Chapter 9
Previously: Obsidian: Crystal Heart – Chapter 8
“Go stand guard! Command those fuckers to drown themselves if they get close!”
John’s voice is a growl, the counterpoint to the whimpering he hears from Quincy. He can’t see fuck all in the darkness behind the false wall, but he doesn’t need to to get too good an idea what he’ll find, going by the stink and the sounds he can make out.
His hand reaches in the dark, he can find Quincy’s shoulder and turn him around. Tell him again to go while he shakes him slightly. This is no place for him. John needs to protect him, and with this… he doesn’t trust himself not to murder the first villager he sees or, really, for them not to try to sneak up on them in here.
The moment Quincy runs back towards the door with a whined ‘thanks’, John calls for Darcy. Not loudly, he doesn’t trust his voice not to be a boom, but he calls for her. She must be in there.
Okay, his girl is just as upset as he is, even in the gloom he can spot the purple glow he’s only ever seen once before, at that fucking godforsaken ritual they never should have done. But it helps him follow her approach in the dark. Just, even in their shared fury, she makes him grin. “Culver, I don’t speak rat. I don’t know what you are trying to tell me with the jumping and hissing.”
The purple glowing streamers off of her are still there but now where her human eyeheight should be. He has half a suspicion she’s not talking yet because she’s giving him a sheepish look, but when she describes what he can’t make out, his hands ball into tight fists. There is a row of cages against the wall, four grown women, naked, scared, and made mute.
As if that wasn’t enough, her next words lash deep into John’s guts. The urge to murder every man involved in this grows so hot he can feel it like lightning strikes throughout his muscles, eager to spring into action. The cages aren’t even the worst, the unbearable stench in here comes from a hole in the ground. A cold, perpetually wet hole that once was a tiny sea cave but now is a dark prison for what Darcy calls puppies.
But John knows what that means: Children. Girls.
He can feel his bile rising, anger so deep, so all-encompassing that he can’t control his body for several moments. He’s sick, and his blood is hammering so hard that his head starts hurting. He was… he knows how it feels to be helpless, to just wait for fate to throw you to a man. He can’t remember much from his time on the ship, but these girls here, what their lives are is so much worse than anything he feared.
He can’t, he won’t let anybody face that much fear and hurt when he can do something. He has to protect them!
Finally, that snaps him out of the raging temper. He is a man to protect, not to hurt. Strength for holding and helping, not for holding down and hurting!
Darcy tells him that the girls don’t know that they are unchained, and she still has to open the remaining cages. One of the women, the first one she let out, seems to have more fight left in her.
Alright, John can help there, maybe. He lets Darcy guide him through the dark to where the woman apparently made it past him and is peering out into the warehouse.
For just a moment, John flinches when he sees two red pin pricks closing in on them.
Then he realises it’s Quincy running back towards them. His words are slurred, he’s concentrating again, but apparently he’s holding off people who spotted their horses next to the warehouse. They need to get a move on, he can’t do this forever.
Red eyes, fuck, yes, if he’s constantly burning blood like that… Rolling his sleeve up, John doesn’t hesitate to prop their current line of defence up. Their dhampir needs blood to let them have this opening… Um, okay, that’s um, okay, bite effect differs from Darcy but only a bit, he wants to grin like a dolt right now with how strong and trusted and… accepted he feels. He knows it’s magic, still, he could hug the molly. Okay, later, later! Ugh!
The moment Quincy has his ability to speak back, he tells John that the selkie woman is thinking about pelts, about them needing to get them before they can leave for the ocean. Maybe they are in the warehouse?
That’s as far as he gets before he flinches and hisses. Sorry, more people arriving. Their molly is straining, fuck. He has to move fast!
Telling the woman to start looking around with him, John dashes about, kicking crates open where they are locked, and that clearly was the right decision. Yes, that feels like fur under his searching fingers! Lifting them out towards where he can vaguely see the woman, he knows it’s the real deal, because she makes a horrible, mangled sound that still is full of relief. Okay. That’s solved.
