Storykiller (6 page)

Tessa opened her eyes as Bluebeard’s axe came speeding toward her, no more thick, wood table left to shield her. If she was going to die right now, she was at least going to have her eyes open for it.

A blur of dark grey flew past Tessa’s face and Bluebeard’s blade landed just to the left of Tessa’s head, deep in the carpet and shards of table. Tessa reached for the axe but just as she grasped the hilt it vanished under her fingers.

“Damn!” she cursed, glancing behind her to see a giant, grey wolf pacing in front of Bluebeard as the man struggled to get back up. The animal barely even fit in the parlor, its tail knocking into furniture as it paced predatorily about the room. It turned its massive head to Tessa as she extricated herself painfully from the wood and glass mess in the dining room and bared its teeth at her.

Bluebeard called out for his weapon again and though the wolf moved, it couldn’t quite avoid the axe in the small space, and the axe clipped its furry shoulder. It howled and snapped at Bluebeard as he yanked the axe back, a little spray of blood coming with it. The wolf shuddered away, limping, favoring its damaged side. While Bluebeard was distracted by the massive creature, Tessa figured she’d best take her shot, and so she lowered her shoulder and ran at him. They went crashing into a glass coffee table, smashing it into painful bits as they landed, fortunately with Bluebeard underneath and taking the brunt of the impact. Even from beneath her, he tried to swing the axe but Tessa grabbed at it so that they were both holding it, wrestling for control
. They rolled together out of the table and then, as Snow woke less than a foot away from them and drew back in shock, they worked their way to a standing position, neither releasing the axe.

Despite his size advantage, Tessa could feel in their struggle that she was stronger than he was. If only she could find a way to throw him off balance, she thought she might be able to gain the upper hand. And so when he pushed his size at her, leaning her back, she let him, and when he overcompensated, leaning too far forward, she turned her body slightly and pushed the head of the axe downward. Just when he had almost lost his balance, she drew upon all her strength and twisted back into him, thrusting powerfully with her right arm, the hand closest to the blade, and driving it with incredible speed up and through his neck with a satisfying
sluishing sound.

And his head went sailing across the parlor.

Snow watched as Tessa angled the axe and then used the full force of her strength to send it through Bluebeard’s neck. It was an incredibly complicated move requiring not just strength, but also an innate understanding of battle. The blade connected as if Tessa had been doing this all her life, not just a few hours. Snow blinked her eyes and clutched her own slender neck self-consciously, shuddering as Bluebeard’s head landed with an impotent, bloody thud some dozen feet away on the red carpeting.

“Storykiller,” Snow breathed, barely a whisper.

Tessa looked at her with sharp but weary eyes. “What did you say?” Tessa stood, spent and bloody in the middle of the parlor, the axe still in one hand, her face somehow both pale and flushed. Snow stared at Tessa, her hand still on her own neck, her eyes fixed and wide. “What did you say?” Tessa repeated.

Snow blinked and tried to regain her composure. “Storykiller,” she said again, barely louder than the first time. “That’s what they call you,” she said, looking back at the Bluebeard head and blinking again, as if she hoped to erase what she had seen with her eyelids. “To your face they’ll call you Scion, but behind your back, it’s Storykiller. It’s always been Storykiller,” Snow looked at Tessa, “I’ve just…I’ve just never seen it.” Snow continued holding Tessa’s gaze for a moment and then looked away, as if wishing herself somewhere else.

Tessa closed her eyes and tilted her head back, letting out an exhausted sigh. She was bone-tired, not to mention more than a little terrified by both what she’d seen and what she’d done. She had just killed a man. And gotten another one killed. And yet both somehow seemed natural and normal and like something that sometimes just happened on Tuesdays. Tessa looked at her hands. Elaborate patterns of blood, both beautiful and deadly, laced across her skin almost as if she was wearing intricately woven, elbow-length, bright red gloves. She shook her head. What was wrong with her? How could she think for even a moment that it was beautiful? Despite the blood, she reached her hand out to help Snow up, but Snow recoiled back, rejecting her
.

