Lucky Rabbit

“Vrazhul,” Saskia muttered, turning so her body was between Pandy and the boy. “Foolish woman.” Her eyes flicked around, lingering on the shadows. “Where is your tenebrak, your elemental?”

Pandy shook her head. “I don’t have an elemental.” Saskia looked doubtful. “Really!” Pandy insisted, whispering for no reason she could see.

“Net tenebraka? To…” The dark eyes narrowed, and she rubbed the red skin stretched across the stump of her finger. “Ty est vrazhul.” Her head bowed, and for a moment, it looked like she might even curtsey. Then she froze and stepped back, releasing Pandy as if burned. “Sorry, sorry, lady. I…misunderstand, yes? I think something not-true.”

Pandy frowned, nodding even as she thought that the other woman didn’t believe she was wrong at all. What had Saskia said? What ‘not-true’ thing was going through her mind? The boy looked as confused as Pandy, stepping forward as if he would take Saskia’s arm and draw her away. She gave him a fierce glare, and he backed up again, raising his hands.

“I will finish your dresses soon,” Saskia said, her accent even thicker than before. “I bring them. You will like them.” She paused, glancing at the boy, then said, “Fifty gold. They will be good. Good.”

Now the boy looked shocked, opening his mouth to protest before another glare made him swallow back the words. He definitely looked like someone who had just discovered that his new gold mine contained nothing but pyrite. Either that or he was constipated. It was honestly difficult to tell.

“Fifty gold, then, Ms. Wellington,” he said with a sick smile, holding out his hand. Saskia smacked it down.

“When done. I will collect. Show respect, Luca. Ona vrazhul,” the woman said.

This didn’t seem to clarify anything for Luca, who shrugged, sighed, and said, “That’s how it is, then. My aunt will see you in a week.”

Pandy looked between the two of them, hand buried in the voluminous folds of her skirt, ready to ‘take out’ her bag of money. Fifty gold seemed ridiculously low for six dresses, including an evening gown sort of thing, plus several pairs of pants and matching shirts. She’d expected this to cost a good part of her newfound wealth, and wondered if she could possibly slip Luca a few coins when Saskia wasn’t looking. Surely they were going to take a loss on this?

Saskia lowered her head again, eyes darting from side to side, then began to usher Pandy out. She held her hands down, palm out, pushing as if to create a cushion of air to gently chivvy her customer back into the open air, and Pandy took the hint, backing up until she was out from under the shade of the awning. Saskia dipped her head once, then again, and this time refused to bring it up again, just scooping her pins and fabric back up so she could sit on her abandoned stool.

Pandy, greatly confused, wandered off, unsure whether she would ever actually get any of the promised garments, but afraid to approach anyone else about it. Instead, she glanced at her stats and realized two things. First, she had slightly less than twenty minutes remaining in Shifting Faces, and second, she had somehow used up every single point of Mana she had. Yep, all eight-hundred plus. Not only that, but she was down thirteen Life Points as well, which made her realize that the ache in her abdomen had never quite gone away after she tried to fix that loose thread. What had happened?

But she would have to figure that out later. With so little time left, she had to hurry and get back to Falconet. There were several carriages, both open and closed, at the entrance to the market, and during her earlier wanderings, she’d seen several people climb out of these, exchange money with the drivers, and other people climb inside. It seemed likely that these were the local equivalent of a taxi, so Pandy headed in that direction.

As she wove her way through the crowds, which were definitely growing thicker as the morning wore on, she saw a few items that had caught her eye before, and now that she had quite a bit of ‘extra’ money, she stopped and bought them. She didn’t have time to bargain, which made the various stall owners quite happy, and the third one even threw in some bags that could have come from a fancy paper-store in Pandy’s world, since they had a thick texture and little specks of what looked like bark in it. She accepted gratefully and dropped in her little treasures before finally reaching the taxis with just over fifteen minutes remaining.

Most of the carriages waiting there were the open sort, which wouldn’t work for Pandy, but fortunately, just as she arrived, one of the closed carriages arrived, disgorging a trio of giggling girls and an older lady who looked like it had already been a very long day for her. Pandy quickly stepped up into the carriage as the lady got down, calling up to the driver, “Falconet, please.”

“Six silver,” the man said, sounding bored, and Pandy passed him a gold from her stash.

Rather than waiting for him to make change, she said, “Step on it,” which thoroughly confused him until she clarified, “Please go as quickly as possible,” which rather ruined the surge of pleasure she’d felt in being able to say the first three words. Pandy had taken a lot of buses in her life, and very few ride-shares, which meant she’d never before been able to tell someone to hurry for her convenience.

As the carriage jerked into motion, Pandy nearly fell into the soft cushion on the hard wooden bench. She flopped back, arms out, legs akimbo, and almost jumped out of her skin when a cold, hard voice spoke from the bench opposite her.

“What are you doing, Wells?” the voice demanded. Pandy looked around, trying to identify the source, but couldn’t. Whoever the speaker was, they were very, very good at hiding. Or, more likely, they had a spell or an elemental concealing them.