Next, he runs to the front of the building and grabs for Quincy’s hand, okay, together now! He can see people milling about, weirdly listless, just shuffling around where Quincy is darting his looks around between them. Fingers tight on his bro’s hand, John pushes, pushes hard on his power. He trapped an entire ship in a bubble of his dreamscape, he clearly has the power, he can do this, somehow.
He doesn’t know how to aim like this, but he’ll just leave that up to the man at his side. All he has to do is stand together with him, hold people off until his girl… yes, fine, fuck, their girl, can break some more chains and maybe carry the girls out if she has to. She would do it, she could do it, he trusts her. He just has to protect her from not getting the chance!
~
Why won’t they move?! Now that John reminded Darcy that maybe her rat form isn’t the most useful right now, Darcy had no trouble ripping the other cages open faster. She also has gone down into the hole and not just ripped out the metal strip hammered into the stone floor that held all the shackles, no, she broke the individual chains.
Still, it seems like there’s an invisible wall that the puppies don’t want to cross. Don’t know they can cross, maybe? All shooing and coaxing doesn’t do anything, and Darcy’s ears have long picked up on the urgency above. She can hear John and Quincy running around, she needs to get a move on. Well, a move on these girls, and she’s running out of patience with the puppies, so she does what she does with her own puppies, too: She picks them up and shows them that they’re being silly.
Not because they are bad puppies, no, puppies never are bad. You take care of puppies and show them what they can do. Namely, get out of this hole!
Darcy has to carry the smallest puppy she started with all the way up out of the hole, even placing her hands on the ladder doesn’t make her get the hint. But up there are the women, for all Darcy knows these might even be their mothers. They take the puppy from her and okay, if they are up there then Darcy can speed this up!
Jumping back down into the hole, ignoring the sludge spraying in every direction as she splatters through it, she grabs the next puppy and stands under the hole’s opening. It’s not tall, not even fully two times her own height, but she can see the woman up there, so she calls up: “Catch!” and throws the puppy up. There’s screaming, but fine, it’s faster than having to carry each of them.
The next two scream as well. One of the older girls tries to scratch at her and Darcy gives her a drac pat back for it, but still growls her towards the opening, if she doesn’t want to be thrown then she can blasted climb up herself! And she does. Hah, good puppy! Darcy still has to rush and help a bit, these puppies never walked before, they don’t have coordination whatsoever, the ladder is a challenge, but with one of them having figured it out there is another trying. Everything not to be grabbed by Darcy, it seems.
Good!
Darcy makes herself big at the back of the hole and growls and claps and lurches at the remaining girls, and finally they scramble away from her, scramble and clutch at the ladder rungs, slip and partially fall, but Darcy can catch them, the women above can reach down and pull them up.
With everybody out of the hole, Darcy can do puppy herding from here. She’s done it so many times before with John. Sure, these aren’t their puppies, they aren’t as well-behaved, but all puppies are bumbling and misbehave at first, it’s just a question of consistent guidance, and Darcy can make herself big and furry if need be.
But by the time she and the women get the girls to the doors, she sees that her men are blocking the way. Peeking past them, Darcy wrinkles her nose. There’s a crowd, that must be half the village!
Turning and looking at her men’s faces, she begins to worry. Quincy and John are both pale, there’s cold sweat on their faces. John’s grunting with every breath, Quincy’s shivering and his eyes are flickering. That’s not a good, steady glow.
She’s out of time, oh no!
It’s not far to the water, not far at all, she could run that in seconds, less than seconds… but she can’t carry more than maybe two girls at a time. It will have to do! And those that can run will have to go on their own. Darcy kicks open the second door of the warehouse and circles back behind the girls, goes back to barking.
They scatter, but at least they scatter forward. The side with the villagers clearly is much scarier, so towards the water, the familiar smell of the sea water, is where they scramble to, where the women try to guide them to, as well.
Why isn’t one of them running? Darcy is just about to actually bite that one to get going when she notices that the woman is desperately piling something into her arms. Oh, they need these, she guesses. Not a problem! She burns blood, sees the slight red reflection of her own eyes against the metal parts of the crate, then lifts it up with a grunt and runs down to the water, throws it several metres from the shore line and gives it a few moments as the women scramble towards it, grab the… pelts, it’s pelts, she thinks, and hand them around.