“How is that possible?” Tessa asked.

“What?” Snow asked, still disoriented and shaken.

“I’m guessing you’ve been around a long time, how can this be the first death you’ve ever seen?

Snow continued staring at Bluebeard’s head. “I’ve never lived in the Mortal world before, so I’ve never seen a Mortal die. And Stories don’t die.”

Tessa pointed the axe at the dead body. “Clearly they do.”

“No, I…” Snow stood up and smoothed her clothing, averting her eyes from both the body and the detached head. “They can’t. Not by anyone but you. You’re the only person in all of this world, or mine, that can actually kill a Story,” she said. It was the most serious and non-snarky she’d been since Tessa had met her. Snow didn’t strike Tessa as someone sincere, but she seemed genuine in this moment.

“That, that can’t be true,” Tessa stumbled over the words.

“I assure you it is. No mere Mortal has the power to kill a Story, and no Story can truly kill another Story.”

“What do you mean ‘truly’?”

“Just that we give it a try—with alarming regularity, in fact—but it never holds, not permanently. Everyone eventually comes back. It’s like—think of your Mortal video games—even if we manage to kill each other, we eventually—
reset
, for lack of a better word. We don’t have the power to erase one another the way a true death would.”

“I…” Tessa started but she had no idea where to go. She tried again, “Wait, what do you mean by
erase
?”

“When a Story truly dies, it means their Mortal story dies too. You’ve not only killed Bluebeard, you’ve erased him. His Fiction no longer exists.”

“Meaning what?”

“Killing him obliterates all record of him. He’s a memory only you and Stories carry now. No Mortal will know, before, now, or ever again, of his Story. And perhaps worse than that, everyone else from his tale is now essentially a ghost. Trapped in a Story that no longer exists, they’re like the walking dead
, wandering without a sense of self or purpose. You have destroyed their home, what breathed them into existence. You’ve made them orphans. It’s why we fear The Storykiller above all else—that we will become doomed shells attached to a Story you have destroyed.”

Tessa sat down on a nearby chair, afraid if she didn’t sit that she might faint. She laid the axe across her lap, and touched one bloody hand to her swimming head. She looked up at Snow with hawkish eyes. “You’re lying.”

Snow shook her head solemnly, “I’m really not, Scion.”

“I, I didn’t mean to do that.”

Snow softened a bit, seeing how hard she was taking it, “You didn’t really have a choice. What would you have done differently? He was going to kill you and your minions. And he killed your Advocate, the one who should have been your teacher. He left you no choice. Not to mention, I’m quite sure he was a serial killer of Mortals, not that I care about
that
,” she added at the last moment.

Tessa lowered her head and spoke more to herself than Snow. “Yes. There were women upstairs, a lot of them. But I, I don’t know. Maybe there was another way.”

And at that moment Micah and Brand crashed into the room, Brand with Tessa’s abandoned bat, Micah, strangely, with a pair of wooden drumsticks, their faces ready for battle, or something. But when they saw Tessa covered in blood, the headless body, blood soaked carpet, and ashen head they cringed. Brand’s face had the look of someone who had just painfully swallowed a throat full of vomit, and Micah turned a sickly green. Tessa thought she might faint.

“I killed Bluebeard,” Tessa said.

Micah and Brand looked at Tessa blankly and asked in unison, “Who?”

Tessa looked from Micah and Brand to Snow. Snow lifted her shoulders lightly as if resigned, a sad little shrug.

“See?” Snow said.

Tessa stared at Snow. “What do we do now?”

Snow looked at a clock up on the wall. “They’ll be here any moment.”

“Who?” Brand asked, still staring at the headless body.

