Lucky Rabbit

“What in Ismara’s name’s goin’ on here?” A gruff voice rang out, and a dozen hands fell to weapons. The lanky, bent figure that emerged from the woods didn’t seem to notice, however. He hurried to Bryan’s side, and Augustus let him pass when Pandy placed a paw on his leg. She recognized the face and voice of George, the long-absent groundskeeper, and one of the last three servants remaining on the Dunning estate when she arrived in this world.

Falling to his knees in the grass, the old man allowed a brace of dead rabbits to fall to the ground. Pandy swallowed hard, feeling an almost-forgotten nausea rise up at the sight of blood soaking the fur of the two small bodies. Oh yes, she always used to get a bit light-headed around blood. Really, being Liminal was already turning out to be a bit inconvenient.

“What’d you do to him?” George demanded, looking around at the tense faces surrounding him as he began to chafe at Bryan’s hands. “Lord Harold, wake up!”

Augustus stiffened at the name and at the strangely querulous tone George’s voice had taken on. Leaning forward, he said, “This is Lord Bryan Conroy. Lord Harold was his father.”

George stared up at them, his eyes red and rheumy. “Don’t be daft. Young Master Bryan’s nought but eight or nine years old.” He blinked, looking down at Bryan, who hadn’t responded to the rather aggressive hand-rubbing. “Maybe… maybe you know Master Bryan from school. He’s a bright lad. Has a great future ahead of him, in spite of being… of being…”

He frowned, dropping Bryan’s hand to reach for the brace of rabbits. Ignoring the blood, he grasped the cord tying their hind legs together, and started to stand. “I need t’get these to Marta for supper. She’ll be right glad of ‘em. Supper’s gonna be hare and venison pie, or so I hear.”

He seemed to have forgotten about Bryan completely, standing and making his way toward the house, brushing past Keros, Edgar, and Dorian as if he didn’t see them. A few of the soldiers looked like they might grab him, but Edgar called out a soft, “Hold,” and shook his head, exchanging a glance with the taller boy beside him. After a moment of silent communion, Dorian nodded and followed after the groundskeeper, leaving Edgar behind to explain.

“Lian came back to check on the house a few times,” Edgar said reluctantly, lowering his voice as he imparted this secret. “He found George living in his old room, the one below-stairs, where he lived when Lian’s mother was alive. George hid at first, but when he saw Lian, he came out. George thought Lian was Lord Bryan, and seemed completely unaware the house was otherwise unoccupied.  Lian couldn’t bring himself to turn the old man in, given that his mind is obviously gone.”

Augustus hummed doubtfully at this. “Couldn’t bring himself, or hoped the man would recover enough to answer a few questions for him? I’ve seen people like this before, and they’ll sometimes have moments of clarity, where they remember the past perfectly well. You just have to catch them at those moments.”

Edgar’s eyes flicked to the side, and he gave a noncommittal half-shrug. “A bit of both, perhaps. In any case, you won’t get anything out of him. He has no idea what’s been happening these past few years.”

Augustus tilted his head at Captain Reedsley, who nodded and went after Dorian and George. “We should get back to Knightsmere. Bryan needs a proper healer, and I want to see if we can find any clues as to where Daedalus has gone, and where Lian is now.”

As to that, Pandy actually had an idea, though it was based on guesswork at best, so she didn’t want to say anything unless Augustus came up empty. Besides, she couldn’t exactly talk at the moment, and this was going to take some explaining. Also, while so far all of the soldiers seemed loyal and helpful and all of that, there was no telling if there was a spy in their midst, so she’d prefer to explain in private. All of which was an excuse for the fact that Pandy needed to think about some things before she hopped any further down this path.

“Go back to my estate,” Captain Reedsley said, gesturing. A few of his soldiers approached, each holding the reins of two horses. The animals eyed Soot warily, the whites of their eyes showing, but they didn’t shy or try to pull away. “It’ll take a while before we finish up here, so there’s plenty of time for someone to bring more horses to us. Lady Reedsley will loan you our carriage. It may not be as fancy as you’re used to, but I guarantee you won’t find better horses to pull it.”

Pandy remembered the stables at the Reedsley estate, which were almost as nice as the house itself, a fact which Lady Reedsley liked to bring up every time she asked for some rare and expensive plant for her conservatory. Lord Reedsley bred horses as a side hobby, and they were, in fact, Very Good Horses.

A smile lightened the worried look in Augustus’s one non-swollen eye, and he nodded. “I’ve heard about your horses, Captain, and I saw their stamina and speed for myself on the way here. I’ll be happy to take you up on that.”

Turning to Soot, he held Pandy tight with his left arm while he gripped the saddle with his right hand and swung onto his steed’s back. Soot tossed his dark head, flickers of flame playing along the strands of his mane in much the same way they sometimes did in Miss Cupcake’s fur. That led Pandy to wonder what the children were doing, and how they were handling all of this, which made her wish she was with Thaniel, rather than sitting atop a fire-horse in the midst of a charnel field. It was nice to be with Augustus, but this wasn’t exactly her idea of a romantic date.

Dorian was called back, and he and Edgar climbed up onto their own horses, but when it came time for Keros to do the same, two things became abundantly clear. First, a torn toga was not appropriate horseback-riding attire, and second, Keros had never sat atop a horse in his entire existence. He was athletically inclined, so he didn’t fall right off the other side, but it was a close thing.