Darcy isn’t sure what’s happening, why are they not just grabbing the first one, why are they switching them back and forth? They don’t have time! Then one of the women clutches the one she got tight, puts it over her shoulders, and suddenly Darcy is looking at a seal! Oh, oh, they need their own pelt! That makes sense, Darcy couldn’t just take her mother’s drac, either. Okay, so the women out there are handling that. Nothing more she can do there.
Instead, she runs to get the horses right next to her men. This is going to be way too close for her taste. Way, way too close. Part of her wants to turn wolf and kill all the people milling about, probably daydreaming. Wants to make sure… wait… wait, she can still make it safer!
Dashing between the people, she snatches away every gun she can spot. There are so many. How do people in a poor fishing village afford so many guns? Oh, by selling women and girls!
Arms stacked high with rifles, Darcy runs up to the waterline again and throws the rifles into the ocean, too. And looking out, she only spots one more seal head diving under. They’re gone, they’re all gone, safe!
Her men are too focused, they don’t know that it’s time to get out, so she runs back to them and grabs Quincy around the waist, lifts him over the saddle of his horse, he can complain about his dignity later. Then she does the same to John.
That breaks both her men’s concentration, and with that, the villagers begin to come to as well, so Darcy dashes into the shade of the warehouse, turns wolf and runs right through the middle of the crowd, howling and barking, nipping at hands and tackling into people.
John grasps what’s going on first, swings upright in the saddle and helps Quincy do the same.
Darcy can’t keep checking, she has people kick at her, cursing about where their rifles are. She needs to keep running, throwing herself at people, but it’s daylight, she feels so slow and weak, even yipps as one of the men catches her side with a knife.
But above that, she can hear the heavy hoofbeats, she can hear the shouts to stop them, to shoot, why is nobody shooting?! Good, she might be able to keep her men safe like this, she will keep them safe, no matter how many knives and kicks she has to catch with her own body.
A shot rings out, and for a long moment, Darcy wants to do nothing more than vault high to check on her men, but then there’s John’s sharp whistle. From far up the inlet.
Another shot. It’s him, he’s shooting! That’s his ‘heel!’ whistle, she knows it!
Dodging around a net that the villagers are trying to throw over her, she speeds up to follow his call… His call that is just as impossible to resist as Radu’s would be, and she really shouldn’t be so elated in this situation but she’s hurting and running and feels so very, very alive that her drac can’t help but sing out to her men as she tries to catch up with the fey horses.
~
It’s getting late in the afternoon and the light is fading. Arthur is contemplating whether it’d be safe to have a candle or lamp in the treehouse, and whether that would be cosy and adventurous, or whether he’d rather go in and curl up on a sofa in the library, after all, when he hears the distant crunch of hooves on the driveway. And only a few moments later, there’s an insistent couple of barks from outside, and a scratching sound. When he crawls out to stick his head over the edge of the treehouse, he sees a familiar red wolf bouncing on the grass below, and jumping up on the tree.
When Darcy sees him, her tail starts wagging and she barks again. Watery grey light lies on the bark, so that’s probably why she can’t just run up- but why doesn’t she just circle around the tree to the side that’s in shadow? Is she stuck in wolf-brain again?
A little behind her, Quincy and John are crossing the grounds on their fey horses.
“Everything okay?” Arthur calls to them.
~
“Oh thank the Divine she stopped running,” Quincy huffs. Now, he’s the first person to want to be as far away from that village as possible, but did they have to ride so hard the entire way? He doesn’t like his arse pounded like that by any guy, much less by a saddle. “Cycy, what the hell?”
Not looking any less tired, John gets off his horse and whistles again for Darcy. “Heel, girl, heel! Get over here! See, he’s fine. Settle down.”
She makes a whining noise, looks, or rather sniffs, up towards Arthur another time, bounces undecided from one paw to the other, but then does trot over to John’s outstretched hand.
~
Well, they all look like they’re in one piece, though Quincy is decidedly more dishevelled than Arthur’s seen him before. Also… are his clothes wet?
“…Is she stuck in wolf brain again?” he asks. “Are you guys alright?”
~
“Chuck me a blanket, she’s totally stuck,” is John’s first answer as he takes a hold of Darcy’s ruff before she gets ideas of running away again. Not that he suspects she has any inclination to find Gregory as well.
