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  “Come in here with me!” Tiana whispered urgently. “She is utterly mad. She will hurt you!”

  “I can take care of myself,” Aveline assured her and moved away.

  Tiana protested, and Matilda whirled. She started forward, knife raised.

  “Whoa!” Aveline said and moved to intercept her. “You’re not right in the head, Matilda! Stop this now!” She pushed Matilda and gripped her wrist.

  “Leave me be, slave!” Matilda hissed and shoved her. “If the freak’s father will not burn her, then I will carve those ghoulish eyes out of her head!” Spittle sprayed Aveline as Matilda spoke.

  Up close, Matilda was even less herself than Aveline initially thought. The woman’s gaze was unfocused and her pupils dilated to the point her eyes were almost completely black. The blood vessels in her neck had begun to rupture, creating a network of purple webbing. The veins in her arms, neck and face were bulging.

  “Let’s be calm about this,” Aveline said quietly, uncertain how to talk sense into Matilda, whose eyes were trained on Tiana. “You are ill, Matilda. If you don’t seek out your physician, you will suffer more than you already are.”

  The hair on the back of Aveline’s neck rose, but it was not from the crazed woman she was trying to subdue. The armoire was floating, along with all the belongings Matilda had dumped onto the floor. Tiana was too upset to control her strange ability.

  Matilda looked at Aveline, away, then back. Her mouth fell open, and surprise registered across her features.

  “You are not mute!” she exclaimed, squinting at Aveline. “George claimed you had no tongue!” Her arm dropped, and confusion replaced surprise. “Why does my head hurt so?” She clutched her temple with one hand.

  “I don’t know, but let me help you. We can go get help now,” Aveline said and shifted closer.

  “But you have no tongue. How can you speak?” Matilda asked.

  “Matilda, please. You are not well,” Tiana pleaded softly, drawing near.

  Aveline waved her back.

  “Those eyes.” Matilda was staring at Tiana again. “You deformed, crippled, sick demon! I will cut them out and then your tongue, slave, before I burn you both!” She launched at Tiana.

  Aveline blocked her again with her body and was driven back by the force of Matilda’s charge. The woman raked nails down Aveline’s face and plunged the knife towards her mouth. One leg buckled as it hit the vanity, and Aveline careened dangerously, struggling to avoid Matilda’s knife and catch her balance. She knocked into Tiana, who had emerged from the closet. The Hanover girl was sent sprawling into the middle of the room.

  Matilda wrenched her arm free and stumbled away, towards Tiana. Aveline hit the ground and launched back up, diving between stepmother and stepdaughter as Matilda’s knife hand plunged downwards toward a helpless Tiana. Aveline calculated the angle of the blade as she moved. With luck, she would take a hit to the shoulder, maybe her upper back. It would anger her without disabling her, so she could disarm Matilda and throw the insane woman out.

  What happened next was not an event Aveline would ever be able to describe to anyone else.

  Tiana screamed, and the world rippled as an invisible shockwave tore through everyone and everything around them. Aveline’s breath was knocked from her body, and one ear popped painfully then began to ring. She was flung across the room and slammed into the door. Lights exploded behind her eyelids, and she fell to the floor.

  The ringing and sharp pain of her ear prevented her from sinking into unconsciousness. The back of her head pulsed from where it had hit the wooden door, and Aveline sought to pull herself out of the in-between state. Urgency was at the edge of her mind, agitated by the sensation of being caught in a cobweb of currents.

  A new sound, that of someone banging on the door to Tiana’s room, helped ground her.

  Aveline’s eyes fluttered open. Vertigo swept through her, caused by the damage to her ear. Her stomach roiled, and she clutched at the floor to try to steady herself. Sitting up, she touched the blood trickling from her hurt ear and struggled to make out what had happened through the sensation of the world spinning around her.

  “This is the Shield! We order you to allow …” The shout was accompanied by more banging on the door.

  Tiana was hunched over in a pool of blood, clutching a knife, rocking and mumbling. Matilda’s body sprawled out beside her, still.

