to imagine the ritual, but maybe not wide off its mark.

"We've gone after too many of their shipments too fast," Saul simulated his best growl back at Gray. "And the trains ain't running like they used to."

"All the more reason to hit them now," Gray responded. The woman in the red dress was sitting too close; under the bar, he shifted his leg away.

"Jesus, will you use your head for one fucking second?" Saul erupted. "The only lines left running now are the Nobles' trains! And after that string of stunts we pulled last week—the casualties—you think they're not coming armed to the teeth?" Saul bared his, an expression Gray had to keep himself from returning; the corner seam of his lip pulled and released vaguely like a muscle twitch.

"Take it easy, Saul." Another of their gang returned from the poorly-landscaped pool table. His furtive eyes danced nervously toward the door.

"Tomorrow," Gray said. A hush settled over the bar, the same hush that always followed any proclamation the uncanny man made. He pushed off and rose. The bartender skimmed his drink and credits, nonplussed by the standoff, as if he was descended from a long line of tenders that could be traced all the way back to the operative days of saloons. At the piano, the pianist was doubled-over inventing new chords with his forehead.

"I know what we are. I know the choices I've made." Saul's eyes gleamed with sudden fever. "But I can live with that. And I intend to live with it. You're suicidal, Gray, and you want to pull the rest of us down with you. Well, not me. Men like me tough it out to see tomorrow. Things are going to turn around any day now—and when they do, I intend to find my place in them."

Saul left before Gray did.

"Never heard the old asshole talk like that before," Cueball remarked. "Never heard the optimism. Think it's the election making him plan ahead for a change?" It was a half-hearted question, barely deserving of any inquiring punctuation. He was already sizing up his next opponent from across a green felt expanse.

"Buy a girl a drink, bright eyes?" the woman in red fluted at him. The color of her dress made her brave again in her approach. Gray took his shoulder out from underneath her hovering hand, turned up his collar, and pushed out the door.

Outside the bar he found himself in cold daylight. Freeze City, the uninspired name of a last-standing civilization that had lost all innovation and hope, choked to its caving steel teeth with pollutants and people. The Forgotten Coast, a frozen waste outside its walls, the perfect subversion of this scene: flat and barren, windswept and snow-laden. Equally inhospitable to life. It was just taking the humanity sheltered here a while longer to see the graveyard for the stones.

He was tall among the throng. There was no tempering the illusion, no controlling it: he was what he was and could not change it any more than he could change his true genus. He stood out as he stepped off the curb into the street, but his assimilation went virtually undetected; a testament to the bland inattention of those around him. They kept their heads down, their shoulders hunched, expressions melting like malformed clay back into unsculpted and purposeless raw material.

She was also there on the street.           

Gray had seen the girl before. He had smelled her before. Even in this claustrophobic, fast-expiring metropolis that exhausted his every sense—that destroyed everything that made being alive worth living, and not just surviving—he knew her.

He didn't want to know her.

She passed down this street often with her dog. He had never seen her keep company with anyone else. Gray watched her, always at a distance. Their eyes never met, or if they had, she wouldn't know it: he partitioned his gaze behind tinted sunglasses, and never stayed long enough for a double-take. He was always just there and gone.

Today was different. Today, the girl was screaming.

They were taking her dog. The creature was in the process of being forcibly requisitioned by one of the local gangs and probably destined for a fight. Judging by its lack of breeding and dopey, fearful expression, it was likely to perish in the ring between the jaws of some more vicious beast, if it even made it that far. There were plenty of dogs humanity expended to train a taste for blood-letting in the others.

"Leave him alone! Stop it! No!" This last ejaculation a desperate shriek, barely a pronounced word, but recognizable between species as a cry for help. It made his flesh crawl to hear. A pair of burly arms roped the girl around the waist and wrenched her away from the squealing dog; she kicked out at the air, making her whole body an ineffectual weapon.

Gray was half turned away already. He could keep turning. The apathetic trajectory was familiar, and plenty of others had taken it already. From behind dark lenses, out the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of small blunted teeth, and heard the dismayed grunt of the leader in the aftermath of the girl's bite. A thick fist raised itself in the air to bludgeon.

To outside eyes, Gray's fingers closed over the man's wrist in its downswing. To outside eyes, he must have had a knife secreted, because his grip alone couldn't puncture skin the way it did now. The man howled and pulled back, doubled over, and clutched his arm; his grip made the bright red rivulets of blood flow faster, as did the fearful pounding of his heart. The man's brain didn't know a predator, but his pulse did. Gray could hear his terror like the galloping of extinct hooves through a ghost-swept wood and despised him all the more for it.

"Get up." The guttural order raised every hair in the vicinity, and when the man didn't heed, Gray snagged him by the nape and hauled him to his feet. "I said get the hell up."

The other men of the pack converged, and seemed ready to lend their numbers to a fight, until the specimen suspended in his grip blanched suddenly. The man had caught the flash of one burning yellow eye over the rim of Gray's flat black Wayfarers. His illusion was always weakest in direct sunlight. When the others saw their leader's expression, they slowed in their haste to bring themselves to slaughter.

Gray flung the man away from him. The other stumbled his way into a run; his ragtag associates followed, shooting perplexed glances back as they went. Once they had dispersed, the next inevitable encounter loomed. In the overcrowded city they were suddenly alone. The girl was there. The dog cringed away from him, cowering behind her legs, also there despite its best efforts.

Almost self-consciously, Gray shifted his hands back into his pockets.

But his nose lost its sensitivity to it after a while. His lungs adapted. His senses dulled, until he was as deaf, blind, dumb as any runt born to a long-perished litter. He didn't spend much time outside the city, not anymore, to know if the deadening was permanent. He feared that it was. Fear was its own stink, and a permanent perfume when it was his own.

He knew that he was no longer a wolf. But he wasn't human, either. He was something chimeric in between, a nightmare of self-preservation and unfulfilled instinct. His loyalties were jumbled, if they existed at all. Now, he gazed dully around himself at the bar, at this kennel of humanity: at the one-armed barkeep, professionally removed but constant in his temperament and in the quality of the information he dispensed; at the discordant pianist too far-gone on cheap scotch and soda to differentiate the white keys from the black; at the slender woman in the skin-tight red dress, her presence familiar enough that he sometimes allowed her to sidle close, but never enough to touch; and she never tried, not anymore.

"You picking up what I'm laying down here, Gray?"

The drink before him glimmered undrunk and diluted in its glass, and it wept down its sides. Always bourbon. The smoke musk reminded him of wood-fire he had once known on the mountain, back when hunters' encampments had served as a reminder of encroaching humanity and not a nostalgic lapse. "Laying down." Spoken in a gruff echo that might have come from a world away. It did come from another world, one they had both shared, once, though the man sitting beside him had no way of knowing it. "Aren't you getting tired of laying down?" He had an image of the man beside him, Saul, on his back with his belly exposed. It was absurd to imagine the ritual, but maybe not wide off its mark.

"We've gone after too many of their shipments too fast," Saul simulated his best growl back at Gray. "And the trains ain't running like they used to."

"All the more reason to hit them now," Gray responded. The woman in the red dress was sitting too close; under the bar, he shifted his leg away.

"Jesus, will you use your head for one fucking second?" Saul erupted. "The only lines left running now are the Nobles' trains! And after that string of stunts we pulled last week—the casualties—you think they're not coming armed to the teeth?" Saul bared his, an expression Gray had to keep himself from returning; the corner seam of his lip pulled and released vaguely like a muscle twitch.

"Take it easy, Saul." Another of their gang returned from the poorly-landscaped pool table. His furtive eyes danced nervously toward the door.

"Tomorrow," Gray said. A hush settled over the bar, the same hush that always followed any proclamation the uncanny man made. He pushed off and rose. The bartender skimmed his drink and credits, nonplussed by the standoff, as if he was descended from a long line of tenders that could be traced all the way back to the operative days of saloons. At the piano, the pianist was doubled-over inventing new chords with his forehead.

"I know what we are. I know the choices I've made." Saul's eyes gleamed with sudden fever. "But I can live with that. And I intend to live with it. You're suicidal, Gray, and you want to pull the rest of us down with you. Well, not me. Men like me tough it out to see tomorrow. Things are going to turn around any day now—and when they do, I intend to find my place in them."

Saul left before Gray did.

"Never heard the old asshole talk like that before," Cueball remarked. "Never heard the optimism. Think it's the election making him plan ahead for a change?" It was a half-hearted question, barely deserving of any inquiring punctuation. He was already sizing up his next opponent from across a green felt expanse.

"Buy a girl a drink, bright eyes?" the woman in red fluted at him. The color of her dress made her brave again in her approach. Gray took his shoulder out from underneath her hovering hand, turned up his collar, and pushed out the door.

Outside the bar he found himself in cold daylight. Freeze City, the uninspired name of a last-standing civilization that had lost all innovation and hope, choked to its caving steel teeth with pollutants and people. The Forgotten Coast, a frozen waste outside its walls, the perfect subversion of this scene: flat and barren, windswept and snow-laden. Equally inhospitable to life. It was just taking the humanity sheltered here a while longer to see the graveyard for the stones.

He was tall among the throng. There was no tempering the illusion, no controlling it: he was what he was and could not change it any more than he could change his true genus. He stood out as he stepped off the curb into the street, but his assimilation went virtually undetected; a testament to the bland inattention of those around him. They kept their heads down, their shoulders hunched, expressions melting like malformed clay back into unsculpted and purposeless raw material.

She was also there on the street.           

Gray had seen the girl before. He had smelled her before. Even in this claustrophobic, fast-expiring metropolis that exhausted his every sense—that destroyed everything that made being alive worth living, and not just surviving—he knew her.

He didn't want to know her.

She passed down this street often with her dog. He had never seen her keep company with anyone else. Gray watched her, always at a distance. Their eyes never met, or if they had, she wouldn't know it: he partitioned his gaze behind tinted sunglasses, and never stayed long enough for a double-take. He was always just there and gone.

Today was different. Today, the girl was screaming.

They were taking her dog. The creature was in the process of being forcibly requisitioned by one of the local gangs and probably destined for a fight. Judging by its lack of breeding and dopey, fearful expression, it was likely to perish in the ring between the jaws of some more vicious beast, if it even made it that far. There were plenty of dogs humanity expended to train a taste for blood-letting in the others.

"Leave him alone! Stop it! No!" This last ejaculation a desperate shriek, barely a pronounced word, but recognizable between species as a cry for help. It made his flesh crawl to hear. A pair of burly arms roped the girl around the waist and wrenched her away from the squealing dog; she kicked out at the air, making her whole body an ineffectual weapon.

Gray was half turned away already. He could keep turning. The apathetic trajectory was familiar, and plenty of others had taken it already. From behind dark lenses, out the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of small blunted teeth, and heard the dismayed grunt of the leader in the aftermath of the girl's bite. A thick fist raised itself in the air to bludgeon.

To outside eyes, Gray's fingers closed over the man's wrist in its downswing. To outside eyes, he must have had a knife secreted, because his grip alone couldn't puncture skin the way it did now. The man howled and pulled back, doubled over, and clutched his arm; his grip made the bright red rivulets of blood flow faster, as did the fearful pounding of his heart. The man's brain didn't know a predator, but his pulse did. Gray could hear his terror like the galloping of extinct hooves through a ghost-swept wood and despised him all the more for it.

"Get up." The guttural order raised every hair in the vicinity, and when the man didn't heed, Gray snagged him by the nape and hauled him to his feet. "I said get the hell up."

