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Episode Twenty-Four: a Night Owl and a Wise Bird Too (Revised)



Your preparations don’t take long.

Once everything is set, Fausta leans your old bronze sword against her shoulder, ruffles Fortuna’s hair one more time for good luck, and walks into the dark, bullet-riddled theater.

Sarah Mankiller draws a line of mist through the air with her vaporizer and mutters powerful words under her breath.

The air around you ripples. Fortuna, Felix, and Macintosh vanish from existence. You look down at your own body and see nothing but a faint shimmer like a heat mirage.

Fausta strolls down the aisle past the rows of the plush, bullet-riddled seats. She stops and looks up at the puncture-marked theater screen. The film projector, its film long since exhausted, projects only a blank square of light onto the nostalgic silver screen.

“Come out,” Fausta declares to the empty room.

Dust trickles from the theater box over Fausta’s head, falling onto the seats below in perfect silence.

“I know you’re here,” Fausta says.

Mandrake Kayne vaults over the side of the theater box. He hits the ground, sinks, and rolls forward like a John Wilkes Booth that studied parkour. He doesn’t make a single sound.

He rises and holds the tip of his trench knife against Fausta’s back. In his other hand, he holds a familiar-looking pocketknife, the one you’d enchanted with a spell of silence.

He flips his pocketknife closed and slips it back into his pocket.

“Where are the others?” Mandrake Kayne asks Fausta.

Fausta takes a calm, centering breath. “Hello, Kayne,” she says. “Have you realized you’ve been duped yet?”

Kayne tilts his bandaged head to the side. “This is another trap, isn’t it?” he says out loud.

You tense.

Kayne reaches into his coat pocket and draws out a cylindrical grenade the size of a soda can. He pulls the pin free with his teeth and raises the primed explosive over his head.

Oh dear.

Kayne turns his head to the side and spits out the pin. “Do you see this, Diesel?” he shouts. “This grenade’s ten times more potent than the charge I used in the ballroom! If I die, you’ll all burn along with this dingy theater!”

You feel Mac, invisible to your left, shudder with barely suppressed rage.

You’re not particularly enthused about exploding. More to the point...you never saw this moment happen in the film. 

A chill spreads through your bones: what other details did that silent film gloss over, and how are they going to bite you in the rear?

“What did Father Albright say to you?” Fausta asks Kayne. “Did he imply that kidnapping my daughter would save the world?”

“Tell your companions to reveal themselves and surrender,” Mandrake Kayne says to Fausta. “If they don’t appear within ten seconds, I will kill you.”

“I’m not surprised you were fooled,” Fausta says quietly. “Jeremiah’s very good at making people hear what they want to hear.”

“One…two…three…” Mandrake counts, lowering his arm and holding his primed grenade by his side.

The spells on your jian are potent and freshly infused. You could seize your sword from Fausta with the force of your will and hurl it through the air to stab Kayne…but that would take several seconds to pull off.

Mandrake only needs a single moment to pierce Fausta’s heart or toss that grenade.

As harsh as it sounds, you’re more worried about the primed grenade.

“Did he tell you my daughter was the Antichrist?” Fausta asks, staring  up at the bullet-riddled silver screen. “The Beast of Armageddon that would bring the end times?”

“…four…five…six…” Mandrake continues to drone.

Fausta takes a deep breath. “You might be surprised to hear this…” she begins.

“…seven…eight…nine…” Mandrake says, rounding his shoulders and bending his knees in preparation.

“...but he was telling the truth,” Fausta admits.

Kayne stops his countdown. Genuine surprise flickers in his eyes.

You hear Fortuna gasp softly behind your back.

“Sometimes I’m afraid as well,” Fortuna admits, her words soft and hesitant. “What if I fail her as a mother? What if the madness and corruption of this world fills her heart with cruelty? How can I teach her to be good when I’ve done so much evil myself?”

Kayne tilts his head to the side in confusion. The tip of his knife dips for a moment.

“I worry,” Fausta says, “and then I think about who my daughter is.” She turns around to face Kayne, a fire burning in her eyes. “My beautiful, kind, brave, clever baby girl. And I have faith she’ll be all right. I know that she’ll never do a thing to harm this world.”

You feel a sudden surge of envy, of ugly reptile resentment towards the little girl hiding behind you.

Why did she get the parent who believes in her no matter what?

Why did your father get a no-good stinking traitor for a son…?

No, you tell you tell yourself. They’re not the bad guys. You’re not the bad guy. You have bad feelings and bad memories…but they don’t have to define you.

With that thought, you feel a gentle calm descend on you, a rare, precious feeling of peace. The world around you grows a little clearer…

…while Mandrake Kayne’s world gets thrown into confusion.

“Jeremiah Albright doesn’t share your confidence,” Kayne says to Fausta, laying on his dry, sardonic drawl a little too thickly.

“Ah yes,” Fausta says with a chuckle. “Good old Jerry. I’m sure he filled your ear with talk about the Rapture, the End Times and God’s Great Plan.” She tilts her head to the side. “Question: did he ever say anything about wanting to stop the apocalypse?”

Mandrake goes still as a deer in the headlights.

