Chapter Two: The Serpent and the Muse

August watched in horror as the hulking man tore across the stage, shifting mid-step into a great boar. He snorted, tusks aiming to gore the woman opposite him. And for a moment that’s what August thought would happen. But the woman looked up through the screen of her hair and as he charged she sidestepped to grab at the horns with a bursting of strength. She held the man back long enough that the audience began to react with surprise and excitement—and the occasional outcry of frustration. She rolled to the side and let her opponent’s momentum take him nearly to the edge of the stage, his footing stumbling as he shifted back into his human form. The audience fell back in false screams of fear, creating a divot near the stage’s pit that August alone soon occupied. He stepped back to the wall of the crowd.

“Nice try, you bitch.” The man spoke low to keep it sheltered but August was close enough to catch the malice in his voice. He charged her again only to find her dodge it easily, her lithe form able to swiftly roll aside from his tusks with each subsequent charge. Growing frustrated, the man snarled out a curse and readied to do it again.

The woman did not move this time. She took a stance that spoke of primal power, legs spread and arms out, fingers curled like claws. They were claws, August realized, and as the man moved to charge again August shouted out at him to stop with enough volume that the eyes of the others nearby flitted to him. He didn’t care. The woman shifted at the last minute, just as her opponent came near, and replacing her meek, doll-like facade was a great and scarred bear that grabbed at the boar’s hide with a roar and tossed him to the side. August heard the squeal of pain as the man sailed through the air. He hit the wall to the left of the stage in a smattering of red.

Silence pooled in the room. August stared, gape-mouthed, as the two fighters regained their human forms. The man huddled tight in a ball, pressing a hand against the weeping wound in his side.

The woman on stage was utterly unfazed, her fingers dripping blood. In her gaze there was bloodlust, and the audience reacted to her slow, intimidating approach to the man with a hush of expectant thrill. These people wanted death. They welcomed it. At the expense of two wardless, their sinful souls made flesh: guardians who had lost their wards and would never be able to fulfill their contract, who would Fade without anyone to mourn them. Their inevitable unmaking was one of the many reasons for their expendability—what usefulness did an untethered soul have to this world? Especially when it was so fleeting an existence?

August leapt onto the stage as the woman raised her arm.

He caught her wrist. She paused, glancing slowly back at him through her dark hair, the silver gilt of her eyes bearing such a resilient hatred he wasn’t sure anyone could ever break it.

“You don’t want to do this.”

The crowd was silent. For a moment it was just August and this small woman, warm under the stage lights, locked in a soundless fight. Then she jerked her arm out of his grip and gnashed her teeth in a vicious snarl.

“Don’t touch me!” She shifted before him, once more a massive bear that stood on its hind legs. August scrambled back. Whispers of fear and uncertainty began to slip from the audience. Some people even laughed. The bear swiped over his head, missing by too little, and August fell onto his butt with a curse. A jostling in his jacket told him Sairne was ripping loose, and he clumsily looked down as she shot forward from the confinement of his vest. The thin form of a small white snake flew forward, mouth open to bear fangs, before a swirl of black saw her transformed.

Sairne’s shift revealed a woman in an immaculate black suit. A faint shimmer of scales flickered across the fabric in the lighting and her poise spoke of a lazy pretentiousness. She straightened and did not smile, looking up at the Wardless from under a black cap. She ran its rim between her fingers, yellow eyes piercing in their glare.

The Wardless woman stumbled back, resuming her human form and regarding August and Sairne as if they were monsters.

“It can’t be.” She whispered, awed. “You’re…the Bane?” Silence grew again in the room as Sairne swept a sleepy gaze over the crowd. Gasps rose as the shudder of recognition coursed through the room.

The Mad’s guardian jerked forward, unfurling her fan to reveal the sharp traces of metal at its edges. The Mad stretched an arm out to keep her back, brows furrowed.

“The Bane!” The call rose. People clamored to flee, shattering glasses, knocking into their neighbors, backing away down the aisles. “I heard her say it! It’s the Bane!”

Sairne rolled her eyes and adjusted her cap. “Don’t all faint at once.” She droned.

It was chaos. August watched the audience run, holding onto their gowns and hats as they tripped to the doors and burst into the night. It was a veritable stampede of pounding feet and exclamations, loud enough to wake the neighboring tenements, which August imagined it would. If Ruckus didn’t end up coming, someone might certainly question why a very large amount of exquisitely dressed people were suddenly pouring from the abandoned theater like cockroaches from an exterminator. If nothing else, he and Sairne would be credited with ending a Grand before it turned too deadly. The Mad watched the egress of her captive audience with thin anger.

