“Fine!” snaps out Eldritch as she deflects another array of shadowy daggers from the King of Spades, Carver.

“You want to stay in the dark and try to ambush us?” she says, agitation rising in her voice. “You want to poke and prod until we give up?” Snarling, Eldritch begins twisting her hands in a complex pattern as she adds, “Well then! If all you can do is hide in the dark, let’s take away the dark!”

With that, she twists her fingers and throws her hands into the air. For a second nothing happens. Then a blazing burst of light erupts from between her palms and rises up to the center of the room. Shinning, it banishes the darkness and forces Carver to expose himself.

With a grimace, the king finds himself exposed by the suddenly well-lit room. With a grumble, he shouts, “My dark is too much for your bright!” Then he spins, casting out motes of inky darkness as he does that dampen the effect of the blazing sun.

“No!” Eldritch responds by raising her hands higher, and beginning a guttural cant that causes the sun to burn with a white intensity, once more casting out the dark.

Sweating from the exertion, Eldritch turns to her companion, Ginger Snap, and says in a low tone, “Keeping this thing up is going to take all my attention. Can you take him down?”

Ginger, in the form of a giant metal tiger, simply nods. Her bestial paws scrape the ground as she begins to stalk the King of Spades. Growling lightly, Ginger makes her way toward the frustrated Carver as he tries in vain to restore the dark.

On the other end of the room, Carver curses and then turns back to face the girls. Catching sight of Ginger his angry expression morphs into a predatory grin as he says, “Well, well, well. Kitty coming out to play?” His eyes flicker over to Eldritch, her hands still upraised and maintaining the sun. “Seems like it’s just you and me, huh doll?” Manifesting a long dirk of black shadows, he says with a pearly smile, “I can dig it.”

Carver seems to shiver, his whole body fading in and out of sight, as he seems to step sideways and then back into reality. When he returns, a matte black skinsuit covers his body and a black baklava covers his face. Only his gleaming teeth and piercing eyes remain uncovered.

Stalking him, Ginger circles forward and around his form snapping at him with her jaws. Each time, Carver adjusts his position slowly, keeping her in front of him. His eyes are wary as he slowly adjusts his dirk from hand to hand. The two continue this delicate movement for a minute, each seeking some slip or momentary advantage to leverage into an opening strike.

Behind them, Eldritch continues to sweat as she maintains the fireball burning in the sky. Her hands ache and her arms tremble but she does not move, she dares not knowing that giving Carver the sanctuary of darkness now would spell the end of this fight. All she can do is endure, hoping that Ginger moves quickly.

For her part, Ginger faces just as difficult task. The wounds HeadHunter dealt to her feet plague her as she circles around Carver. The injuries mean she cannot leap with the full force of the predatory beast whose figure she now mimics. Instead, she must circle, waiting for an opportunity to pounce with her limited force. Still, she has the dangerous form of the great cat at her disposal and all the claws that come with it. One lapse on the part of Carver and she can end this fight before it begins, and with that in mind she continues to pace in circles around him.

Palming his blade, Carver assesses his situation. The miniature sun prevents him from accessing the most powerful of his abilities for all that it removes one of the girls from the fight. The blessing is a scant one, for Carver has long been much more of an ambush fighter than a combat specialist. In a straight fight against the tiger he will lose, that he knows with certainty. His only option then is to find a way to either turn off the sun or change the terms of the engagement. Unfortunately for Carver, the great cat has him boxed in and unable to leave the room in a bid for better ground. Of course, he has little choice in the matter. If he retreats, the girls will undoubtedly succeed in their bid to keep Rabbit, and the knowledge in his head, alive. That, above all else, is an outcome Carver will not stomach.

The option in front of him then, is simple. Carver nods, his thought process catching up to the unconscious dance of positioning and movement he is engaged in with Ginger. His training is so ingrained that it takes almost none of his mental acuity to maintain the dance, a skill picked up by necessity during long hours on the hazily defined frontlines of the war between supers. Those days, however, are long behind him. All that remains is the instincts and training, so it is when Ginger senses an opening and leaps he reacts in time to roll to the left, scoring a long cut along her side.

Snapping back, Ginger twists and bats her paws at him as he flips around in a circle to reposition for another round of combat. Spinning, he barely manages to bring the dirk in between his flesh and her claws, but it is just fast enough to prevent her from tearing him to ribbons. Cursing lightly under his breath, Carver shoves his body weight into the blade and forces the cat back on her haunches. Then he springboards off, leaving the weapon to confuse Ginger and creating space between the two. Before she can ready another leap, he pulls a new weapon from the shadow.

Seeing the King form his blade, Ginger takes a moment to pause and reassess. As she does, she seals the damage from the earlier cut, watching Carver glance at the disappearance of the wound in consternation. Smiling underneath her metal mask, Ginger taunts him by saying, “You know I can control the metal right? You’ll have to do better than a little cut like that to hurt me.”