“I…had a day off,” Pandy said, sitting up straight and desperately trying to look like Alexandra Wells – or Ms. Wellington, at least. In the excitement of being out on her own, she’d completely forgotten that she was supposed to be acting like someone else.

“Shadows don’t get days off,” the cold voice said, and a dark shape shimmered into being on the bench across from her. It was covered from head to toe in a black cloak, so she couldn’t even tell how old the person was, or if they were male or female. She didn’t think they were very tall, but if they were hunched over within the cloak, even that might be wrong.

Pandy put her nose in the air. “Maybe not, but teachers do, and I am supposed to be a teacher right now.” Her mind raced. How to explain the way she’d been acting? “After the events of last Friday,” she said with great caution, watching the dark figure, “I am under suspicion. I believe I’m being watched, so I’m trying to lull them into a false sense of security.” There! ‘False sense of security’ was spy-talk, wasn’t it?

Silence lingered in the darkness, a heavy blanket smothering them both, before the other said, reluctantly, “You were being followed. An Air elemental. It is no longer a problem.”

Pandy was barely able to keep her reaction under control. Had this person done something to Zephra? That wasn’t possible, was it? Surely it wasn’t that easy to destroy even a weak third-tier elemental. “What did you do to it?” she asked, trying to sound annoyed, rather than worried. “If their spy vanishes, they’ll only suspect me even more. I’ve worked too hard to have you ruin everything.”

The blanket of silence grew heavier. If before it had been a normal quilt or throw, now it was weighted, holding Pandy in place. Sarcasm was thick in the voice when it said, “How have you ‘worked hard’? This is not what is expected of you. First you argue with your orders, and then you fail to reestablish contact after what could be considered a catastrophic failure. If you were not so senior, you might well have been…retired.”

There was a definite threat in that last word, and Pandy suppressed a shudder. Somehow she didn’t think this ‘retirement’ came with cake and a gold watch. “I’m still in place,” Pandy said, her voice shockingly calm, given the vast quantity of butterflies in her stomach. “You haven’t reached out to me, until now. Why do you think I really went out today?” She lifted a paper bag and shook it. “To buy trinkets?”

“Where is your knife?” the other demanded in turn. “It vanished almost a week ago. Until one of our other agents reported seeing you, we thought you were dead.”

Uh oh. That black knife could be tracked somehow? Pandy would have to let Augustus and Professor Beeswick know. Or maybe they already knew, and they were intentionally blocking it somehow? Which reminded her that her creepy visitor hadn’t answered her question about Zephra. But she couldn’t ask again. That would definitely give her away.

“Have my orders changed?” she asked, then decided to go for broke, and added, “I can’t get the boy. Even if I could, I don’t think he’s a Dark mage after all. I saw him heal one of his friends after I sent the Fire elemental after them.”

During the pause that followed, Pandy watched the timer on Shifting Faces tick down to less than five minutes. “Keep an eye on him,” the other said finally, sounding reluctant. “His father was strong, but so was his mother. Either is possible. Continue to beguile the girl. She must be absolutely obedient when the time comes.”

Pandy’s stomach roiled again, but she nodded, keeping her lips pinched into a tight line. Fortunately, that was Ms. Wellington’s normal expression, so the other didn’t see anything strange in it.

A black-gloved hand stretched out of the cloak, holding a small pouch. “Your fee,” the voice said, and without thinking, Pandy stretched out her own hand. The pouch fell to the carriage floor, the gloved hand twisting to clamp onto Pandy’s wrist. Another hand emerged, this one holding a black blade that looked just like the one Pandy found in Ms. Wellington’s bed. She braced herself for the pain of being stabbed, but all that happened was that her palm was ruthlessly turned so the blade could prick the soft flesh of her thumb. Blood welled slowly.

-2 LF

You have been Poisoned. Poison is ineffective. You take no damage.

The hand gripping her own was thin, the bones noticeable beneath the supple leather, but it held an implacable strength that made Pandy doubt she could get free, no matter what her Strength score was. She could just make out the deep black of a familiar, stretchy suit, slightly overlapped by the edge of the glove. No skin was visible, and not even the vaguest hint of features could be seen within the cloak.

Rather than dripping down her finger, the blood rose up along the keen edge of the blade, entirely rejecting Newton and his puny Law of Gravity. As it rose, the crimson grew fainter and fainter, until it disappeared into the blackness, as if the weapon had drunk Pandy’s blood. Only then did the other release her, flicking the blade to shake off moisture that was no longer there. A quiet curse came from the depths of the hood as the hands and the weapon vanished once more.

“I would have sworn-” that voice muttered, sounding almost human for the first time. Was there the faintest feminine tone to it? Pandy couldn’t be certain, and she wasn’t going to exclude half the human race from suspicion based on a guess.

Standing, the other took hold of the door handle, utterly ignoring the movement of the carriage that indicated it was still racing down the streets as fast as the horses could pull it. “Return to Lanthorne Court in two weeks’ time, unless you receive instructions otherwise.” With that, they opened the door and leaped out, one shadow among many as buildings flickered past.

Pandy stood and leaned out, pulling the door back in before collapsing once more into the seat, which was somehow no longer as comfortable as it had been. With only two minutes remaining, she thought, and desperately hoped that she was actually alone.