The other men of the pack converged, and seemed ready to lend their numbers to a fight, until the specimen suspended in his grip blanched suddenly. The man had caught the flash of one burning yellow eye over the rim of Gray's flat black Wayfarers. His illusion was always weakest in direct sunlight. When the others saw their leader's expression, they slowed in their haste to bring themselves to slaughter.

Gray flung the man away from him. The other stumbled his way into a run; his ragtag associates followed, shooting perplexed glances back as they went. Once they had dispersed, the next inevitable encounter loomed. In the overcrowded city they were suddenly alone. The girl was there. The dog cringed away from him, cowering behind her legs, also there despite its best efforts.

Almost self-consciously, Gray shifted his hands back into his pockets.

Waylander:

In the grand scheme of things, explosions were nothing out of the ordinary. Worlds came and went with a bang: it was an explosion that ushered in the universe at the dawn of time, if great minds were to be believed. It had been a series of explosions that had rocked the planet nearly a year ago and caused the mass almost-extinction of mankind, and it was a series of similar explosions that rocked the warehouse that morning and woke the man called Waylander.

There was no real transition between sleep and waking—one minute he was lying down, the next he was lunging upward, fully alert. Well, maybe not fully. He didn't remember falling asleep the night previous, and for a disoriented moment he looked about himself, as if expecting to find another there with him. The only evidence that the man may not have spent the night entirely alone was a disturbance in one of the quilts: a pond ripple of wrinkles where another body had sat, as well as an open (but untouched) bottle of water. Whatever last night's circumstances, he was on his own now—save for the rifle resting beside him—and another explosion sent him scurrying to his feet and yanking the canvas curtain aside.

Down below, others had been roused, and the alertest among them were already sprinting for their weapons. Waylander, leader of the South Cardinals and resident of the lighting fixture department at Home Depot, slung his rifle across his back and sailed down the ladder of his shelving unit without the use of rungs. He hit the ground running.

"Stations!" A voice gentle in conversation projected itself all the way to opposite ends of the warehouse and rebounded back, as loud as the booming outside. In the pandemonium, his eyes sought the side exit to the store's garden department, but if there was no time for anything, there was certainly no time to locate his second-in-command. Joanna could take care of herself, anyway, and all the others she crossed paths with... whether they happened to be with the regiment or not.

"Commander, we've got company!" someone shouted as Waylander waded through the sea of bodies towards the front. Dodger, his best scout, drew abreast of him; the other's rifle was shaking in his hands, but Waylander noted the safety was still on. While their group had been no stranger to raiding parties these past few months, the explosions had everyone rattled—they were too much like the ones that had ended the world eleven months back, ending all of their lives as they knew them. Waylander thought he would never find himself thanking God for grenades and grenades only... then again, there were a lot of things the man had never thought he'd find himself doing. Commanding a motley crew of forty-some survivors was one of them.

Joanna:

There was no sleeping, not anymore, and the raucous sounds that assaulted her ears only awoke her from a false slumber. Her eyes, a sharp crystalline blue, snapped open immediately, and with speeds no human could replicate Joanna was out of her bed and pulling shoes unnecessarily onto her feet. A rifle followed suit just as quickly and the woman charged forward, entirely without back up and unperturbed by the fact. The sound of the explosion carried her at a pace far too quick for even her long, lithe legs, but without witness she found it hard to restrain herself to normal speeds. Investigation of the explosion’s cause was temporarily more important, and when she found the problem at hand ( several men launching grenades at what functioned as their community home), she considered solving it herself before anyone could see, but the harsh cries of her companions drew her back to join them. There was risks even she could not take, not when she had such an important purpose for keeping her cover.

A bullet cracked overhead and she flinched down only for the benefit of the others, turning only briefly to see the rapidly approaching reinforcements. Raiders were not uncommon, but the ones particularly well armed were especially annoying. Their bullets couldn’t do much to harm her, but that didn’t mean they didn’t sting. She weaved through the sea of approaching bodies and familiar faces, who in respect formed empty space around her as her gaze sought desperately one single man. Keen eyes alerted her to his presence momentarily, and she need not even slow her steps until she caught pace along side of him with a natural sort of ease. She fell in perfectly synched step with him as though designed for place at his side.

“They’ve got some kind of improvised grenade launchers. Easily the most heavily armed group we’ve seen in a while,” Her words were not cheerful nor anything but painfully blunt, stating the truth in the most unbiased way possible. The way she spoke only seemed to emphasize this, voice remaining perfectly composed despite the way it pitched up to be heard over the shouts and open fire. There was another sharp crack of ammunition spray nearby and they were forced to duck behind artificial cover, placed in the well worn battlefield specifically for that reason.

Her rifle had already been removed from her shoulder and was held firmly in her grasp. Joanna popped up only long enough to take the shot, and there was the sharp cry of agony that followed a millisecond later to signify her success. Tucked momentarily behind the barrier, she turned to Waylander and with a wry sort of grin remarked, “Good morning. Sleep well?,”

His response would be mostly lost under the sounds of intense battle. Despite the more advanced weapons, the South Cardinals were pressing back with surprising skill. Their numbers were greater and they knew the environment well, most of those on her side pressed tight against strategically placed barriers. There was only one problem, that being the few men armed with grenade launchers. The men were too far away for an accurate shot, even with her vision, but allowing them to continue further no longer remained an option.

Joanna momentarily considered informing Waylander of her intentions, but knew within that same instant he would just simply run after her despite any of her protests. The woman met his eyes only briefly instead, and hoped hesitation would be enough to make him too late to follow. She leapt up suddenly from her crouched position and took off at a dead sprint for a closer barrier to take the shot.

Waylander:

She appeared, as always, in an instant, not so much arriving as materializing out of thin air. While Joanna's almost unearthly punctuality seemed to spook some people, Waylander was so used to it by now he would have been alarmed to turn his head and not find her flanking his left side. But there she was, as expected: dark hair rumpled from sleep, as was his own, but eyes glowing with an uncanny clarity that the rest of them had yet to summon to the forefront. Joanna delivered her report and Dodger fell back, weaving from group to group to spread the woman's intel. Waylander could only muster a grunt to signify that he understood before they were being sprayed by bullets, and the time for conversation was at an end.

The two of them ran, hunching to minimize surface area, and dove up against an available bunker. They were two of the first to arrive, but more would soon follow: the South Cardinals may have been a ragtag group, but what they lacked in experience they made up for in preparedness and gumption. Waylander pulled an extra round from his pocket and passed it to her wordlessly. Everyone had been caught in their pajamas that morning—fortunately, his didn't lack pockets. Generally, he made a habit of sleeping in his jacket; mostly because it got cold in his loft at night, and he had long ago volunteered the majority of his blankets to the other families. Joanna, on the other hand, didn't appear to feel the cold as keenly as the rest of them... and while shorts and a shirt were practical, and, he may as well face it—cute—odds were she'd left any spare ammunition in her "other pants".

Waylander did find time to wince briefly at her remark, however. He hadn't meant to fall asleep last night. He never did. When Joanna stole into the warehouse to visit him past curfew—and really, it was becoming a nightly ritual, their conversations—well, it'd become one of the few things he found he looked forward to. No matter how often they spoke, they never seemed to run out of topics (or in Joanna's case, interesting facts. The girl was a walking encyclopedia of information, especially on historic topics). Sometimes, they didn't speak at all; they would spend the evening staring off into the chandelier constellation that made up Waylander's front yard, or out past the barricade, in the rare instances that it was he who visited her. Sometimes, there was just more to be communicated through silence. Through base companionship.

Everyone felt that way, surely.

But it embarrassed him more than a little that he was always the first to nod off. Joanna didn't seem to mind it, but it was something he privately agonized over. Did she not trust him enough to fall asleep in his presence? That was all right, if so... still, just once he thought he might like to wake to find her there. Just once, he'd like to be the last one conscious, the one to rearrange her until she was warm and comfortable and safe, as she had rearranged him so many times. Because despite the fact that Waylander was currently wearing a jacket, he definitely didn't remember falling asleep in one.

All thoughts of the girl's safety flew from his mind when she turned that look on him, though. He only had a chance to widen his eyes in response before she took off for the next barricade several yards ahead. The man cursed below her breath and followed after, as they had both known he would. His personal behavioral patterns were as predictable as hers weren't.

He slid in beside her about a half second later, pressing his back up against the sandbags they'd erected earlier that week. It was a new addition, this barricade—he'd been hesitant to allow its creation because of the possibility of bringing its occupants so close to enemy fire, but that was precisely why Joanna had pushed for it. Today would be its trial run.

"I'd sleep better knowing you're the sort of person who doesn't run right into the thick of things," he mentioned as he reloaded his weapon. "You're going to need another pair of eyes for this shot."

Once his rifle had been secured, Waylander yanked the pair of binoculars from up around his neck and turned back to the frontline, easing his head up over just enough to allow him a brief visual. Another spray of bullets had him ducking back down again, but he locked eyes with Joanna calmly despite the perspiration beading his brow.

"Launcher, two o'clock."

Joanna:

There was much the forty eight members of South Cardinal did not understand about the mysterious Joanna, but the same could be said in reverse. While they found her skill to appear and disappear so unobtrusively strange, she judged their ability to take any of her many interactions with Waylander as indisputable truth the two were secretly together similarly. There were some things about humans Joanna feared she would never properly understand. She did her best to feign normalcy and had been mostly successful in her efforts, but on occasion she grew forgetful. Like when she forgot the average soldier required ammunition to be truly dangerous, while she was lethal with nothing more than her own hands and teeth.

He passed the rounds to her silently, and she tipped her head shortly in thanks. He seemed to realize exactly what she’d forgotten, and as usual, had her back. The tight fitting shorts she wore had no pockets for ammunition and were mostly impractical in the chilly weather. But she was numb to all weather and climate, to anything but the feel of sunlight on her skin. Her conscience made taking weather appropriate clothes from those who truly needed them impossible. She tucked the block of rounds into the tight fitting waist band of her pants, missing the flinch that overtook his features as she spoke of sleep.

Her late night visits might’ve fueled more than a few unsavory rumors, but Joanna was mostly unconcerned. As long as such talk did not affect Waylander’s ability to lead, she found herself entirely unperturbed to what the more creative minds of the South Cardinals could think up. Their visits had started out as time to simply discuss battle plans or whatever had been bothering the group at the time, but as the tradition progressed further into simple habit, their conversations became more casual. Typically she remembered to dismiss herself before he grew too tired, but on nights like the last she had forgotten his need to sleep and had only remembered after he had fallen silent, slumped over on his bed. A combination of guilt and her strange, compulsive desire to protect the man had led her to put him in the jacket he currently wore. Whether he realized this or not she did not have time to consider, not as another violent explosion shook the area.

The men armed with grenade launchers needed to be taken out, she could not afford to wait any longer. She met his eyes only briefly before leaping up with an impulsiveness in battlefield that was a likely result of her own near immortality. She had hoped in vain that the quickness she had moved would have been enough to stun him properly into remaining where he was, but she wasn’t too particularly surprised when he clambered to his feet behind her. The narrowly dodged a spray of bullets before managing to slide into place behind the make shift barrier. She remained with her back pressed tight against the sand bags as he crept up, announcing the grenade launchers position as he quickly sank back down.

She did not need to signal her understanding, the way she gripped her rifle and twisted for a proper shot was proof enough. Her aim had been on target and took one of the heavily equipped men out, but not before a grenade rocketed forward with the clear destination of their barrier. It took Joanna mere milliseconds to process what to do, and unflinchingly the woman shot the grenade in mid air. The explosion that resulted shot shrapnel into their direction, but disaster had mostly been avoided. Or so she had thought. With her heightened reflexes she had been quick enough to duck back down, but it seemed Waylander had not. So often she forgot the frailty of humans, and she cursed herself for it once more. Twisting to face him, she was confronted by the thick trails of blood that dripped down his face and arm. Her blue eyes suddenly alighted with indecipherable emotion.