As if to answer his question, there was a snap of electricity and a hum, the hair on Tessa’s arms stood up, and a flash of bluish light illuminated the room. Tessa shielded her eyes against what best resembled a strike of blue lightning. When she could see again, there was another woman standing in the room with them—tall and beautiful, clad in luxurious dark brown leather from knee-high boots to a fitted motorcycle jacket. She wore thick leather gloves with steel fingertips that glinted in the light as she pushed a strand of hair from her face. A longbow made of rich brown wood was slung over her shoulder, and a quiver of arrows was strapped securely to her back. A mass of shiny golden-blonde hair, bound loosely in a thick braid, hung down her back. She was as impossibly beautiful as Snow, though different, her skin the color of a rosy peach, her eyes a much darker, stormier blue. Beside her stood a massive dog that Tessa at first assumed was the wolf that had saved her from Bluebeard’s fatal stroke. But this was not a wolf and it was smaller, which wasn’t saying much as its shoulder reached the woman’s hips. The dog’s fur was thick and deep black, its paws large and powerful. Its eyes glowed a steady orange-red that looked not unlike two tiny fires in its face. The woman and her dog stared at Bluebeard’s body, then looked to Snow. Although Tessa could not read her expression, it made her shudder.

Brand spoke, perhaps on accident, from the corner of the room where he huddled with Micah. “Whoa.”

The woman’s eyes snapped to Brand and Micah, and her expression was now clear displeasure.

“Snow?” she asked, a warning tone in just that one word.

“Tal.” Snow said, clipped, clearly not biting.

“Devlo. What a mess,” Tal said flatly, the dog moving from her side to investigate Bluebeard’s body.

“No kidding,” Snow said, “I told The Court we should have waited for you to return. This isn’t exactly my skill set.”

“Clearly,” Tal said, taking stock of the room. “You’re in the Mortal world for half a day and we have a dead 300-year-old Story
and
mortal witnesses?”

“And a murdered Advocate,” Snow added, nodding toward the foyer. Tal left the room and came back a moment later, the dog trotting at her side.

“Tova,” Tal said in that same strange language that Tessa was sure she had never heard before. She watched Tal carefully. “Hecuba, search the house,” Tal said, nodding to the dog who took off.

“And, of course, there’s that,” Snow said, gesturing disdainfully in Tessa’s general direction.

“What?” Tessa asked, looking down at herself and then back at Snow.

The woman named Tal really looked at Tessa for the first time and let out a breath of shock, “Yae Simane.”

Snow nodded, “I know. She’s The Last.”

Tal turned to Snow, “Does The Court know?”

“Not yet.”

“We must get her there.”

Tessa was fed up. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” she shouted. Neither Snow nor Tal paid her any mind. Tessa looked at Brand and Micah, “You guys didn’t see a giant grey wolf anywhere did you?” They both shook their heads. Tessa returned her focus to Snow as she began talking about Brand and Micah again.

“What about her minions?” Snow asked, jutting her chin at Brand and Micah, who didn’t seem to like being talked about either but were arguably even more freaked out than Tessa.

“Well, we can’t take them to Story,” Tal said, her tone suggesting it was out of the question.

“Yes, but then what do we do about them?” Snow said, her teeth gritted, “They have seen far too much.”

Tessa had just about had it and so she yelled at the top of her lungs, “Knock it off!” When Tal and Snow finally looked at her, she added, “And nobody is going anywhere.”

Tal looked at Tessa in a bored way. “Kid, you’ve killed a 300-year-old Story, your Advocate is dead, you’ve got two mortal witnesses, and you’re The Last Tovaien Scion. There’s no way you’re not going to Story.”

Tessa opened her mouth to protest again and Hecuba, who had rejoined the group, growled at her. Tal looked at Snow. “Leave the Mortals here. Maybe Morgana can whip something up to free them of these traumatic memories later on,” she said, casting another glance at Micah and Brand. Micah spoke up this time.

“Um…that sounds a lot like brainwashing or something. I’d like to vote for no brainwashing.”

Tal ignored her and turned to Snow, “Hecuba says the house is clear. I’m opening the doorway.” Snow nodded almost imperceptibly and stepped back. Tal reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small blue pebble made of glass. It looked like an average marble any kid might have. She held it between two steel tipped fingers and then threw it into the air a dozen feet in front of her, shouting, “Yonep ge rupto!”