  Alarm and concern prevented Aveline from letting the vertigo drive her to the floor. She staggered up, tripped, and lurched to her feet once more. She dropped to her knees beside Tiana, unable to see clearly what the Hanover girl was doing until she was within arm’s reach.

  “ … bleed the evil out. I have to bleed the evil out. I …” Tiana was saying over and over.

  The sensation of twirling and spinning began to subside. Her senses were delayed but working, though her brain remained sluggish after the blow to her head. Aveline began to catch up with her surroundings and specifically, with the girl before her.

  Rocking back and forth, Tiana’s arms and legs were bloodied, her gown soaked with red. She was cutting herself as she mumbled and had shredded one forearm and both her thighs.

  “Stop.” Aveline snatched Tiana’s wrist.

  “ … have to bleed …” Tiana pulled away.

  Aveline snatched her arms and shook her. “Stop, Tiana!”

  Tiana’s ghoulish, black eyes were unfocused as she stared at Aveline. “Aveline,” her voice trembled. “You live.”

  Aveline lifted her face as Tiana stretched out a bloody palm to her. “I do.” Before she could ask what had happened, her gaze fell again to Matilda’s body.

  Aveline released Tiana with one hand and stood up on her knees, shuffling closer. She reached out to Tiana’s stepmother and then froze, her hand halfway to the still body.

  Where was Matilda’s head?

  Tiana was breathing hard and quick. She clutched Aveline’s arm. “Forgive me,” she whispered, panicked. “I feared she would hurt you … I lost control … please forgive me! I did not mean for this to happen!”

  You did this? Aveline stared in disbelief. Matilda’s head was nowhere to be seen. Too much blood formed puddles on the floor to be from Tiana’s self-afflicted wounds alone. The ringing in Aveline’s ear became louder, along with the shouting from beyond the door. The sound of an axe splintering wood jarred her. She shook her head, grappling with her own weakened state.

  “You have to hide!” Tiana told her urgently.

  Aveline shifted back and sat before her.

  “He will burn you!”

  “Tiana –”

  “Quickly! If they see you here, they will murder you!”

  Aveline glanced down. Covered in the blood of the two most powerful women in the city, holding Tiana’s knife, and seated beside Matilda’s headless body, even dazed Aveline understood being discovered in such a state by the Shield did not bode well for her.

  Tiana sagged.

  Aveline caught her. “You’re hurt.”

  “Bleed the evil out,” Tiana said again, her voice growing weak, distant. “I thought I had killed you. Forgive me, Aveline.”

  “Stop it!” Aveline snapped, irritated. “It isn’t possible for me to hide. I won’t dive out the window, and you need me here to help you.”

  Tiana’s eyes fluttered closed. “Behind the tapestry.”

  “What?”

  “Go behind the tapestry.”

  The door began to buckle. Aveline lifted her head too fast, and the room began to spin again. What was wrong with her? Why did she feel as if she had been caught beneath the hooves of a stampede of horses?

  “Please, Aveline. They will not hurt me. I am a Hanover. But you are my only friend. I cannot lose you.” Tiana was fading. Blood loss and shock were too much for her, and her eyes closed as she fell unconscious.

  Aveline hesitated, hating the thought of leaving Tiana in the middle of this disaster.

  An axe made it through the door, which mea
nt the Shield soldiers would soon follow.

  Aveline debated but then stood. If she were thrown in prison now, she would never know who else threatened Tiana or be able to help. She had to make this right, which started with fulfilling her duty to the Hanover girl.

  Besides, if the Shield discovered Tiana’s eyes, someone would need to be able to rescue her, if her father decided to burn her.

  Setting Tiana down gently on the floor, Aveline leapt to her feet and was hit by a wave of dizziness. She staggered to the closet and inside. Blinded by the spinning sensation, she stretched out her hands to catch herself against the wall. Her palm went through the wall. She tumbled helplessly forward, through the tapestry and into the dark, hollowed out space behind it.