What troubled her more beyond his flesh wounds, was that her first thought had not been one of concern. It had been one of hunger, of urge to take his marred face in her hands and taste the blood that beaded tantalizingly down from his split lip. Her lips parted, suddenly dry from temptation as her mouth grew moist with saliva. She had not fed in weeks due to the lack of activity, and her self-control was being sorely tested. However the pain in his eyes snapped her suddenly from her own internal struggle, her own strife compartmentalized. Joanna took his face in her hands delicately for fear of harming him further. She inspected the damage, twisting his chin gingerly this way and that with detached ease.

She was reassured by the fact his cuts were nothing that couldn’t be healed with proper medical care. Her sharp gaze found no major damage on his face despite the blood that suggested otherwise. She was oblivious to how her behavior and sudden proximity might’ve affected him, her gaze calculating as she considered. The shrapnel had dug into his face but he seemed mostly unaffected. As it turned out, most of the metal had imbedded itself into his arm as he’d thrown it up for protection, but there was little she could do about that now. The fact his condition was stable provided only a slight relief. If she had acted only a second faster, been only a slight more diligent in her protection the injury could have been avoided in its entirety. She released his face abruptly and glanced up, peeking up over the barrier momentarily. Only a few more men armed with grenade launchers remained, and when she ducked back down it was with utmost seriousness. Her gaze caught not on the blood staining his features, but the dark of his eyes with a piercing urgency.

“If you think you can make it, head back to the farthest barrier. Otherwise stay here, and I’ll be back once I take care of the men with grenade launchers.” Her instructions were spoken with the crispness of a veteran soldier, a striking lack of room for argument in her otherwise monotonous voice. She hesitated, and then remarked again in after thought.

“Try not to be a hero, you’re not as bullet proof as we all like to think,” The woman’s lips stretched thinly in what might have been a smile, a rarity he was mostly afforded in her efforts to have him listen to reason. There was a slight note of something, perhaps concern, in her voice hidden behind the cool, composed way she spoke. While she remained merely his second in command, it was quite obvious she expected him to take her demands seriously. She met his eyes for a moment longer, unwilling to leave him but knowing it was a necessary for the success of the group. Only a few terse seconds later and the woman was on her feet, rushing past the barrier with the sound of bullets cracking sharply in the air.

Waylander:

Nothing ever slowed down, not in Waylander's world. Time never inched forward at a crawl on the battlefield; bullets never flew any slower; no fallen comrades ever had a chance to breath last breathes or imprint on others with their parting words, they just blinked out. One moment Joanna would be by his side, the next she would be gone, with him left helpless and hoping he would see her alive again once the dust cleared.

And he had no say in any of it.

But he had a say now. Launcher, two o'clock. In his peripheral, he saw Joanna pull back and take aim, as if time slowed for her and her alone; Waylander rose to cover her, risking exposure only for what he perceived to be an instant, and then it was over—the man firing on them was dead—but then it wasn't over. The launcher belched a last grenade as the raider went tumbling backward with a bullet through his brain, and it was headed straight for them. Joanna swung around immediately and fired off another shot, this one exploding the live grenade above their heads; shrapnel rained down around them as the two ducked for cover once more. Now Waylander was cringing for more than just the sake of another close call.

He had been hit. What they said was true in one regard, at least—in the arms of adrenaline, he barely felt any pain—but he could feel that he was wounded all the same, and he could see it in Joanna's eyes...

Then again, he didn't know what exactly it was he saw in Joanna's eyes. Fear? Pain? Fury? It was enough to make him want to shrink from the person who now carried the distinction of being his oldest living friend, but all it took was the touch of her too-cool hands and Waylander was leaning forward instead.

Maybe time did finally slow down for him then, just a little. Joanna tilted his head to assess the damage, and he complied; an urgent voice in the back of his head was screaming that this moment had to end, now, before it got them both killed, but in Joanna's hands he was a defeated man. He could only hope she found it in her to release him long enough to finish the job he'd been elected to do.

And she did, of course. Waylander fell back heavily against the barrier, momentarily confused by his body's unwillingness to respond more promptly to his commands, and Joanna took advantage of his disorientation to assume control. He watched through a red lens of blood as the girl stooped to converse with him quickly—he couldn't keep up with her—why must she always move so fast? Maybe he was getting old.

"Were you hit?" he tried to interject, but he could see for himself that she wasn't. Shrapnel wounds didn't tend to hide themselves. "You aren't bulletproof, either—Joanna!" The ghost of a smile, and the girl was gone. Waylander cursed, something he only ever did when he was alone, and attempted to reload his rifle. What normally would have been a five-second job dragged on into minutes when his wounded arm proved useless in the task, and by the time he'd risen to rejoin the battle it had all but ended; the surviving raiders were in the process of retreating. Waylander retired his rifle, not having the same heart to pick any of them off as some of his more vengeful soldiers. Instead, he moved to tend to the wounded.

There were three dead; nine injured in total. A fourth of their numbers out of commission. Waylander tried not to let the strain show on his face as he worked swiftly to get everyone back inside... they could assess the damage to the barricade later, once things had quieted... he was in the process of dragging a concussed teenager back to base and barking orders when a sudden hitch in his stride caused them both to go down. He felt the kid being lifted away from him as he was pulled to his feet, the world suddenly spinning wildly around him.

"Get the commander to the infirmary!"

Maybe some shrapnel wounds hid themselves, after all.

Joanna:

Joanna’s abrupt departure was marked only by a short laugh consumed by the sound of enemy fire. Bulletproof, indeed.

She moved faster than she would have typically allowed herself in the presence of humans, but the only one close enough to register the velocity at which she moved had little time to dwell on it. There was a sharp crack of ammunition, and a bullet through the jugular. She continued taking her shots, picking off the remaining launchers with ease from her new vantage. With the carnage came the smell of freshly spilt blood, and it took Joanna more than a moment to gather her bearings. It had been far too long since she had last fed.

Her limits were sorely tested as she eyed the corpse before her. It would only take a moment, the burning in her throat assured her, and her fangs slid out reflexively even as her mind protested. It was unwise, but perhaps necessary, especially if she were to return to Waylander’s side in his current state. Waylander. Her fangs flicked back in with purpose at the thought of her injured comrade, knowing full well she could not be delayed. But it seemed she would be, as a raider had taken advantage of her momentary lapse in attention.

She was aware of the knife as it pierced violently through her stomach, leading every fibre of her being to suddenly alight with pain. Vocally, she only gasped (this wasn’t her first stabbing unfortunately, but they ranked a little worse than being shot), In comparison, the reaction of the man who stabbed was considerably more dramatic. She removed the knife gingerly from her abdomen, and the skin around it healed within the moment. He swore, and confusion would have registered plainly on his face had she allowed it, but he fell dead before he had the chance to even knit his brow. Shaking off the unpleasantness of being stabbed with the same nonchalance one might dust off their shoulder with, Joanna made quick work of returning to the group once the battle had ended. After a brief visual inspection, she was confident in that the price of victory had not been too steep.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Waylander fall to his knees, and abruptly she was not so sure. Her light jog quickened to a sprint, though men had already hefted their commander to his feet by the time she reached them. “Take the boy, “She delegated instead to the man on the right, taking his position at Waylander’s side. His arm slid easily around her shoulders, too easily she thought with concern. Her thoughts became preoccupied by how pliant Waylander felt against her, and the smell of his blood remained entirely disregarded.

The walk to the infirmary had never felt so long as it did then. But relief did not come even when Waylander was settled into a cot. She dismissed the other man to help the others with injuries, as surely the few nurses they had would be preoccupied. Frowning, though unaware of it, the dark haired girl began the tedious work of removing the shrapnel and cleaning wounds and dried blood, forcefully biting her tongue through the entirety of it. There was a lot of blood, but as the other freckle-face nurse had assured her after pausing in tending to a rather moody red haired man, he would be okay.

The pain medicine she gave Waylander, and momentarily considered lacing with her own blood, knocked him out rather successfully. However, as the infirmary gradually emptied and time marched tragically on, Joanna remained at his side. Her need for food was perhaps unwisely disregarded, but the stinging ache in her throat seemed so unimportant when compared to the sudden pallor of Waylander’s skin.

He awoke slowly, and she remarked “Nice of you to join us,” in response, her eyes brightening imperceptibly.

Waylander:

It wasn't a nice feeling, being there one moment and gone the next. One minute he was pulling a bleeding kid to safety, and the next thing Waylander knew he was waking up in the infirmary—the state of the survivor's camp in question, the kid's whereabouts unknown. Had they been attacked again while he was out? Any one of a number of possibilities flew through Waylander's brain, none of them good, but as he made to rise and resume command he found himself falling back into the makeshift bed, head spinning.

Powerful forces were at work here: morphine, he thought, and in the next instant the man was wrenching the tube from his arm and flinging it as far from him as possible. Whoever was sitting beside him had to understand... understand that he didn't want any of it wasted on him... it needed to be conserved for emergencies. He couldn't lead without a clear head, but the damage was already done. Waylander eased back into his pillow, suddenly woozy, as the phantom at his bedside rose to hover over him. Squinting, the man raised a hand to cup the curve of his nurse's face. Skin like satin, cool like frost.

Joanna sat back down, and Waylander relaxed a little. But not much.

"Where is he?" he croaked, referring to the soldier he had misplaced. "Are we under attack?"

In repose she was out of his reach, so his hand found her knee instead and gave a squeeze of desperation. He needed to maintain some sort of connection to her, to keep himself grounded... but the sudden thought of Joanna slipping away from him threw Waylander back out onto the battlefield, and back into the moment when he had watched her disappear into the cloud of dust kicked up by the raiders and their weapons.

Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, he saw everything clearly. The unbearable halo of bright light overhead shrank as his vision returned to him, and he beheld Joanna's face, eyes bright as if she'd been... crying? No, that wasn't the Joanna he knew. Past the unearthly color of her eyes, he could never tell what she was thinking. He doubted the same could be said for him. She could probably decipher his every thought, said or unsaid... he could only hope that they were cycling too rapidly at present for her to get a clear read. He certainly couldn't. It was like watching two characters in a movie—he didn't feel in control at all anymore. Just a helpless spectator awaiting the next move of what had once been a predictable male lead.

This time, Waylander did manage to rise, using Joanna's knee for support; it was thin enough he imagined the effort he exerted might snap it, but it remained as strong as a steel girder beneath him. She was always there to support him... sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

But where was he, when she needed him? Where was he? Doped up on morphine and out of commission.

Christ, she was beautiful.

His thoughts were everywhere, fragmenting like the pieces of a detonated grenade. Thankfully, it was this metaphoric thought that distracted Waylander from the others currently clamoring for his attention.

"Nice shot," he added, rotating his shoulder with a wince.

Joanna:

An instant seemed so small a unit of time, so easily disregardable to one who had lived so many centuries, but it had taken only an instant for the grenade to impact. It had taken only an instant to realize what happened, taken only an instant for Waylander’s bloodied face to remind her harshly of human’s devastatingly fragile morality. Joanna dwelled on this as she stitched Waylander’s wounds with well practiced precision. She was slipping. She had reacted far too quickly, and worse, she had not even thought to protect him, a compulsion that typically came naturally.

