“Oh fuck,” Paracelsus groaned, pulling Lonceré around a corner, “I really hope they didn’t see us.”

  “Who?” His cook asked, looking around the corner. Upon doing so, he saw a pair of rabbit-eared twins approaching them.

  “Idiot.” The Captain hissed under his breath, turning to address the new arrivals, “Hello there.”

  It seemed they were in no mood for pleasantries, as the older twin started kicking at him with her long, powerful legs. She even added a bit of fire from her gift for flair, despite the rain dampening its efficacy somewhat. He did his best to dodge, but holding the papers made it a moderately difficult ordeal.

  “This is a big misunderstanding!” He said, ducking under a sideways kick to the head, “Believe it or not, we want the same thing.”

  “Oh shut up,” Anne-Marie insulted, “You’ve been conspiring with her the whole time.”

  The Captain finally gave up on restraining himself, and made a small bully stick to thwack her on the side of the knee, “Alright, I’m giving you one chance to give up.”

  She bore her teeth, flashing them in a wicked snarl, and growled to try and intimidate him, “I’ll fucking kill you.” She spat at his feet, before she limply tried to lunge at him.

  In response, he simply repeated the stroke, striking her left leg this time, “I tried to warn you.” He looked over and saw Lonceré had since dealt with the younger twin, “Let’s go.”

  —

  “God, isn’t it ironic?” Montpelier lamented, looking out the window to see the city she loved being reduced to this, “If I knew all this was to occur, perhaps I would’ve run away with L’Orange.”

  “I don’t think it’s productive to speculate on that,” Copain said, laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, even though he had to admit that she wasn’t entirely wrong, “And besides, for all we know, Mr. Bordeaux is dead. You wouldn’t want to wind up like that.”

  The office behind them lay in ruins, books and furniture strewn about randomly and burnt, with the wall itself having given out, leading to the floor and carpet getting soaked where it wasn’t singed. Still, for all its faults, it was distinctively hers, at least for the time being, and so, with the letter from before drafted, she waved a bit of summoning jerky, and sure enough, a small black raptor landed in front of her.

  “Here, little one,” She carefully gave the beastie her letter, as well as the coin required for such a service, and allowed it to smell from a patch she kept in her desk, “If he’s still alive, I want L’Orange to read this.”

  The raptor, instead of flying, simply glided over to the door, whereupon he dropped the letter and flew away. For a moment, as she hunched to pick it up, the Mayor thought the bird mad and wrote off the expense as her atonement for any number of mistakes she made in her thirty odd years on this planet, before she realized what the implication of the mailbird’s action was.

  She threw the door open, and there he stood - L’Orange Bordeaux, her once dear friend, was as tall (and, although she would never admit it, handsome despite, or perhaps in part due to, the disfigurements) as she remembered.

  “What are you doing here?” She asked, not without a healthy dose of venom and grimace.

  “I came to relieve you,” He said, a sad, almost pitying look in his eye, “I’m your replacement.”

  “You?!” The shooter woman screamed out in a moment of pure rage, “Now, by what mechanism does a father-killing lunatic like yourself manage that?”

  “Lunatic?” He shouted back, grabbing the burn on his eye, from acid that she had poured on him when the knowledge of his misdeeds found her ear, “Look at what you did to me. I had to sell my body to that sadistic Admiral just to survive.”

  “All these years…” She shook her head mournfully, “I thought if you survived - you might’ve grown, might’ve taken time and reflected upon the great and terrible things you’d done. But you still refuse to take responsibility for anything. And what’s more - I wrote an apology in that letter. But I’m glad you’ll never read it, and what’s yet more - I think you deserve everything that you received after what you did.”

  “And here I thought you might’ve loosened up -” He countered, “I thought I’d have you grovelling, thanking me for doing what was best for us. Can’t you see? This isn’t what either of us wanted out of life!”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Us?” She roared in anger, trying to hint with her eyes for Copain to search her desk, “You acted on your own ego - without consulting me - about what you thought was best for you! I can’t believe at one point I loved you.”

  “Has that tumor in your head driven you mad?” He asked, jabbing a finger at her forehead, “Even now, hearing the music, you refuse to face it. You don’t hold the cards here, Veronique!”

  “Oh shut up.” The Mayor spat, both literally and figuratively, before slapping him on the cheek, “I should’ve been able to tell you were scum from the start. You always hide your intentions behind metaphors and aphorisms because you’re too scared to face yourself.”

  While Bordeaux fished a needle from his jacket and jammed it into his arm, Copain had finally got the message, calmly searching the mayor’s bureau for the firearm he knew should be there, yet paradoxically had made itself sparse. Then it struck him - the alchemist had touched the desk. Had he, in that moment, managed to gain some of that collateral he was searching for earlier?

  “Ma’am,” He said, with no shortage of reservation as Bordeaux continued dragging the needle along his forearm, his blood coagulating on the ground in the shape of a sword, “I regret to inform you that your pistol has been absconded with.”