Underneath his mask, Spade grimaces. Then he grins, his teeth forming into a row of white stones. “Baby doll,” he drawls, “if you wanted me to go deeper, all you had to do was ask.” His grin seems to widen as he elongates the blade and adds cheekily, “Is twelve inches big enough for you? I can get it longer if you like.”

Flushing with embarrassment, Ginger’s face turns almost as red as her hair! Angry, she roars and leaps at the King in blindly, swiping with her claws as she goes. Anticipating her movement, the King of Spades jumps backwards and sweeps his weapon down in front of him, catching her in an overhead strike just as she lands. Unable to defend, Ginger feels the weapon slice through a few inches of her suit before losing momentum and embedding in her armor. A second later, the weapon vanishes as Carver forms a new one in his off hand and swings that one down too!

The second attack comes in point first as if he intends to skewer her through the skull. Ginger, suitably cowed by the first attack’s near miss of her vitals, contorts her torso and brings the backhand of a paw up to push the weapon aside. The movement is gangly and awkward, however, due to the wounds on her hind legs that prevent her from putting all her weight on her heels. As a result, the weapon goes straight through her paw and penetrates right through not just the suit but also the palm of her hand!

Howling in agony, Ginger lashes out with a swing of her other claw. Unable to dodge, the King takes the blow straight to the side of the head and falls to the ground immediately as if poleaxed. Stunned temporarily by the force of her attack, he does not capitalize on Ginger’s distracted state. Indeed, he has problems of his own and were it not for the spike in Ginger’s paw, she likely would have ended the fight right there!

Ginger, still raging in her pain swipes wildly, missing the prone figure of the King. Recovering slightly, he rolls to the side and falls into a shadowy mist that phases underneath Ginger’s uncontrolled attacks and makes toward Eldritch.

Spotting the danger, Eldritch shouts out, “Ginger! Snap out of it and protect me!”

Clutching at her hand, Ginger rotates her head toward the King, who rises in a pillar of swirling black. She leaps! Trying to catch him before he can slip past her and toward the undefended pair of Rabbit and Eldritch. But with three limbs injured, Ginger is almost immobile and can barely muster enough force to make it halfway to her target. Snarling, she continues to chase knowing it will be in vain.

Diving forward, Carver spins twin knives into existence in his hands. With a snarl, he cries out, “One for each of you!”

Then the King jumps high, his daggers pointed downward as he seems to fly through the air toward the two. With an angry epithet, Eldritch drops her hands and extinguishes the light in the sky. Two things happen instantly, first the room plunges into darkness once more and Carver starts to flicker out of tangible form again. Second, Eldritch snaps out an incantation that manifests a shield of glowing light between Carver and his intended victims.

Unable to stop moving in time, Carver’s daggers scrape against the shield as his body collides with the barrier. Smashing into it he begins to fade away taunting with a confident smile. “I can go all night long doll, can you?”

Eldritch grimaces as she watches him begin to fade. He is right, she knows how drained she is after the gambit that was the miniature sun she created. It’s failure cost her a significant portion of her energy reserves and it would be cost her even more, perhaps more than what remains, to raise it again. Despair runs through her along with these thoughts, bringing pinpricks of tears to the edges of her eyes as she contemplates the price of failure.

Then, in an instant, her fortunes reverse. With an enraged roar, Ginny body slams into the King from behind, having found enough desperate energy to fuel one final leap! Hitting him with a crack, she disrupts his fade out and forces forward, where he collides with the glowing barrier once more. With a snap, his head whips forward and slams into the light. A second later, he passes out, his eyes rolling up in his head.

Ginger too, falls unconscious. The impact was a desperate gambit to save her friend, one that took what little she had left after the fight with HeadHunter and the clash with Carver. Eldritch too, finds herself slumping. With no more need to maintain the barrier, she falls backwards into the wall and slides down into a sitting position. Then, curling her knees close to her chest, she whispers out, “We did it, we won!”

Indeed, dear reader, the sounds of sirens above make it abundantly clear that the two heroines have won, for now. The remaining kings have doubtless fled the scene and while they still prowl the city, they do so without their leader. Indeed, The Deck itself is in for a long period of rebuilding before they can seriously challenge for control of the underworld again, disorganized and decimated as they are.

But those victories will ring hollow next week, dear reader, for even as the sun Eldritch hung in the roof of the room fades a new figure emerges from the shadows. This time with blood on his hands, the demon Soneillon walks into the room, opposite Eldritch, and greets her with a nonchalant wave!

Why is he here? And what does he intend for our weakened and weary heroines? Find out next week in… “To Dance with the Devil!”