Forgetting Waylander was human was not a common error she allowed herself, but she had never considered him anything less than her equal. Perhaps as a result, she tended to be briefly neglectful to remember her own immortality did not carry onto to those who surrounded her. She had privately thought, once or twice in moments of bitter loneliness she would not recognize as such, to turn Waylander. However, time had a way of changing even the most incorruptible, and she quite liked him the way he was, so earnestly human. Even if it made caring for him in what little capacities she was still capable so much more difficult.

As though punctuating her thoughts Waylander woke abruptly, and her seemingly nonchalant remark was ignored as he pulled the make shift IV from his arm. Joanna thought to stop him at once, but was afraid of hurting him in the process. Her hesitation showed clearly as she quickly rose, hovering over him in way that contrasted sharply to her impassive expression. For a moment she was afraid she might have to restrain him, but with a troubling weariness he settled back into his pillow. Perhaps most startling of all, was the sudden feel of a calloused cupping her cheek. Whether she was too startled by the embrace or chose consciously to linger remained without answer, as she wordlessly sat down the moment his hand drifted from the side of her face.

His voice was hoarse and rasped horribly, but it was of no surprise to her the concern that marked it so heavily was not for his own sake.

“He’s fine, left the infirmary with nothing more than a mild concussion and sprained ankle,” She informed Waylander crisply, an indiscernible pause marking her words the moment his hand took hold on her knee. “No. The raiders left running hours ago, and we managed to acquire a few grenade launchers as a result,” Her explanation was nothing short of brusque, but hopefully her intent to reassure him translated regardless. Considering the recent trend of raiders attacking more frequently, it had admittedly been one of their better, more decisively victorious battles (even though it felt like such a strange thing to admit as he remained bed ridden).

Whether intrinsically aware of her thoughts or simply thinking along similar lines, Waylander rose unsteadily from the bed with only her knee as a crutch. She mirrored his actions, rising with more certainty as he did and with the intention of forcing him back into the bed. Such intentions fell awry however, his words troubling her more than their sudden proximity. The otherwise dim lighting cast sudden, harsh relief onto the new angry scars carved into his face. Unbidden, a frown pulled the corners of her pale lips downward.

“It could have been better,” She amended not fiercely but with little room for argument, light eyes taking on a sudden darkness.

Waylander:

With Joanna's help, Waylander had managed to haul himself up into a sitting position; still, even this latest small feat had never felt so difficult. All his battered body wanted to do was lay down and succumb to the narcotic, to let someone else lead for a while...

But he couldn't do that to Joanna. While she was as strong as him—maybe even stronger, he suspected—they had both quietly perceived long ago that he was the one right for the role, the one that everyone wanted to fall in line behind. Whatever quality it was he embodied, it bound them all together like glue in a time when they couldn't afford to dissent and separate. They had already lost so many—whether to sickness, accidents, or attacks such as these—that all they could do was sit tight and hold out hope that the North Cardinals would return any day now with the numbers and supplies they so desperately needed.

That was one of the few talking points that he and Joanna tended to disagree on. Waylander was almost doggedly persistent in his belief that the other half of their faction was on their way back, while Joanna was more skeptical. The topic tended to increasingly dominate their conversations recently, bringing their contrasting natures to the forefront: whereas Joanna looked at their situation objectively, seeing the sick, the old, the wounded, the children incapable of pulling their own weight, and concluded that it would not be beneficial to the others' survival for them to return, Waylander had to believe that they would. Otherwise, what were they left with? A hopeless situation, a sure defeat, and as a leader he wasn't about to accept those terms.

But for now... for now, he didn't need to worry so much about it. He felt as if he was floating, as sure as the morphine floated through his veins, clouding his judgment and priorities. All he wanted to do was sit and look at Joanna. He imagined they appeared as different on the outside as they were within. He had stopped looking in the mirror months ago—what he saw only distressed him, only made him think about Joanna more. It was as if every passing day only aged him more, introduced new lines to his face, new scars to his weather-beaten body... whereas she remained as still and untouched as a stone in a river, passed over by the current of time when the rest of them couldn't help but be carried with it.

In the months he had known her Waylander had privately collected the reasons, stacking them like a wall to keep some of his more worrying thoughts of Joanna out. And it had worked, so far. So far, he had been able to maneuver around them, to work with them shoved to the far back of his brain; but now, that dam had broken. She was all he could think about. What would he have done, if she hadn't come back...? There were so many things he kept unsaid, so many things he dwelled upon privately in his loneliest hours. What was the point of keeping his silence? He couldn't even remember anymore.

There was nothing holding him back now. All of his doubts, his carefully constructed inhibitions, melted away as Joanna leaned in to check his shoulder wound. Waylander turned inward towards her, bringing their foreheads together in a clumsy, feather-light collision. They remained that way for only a fraction of an instant, but it felt like an eternity; he breathed in and closed his eyes, submitting to the connection, relishing the physical closeness he had always denied himself. Then he turned his head sideways into hers and kissed her.

His mouth brushed the corner of hers, too helpless, too deliberate, for him to have been aiming for her cheek and missed his mark. When she didn't pull away immediately, his lips finally moved to join with hers, fitting against the shape that had eluded him for so long. The kiss was too enduring to be chaste, but it was gentle; it was enough to cause the split in his lip to reopen, but Waylander was caught in a morphine dream and beyond noticing. At some point during the proceedings his hand moved to cup the curve of her neck, pushing himself up to meet her as much as he was pulling her to him. If this was a dream, he never wanted it to end.

Joanna:

His lips were warm when they met her own. Whatever thought she had been having before that moment was lost to the feeling of Waylander’s sudden proximity. Rationally she should have pulled away, dismissed his impulsive actions as a side effect to morphine and quietly moved along with what needed to be done. But something she could not name stopped her, and by the time his lip split it was far too late to pull away. Her hunger consumed her suddenly, deepening the kiss and shredding any chance of reasonable thought. His hand found the curve of her neck, pulling her to him as she simultaneously did the same. The resulting action had her pulled onto the poorly constructed cot, straddling him as her hands wound in his hair.

Waylander had initiated the kiss with a sort of gentleness Joanna sorely lacked in her blood lust inspired fervor; she pulled on the flesh of his lower lip as she deepened the kiss. She shifted so that her body aligned with his, and after some time her lips left his to trail slowly downward to the pulse in his neck that thrummed so enticingly. His heart beat pulsed beneath the thin flesh, beneath her lips as she kissed the area with enough force to bruise. Her fangs protracted with an audible click, and it was only then she was fully aware of the situation. She recoiled with an inhuman quickness marked by the rounding of her impossibly blue eyes.

Her seemingly limitless self control had almost slipped unnoticed through her fingers, but the consequences had she not stopped herself would have been dire. A clenching nausea that had nothing to do with her starvation rolled in her stomach at the sight of Waylander beneath her, blood on his lips and his pulse still thrumming wildly. Kissing him back had been mistake enough, but nearly feeding on him? There were no words to describe her horror, even as her expression slid back to coolly guarded within the instant. With a sudden decisiveness she leaned forward once more, taking Waylander’s face in her hands as she met his eyes intently.

“Forget that you ever woke up, that this even happened. Go back to sleep,” Her voice had taken on a strange, hypnotic quality that cast urgency into the otherwise monotonous way she spoke. When it seemed Waylander would comply she moved from the bed gently, careful not to disturb him. She stood over him a moment, arms crossed protectively across her chest (though to whose protection it was for could not be properly gauged).

She had glamoured people before, but it had never felt this dishonest, this dirty. As much as her response had been a necessary evil, essential to keeping the group together for she could only imagine how much a kiss such as that might’ve complicated things, it felt wrong. She felt wrong, increasingly more aware of her own inhumanity as she stood over the painfully human Waylander. Loneliness and drug-addled thoughts were more likely to blame than any feelings other than platonic for the kiss on his part, but she had no excuse. Dwelling on that particular train of thought would certainly be more trouble than it was worth, so she curtly shoved it aside, moving towards the door as she did so. She caught a pale-faced, startled looking woman outside the door,, and far too troubled to spend even a thought on what such an expression meant, she asked her politely to watch over Waylander. The young woman complied quickly, but awkwardly, hardly meeting her eyes. Joanna couldn’t give less of a damn about the woman’s nervousness, striding past with nettlesome thoughts that would certainly complicate the next few days.

Waylander:

This had to be a dream. It was only in his wildest imaginings that Joanna had ever let him close before, had ever...

But he had never imagined it like this. Maybe he hadn't been brave enough, even locked inside the privacy of his own brain, or maybe he hadn't thought either of them capable of the hunger. Starvation was a part of their lives, a necessity—sometimes, it seemed like the only thing any of them had in common. They went without, and they learned to deal with the resulting emptiness.

Or maybe they didn't. He had expected her to pull away—had prepared for it, even. Maybe he didn't know what he was doing anymore, but he was ready to deal with the consequences, ready to take responsibility as always... only now, Joanna had completely taken it out of his hands. He wasn't sure if retreat was even an option at this point, for either of them. It was strange and sensual, this dance between conflict and utter surrender. As a soldier, it didn't sit well with him—but did passion ever 'sit well' with anyone?

In his weakened state, Waylander was easily overpowered. Or maybe he was the one doing the overpowering?—it was hard to see where he ended and she began anymore, but that didn't change the fact that he was soon falling back onto the cot with Joanna in close pursuit. His head struck the pillow hard, and he saw stars; he might have had the wind knocked out of him completely had he any air left in his lungs. His hand moved up to tangle in her hair as her fingers roved through his, her teeth grazing his lower lip, laving at the blood... her movements and motivations were jumbling together, nothing made sense, but she was straddling his waist and he was on fire beneath her. Her mouth trailed down his neck and Waylander's head fell back against the pillow again, his breathing coming in increasingly unsteady hitches. His pulse beat wildly as a butterfly as her lips alighted on it. The ceiling swam in and out of focus above him as Joanna marked him; his hand was at her neck again and somehow the collar of her T-shirt had fallen down past one shoulder, but he couldn't decide if he was meant to restore it or aid in its descent...

... when all at once she was pulling away. Waylander met her eyes, his pupils dilated from more than just the drugs. His hair was mussed and his lower lip was painted red with blood, but he seemed completely unself-aware. Joanna took his face in her hands, and he closed his eyes in complete trust as she spoke. A part of him, a very small part, wanted to resist her words: he didn't want to forget. Why did he have to give this up? But he would do it, for her. Anything for her.

He was asleep before her hands slid from his face.

🩸

Several days later and the commander of the South Cardinals had made a full recovery; he could most commonly be seen striding around the exterior of the base, doling out tasks and barking orders. Well, an almost full recovery—occasionally the man could be observed holding his side after a particularly laborious activity, or rubbing at an odd spot on his neck that tended to stay covered up by his scarf. One of the nurses had taken to following doggedly along behind him, awaiting an inevitable collapse. But Waylander stayed upright, and he stayed busy.

Keeping himself occupied kept him from worrying too much about Joanna. He had caught only rare glimpses of the woman in the aftermath of the raid, and their nightly visits appeared to have been put on hold... then again, he'd been holed up in the infirmary for the better part of seventy-two hours, and his second-in-command had always famously avoided that area of the camp. Maybe it brought up bad memories. Maybe she just didn't like the smell of blood.

Still, Waylander couldn't help but feel like it was him Joanna was avoiding. He was probably overthinking it — then again, when he made eye contact with her a few days later from across the yard, she appeared to turn deliberately and sever it. Puzzled, Waylander excused himself from the expedition he was assembling and sauntered over to her.