  “Dammit,” She growled, before taking a deep breath to regain her composure, “Copain - see to it that my wishes are taken care of. Bordeaux, do as you will.”

  Copain left, and for the first time in his “life”, he may have felt some emotion. The unfamiliarity of such a sensation meant that he wasn’t sure what it was - regret, grief, and sorrow were likely suspects, but regardless, he felt too much loyalty to ignore his dying friend’s wishes.

  “I thought this would be much more satisfying.” He said, using the sword to, finally, kill the former Mayor.

  However, his victory was short-lived, as soon after, he felt a blade, cold as ice and thin as a feather, pierce his sternum. When he looked at the assailant, he didn’t recognize him, but readers would do well to know it was the same Xenepol from earlier, here to take the fallen sword before dashing away.

  “Bad news, Xenepol -” His wife, Rian said, fending off two of the Gendarmerie with a long chain, “They’re onto us.” With a great grunt of effort, she twisted the chain, using her large stature to drop them to the ground before using the end of the chain - a small, sharp sickle - to slice their bellies open.

  Xenepol himself narrowly managed to lock blades with another policeman, before biting the law’s throat out and spitting it on the ground. Another charged him. He simply ducked and allowed Rian to decapitate him with her sickle, before pointing his sword forward and allowing yet another lawman to impale herself on his weapon.

  “What do you think the chances are that that man with the boat is still here?” He asked, admiring his wife as she wrapped the chain around an officer’s throat and garrotted him to death, “Furthermore - what are the chances he might be willing to give us a ticket out of here?”

  “Furthermore?” She asked, “You’ve never used that word before.”

  “What does it matter?” He chuckled in an embarrassed sort of way, pulling at his collar, “Anyway - just answer the question.”

  She scratched her chin with one hand, using the other to trip a man with his sword aloft, before throwing him out a nearby window, “I don’t want to stay in the countryside or anything like that.”

  “Too dull?” With no more enemies, he wiped his sword and mouth down.

  “Too dull.” She replied, cleaning her weapon as well.

  “That’s a shame,” He laughed in earnest this time, “I thought I’d just sharpened our weapons.”

  “Oh, you fool -” She said, gripping a final assailant by the neck before slamming him into the ground, “ - Let’s get going.”

  —

  While running back, Lonceré was, the whole time, speaking the script to a mouse they’d found, now being around a tenth of the way to completion. With the boat finally in sight, they hastily hopped aboard, and he began the process of speaking to a larger group of the rodents to spread the message faster.

  “I’ll be damned,” Serpacinno said, hands on her hips, “You seem to have made it work.”

  “We all made it work.” He corrected, now with a softer, more genuine smile, “And, I just wanted to reiterate that I really do appreciate everything you’ve done.”

  “Really, I understand.” She said, returning with a similarly shy smile, “I mean - we’ve all been stressed. At least I have.”

  “It’s just unbelievable,” He argued, “We just happened to arrive here, at the worst possible time. You know they call it the ‘City of Love’?”

  It started out with him chuckling sarcastically. Then his partner joined, and the two of them quickly escalated into laughter. Eventually, they threw their heads back and leaned on the gunwale, breaking into a full-on fit for a few minutes before they saw everyone looking at them.

  “Paace,” He ignored them long enough that the stares dissipated, “I can’t believe it. Well,” He hopped to his feet, “Let’s get everything ready.”

  —

  “I told you the West was a shithole.” Avignon, the Chief’s deputy remarked, “Look at what’s happened here. Never would’ve happened back out East.”

  “Agreed.” Toulouse said, “That being said, we don’t have a choice now.” She pulled out her rapier, an especially long sword, at nearly six feet, and flexed it behind her, throwing the excess moisture off of it, “Let’s do it.”

  She immediately took up a sideways stance, holding her off-hand at her shoulder, thrusting the blade forward at Xenepol. He managed to dodge it gracefully, but when she used that same off-hand to point behind him, his normally impeccable focus was inexplicably driven towards the object of her gesture.

  “Agh!” He grunted, feeling the blade pierce his side. Luckily it wasn’t too deep, but it still stung like hell as he pressed a handkerchief he had over his bloody side.

  He tried to charge, but was once again rid of his wits as he was forced to stop and look at the ground near his feet, receiving for his misgivings a slashing about the length of his arm with the rapier’s edge.

  At the same time, Rian was having her own share of trouble with the reptilian foe she stood down. Despite her massive advantage in size, and the unorthodox nature of her weapon, she was finding herself vexed with his inhuman reaction times, allowing him to perfectly weave in and out of her pattern of swings to close the distance.

  “Now I have you!” He shouted, sinking his teeth into her arm, right over her basilic vein and delivering a worrying dosage of venom into her body. What was worse for her still was that he refused to let go, even as he made a strike at her neck with his sword.

  Eventually though, with a great deal of both effort and blood loss, she managed to wrest his jaws off of her and toss him some three meters away. Before she could begin another wave of attacks, she shared a look with her husband, and with no words exchanged, they spun around, each duelling their partner’s former opponent.