Sairne glared down at the Wardless cowering before her. “I suggest you run.”

Eyes still wide with fear and a deeper and odd reverence, the wardless woman did just that. No one gave chase. The Mad watched her pass with a barely held annoyance that ticked the corner of her lips up. “We paid good money for her.”

August held his head higher. “She’s not a toy.”

"Awe, I never said she was. But the people who paid for her think she's worth an awful lot, they're going to be upset when they hear you've let her escape!" When the Mad affixed a smile to her face it was dainty and mocking. "I would like to know how the guardian of Sin and her ward found us, though."

“You’re not a very subtle group.” Sairne offered, gesturing broadly to the room. “And we’re a bit more concerned with you than the Patrol ever is.”

“Oh,” the Mad pressed a hand to her chest in a breathless gesture, as if Sairne had offered her flattery. “Is this personal?”

“Do you remember a Bell Mayweather?” August asked, cutting to the chase.

“Mayweather?” She tapped at her chin, thoughtful, “geez, I can’t think of anybody. Lots of people come to see me though, he could be anyone.”

“He went missing.”

“That’s awful.”

“And he isn’t the only one.”

“I can’t help you, I’m real sorry.”

“I could arrest you and ask my questions, but you won’t like that.”

“You can try.”

Behind her, the Mad’s guardian bristled with excitement, her cat’s eyes round and eager and alarmingly inhuman, her grip on her weapon tightening. Unable to wait, she leapt forward in a blur of white. Sairne manifested a dark blade in her hand barely a moment before the Mad’s guardian’s sharp-edged fan snapped at her. They clashed in a spark of metal that made August step back.

His focus shifted as the Mad herself dashed forward, pulling two stilettos from sheaths he didn’t realize she had even had. He was a quick enough draw that the pistol was out before she was halfway to him. Already loaded, he clicked off the safety and aimed it at her. It wasn’t a lethal shot—the chamber was loaded with powder rounds, a mixture of blessed salt that had a habit of stunning more than killing—but as his finger curled on the trigger she was on him, quicker than he imagined possible, her thin stiletto shoved up under the gun, tearing it from his hand. He ducked out of her range and rolled back, drawing the knife from its sheath in his pant leg. It was a practiced move, made easy through years of repetition, but when he made to stand the Mad was already on him, pressing his own pistol’s muzzle against his forehead.

“Guess it didn’t work out for you, huh?”

“Guess not.”

Sairne’s dark blade whirled just under the Mad’s chin, a dark passing of smoke that she dodged with the barest of luck. It broke her focus enough for August to lunge and tackle her. She struggled as he pinned her arms down at her sides, the pistol skittering away. Her teasing smile was now the clenched grit of struggle. “Haliforte, you’re under arrest.” He spoke tersely through heavy breaths.

“Adorable that you think that’s my name.” She managed as he struggled to get her into handcuffs.

The Mad’s guardian erupted in a flash of wildly angry white. Before August could even move to stop her she was behind him, nails snagging into his jacket to drag him off her ward. He stumbled back, crashing onto his side as the Mad shot up, rubbing at her wrists. “Those bracelets don’t do a girl any favors, do they? Completely ugly things. Hestia, that’s enough.” Sairne bent down at August’s back, holding at his shoulder, as the Mad’s guardian came back to her side. “A shame, baby, but we’ll have to take this outside some other time.”

Her guardian held her paper fan out and snapped it shut. Dust burst in the air as August shrugged from Sairne’s grip to attempt one last punch. But when he blew past the white cloud there was nothing there. No trace of them. Gone. He stumbled to stand in the remnants of the powdery residue, rubbing at it on his fingers.

Behind him, Sairne sighed. “Always a clean sneak.”

A door slammed open in the distance. Shouts echoed in the hall but August didn’t turn as the pounding boots hit the ground behind him.

“Hatch!” Sairne turned at the call to face the wall of uniformed officers donning crimson hats with a look of disinterest. They spread out along the back of the theatre, funneling in lines through the aisles. Down the center one a large man tore through the others, barreling over the mess of the night’s remains with all the grace of a taunted bull. “What in the hell happened here?”

Sairne brushed at the powder on her shoulder and said, morosely, “we ruined a party.”

“You did more than ruin a party, Bane.” He paused, appraising August with a nose turned up in derision. “Hatch, what the hell are you wearing?”

August recalled the mask that sat over his nose and quickly rushed to pull it off, catching the ribbon of it on his ear as he did so. He chucked it to the side.