"I'm getting a group together to go out scavenging for supplies—maybe do a little hunting, if we're lucky," he began awkwardly. Why were things suddenly so tense between them? He felt about as foolish as he had the day he'd asked his wife out on their first date. "Care to join us? No one brings down their prey better than you."

He meant it as a compliment, but it fell decidedly flat. Waylander flexed a little smile anyway, certain Joanna would forgive him.

Joanna:

Conveniently enough, there was little time for Joanna to dwell on what exactly had transpired between herself and Waylander. There was no lack of tasks that needed to be completed and consumed her time. The daily workings of life kept herself busy, as did tending to all of the various things that needed to be done as Waylander recovered. The only real moments she had to herself were only when she feigned sleep. It was considerably more difficult then to not think of what she had done, and even worse, what she had nearly done, but the woman managed with considerable skill.

She could avoid dwelling on it for the most part, until a glimpse of him would send her reeling. For the most part, she avoided such unnecessary angst by avoiding him, though her plan was made considerably more difficult by his insistence on being everywhere she needed to be. Her agitation was not at Waylander however, but at herself. At best, her behavior was impractical, at worst it was immature. Her guilt at nearly feeding on him was immense, without a doubt, but there was also another reason that made meeting his eyes so damned difficult. (Such reasons had much to do with the scarf wound around his neck, and more so what it concealed)

As though to sharply remind her of this, she briefly paused in overseeing the rebuilding of the barriers to catch who else’s gaze but his. She reacted impulsively, turning away, and knew immediately as the confusion crossed his face she’d made a mistake. Resisting the urge to swear aloud, Joanna instead turned back around a moment before his approach was audible. She knew him too well.

And as it seemed, Waylander could say the very same. Though she had done her best to hide it, he seemed very aware of the tension between them, and his way of speaking was not as comfortable nor familiar as usual. In fact, he sounded painfully awkward, and Joanna had to bite down a smile at his expense. Such amusement faded in the wake of his far too apt remark, and while her features remained blank her mind graphically detailed what would likely happen if she were to join them on the hunt. She could see it now, the scent of blood, human or not, waking something primal and bestial within her, a hunter slicing his hand on accident and her near starvation culminating in her ripping open the throats of comrades with her teeth.

“I’d better not,” She declined gently, her features and voice void of any emotion. “Someone has to oversee the reconstruction,” Joanna explained in further detail, eagerly seizing the opportunity to halt their eye contact in lieu of glancing over the construction in progress. Certain now her face nor gaze would give away her guilt, she asked with sudden sincerity, “How are you feeling?”

She had not been at his side during his stay at the infirmary, which wasn’t particularly too strange given her distaste for the place, but it was certainly enough to cause a ripple of gossip through the South Cardinals. Joanna and Waylander were mostly thought of as inseparable, yet she had not been at his side during most, if not all, of his recovery. But it seemed they would not have much time to make up for it, as a particularly loud member of Waylander’s group made his impatience known. Joanna forced herself to meet Waylander’s gaze, and managing a small, thin smile she simply requested of him, “Be safe. ” with more affection, even if it was hardly perceptible, than she would have typically allowed.

Waylander’s small unit left without much commotion, leaving Joanna in charge, something the South Cardinals did not necessarily approve of, but certainly knew better than to vocalize against. For the most part, things went relatively smoothly, until the feeling of something warm and wet dripping down her chin startled both Joanna and a nearby matron. “Oh dear,” The woman gasped, brown eyes widening, “You’re bleeding,”

And so she was. Pale hands, trembling hands, Joanna noted with mild surprise, reached up to brush the blood that dripped from her eyes. She knew at once what it was, a side effect of her starvation she could not ignore, but she spoke at the older woman as convincingly as possible. “I’m going to check in to the infirmary now. Tell the men I’ll be back soon, but not what‘s happened,” She spoke rather bluntly for someone bleeding from the eyes, the pale face matron thought, but woman obeyed nonetheless.

Glamouring members of the South Cardinal was not something Joanna enjoyed or approved of, but the situations she seemed to be getting in called for nothing less. One couldn’t exactly explain why he or she was bleeding from the eyes without divulging certain details, details that she would rather keep hidden. The vampire did not seek the infirmary, but instead made her way out past the clearing that surrounded them. If she was lucky, there would be a survivor or two of the raiders to pick off, and if she wasn’t…well. There was no use in thinking about that. Fate, it seemed, was for once on her side. She smelled the man before she saw him, his blood heavy in the air. She recognized from before as one of the attackers, though now it seemed he lacked a limb for his troubles.

Fever and the darkness on what remained of his limb indicated gangrene, and his malnourished state starvation. He wouldn’t last much longer, and the delirious sort of fear in his eyes indicated he knew that well. Joanna was quick, as always, biting into his throat long before he had the chance to croak out some sort of inquiry. His blood was fouled by the infection, but it would do, especially in her state. Starvation consumed her, made her sloppy, and by the time she heard the crack of footsteps behind her it was too late. She turned at once, mouth red with blood and pale skin smeared with the same vibrant hue.

Before her, stood five members of the South Cardinals, five humans who had just learned what she had tried so very hard to hide. “Let me explain,” She spoke calmly, quietly, but they flinched in fear regardless. The scout, a nervous looking boy, looked paler than even she, and explained their presence in nervous stutters, “We checked the infirmary and you weren’t there. We went looking and---”

It seemed Joanna had underestimated their concern for her, and it would be her downfall. The other members of the small party moved quickly, and far faster than she would anticipated she was seized and captured by them. She was capable of escaping, capable of killing them all, but there was no point it, not now. Her situation was at best, hopeless, and the vampire allowed herself to be dragged back to the headquarters, where she was then promptly tied up like nothing less than a beast. A larger group, but still not all of the humans who made up the South Cardinals, watched her with expectant gazes, but she provided no explanation.

After all, there was very little she could say.

Waylander:

He couldn't say he hadn't been expecting it. A part of him had hoped for the chance to work with Joanna, even if they wouldn't be alone; often, just pursuing a mindless (if necessary) task had a way of soothing tensions between them.

At least, it had always worked when they had butted heads in the past. But Joanna was right: somebody had to stay behind and oversee things while he was gone. He had been prepared to put another in charge, but there was no one he trusted more than her. It had really been stupid of him to even ask.

When she inquired about how he was feeling, Waylander rubbed his neck sheepishly, unintentionally drawing attention to the odd mark beneath his scarf. To him, it was just another inexplicable bruise, something he had earned in battle (even if he didn't think he necessarily deserved it). "Better now. I would have been out sooner, if they'd let me." As if Joanna would doubt for an instant the truth of his claim. "Thanks for running things. Don't know what I'd do without you."

Be dead, most likely, Waylander reminded himself. He would have probably been dead a hundred times over by now if it weren't for her. Still, it was not uncommon for him to say it—"don't know what I'd do without you". It was almost reflexive; sometimes it was an inside joke, and other times it meant more than words could say. Today, however, it felt too formal, as if they didn't know each other at all. As if they were simply a commander and his subordinate.

This sudden coldness puzzled Waylander, even as he departed with his team an hour later. True, Joanna had always been cold, but there were occasional sunbursts of unexpected warmth to temper her frost... and while others had trouble seeing it for themselves, Waylander had never doubted the woman's capacity for compassion. Not even in the early days of knowing her had he found her emotional remoteness odd, or even repellent; he had simply accepted her for who she was, without question or stipulation. She was Joanna. She was his oldest living friend. She was the closest thing he had to family within the South Cardinals, and he'd be damned if he'd let anything ever happen to her. Eventually he'd thaw this chill between them; it would pass, as it always had before.

Waylander went through the motions of the mission, his confidence renewed. They found and put down a total of two deserters, raiders who had abandoned their party before succumbing to injury or affliction—both had been too far-gone to communicate at all intelligibly. One of his men had volunteered for the deed readily, and Waylander had allowed it... though at the last instant, he always looked away.

This confirmed one of his suspicions, at least: the raiders had not attacked them out of spite, but rather out of necessity. These were not healthy people. He would go so far as to guess that illness had overtaken their ranks, one that would probably burn through their numbers like a wildfire... though of course, he had no proof to back up his belief. This was a hypothesis far beyond their ability to test, anyway—but Waylander suspected that this particular group of raiders would not be troubling them again.

It wasn't a wasted trip, anyway. They scavenged what supplies they could from the bodies they found, as well as took the time to forage; one of his men managed to bring down a few rabbits after accidentally stumbling upon a warren. But the real prize came a few days later, when they found a flock of migratory geese nesting by a dried-up riverbed. Many of them could barely stand, much less fly; still, there was meat on their bones. Waylander took no relish in the slaughter, but the thought of every wasted face and hungry mouth back at camp made the work easy. They headed home.

Waylander was leading them all in a song as they crested the hill; every man was tired and filthy from the trek, but loaded down with enough food and supplies to ensure their survival for at least another month. Waylander turned away from them all and grinned, expecting to see Joanna's lithe shadow leaned up against the barricade far below—she always had an uncanny knack for knowing when they'd return—what he saw instead was Dodger, running up the hill to meet them, his face drained of color despite his exertions. The song died on Waylander's lips.

"Report, soldier."

"Sir, it's Joanna—"

That was all he needed to hear. Waylander threw down his catch and was flying down the hill after the winded scout, his rifle drawn; he suspected injury, or worse, mutiny, though he hadn't detected any indication of the latter before he left. The level of unrest had been the same since the day they first arrived at the Home Depot, really nothing out of the ordinary...

"Joanna!" He was shouting her name before he found her. They had her bound to a chair in the basement storage room away from the general populace, locked in the makeshift cell they had built for emergencies but never used. Fury rose in Waylander as he muscled his way through the bodies crowded around her; he went so far as to let it show on his face, and his passage between them became speedier. Few had seen their commander truly angry before today.

But he managed to stop himself just short of her prison. His chest heaved with each labored breath, and he locked eyes with her; though every line in his long, lean face appeared pronounced and dangerous, he dredged up his famous willpower now to keep himself from single-handedly wrenching the door off and sweeping his captive friend up into his arms. This was all a misunderstanding, whatever-it-was; that much was clear to him without being told, though he couldn't very well say so out loud. The South Cardinals had acted as jury without him, but he was still the judge. As much as he hated it, he had to hear them out. Letting any favoritism show at this point only ran the risk of making things worse for Joanna.

"I've yet to hear your report, soldier," their commander said quietly, his words honing in on Dodger. The scout shrank back, looking as if he'd prefer anyone but himself to be the one to explain. Waylander barely noticed the other's sudden reticence. There was dried blood painted down the front of Joanna's clothes, and there was more of it darkening the corner of her mouth. The sight of it made Waylander's stomach churn—not with nausea, but with worry that it might be her own.

Joanna:

The news traveled fast throughout the South Cardinals, as information tended to do. Joanna had always be strange despite Waylander’s polite insistence to the contrary, but there was no denying it now. There was little argument one (even Waylander with his all his people skills) could give to reasonably explain Joanna’s blood stained mouth, and so she remained silent, which unintentionally kindled the gossip and speculation alighting throughout the camp. The few that found her were equally susceptible to curiosity when the woman in question dared not supply an answer.

“Maybe she’s ill,” A man unhelpfully provided with a knit brow. His response was marked by a disdainful roll of eyes from the woman to his left. “Of course she’s ill, you’d have to be to go…eat someone!” Briefly the group erupted into another senseless argument fueled by panic and misunderstanding. The people of the South Cardinal were tired, hungry, scared, and without a leader they dissolved into chaos. Those who found Joanna tried their best to keep the cell room free of prying eyes, but ultimately failed. A rally for an explanation, a trial, anything to calm stirred up further unrest in the camp.