  Aveline landed in a heap and gripped her head. At the sounds of the Shield soldiers smashing through the door, she stilled her breathing and sat up, afraid they would find her. From the footsteps, she counted three of them.

  Silence followed, and she inched close to the tapestry to hear.

  “This is her,” the voice was hushed.

  At first confused, Aveline recalled that no one but her had ever seen Tiana. She silently cursed the soldiers for stopping to stare at the elusive Hanover daughter instead of rushing to help her.

  As if hearing her thought, one of the Shield members stomped across the floor towards Tiana. Another began belting commands. The sound of sheets tearing was accompanied by a soft-spoken order to lift Tiana carefully.

  Only when she was convinced the Shield members were acting to help Tiana did Aveline ease back from the tapestry. She shifted into a more comfortable position and stretched back with one arm, expecting to find a wall close behind her.

  Her fingertips grazed nothing. The light from the closet, diluted by the tapestry, lit her immediate surroundings. She twisted to peer into the darkness and began to realize the hiding place was not completely dark. Ten feet away, a similar patch of faded light was present and another fifteen feet after that, a second. She could not gauge how far the tunnel went.

  Aveline climbed to her feet slowly to prevent the vertigo from returning. She tested her body and frowned. The strange shockwave had hit her hard. She was fatigued, worn, her muscles shaky and skin crawling from Tiana’s magic. Her left ear continued to ring faintly, and she could barely hear out of it.

  Stretching her legs, Aveline began to walk towards the first patch of light down the darkened tunnel. She braced herself against one wall as she moved, afraid of collapsing and alerting the Shield soldiers to her presence.

  She reached the lit area. Aveline started to lift the covering hiding the tunnel entrance from those on the other side before she noticed light piercing a peephole. She went to it and leaned against the wall, peering into the adjacent chamber.

  She recognized the gilded chamber immediately as Matilda’s. Her eyes fell to the still form of a slave in the middle of the floor. Blood darkened the carpet beneath the slave’s head. One of the gold candlesticks Aveline had admired lay beside the woman’s head, the heavy base bloodied. It was the same slave she had seen beaten by Matilda before.

  I’m definitely going after the apothecary first, she vowed. The drug he had mixed in pushed Matilda over the edge, and now, two people were dead. Aveline had wanted the threat to Tiana to disappear – discreetly. There would be no hiding two murders in the Hanover household.

  Her demon’s blood stirred with her flash of anger. Another wave of dizziness swept through her. Aveline sagged and lowered herself to the ground. The world was growing dark and fuzzy around the edges, her muscles starting to give out.

  Please forgive me … you are my only friend. I cannot lose you. Tiana’s desperate words rang in Aveline’s mind louder than her damaged ear, along with the Hanover daughter’s previous assertion her father meant to murder her soon.

  Until that moment, Aveline had only known one other person who would kill to protect her, and that was Rocky. Tiana did not think herself worth saving, but she had taken a life in order to help someone she cared about.

  “She’s madder than I first thought,” Aveline murmured.

  What would happen to Tiana, once her father found out what had happened?

  Aveline’s last flicker of urgency died, replaced by the overwhelming need to sleep. Any sense of protectiveness she should have possessed about her ward crumbled beneath the oppression of looming unconsciousness.

  Aveline rested her head on the cool floor and closed her eyes. As she slid into unconsciousness, she saw the map Tiana had created of the Free Lands in her mind’s eye. Tiana would not live past two days outside the city or a few weeks in her room. Was it possible to protect the Hanover girl, or was she simply doomed?

  Book Two

  Tiana

  Chapter Eleven

  Five hundred years ago, the world fell asleep with a sigh and never awoke. The long night turned into the Age of Darkness, a hundred years where the sun was unable to penetrate the night, and was followed by the Age of Dusk, where the world was stuck in twilight for fifty more years. Human predators - from an age predating all recorded knowledge -arose from the darkness, awakened from their hibernation by the changes in the Earth. They were called the Ghouls. Strange deformities, some of a physical nature and others of a mental nature, took hold of many survivors.