Swinging down and starting to rub his back and behind, Quincy stretches with a long groan, before looking up at Arthur. “Physically unharmed, or healed over in her case. Let’s not talk about other alrights for a bit, shall we?”
~
Arthur hooks some of the blankets with his foot and turns half around to pull them over and then drop them down to John. Hannibal has also wandered over from wherever he’s amused himself to give them all a thorough sniff over, starting with Quincy, whose words tell Arthur that something pretty major must’ve happened, something bad.
So he tosses down the ladder to climb down after asking the house to put everything else in the tree house away again.
After putting the blanket down, John sits on it and pulls Darcy’s head on his lap. “Just a moment, I’ll have her out in no time.”
~
At seeing John put their hard-earned knowledge about Darcy’s bad dream habit to good use, Quincy relaxes a bit, at least, but keeps shaking his legs out, ouch, ugh, he doesn’t like working out like this. Still, this was supposed to be Arthur’s day off. “Sorry, honey, we didn’t mean to disturb you. Just that drac furball over there seems to have forgotten that you are unlikely to be in any danger, and, well, you know how protective she gets.”
~
“It’s okay,” Arthur says, with a bit of a sigh. “I mean, I did really need a day off, I think, but it’s getting dark, anyway, and, well… Obviously there’s something more than routine barony stuff going on and… I’d rather know about it?”
~
“I’d still hug you, but I have seawater, and hopefully only seawater, in unspeakable places, so if I don’t get into a bathtub very soon to save my hair, the biggest danger is going to be me and my shrieking.” With a wave and another groan, Quincy starts limping back towards the house, he’s bloody done with this day!
~
John, meanwhile, is too distracted with his power to really follow the conversation, but he can guess anyway.
Aha, there she is. It’s always a game of hide and seek in his dreamscape when his girl forgets herself, as she has a habit of when she’s a wolf for too long in her dreams and her body does the same outside. Not that he didn’t laugh hard the first time he woke up because there was a wolf running in her sleep in the bed. He’s gotten pretty used to hunting her human-ish mind down in the mornings to pull her back… or face the consequences of one redhead desperately trying to keep everybody from leaving the bed and the other bitching like a sailor because he’s covered in fur, again, and does not appreciate getting his morning wood trampled on.
How that has become a normal morning is still a bit beyond him, but hey, the things that happen when he spends every night with two dhampirs in his dreamscape. It adds up on time and really, with all that time accumulated he’s known Quincy for well over a month, plus the outside time, of course. So yeah, that’s just his life now.
~
Arthur nods. “I’ll sort out the horses then,” he volunteers. That’s hardly work, anyway. He looks at John, but he looks like he has things under control. Arthur’s not sure what he’s doing, but he can ask later, maybe, John seems to be concentrating. “I’ll see you in the library later?”
“John’s going to have her out in about three minutes, not as if I don’t see this in the mornings. They can fill you in,” Quincy calls over his shoulder.
…Darcy’s a wolf in the mornings? Well, there was that time she got all wolf-brained on him in the library, maybe that happens regularly? “Okay, um… feel better?” Arthur calls back, and then goes to collect the horses and Hannibal to bring them all to the stables.
Not much later, he has a very sheepish looking wolf nuzzle at his side while John walks up with the blanket over his shoulders. “Pretty sure that’s her saying sorry for worrying you. Now she’s just shy.”
Arthur pats the fey horse whose hooves he’s just cleaned out on the shoulders, and nudges it towards its stall. Placid as always, it wanders off to sniff for oats in its feed bin. Arthur, meanwhile, smiles down at Darcy.
“That’s okay? Um… thanks for coming to check on me? Do you need any healing or anything?”
Finally turning human again, she shakes her head despite how her dress is a mess of rips and tears. And stains, which he takes for blood at first- until he breathes in, and nearly gags.
Seeing his expression, Darcy quickly turns wolf again and John groans. “Yeah, you don’t want the details. You dodged a real shit hole, and yes, literally.”