All the while Joanna remained eerily immobile, eerily quiet. She gave them nothing, even as the unnerving center of attention sitting deathly still with closed eyes. The contrast of red against lily white skin had an lurid effect, and when her eyes snapped open suddenly, a sharp burst of glacial blue, many jumped or recoiled in shock. Many were too startled to notice or even realize how easily her bindings snapped as she rose like an apparition from her chair. Heads turned in the direction of her thousand mile stare, and it wasn’t but a moment later a shout of her name rang dimly through the room. The camp shifted in visible anticipation of what would come, tittering quietly under their breaths in expectation. Many began filtering out quickly in an effort to avoid association with the group who jailed Joanna, as there was no mistaking the impressively restrained rage darkening Waylander’s features.

He demanded a report, but there was nothing to report, nothing but the dead man’s blood that stained Joanna’s front and her persistent reticence. Dodger looked unhelpfully to his left, then right quickly in an effort to find support, but no one spoke or hardly even seemed to breathe under Waylander’s accusing gaze. A nervous swallow lead to a stammered remark about cannibalism and doing what they thought was right, but even in the heavy silence of the cell room his words were an inaudible, jumbled mess. The scout looked precariously on the verge of breaking into a nervous sweat, until a hoarse voice spoke suddenly and brought visible relief to his features.

“Ain’t it obvious?” The man demanded with a mirthless laugh, and though he obviously spoke to the group his eyes did not stray from Joanna. “It’s a vampire. Thought so when I first saw you, but you can never be sure. They’re tricky but we, we got our proof now!” If the man had expected a rally of understanding in response to his words he would be sorely disappointed. The only real response was a nervous peal of laughter, subtly asking what they were too cautious to. He couldn’t be serious, but when the man’s face tightened in understanding of the implications of their laughter it was incredibly clear he was.

The man, named Jack but half heartedly referred to as Old Man simply because he fit every grumpy stereotype to the point of being a living parody, was often dismissed as crazy by the group. He had no family, but the story of how he had lost his wife and children and survived himself changed daily, as though he could never quite remember. The accusation that their leader was a vampire from him, had no real weight and would have been dismissed as ridiculous, but Joanna could see the cogs turning in their minds as they tried and failed to laugh off such a claim. For herself, she gave nothing, not a blink of the eye in response to his painfully true accusation. Instead she met his stare, which he quickly pulled away from, obviously knowing better. He mumbled something about idiots, about being glamoured, as he dug unsuccessfully through his pockets. The entire room was now entirely preoccupied by the exchange, and such interest grew rapidly when the man produced what appeared to be a silver necklace chain from his pocket.

Joanna, who stood otherwise impassively near the bars of her make shift cell, frowned visibly. Old man’s grinned widened with morbid delight until it appeared to near split his face, and as he drew nearer the woman shrank back in a rare show of fear. “That’s right, you know what this is, don’t you?” The cell, hardly big enough for the chair, allowed limited movement and so it wasn’t with much difficulty he managed to grab hold of her head, forcing the silver around her neck. The reaction was instantaneous. The sound of burning flesh sizzled through an otherwise silent room, as well as a sharp, strangled noise of pain from Joanna. What had the few remaining South Cardinals gasping in horror however was the appearance of fangs, visibly sharp, in response to her obvious pain. She seemed incapable of pulling away from the man, the silver burning deeper into her skin as the camp looked on in less concern and more obvious revulsion.

“I was going…to…tell you,” The woman managed while staring directly at Waylander, but such words were only an irrefutable confession to what they could hardly believe.

Waylander:

It's a vampire, the old man said. Three incongruous, insane words, and the one that made the hair on the back of Waylander's neck stand on end was it. In the span of a supply run, the men and women of the South Cardinals had robbed Joanna of everything, including human pronouns, and cast her into the perdition of a crude jail cell.

She stood in the slatted shadows of her prison now as still as a marble statue. Looking at her in this context, it was almost too easy to imagine how rumors of her inhumanity might have kindled and caught fire. Waylander had often found himself marveling at his second's etherealness in the privacy of his own thoughts, but he had never gone so far as to question her place among them. Never.

The abuse might as well have been happening to someone else, for all Joanna responded to it. Waylander turned reluctantly from her and crossed his arms as Jack ranted. More troubling than the old man's ravings was the uneasy subscription he saw on the nervous faces of the crowd. How had this medieval hokum, centuries dead, managed to crawl its way back into their fractured society and revive itself? The only thing vampyric he saw was the superstition suddenly thrust into their midst.

And he wasn't the only one who took it that way. Jack's conclusions were ultimately met with laughter, and Waylander relaxed a little despite himself. He didn't let it show on his face, but he was glad of the ridicule. It was his job to weigh every grievance equally if he wanted to keep the peace, but he wouldn't stop Jack from digging his own hole, either.

A glint of weaponized silver, and the world as he knew it came crashing down around him a second time.

For a man fresh out of the infirmary, Waylander's own reaction was lightning-fast. He seized Jack's wrist and wrenched so viciously the old man dropped the necklace with a sharp cry of pain… but that pain was nothing to him, nothing, compared to Joanna's. The commander ground the chain beneath his boot heel and kicked it away like it was incendiary, but the damage had already been dealt. The mob gasped and shrank and rippled, a wave about to break. He couldn't let hysteria take hold. Navigating the next few seconds was more important than Joanna… Joanna's…

Her eyes held him like she was sinking. He wanted to follow her down. He wanted to retreat to a time, a place, where fangs had never been forced to the surface.

"Everyone! I need you to remain calm," Waylander said as he put out his hands. "I know we're all still reeling from the attack a few days ago. The last thing we need right now is to turn against our own because of a misunderstanding. Joanna has been nothing but a loyal member of this company. More than that, she's been a selfless soldier, and acted as a protector to all of us on more than one occasion. Most of you wouldn't be here to debate her innocence if it wasn't for her."

The wave crested and held, but there was no conclusion, no crash. Not a lot, but enough. Let them redirect their focus inward for a bit and find some temperance before they burned the whole place to the ground. "Right now, I need all of you out of here," Waylander continued. "There's still work that needs to be done. I'll call a meeting tonight once I get Joanna's side of the story. No one will be denied a chance to speak then."

"… with all due respect, we'll go as far as the other side of the door, sir," one of the soldiers who had returned with Waylander volunteered. It wasn't a direct disobedience of his orders, but it was as close as anyone had ever come before. "Me and Phillips, sir," the soldier added quickly, and Waylander nodded. It was a concession he was willing to put up with.

As the mob filed out of the room, the old man cast a look of pure loathing over his shoulder. "She'll get to him," he muttered, "if she hasn't already."

The words hung in the air long after the crowd had dispersed. When Waylander was assured that they were alone, he crossed to where he had kicked the necklace and rehomed it inside the front pocket of his coat, just so no one else would. He didn't look at Joanna. Though he would have liked to join her in her cell, the closet wasn't big enough for both of them… and while anyone posted by the door would be unable to hear their conversation if they spoke low enough, a cursory glance in would tell the guard if the visitation was compromised.

Waylander felt a pain so acute it was almost physical when he looked at her caged. They had a lucky run, he realized—that nothing this self-destructive to the South Cardinals' cohesion had reared its ugly head sooner was probably a miracle.

But why did it have to be her?

Waylander pulled his canteen free and unwrapped the scarf from around his neck. He wetted a corner, and reached through the bars. He slowly began to dab along the edges of Joanna's mouth, taking her too-lovely face in his free hand to hold her steady. Blot by gentle blot, the gore began to recede, and the monstrous visage began to disappear.

"Tell me like you would have told me," he whispered finally. "Tell me like none of this ever happened. Jesus, tell me this is just a morphine dream I can wake up from."

Joanna:

This was not the first-time Joanna’s truth had been revealed, nor even the most violent. But something about this time was different, and as the silver burned deeper into the flesh of her neck she almost wished for it to cut her totally through. Her fangs extended reflexively but the searing pain lasted only an instant longer. The sound of the chain rattling as it hit the ground echoed faintly in her ears, Waylander’s words a distinct echo she tried desperately to clarify. Her hand came up to grip her wounded neck, the flesh still sizzling beneath her palm.

The burst of energy in the room was dampened almost immediately after Waylander spoke, but it was with trepidation the quieted mob trickled out the door. The old man shot his accusation witheringly over his shoulder and a strange expression of grief passed quickly over Joanna’s face. Her expression recovered quickly, returning to the stoic mask she was known for. Though she had only used her powers of persuasion once on Waylander, that single instance made the old man’s word as striking as a punch to the gut. There were plenty of vampires who indulged their hellish nature, torturing and abusing humans as a merciless god might. Joanna had carefully toed the line between monster and man for many centuries, but she found herself doubting her current success at balancing the two.

She watched with a guarded expression as Waylander bent down to retrieve the silver necklace. For an instant, she questioned his intentions, but there was visible relief on her face as the chain slipped into his pocket. Her eyes desperately sought his for reassurance. She leaned her forehead against the cool metal as her hands gripped the bars that kept them apart. The skin on her neck had already begun to heal, though a shiny blistered scar was left as a cruel reminder.

The woman did not flinch as the cool, wet end of his scarf cleared the blood from her face, but her eyes closed gently and her entire being seemed to relax subtly into his touch. The thud of his pulse from his wrist echoed reassuringly in her ears, and for a moment of calm she listened to the steady rhythm.

When he spoke, she opened her eyes, taking the hand he supported her face with gently with her own. She held his hand with an uncharacteristic tenderness, a smile that displayed no mirth overcoming her features when he begged her to insist this was all a dream. “I’m more the stuff of nightmares really,” She corrected gently, and the small smile fell from her face.

“How would you have liked me to tell you, Waylander?” She inquired, though not accusingly. “I thought of a million different ways and none ever seemed good enough,” She released his hand and moved slowly, taking the metal bars in her grasp and pulling them apart as though they were made of a far more malleable metal. Smoothly she slid between the newly created door, and with the same ease she had pulled the bars apart she pulled them back into place.

“I should have told you,” Joanna conceded quietly, “But I was afraid,”

Although that admission seemed laughable after her show of brute strength, it was the truth. She did not fear the mob nor the pain, but the thought of seeing that same horror and revulsion displayed by the crowd on Waylander’s face hurt her in ways she could not explain. It seemed strange now that all her power and might was out in the open, that Joanna felt her most vulnerable. She could have decimated the entire mob without a scratch to show for it, but standing now in front of Waylander and asking for his understanding she felt more human and weak than she had in hundreds of years.

“No more secrets,” She promised, extending a hand like a soldier might as a show of sincerity. She met his eyes intently, uncertainty of his response intensifying the brightness of her eyes.

Waylander:

Darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream. What had once been the cloying lyrics to a song he heard played on the radio resurrected themselves now as poetry. Is that really how you see yourself, Joanna? He almost asked her outright. How did the woman distort her own image to fit the self-characterization when she looked in the mirror? (Waylander had seen her cast a reflection, so he didn't embarrass himself with a quick fact-check into the lore.)

Her hand, cold as marble, alighted on his. He stopped fussing over her like a mother hen. Most of the blood was gone, anyway, although her pale lips looked redder than usual. They were either temporarily stained, or flush with the living blood pumping through her veins…

God, there was so much to know. Waylander had already recalibrated reality once in his lifetime. Where other men might have feared for their sanity making a second attempt, he figured he should be used to it by now.