Ruckus, Captain of the Patrol’s 9th Division, was a beady-eyed fellow whose cheeks and neck were often inflamed in unsightly splotches of red. A byproduct of his rage, August had always assumed, but it wasn’t often enough he saw the man calm that he knew if that was the cause or if fury was just his state of being. Knowing full well Ruckus’s inability to control his often frothing anger wouldn’t bode well for his guardian, August intervened to slacken the tension. “We didn’t think you’d get here in time.”

“So where is she?” Ruckus barked. “You made yourselves sound confident in being able to capture her in your little letter. So did you get her?”

“Well…no. You just missed her, see.” He glanced over his shoulder at the flutter of glittering air.

“No?” Ruckus glanced around the the large room—the upended platters in the aisles, the small shards of glass that twinkled on the carpet. August noted that the wardless man had also somehow managed flee, leaving behind a dark red stain. Some of the Patrolmen climbed the stage to examine it.

Ruckus suddenly rounded and, with a bellow loud enough to wake the city, shouted: “Search this place top to bottom!” One of the men standing directly behind Ruckus visibly flinched at the proximity of the shout. The captain turned back to where August and Sairne stood, unaffected. “I’m placing you both in holding tonight.” August had honestly expected worse. He glanced sidelong at Sairne, who shrugged, and then back up at Ruckus. “You were barred from working on anything to do with the Mad. Now I have to clean up the mess of a wayward shit,” he slapped at the back of August’s head, “and his little pet,” he tried to do the same to Sairne but Sairne ducked expertly, leaving the man’s hand to whoosh in the air.

“Wayward?” August said at the same time he heard Sairne mumble, “little?”

“And what the hell did you tell Hook about all this?”

Nothing. But August didn’t want to think about that.

“Captain.” The call came and Ruckus turned as one of his men rose from the bloody imprint of the fight, shaking his head.

Ruckus glanced back at August and Sairne and pointed at them each in turn. “You’re going to the Seventh with Lisand willingly or by the Saints I will make it as painful a trip as possible.” He left with that and August glanced around for the familiar visage of the dour man named Lisand. He found him by the entryway of the theatre, twirling at his waxed mustache as if he were some fiendish villain.

August turned his back to confer with Sairne before he arrived. “Was that her Creed?” He asked. “I thought guardians without an alignment couldn’t manifest one?”

Sairne drew her hat off and fluffed her hair. “I’m sure there’s a reason she can. Not all of the Apostles have been found, after all.”

“I think we’d know if she was an Apostle.”

“Hm.”

“Did you feel anything? When she used it?”

She gave him a sour expression he understood as meaning “don’t-ask-me-that-again”, because he had the bad habit of asking Sairne if she sensed when guardians did certain things even thought she had been adamant, multiple times, that it wasn’t as if they all had wires hooked into each other’s brains. She could only sense the fluctuations of the air, sometimes with a scent of burning incense or the lofty unknown foral notes that spoke of the celestial magic that guardians and their wards could wield. Other than that, they were as intractable to her as they were to August.

“Sorry,” Lisand laughed, managing to look guilty as he put his arms around them both. “Tough luck, you two. What a night!” His joking was a cover for the satisfaction he had from snapping shiny cuffs on August’s wrists, a sly glint in his eye. “You’re just like real criminals.”

“Are these new?” Sairne questioned, lifting her arms for examination of the handcuffs. Lisand didn’t bother to answer.

He walked them from the theatre with arms draped across their shoulders. He started to whistle once they’d exited back onto the slick city streets and towards a large truck with its back enclosed in a wired frame, the driver sitting in a vigilance of surprising alacrity.

When Lisand opened the back door Sairne and August were greeted with several pairs of blinking eyes set in grubby faces. Not likely attendees of the Grand—they had the look of captured thieves or drunks or other hoods swept up on patrols. August ducked in to sit at the end of the bench as far from their glares as he could manage. Sairne followed to take the seat opposite him.

“The irony’s not lost on me, boys.” August offered with a smile no one returned.

When the door shut there was a moment of cityscape-infused quiet. He glanced warily at their fellow detainees but it was Sairne who spoke up first, sliding back against the chicken-wire and pulling her cap down over her eyes. “I’m the Bane—Sairne, if you’re polite about it—perhaps you’ve heard of me? If anyone touches him or me, I’ll turn you all into mushrooms and once we’re out of this metal box, I’ll light you all on fire.” August smiled dumbly as she spoke, appraising faces that went slack with fear.

No one tried anything.