  Between the Ghouls and the shortage of food, no one knows for certain how anyone survived. Stories from the Age of Darkness are scarce. Either people were too busy surviving to write down what happened, or the records were destroyed by later generations. Some oral traditions remain and are either too morbid or too fantastical for anyone with sense to grant them any credence.

  Whatever happened in the Darkness, some people survived. They found their ways to the remains of cities and huddled together with fire, learning to hunt in the dark. A man named Charles Cruise led a thousand people across the Great Plains to Lost Vegas. He was among the ten people who survived the journey. He and those with him re-established the city. They scoured the countryside for more stragglers and rescued them, until there were two thousand people living in the abandoned city.

  Fifty years after he arrived, the first Hanover appeared in the city. His sudden arrival, too, is shrouded in myth and few details, except that, upon arriving, he was in control of the city within a year. The Hanover’s seized power and never released it, forever displacing the elderly but highly respected Cruise founder of Lost Vegas.

  Fifty years passed with no mention of what occurred anywhere in any records. No history is written until the skies turned from night to twilight to day, one hundred and five years after the end of the Old World. During the dark age, deserts had turned fertile, and bodies of water shifted. The tundras of the north spread south, while the forests of the northwest pushed into desolate expanses in the southwest. It is said the ocean was twenty miles closer to Lost Vegas than it used to be. The world changed in the Darkness. Those from the Old World would never recognize what happened after their era ended.

  When twilight lifted, and daylight returned, the survivors were able to see what remained of the Old World: the crumbling structures and equipment, none of which the second and third generation survivors understood, and … the dead. It is said ninety-nine out of every hundred people died during the dark age. Skeletons littering the cities and plains were commonplace and became a source of materials for weapons and homes. No one knew who the dead were anymore, so no one bothered to bury them.

  The return of the twenty-four hour day brought stability and wealth to some, but also introduced new threats to the residents of Lost Vegas.

  The First Peoples, the natives of the continent, arose with the dawn, more powerful than they had ever been, and bearing the resentment of a people oppressed for hundreds of years. They bore great hatred for the loss of their people, lands, and traditions at the hands of the Europeans who claimed the continent a thousand years ago. Tribal rivalries and traditional enemies were forgotten in the face of a common goal to drive out those w
ho had stolen what was rightfully theirs. The Natives swept across the continent to reclaim their ancestral lands.

  Three hundred and fifty years of wars ensued between those living in the settled communities similar to Lost Vegas and the Natives who roamed the wild, wide stretches of land between cities. Many isolated cities that once flourished – Phoenix, Reno, Austin and most of the cities of the Great Plains – perished during the Native Wars. It is said the cities along the Eastern Seaboard fared better, for many of them had been established on points of military advantage. They were also close enough to one another to help defend each other from attacks.

  After three centuries of war, even those First Peoples who bore the deepest resentment towards the descendants of pale-faced European invaders either died or tired of death. Truces were called, and autonomous cities negotiated peace with the natives neighboring them.

  With the common enemy and cause replaced by peace, the traditional rivalries among the tribal peoples returned. The coalition that nearly achieved dominance over the entire continent, for the first time since Europeans set foot in the Americas, splintered and cracked, until it was no longer a functional coalition. Natives fought one another for a short period and on occasion, still skirmish over disputed territory.

  Our city is surrounded by a buffer area and the territories of three Native peoples: our allies, the Newe, to the west and north; the neutral Kutsipiuti who wish for peace, and whose lands are to the west, south, and north; and the Diné who have claimed an eternal blood war against the city and whose lands lie to the east and south.

  The cities remain islands in the midst of forests, mountains, and plains. Each is self-ruling, with a feudal type system of governing that varies some from city to city. Little is known about those cities in the far east and south. The Free Lands are rumored to be to the north, from the direction Charles Cruise originally journeyed. No one, even the Natives, can confirm they exist.

  Nothing is known about the state of the rest of the world.