"Any way besides this one," he replied. His mouth twisted in a rueful smile. His beard had grown out during his time spent in the infirmary. He thought about squeezing her hand, but she let it drop suddenly. Some instinct told him to step back, and he saw Joanna's true power unleashed. The bars of the Cardinals' makeshift cell might as well have been fashioned out of overcooked noodles. Joanna pulled them apart without any change in her expression and stepped out. Waylander's astonishment was evident on his face, all soft mouth and raised eyebrows, but there was no trace of the revulsion Joanna might have feared seeing there. He gazed at her like she was a tiger that had just escaped its enclosure. Admittedly, that was often how he looked at her.

"Saves me a trip to go find the key," he said, because it was only in that moment he realized Dodger still had the keyring. Waylander usually entrusted it to him when he was away, just to give the boy a taste of real purpose. Locked doors had never stopped his second's movements around the compound, and he now understood why.

He doubted Dodger failing to hand them over was just oversight.

Joanna extended her iron-proof hand to him, and Waylander took it without hesitation. "No more secrets," he agreed, and wasn't prepared for the wrenched feeling that overwhelmed him hearing his own promise. Why did it suddenly feel as if he was the one most likely to renege? Joanna clearly hadn't meant to extend the pact to his most private thoughts. He doubted they would ever come up in conversation.

"This is going to be a tribunal," he warned. "I'm not going to be able to defend you publicly. At least, not as loudly as I'd like." The skin around his eyes creased with sorrow momentarily. "But I'm not going to leave them without any question as to where I stand. As far as I'm concerned, everything's changed, and nothing's changed."

Joanna:

It had been a long time since she had known fear. To a creature who had seen centuries of war, plague, and famine, it was a chilling sensation. The relief she felt when he extended his hand and accepted within her was overwhelming, the heat from his skin warming her own. He spoke, his voice echoing loudly in her head. Her own thoughts raced, impossible to track, but she found herself pulling deeper into him as if in a trance.

Joanna’s embrace was totally out of character, as if possessed by her own emotions. She could think of nothing but his honest acceptance, more than she deserved, more than she could have ever hoped for. Her face pressed tight against his chest, arms snaking around his torso pulling him into an embrace she had not initiated herself for many decades, maybe centuries.

But the unfamiliar motion brought back memories unbidden, of those she had loved and lost before long before she had given up on such follies. For a moment she could almost remember what being human felt like his heart was pounding so loud, reverberating through her as if it were her own. Time always stood still for Joanna, but in this moment it raced. She could not control the flood of emotions that rolled through her, the memories like movies of those who had rejected her.

But not Waylander.

As if his name alone broke the spell, she regained herself quickly and stepped back, but perhaps not as far as she would usually. She tilted her head up to look at her steadfast companion directly and said the only thing she could say.

“Thank you,"

Simple words, but they weighed heavily in the air with their meaning. Her eyes conveyed her earnest, brighter than they had ever been, like a frozen lake thawing in the heat of the spring sun. She smiled, not the quick twist of lips he had come to know but a true curve that pulled her face in a way unfamiliar even to her.

🩸

Waylander was right, of course, there was a tribunal. No one was pleased that the scariest monster of all had been lurking right under their noses. The feelings were varied, some could see reason, but others questioned every disappearance, every death that had occurred while she was around. She tried to remain impartial, see from their point of view, but lions don’t often try to imagine the perspective of the lamb. It was more of what she had already known, had already heard before, and so she was unblinking in the face of their accusations. Fear was the cloying undercurrent, inescapable in everyone’s face but his.

She answered every question patiently, but the responses were admittedly short. She spoke as if every bit of knowledge she gave away stripped a level of protection away from her, but she never refused to answer. The questioning aligned with what she had expected, mostly concern over what she ate, how she ate, and if she could ever truly be in control. To that question she allowed herself the smallest of mirthless smiles, “Do you think any of you would be alive if I couldn’t?”

There was murmuring and grumbling that belied the general discontent. Their leader’s presence made it difficult for most to be anything but respectful in their questioning, but Joanna better. The old man did not have many friends, but his insight into her world did bring him into focus. More of the cardinals than would admit lingered around when he talked to his small band of followers, pretending to be interested in other tasks. His knowledge of vampires was deeper than even she expected, her keen ear catching his mutterings. Somewhere deep her heart ached for him, if it was capable of such things, for the only reason he had that knowledge in the first place meant he’d had experience with her kind before. He did not admit to it, but she felt strongly it was related to the story of how he lost his entire family long before the world ended, a story he’d never told in a way that rang true.

It was with a begrudging kind of acceptance the Cardinals eventually had their fill of poking and prodding. The tribunal was winding down though an undercurrent of tension filled the makeshift courtroom. The consensus was headed towards allowing her to stay, but with restrictions of course, but those details had yet to be decided when the question she had been waiting for all along was finally asked.

“No one is going to ask how we kill her if she changes her mind?”

The question sucked the life out of the room. There was no sound, no stirring with the exception of Joanna turning her head so that her eyes met her accuser’s. The hate she saw reflected back was not unsurprising or unnerving.

“I think you already know the answer to that question,”

Her response carried no inflection of ill will or malice, but it made the old man’s face twist uglier as if she cursed him.

“The only way for a human to kill a vampire is with real silver, your best bet is a stake to the heart.” Her tone was so matter of fact she could have been reciting a recipe from memory, but the response from the crowd was explosive. Immediately the calm was lost to chatter, dissolving further into chaos as Joanna turned back to Waylander, seeking the only relief she could find.

When the majority of the modern world stood empty, it was easy to take for granted a roof over your head.

The clouds wept swollen raindrops that accelerated to the thirsty ground like bullets to relieve it its misery. Soaked to the bone and fuming at the forecast, Russell Hinder held his head low and accelerated faster through the mist.

Like a graveyard of ancient giants, the steel and concrete skeletons of vacant skyscrapers towered on either side of the deserted avenue. The growl of his engine resounded like thunder in the lonely urban canyon through which he navigated, singing a cacophonous duet with the storm raging above. The single beam of his headlight brought a sense of alienation rather than any brand of comfort; in the thick of the evening storm, Russell felt as though he could be the last remaining human in the dystopian confines of their world. 

Through the fog that shrouded the tops of the dilapidated buildings, the soft pinkish glow of neon letters came in and out of focus as the low-lying moisture shifted rapidly in the wind. Russell peered through his helmet’s rain-streaked visor. From directly below, the word NEWARK was obscured nearly to the point of illegibility even without the weather’s interference. The blood red of its plastic-faced mark had long since faded to a less intimidating dusty rose, and several of the bulbs backlighting its display flickered on and off behind cracked exteriors.

Housed in the center of a once-thriving metropolis, the world headquarters of Newark Pharmaceuticals shared the only surviving downtown district with two other equally influential biomedical corporations. Alongside the red of Newark, the bright goldenrod of Faribault Group and the eerie glowing blue of ACESO comprised the skyline of what had come to be known colloquially as Pharma City. Their three separate buildings were the only illuminated towers in the entire length of the abandoned downtown’s silhouette. The rest—particularly in the thick of summer storms like these—was dark and gray with an utter absence of contemporary life, and at night the surrounding streets were black as pitch and empty but for the rats in the gutters.

The geographic proximity of Newark, Faribault, and ACESO was the result of necessity rather than any desire for partnership. The handful of blocks they occupied contained their three individual towers—converted from former office use to be closed-door, state-of-the-art research facilities with hundreds of floors for laboratories and operating rooms—and were surrounded by shorter buildings sectioned off for employee housing and hospital recuperation. ACESO owned the tallest, most well-equipped real estate of the trio; it was common knowledge that they were the frontrunners of the unspoken contest. With the best facilities, the most money, the best researchers, the biggest staff, and the most well-known experimental breakthroughs, ACESO was rapidly becoming the most influential organization not just in their city, but in the world.

Despite ACESO’s obvious lead, the three companies were fierce competitors, maintaining an adversarial relationship born of stubbornness, greed, and most potently of all, a quest for dominance over the others. The degree of enmity between them, however, resulted strangely in very little interaction, violent or otherwise; they kept to themselves almost entirely, upholding an unspoken vow of silence and secrecy that made them mysterious forces of governing business no outsiders could touch even if they wanted to—even if they weren’t already dependent upon their functions.

The handful of blocks they occupied was one of the few areas that had been upgraded from the old power grid when resources had become scarce nearly a century prior. City officials had promised a gradual conversion, completing a few blocks at a time to the superior system—a more efficient, more durable, and more cost effective method of delivering electricity, the breakthrough of the era—but unforeseen difficulties brought construction to a standstill. The mayor at the time (before the government crumbled beneath the hammer of the pharmaceutical companies) claimed a temporary cessation due to budget restrictions, as the installation of the upgrade was an expensive due to pay for what would be cheaper consumption in the long run, post-completion. Whether or not it was coincidental that the conversion stopped as soon as Newark Pharmaceuticals, the first of the three to establish itself as a player during the War, moved into its home and finished its facility upgrade was up for debate, but word on the street spoke of the fiasco with bitter, distrusting tongues.

Newark may have been the first to be established, but its leading reign lasted only a decade before a long-running internal civil war shattered the administration and divided the key researchers so absolutely that it became impossible to further their experimentation. Pitted against one another in a tidal wave of dissent, two of its former board members, sisters Belinda and Stella Faribault, broke away to uphold their own constitutions in a rival corporation bearing their surname. Lewis Andover, a founding Newark board member with yet another differing set of ideals, followed suit, making his own dramatic exit and forming what would soon be known as ACESO. Both were forced to remain in the area if they wanted the electrical hookups necessary to operate their ever-advancing equipment.

Despite the near-century that had passed since its inception, the roots of corruption that cracked Newark’s foundation ran so deep that it had never been able to rid itself of all the weeds. Their day in the spotlight had largely come and gone. What good they had contributed to society from those years—a handful of useful drugs, a few key treatments in childhood genetic syndromes—were now so commonplace in basic disease management that they were overlooked as everyday, origins forgotten. But what the public did not know was that a major portion of the company’s research had dealt with addiction and dependence, the experiments of which were initially overseen by Henry Newark himself and then continued after his death by his daughter and then his granddaughter, Veriska Lang. Their elaborate setup was intended to produce drugs that were ultimately beneficial, but that required repeated dosage for the length of a patient’s life in order to be effective. It was paramount job insurance, promising a future not only for the employees, but also for the company itself. A smart business move, if wholly unethical. Was addiction really so bad when there were no detrimental effects to the body?

As it turned out, the unscrupulous experiments did save Newark from financial collapse. When ACESO’s cancer-curing serum backfired with apocalyptic results, effectively killing a large chunk of Newark’s typical middle-aged clientele (and shortening the lifespans of their younger consumers), they discovered a portion of the dwindling population that they had never before considered a part of their demographic. Despite its history of unsatisfied staff and less-than-moral ideas regarding monetary growth, Newark had at least done its best to cure its ailing customers, first and foremost. Now, under new management brought about by the Youth Crisis, they began to look down rather than up to escape the threat of dwindling bank accounts and dying investors. With the knowledge that they could never gain the footing to compete against steady Faribault, let alone the explosive ACESO, they sought the trade-solace of the street-bound—the people their two competitors looked straight through and ignored.

Russell revved his engine with a twist of his wrist, rounding the dark corner of 58th and Travers that marked the border of “inside” and “outside.” The orange glimmer of street lights ahead was a welcome beacon of civilization after his ride through the deserted urban landscape surrounding the veritable island of Pharma City. And in this weather, even the sight of its cracked sidewalks, corporate banners, and uniform dormitories was a comfort.