His nose still wrinkled at the sewage smell coming off of Darcy’s dress, Arthur nods. “Uh, yes, okay. But… is everyone okay now? Can I have the broad strokes of what happened? ‘Cause otherwise wondering about it is going to drive me mad,” he admits sheepishly.
John shoos Darcy off to go harass Quincy in the bathtub, she needs a bath, too, and then tells Arthur about the village and what they found there, the mermaids and selkies and the fight, while he helps him put the horses’ tack away and then walks with him back over to the castle.
And he’s very right that Arthur doesn’t want the details. Just the thought of the abuse makes him feel sick. He’s glad that those selkies escaped, but: “So that’s probably happening in other places, too, from what that mermaid said to Darcy?”
~
Running a hand over his face in a useless attempt to not get upset about it all over again, John just nods.
“Well.” Arthur shoves his hands into his pockets, sets his jaw. “Then we better do something about it, don’t we?”
“We can’t check every fishing village though.” Not that John doesn’t want to murder somebody over the thought of any more women caged like that, girls kept worse than animals, but he’s not sure how they can do something when some other country’s police hasn’t gotten it dealt with. Still, he agrees with Arthur. “You to the library to figure something out about who we’re dealing with, Darcy back to the ocean trying to talk to them?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Arthur agrees. “Or at least a place to start. Could we somehow figure out who that village has been doing business with? I guess now that they know their cover is blown, they might not contact their usual accomplices, but are there ways to track the money or something?”
“Didn’t grab anything, sorry, kind of ran for our lives, it’s daylight after all.” John leaves it at that, because he might have gotten used to his girl not minding pain, but seeing her wounds stream blood into her fur because she doesn’t just heal quickly under the sun was enough to put him off anything that endangers her for a while. “I can check if we have any previous records, but my hopes aren’t high.”
~
Arthur nods- has a stray thought of “where’s Gregory when you need him?” because an invisible cat going snooping through the villagers’ belongings before they might destroy any incriminating evidence would be handy right now. But, well… it’s not like Gregory can read to find out what would be important, anyway…
“We’ll investigate and see what we can find to work with, I guess,” he concludes.
~
Agreeing with him there, John sends him ahead to the library, they’ll join him in a bit. Well, he probably will. If he’s any judge, the dhampirs are going to be in that bathtub for forever… Actually, he waits until Arthur is well around the next corner, then gets himself to that bathroom, too. Warm water and a cuddle with his girl while the molly is quipping the house down to hide that he’s rattled and totally looking for backup from him sounds just about perfect for getting his own nerves calmed down, too.
~
Arthur has tea in the library while he gets started on that investigation, and it’s almost dinner time when the rest join him- all clean-smelling and scrubbed and looking more relaxed.
Unfortunately, he’s also already finished his research, because there really wasn’t much to be found, and what he did find is bad news.
Turns out, what the villagers did wasn’t even illegal. Well, the ‘attacking your nobles’ part was, but not the selkie parts. Because the underwater kingdom of Lemuria is actually an enemy of the crown over some territory dispute, and their citizens have no rights or legal protections.
This makes Darcy stomp her foot and declare that that’s no fair, and that’s silly human rules, and no, she finally got to be the heroine again, nope, she’s going to go talk to the sirens again! Quincy groans that he only just got all the salt out of her hair! Darcy, of course, isn’t persuaded in the least. John says he’s had it with sirens and the water for one day, and Quincy huffs that his hair certainly can’t take any more salt or there will be shrieking, so Darcy heads off by herself, eschewing dinner for the moment.
It’s not like the coast is far away anyway, she assures them, no, they should go eat, she’ll have something once she gets back.
When she returns, however, soaked through again but at least only smelling of brine and seaweed, she pouts that she shouted herself hoarse but couldn’t find any sirens.
It’s getting late, but Arthur feels too restless to go to sleep with this gnawing at him, until it occurs to him: Maybe they can check over the tax records of their coastal villages? These villages should have too much money, and they won’t want any attention, so maybe they can find a pattern? Villages that are too good and regular and by the book about paying their taxes? Not enough complaints, paying even in years when other places around them struggle because of bad weather or something.
John agrees that it’s an idea, while Quincy tells them to count him out, that sounds like a perfect nightmare to him, he’ll leave it to them and handle the mail instead.