This required a quick trip into the house to find some Very Large Pants that must have belonged to a bygone servant, as well as a round of musical horses. They had given Keros the largest horse, because he was even taller and broader than Dorian, but said horse was deemed too ‘high strung’ for a beginner, and a gentler gelding was brought over instead. The beast was broad but low-slung, and Keros looked ridiculous crunched up in the saddle, feet nearly dragging, too-tight pants pulling in what had to be uncomfortable ways. Still, he voiced no objection, which was an astonishing improvement in his attitude from when Pandy first met him, and he came across as nice enough and only a bit self-involved.

Augustus and Edgar were by far the best riders, and Edgar had been given the ‘high-strung’ horse, but Pandy didn’t miss the narrow-eyed looks he gave Soot. Gacha Love Edgar never had a – what had Augustus called the elemental horse? – Dire Steed, but it certainly seemed likely that real-life Edgar would. Dorian didn’t comment on any of it, just climbed onto the horse he was given, and rode along with what looked like competence, if not excellence, at least to Pandy’s admittedly uneducated eye.

Little conversation took place during the trip to the Reedsley estate, which allowed Pandy to think through everything that had happened and What She Should Do About It. First, she was fairly certain that with the information they now had, as well as the papers provided by Matilda’s mother – whatever it turned out they said – the conspiracy to topple the royal family was effectively dead. Even if they couldn’t arrest everyone involved for political reasons, those people also wouldn’t be able to get away with manipulating people and lying anymore.

That left the cult of Zheraphon, but without Daedalus and their storeroom of magic rocks, they should be seriously weakened as well. Hopefully, Augustus and Queen Louisa would be able to shut down the Shadow Exchange, though Pandy didn’t hold out much hope for that, at least as long as Keros’s magic was running around unsupervised. The Shadow Exchange was part of the events of Gacha Love, and that meant it had a sort of divine plot-armor as long as Keros’s magic was running loose.

Still, the cult was far from toothless. They had whatever it was they were up to with Ismara and Zheraphon’s stones. Not that they had the stones themselves, and they wouldn’t get them so long as Pandy had anything to say about it. Thaniel still needed them to live, though Pandy was also cautiously hopeful that her new spell would change that.

No, as far as Pandy could tell, she was mostly facing two Very Big problems. First, they had to find Lian and rescue him. Hopefully, Augustus and Beeswick could handle that, but if not, Pandy was fairly certain she could figure it out. The cult had nothing to gain by killing Lian until they had the stone, especially if they hoped to turn him into Ismara’s Champion just in time to have Zheraphon’s Champion murder him. Which was a bit of a twist from Gacha Love, but if Keros’s magic had decided Daedalus was a good enough substitute for Killian, then presumably Lian was a good enough substitute for Clara.

The second problem was Zheraphon himself. In theory, Ismara was trapped in Thaniel’s heartstone, so they had to get her out, then break the heartstone in order to defeat Zheraphon. That would prove that Ismara hadn’t abandoned her position, the goddess could retroactively give Pandy permission to reincarnate on this world, and Zheraphon would be sent packing.

Pandy put her paws on Augustus’s shoulder and glanced back at Keros, who was still clinging to his saddle with a great deal of determination and no small amount of visible discomfort. There was, of course, a third problem. Keros. When the ‘game’ ended, would his magic just return to him without any fuss? Would he be neatly and tidily returned to his position as a god? In Pandy’s experience, neat and tidy was more of a theoretical possibility than something that actually happened. 

All right, so three Very Big Problems. And conveniently, the solution to all of them seemed to be the same. First, remove the heartstone from Thaniel. Second, find Lian and complete the storyline of Gacha Love in some way that Keros’s magic found acceptable and where none of Pandy’s friends died. Keros and Ismara would be free again, Zheraphon would go away, and everyone else could go about their lives without fuss or bother.

Including Pandy. Who was apparently actually coming back to life, at least if the renewed pounding of her heart, increasingly urgent need to breathe, and the persistent rumble of hunger in what might actually be a stomach now were anything to go by. But what did that mean for her? If everyone else got their happily ever after, what about Pandy?

Closing her eyes, she let her chin rest on Augustus’s shoulder, drawing in a deep sniff of his scent. Which was actually a bit ripe and copper-scented at the moment, but it was still Augustus, and while it made some vague kind of sense for him to date an undead rabbit who could turn into a human for five hours a day, it didn’t make sense for him to date a Demon. Especially not a Demon who seemed to have to eat people in order to survive. If Pandy became a full-time elemental, would she be able to continue as she had been, or would she have to go wherever Demons went when they ran out of Corruption Points?

No matter what happened, Pandy just didn’t see a happy ending for her. Which was nothing new really, so she wasn’t sure why the thought made her chest feel like it was caving in – she checked to make sure it was just a feeling, and she wasn’t turning into a Bunny Mummy again – but there it was. And for the first time in either of her lives, Pandy decided to fight for her own happiness. She would find a way to heal Thaniel, rescue Lian, free Ismara, get Keros’s powers back, kick Zheraphon’s butt, and still get her man.

But first... Letting her body go limp against Augustus’s chest, she surrendered herself to something that had eluded her for months. Sleep.