A shrill chorus of car alarms sounded in his wake as he sped by the vehicles parked bumper to bumper on either side of the street. He grinned broadly behind his visor. A glance in his mirror revealed a fanfare of blinking lights to accompany the shrieks, announcing his arrival to anyone within ten stories of street level. 

Only the wealthiest families could afford to own automobiles in this age, the majority of them being high-ranking scientists who worked for Pharma—none of whom were likely to be living in the stark utilitarian housing along which they parked. The big players made their homes in the various suburb villages several miles outside of the isolated district. Lab assistants, interns, office staff, security, and janitorial staff who were lucky enough to secure employment rarely had salaries that could provide more than the provided housing—and there was no public transportation to Pharma City. It made for deserted highways and a distinct lack of traffic law enforcement, the entire division of which was deemed entirely unnecessary given the skewed ratio of population to vehicles in operation. Besides, with a barely-functioning court system (where convicted criminals were shipped off to labs rather than prison cells) and attorneys who almost exclusively worked on Pharma’s dime, there was simply no point in persecution for comparatively harmless wrongdoings.

Let them know we’re here, he thought with a dark smirk, relinquishing his left grip to launch a middle-fingered greeting at the valet awning of Faribault’s HQ tower as he passed. It was nearly midnight, so there was no one at the door to witness his gesture. Fortunately, he was on his way to a much lower-key, much more effective, and a much bigger fuck you type of meeting at Newark. He would have to find his satisfaction there instead. He had no doubt he would.

The rain began to ease up as he pulled past Newark’s main entrance and instead descended down a steep concrete ramp leading below ground to the first floor of the building’s basement. It had once been a garage dedicated entirely to parking cars, but after the pharmaceutical corporation remodeled the structure, its ten subterranean levels had been converted to offices and maintenance access rooms with the exception of this first story, which remained a bright, fluorescent cave of smooth cement for the convenience of the ten board members’ chauffeurs. Only a very select few were granted access, and even fewer were given permission to enter the facility through its exclusive passages. Russell, as it turned out, was one of them.

The man punched in his fifteen-digit security passcode, then flipped up his visor for the retina scan. The machine detected and recognized the patterns in his blue-gray irises almost immediately, beeping its approval thrice—the first to let him know he had been accepted, the second to alert building security, and the third to alert his contact inside.

As soon as the armored garage door slid open to allow him passage, Russell slipped through and maneuvered his motorcycle to the west wall. His tires left wet marks in his wake as the rain slid from the bike’s titanium frame. The roar was deafening in the wide but short-ceilinged garage, and when he cut the engine he found himself engulfed in a sterile, unnerving silence.

“Hinder?” 

Russell, recognizing the female voice, straddled his bike and took his time turning around. “Lang,” he greeted coolly, pulling off his helmet to reveal messy but dry brown hair and a handsome, youthful face. 

“Lang? Oh, please,” Veriska Lang returned, her impossibly high heels a staccato announcement of her presence as she stepped leisurely towards the biker. “That makes me sound like my father.” Her disgust was evident in her tone, but her slender face shone with mirth as she regarded her familiar visitor.

Russell dismounted and placed his helmet on his seat. “Figured I’d be the first one here,” he said, unzipping his jacket and draping it over his handlebars to dry. Droplets rolled from its leather exterior to pool on the floor beneath his boots.

“As usual,” the woman agreed. Veriska was a demon in disguise—a terrifyingly intelligent woman who was as ruthless as she was ambitious, as cruel as she was strikingly beautiful. She was not only the president of Newark Pharmaceuticals, but also the head of her own laboratory…a laboratory that consisted of all eight available underground floors of the mammoth skyscraper. A laboratory that, for Russell and the organization to which he belonged, was as essential to their survival as the oxygen that filled his lungs.

Russell stepped up to her, closing the short distance between them until they nearly touched. Veriska Lang was intoxicating; she was perhaps the only person in the world he feared, knowing she was as heartless a scientist as she was a businesswoman as she was anything else. She wouldn’t hesitate to slide her long, slender fingers around his neck to strangle the life from his body. Perhaps it was the danger that drew him to her—and she to him, given his own predisposition to violence—but either way, it was more than simple professional agreements that had kindled their mutual attraction. He liked her unpredictability, her mercilessness. It was poetic, in a way, that she was just as likely to murder him as he was to murder her.

As he leaned in to brush his lips against hers, the humid air thickened, growing hotter, more difficult to breathe, more difficult to keep himself in check. It was bad enough to make these exchanges in plain view of the security cameras (which were unavoidable); to display this kind of closeness with their ally in front of his club would be as good as tying his own noose. Neither side could afford this kind of compromise, yet there they were, treading the line between safety and chaos, as ever. Part of the rush. Part of the appeal.

They leapt apart as soon as the door jolted open once more, this time allowing passage for a group of six additional motorcyclists clad in similar black leather. Russell watched, unblinking, as the rest of his gang council parked their rides, a small stream of water trailing after them as they stripped their soaked gear and gathered, looking disheveled, in front of the woman.

Veriska looked strangely nervous as she stood, tapping her heel on the ground, arms folded tightly across her chest. She had never been intimidated by Russell’s gang, not even by Pryce himself, the president of the Catalysts, but here she seemed suddenly to shrink. Russell narrowed his eyes and joined his ranks, following when the young woman took off towards the security-protected stairwell and led them to her private meeting floor below.

“Right,” she announced, standing at the head of a long elliptical table while her rough-and-tumble audience shuffled in to take their seats. Russell, the last one inside, closed the door tightly and joined the ranks of his council. “Straight to business. Is everything in order?”

Pryce looked up, brows arched high. “Our team is in place,” he confirmed. “And this. Your payment.”

“This is only half,” she declared, without looking at the black canvas bag the man pushed towards her.

“Half now, half later,” he stated.

Veriska narrowed her eyes. Russell recognized a spark of predatory fire in their dark depths, and he held his breath silently, awaiting her response. She would never threaten the club leader when the rest of the council were in the same room. The woman may have been smarter then the entire Catalyst group combined, but she was plainly outnumbered. At last, she heaved a sigh and spoke. “That was not our agreement,” was all she mustered.

Pryce shrugged. “Deal’s off, then.”

“And you plan to go through with it without my help?”

“Damn straight we will.”

Veriska laughed. “You’ll go in blind, without a shred of intel? Give me a break. You’re a con, but I didn’t think you were stupid. Your threats are as empty as this whole damn city, and if you think you can pull the wool over my eyes after five years of solid partnership, maybe you deserve what you’ll get. They catch you, you’ll wind up right back inside ACESO—only on an operating table.”

Russell cleared his throat. The daggers in Veriska’s glare as she shifted her attention would have been physically painful for any other Catalyst at the table, including their infallible president. Russell, however, mustered a crooked and entirely fearless smile. “You think for one second we’re trusting you—and not just you, the rest of your crew too—to get us into ACESO without tipping off some bastard guard or worse?” He snorted, reaching for the bag of cash across the table and snagging it on his finger. “What’s to stop you from taking your prize and leaving the cons to rot? If that’s all we are to you, then fuck it all, you go right ahead and recruit another group to distribute your product. Good luck with that, by the way.”

The men collectively inhaled, holding their breath in anticipation. But Veriska’s hand, her long oval nails painted in fresh jewel-tone magenta, shot out to intercept the payment in a blur that was eerily reminiscent of a viper’s strike. Russell looked smug, relinquishing his grasp. So that was why she’d looked nervous. She had been about to play them, or at the very least turn a blind eye as someone under her command unraveled their delicate plan.

“Fine,” she said tightly, running a finger through her long black hair. “Fair enough.”

“It’s better this way,” Pryce piped in, apparently regaining his courage. He nodded to Russell—thanks, brother, he seemed to say—and rose to his feet. Everyone in the meeting room knew very well that Newark couldn’t afford to lose even half of the Catalysts’ final total payment; worse yet, they would fall into complete ruin should the distributors of their addictive synthetic substances suddenly repeal their longtime alliance. Newark’s survival was almost completely reliant upon their partnership with the Catalysts, who functioned as one of very few organized bridges between Pharma and their vast clientele of dependents. Now that they were working together in the quest so solve their competitor’s epic biomedical mistake, everything was truly on the line.

“Marsden will be in touch,” Pryce continued, referring to the club’s favorite techie—and lead infiltrator. “We move tomorrow night. The arrangements are the same as we discussed before. Equal parts in what we find.” He cleared his throat, and when his hand moved to the inside of his jacket to indicate the threat of his concealed weapon, so too did the other six Catalysts. Veriska maintained her composure, but Russell detected a wrinkle of concern in the corners of her almond eyes. He smirked.

“Let’s not forget the rest of our arrangements,” Russell added. “It’s business as usual outside of this room. Got it?” He looked from one solemn face to the next until his icy stare landed on the young woman. “The rest of the guys will be expecting a new drug shipment day after tomorrow. Alletrax, Hallastrin, Malphoren, the usual. Whatever happens, they can’t know any of us were involved. They can’t know what we were after, either.”

“And if your team goes down?” she asked.

Russell grinned, pulling out his silver pistol and holding it lazily to her bare temple. “You’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Won’t you?”

Veriska bristled, but her eyes had widened. “I’ll do what I can,” she promised coldly, regarding him with such disdain he had a hard time not kissing her then and there in front of the entire Catalyst council. The thought made him chuckle, and he put away his weapon as Pryce lead the group back outside. Veriska scanned her thumbprint and allowed them passage to the garage. As they geared up and collectively departed into the storm as a herd of growling industrial beasts, Russell could feel the scientist’s eyes on his back.

The fun was just about to begin.

Marsden Banks was a technological genius, a man who, if Russell had not previously witnessed him bleeding with his own eyes, may as well have been constructed of electronic circuitry himself. Breaking into ACESO, according to Marsden, was not so much overcoming a barrier of difficulty as it was a matter of time and patience and careful coordination. It was like a theater performance, he’d said, or a ballet. Preparation, rehearsal. Repeat.

The company upon whose shoulders the performance rested had been hand-selected by the council—pending approval from Marsden—and consisted of five of the Catalysts’ best soldiers. The techie was the first; he would initiate the system break-in and reprogram the door security to include their false identification. The second posed as a patient in the building’s main lobby, incognito among the general populace. The final three functioned as a tag-team that would allow clearance one level deeper to the next; the first would grant access to the second and third together before standing guard, then the second would give final access to the last—who, as it turned out, was none other than Catalyst Vice President Russell Hinder.

He’d been selected because he was smart and he was ruthless; he was thorough and he was quick. It was perhaps a risky move to allow one’s vice president to be in the crosshairs of a dangerous mission, but in this case it would have been a greater hazard to send someone else in his place. Despite their prowess, despite their firepower and their influence, the majority of those bearing the Catalyst title were good for little more than muling drugs from Newark shipments to the dealers in the streets. They were necessary in the chain of command and productivity, sure, but that did not make them leadership material—they were members of the Outer Chapter, and they were not privy to internal affairs.

After passing through each obstacle with relative ease, Russell at last lowered himself into the tall-backed chair perched behind an immaculate desk. His gloved fingers raced across the computer keyboard, entering an impossibly lengthy code Marsden had insisted he memorize; it would, the man said, override the security in place that guarded not only the laboratory entrances, but also the extensive set of incubators, storage compartments, and medicinal cabinets just beyond the armored threshold.

Reciting the digits in his head, the young man—too near thirty for comfort, but that was a worry for another day—was so absorbed in his translation that he did not hear the soft shuffle of footsteps behind him, nor the gentle click of a carefully-opened door to his back.

The fun was about to begin indeed.