“I see now,” he whispers. “You’re just trying to fill my heart with doubt.” His voice hardens. “Just like all the other monsters that beg me for mercy.”

Father Albright,” Fausta says, pronouncing his title with a surge of venom, “prides himself on never telling lies. Practically speaking, that means he lies by omitting details and letting your mind fill in the blanks. He told you to bring the Antichrist to him alive, didn’t he?”

Kayne’s eyes widen for split second.

“Did he tell he wants our daughter to trigger the Rapture and End Times?” Fausta asks gently. “Did he tell you he was Fausta’s father?”

Mandrake Kayne hisses loudly from between his clenched teeth.

“You never even thought to ask, did you?” Fausta says, smiling with satisfaction. “He would have confessed it if you asked.”

“Silence,” Kayne hisses.

Fausta goes quiet and lets Kayne stew in his own thoughts for a moment.

The tension in your body heightens every one of your senses. You can feel your pulse pounding in your temples. You can sense the cold chill of the zombie enchantment, coiling around your spine and animating your wounded flesh.

Can Fausta do this, you wonder? After all this ridiculous violence, can she defy prophecy and talk Kayne into just going home?

“Hmmph,” Kayne grumbles. “Even if you’re using the truth to turn me against my employer…it’s still the truth, isn’t it?”

Your heart skips a beat.

Kayne nods to himself in resignation. “I will go kill Albright,” he says. He looks up. “After I save the world by killing you and your hell spawn.”

“My daughter,” Fausta says hotly, “is not spawn. And you will not lay a finger on her.”

“Give me a reason to spare your lives,” Kayne says to Fausta. “Tell me why you deserve to live.”

Fausta turns her back on Kayne and looks back up at the tattered theater screen. “Let him do it,” she says to the empty air, the movements of her mouth broad and exaggerated.

Suddenly, you figure it out.

Fausta can read lips. She’s sending a message to the past through the film she watched ten minutes earlier.

“It’s time to stop hiding, spy,” Fausta tells her past self.

Kayne drives the tip of his trench knife into Fausta’s back.

Fausta screams, a high-pitched, avian shriek. Fire explodes from her chest cavity and splatters onto the ground like lava.

For a moment, you think those flames are coming from Kayne’s dagger, the dagger you’d enchanted with spells of heat and friction.

Then you smell the rotten-egg stench of sulfur, permeating the dusty theater like foul miasma from a sewer drain.

Fausta’s head suddenly twists backwards 180 degrees. She locks eyes with Kayne, glaring at him over her own shoulder blades. Cracks spread across her cheeks likes fractures in the face of a porcelain doll.

Kayne draws his knife out and takes a step back.

With a wet, ripping noise, two pairs of wings explode from Fausta’s back, their angelic-white feathers stained with red blood.

Those wings smack Kayne right in the face, pushing him away from Fausta and hurling him down the theater aisle. He stumbles several feet, trips over one of the theater steps and lands on his rump. He stares in disbelief at the trench knife in his hand, the thin blade drooping as it glows with a dull red heat.

What is this?” he screams.

Now, you think.

You step forward, emerging from Sarah’s veil of invisibility. You extend the index fingers of your left hand and flick them through the air.

A bright gold shape flashes down from the darkened recesses of the ceiling. Kayne, his eyes focused on the transforming Fausta, doesn’t notice the blade that pierces through his coat and slides into his back.

His eyes bulge. He drops his knife. He staggers forward but does not fall.

The bronze sword in Fausta’s hand flickers and vanishes. Behind you, Sarah lowers her hand, sighing in exhaustion as she releases both her illusion spells.

With a sound like the cracking of clay, Fausta’s human skin crumbles away in a spray of skin-colored shards. Her face becomes a swirling coat of black and brown feathers. Her brown eyes become wide, black orbs ringed with gold. Her mouth becomes a beak.

Beneath Fausta’s ragged, charred sweater, you see pale flesh the color of bone and an exposed furnace of flame, burning in the hollow of her chest cavity right where her heart should be.

Mandrake Kayne claws at the sword embedded in his back. He staggers forward. He staggers back. He looks up, eyes widening.

“You,” he rasps. “You were the demon parent?”

Fausta spreads her wings. They are impressive wings, you note, but still too small to lift her into the air.

A foolish observation, Diesel. Birds may rely on air pressure and wind currents in order to fly.

We demons are not so primitive.

Light gathers around the feather-tips of Fausta’s wings as she floats into the air. With long, slender fingers, she reaches into her furnace-heart and draws forward a beautiful, ornate pistol, a black iron-forged gun etched with silver runes and tipped with a cylindrical silencer.

Kayne falls to his knees, clutching his primed grenade with a white-knuckled hand. “Monster,” he snarls. He briefly glances at you and the people behind you. “Monsters,” he repeats, sneering at Sarah, Lynn, Macintosh, and the wide-eyed Fortuna Orobas.

Fausta opens her beak and speaks.

“Maybe we are monsters,” she says, leveling her silenced pistol at Kayne’s head, “but we don’t need your permission to live.”

Next Chapter: Episode Twenty-Five: Poor Choice of Words (Revised)