[7] Form Specifications Rather Than Formal
Jay Waringcrane was an ungrateful sack of shit.
Did he have the minutest, most insignificant inkling how much work went into the operation of even a miniature world like Whitecrosse? How many moving parts must be maintained to operate in an even slightly cohesive way? How often a guiding hand needed to push one thing or another into their proper place to prevent the whole machine combusting? No. No consideration given. He doubted everything, ran off in his own direction, forced an even more frantic scramble to get him back on course. It was only Day 2.
Perfidia Bal Berith's office stood as testament to the nightmare. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling stacked tomes and scrolls that contained the key details of Whitecrosse. By reusing an older world, Perfidia saved herself a lot of initial trouble and a little Humanity, but the downsides became apparent quickly. None of this crap was computerized. The Perfidia of 1642, younger and more eager to please, ignorant of future human technological advancement, had happily operated in the antiquated medium of parchment and quill pen. The Perfidia of 2017, upon fishing all this junk out of storage, only slumped her shoulders in despair.
Nonetheless she got to work. As she expected, the world of Whitecrosse more-or-less remained unchanged since Coke's time. There'd been births and deaths, strife and conflict, disease and hunger, but no real political, social, or technological advancement. This immutability turned out to be a problem, though. For starters, everyone in the world spoke in Shakespearean English: lots of thee, thou, prithee, and so on. Such vernacular would make the world unlivable to a modern teenager, so Perfidia updated it to a more contemporary style. But when she did that, she realized everyone started to use slang that wouldn't feel suitably fantastical or medieval to a 2017 ear, so she had to adjust again, trying to find a mode that sounded old without actually being old.
By the time she solved the language issue (way too much time wasted), she needed to figure out something for Jay to actually do. This took even more work. She sorted through her papers, picked out a principal cast, engineered a problem, and prepared to spring it on Jay the moment he passed through the Door. She was still penning the finishing touches when he returned to her office ready to go, and she hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours, but everything was close enough that she'd have time to prepare the rest on the fly.
It started perfectly fine. He distrusted the harpy sisters like she expected, he beat them even easier than she expected, and he didn't even kill them off which meant she could reuse them instead of having to create new enemies for later. But he smelled a rat with Olliebollen and Perfidia was willing to admit maybe that was her fault, she didn't operate with as much subtlety as she could've—blame her tight deadline—and everything quickly went off the rails. Jay didn't want to rescue the princess. Perfidia couldn't believe it. John Coke never needed a compelling reason to rescue a princess, or slay a dragon, or wage a war against an evil army. In fact Perfidia remembered having the easiest of easy times with Coke, she only needed to chuck another monster his way and that kept him entertained, no mental effort whatsoever.
Through a lot of cleverness on her part, moving some planned events around and adjusting a few details, she finally got Jay to go to the monastery. Then everything really went to shit.
He's gone! Olliebollen said to her. The fairy's words appeared on the long piece of parchment sprawled over Perfidia's desk, the ink fading into existence line by line. The hero is gone! What do I do what do I do?!
Perfidia hooked the fingers of one hand around her forehead and imagined how lovely it'd be to crumple her frontal lobe into wastebin trash so she wouldn't have to think about this shit anymore. Her pen scratched:
Go after him.
Buhbuhbut that stupid human prince took him on his horse! They're already so far away! They'll go straight to Flanz-le-Flore, and she's way stronger than me!
Calm down. Your animus is favorable against hers—defensively at least.
It wasn't actually. But on another scroll, one describing the causes and effects of various magical properties within the world, Perfidia quickly scribbled: The Faerie of Rejuvenation can rejuvenate transmogrified objects to their original form. It at least kind of made logical sense.
Really though, Perfidia didn't need Olliebollen to tell her how fucked everything was. It all started with the fight in the forest, when Charm and Charisma and their new friends attacked Jay and company. Because Jay wasted so much time beforehand giving Perfidia the will-he-or-won't-he runaround she hadn't had so much time to thoroughly sketch out the terms of the encounter and it quickly went off the rails. Early in the fight, she presented Jay with two viable options: He could try to heal the wounded Sansaime or he could try to cut Makepeace free from the spiderweb with Sansaime's dagger. Both options would've worked, but Jay—of fucking course—did something Perfidia didn't expect and tried to kill Pluxie himself in some batshit scheme that involved repairing the two halves of Makepeace's spear with Pluxie in the middle. Jay. Jay my boy. Why in a million years would you ever, ever think something so stupid would work? But Perfidia lived to please, and thus in the same scroll where she just gave Olliebollen a way to counteract Flanz-le-Flore's animus she'd written: A rejuvenated object will not yield to anything in the way of its reconstruction.
She reveled in how genuinely happy with himself Jay was when his harebrained scheme worked. Maybe he doubted everything about this world, doubted even his own emotions, but he seemed to have confidence enough in his intelligence. Perfidia tucked that tidbit away for later use.
All good, right? Well it would've been, but Jay then went to cut Makepeace free. This gave Lalum time to use her animus on Pluxie—significantly earlier than Perfidia planned—which meant the entire rhythm of the fight was broken, and while she tried to figure out how to bail Jay out of his self-inflicted mess Makepeace got it into his dumbass head to ride away with Jay on the horse, which would've been all fine and dandy except somehow in the confusion Olliebollen didn't wind up on the horse with them.
Perfidia wanted to scream. Even the simplest moments contained so many complexities that something invariably slipped her attention. John Coke never had this problem. She gave John Coke the relics so he could just cheat his way out of anything, and he was perfectly content to do so. But nooooo, Jay Waringcrane needed to "earn" everything, didn't want it just handed to him! Jay Waringcrane could suck her fucking dick.
On the other page, Olliebollen went on the fritz. Sobbing, wailing, panic, oh boohoo. Idiot fairy didn't know how good it had it. It wasn't going to be culled for underproduction if it screwed this up.
Deep breath. Perfidia told herself: Remember the Humanity. Twenty-nine more days and every juicy bit of it was hers. Twenty-nine days was nothing. Blink of the eye. It could be done.
First she checked a third scroll to see how Jay was doing. He and Makepeace continued to ride away from Pluxie on Makepeace's horse. The current biggest danger was Jay, who probably never rode a horse in his life, falling off and breaking his neck, so Perfidia surreptitiously wrote the following property into Makepeace's horse: Anyone who falls off this horse will be miraculously unharmed. This property made zero sense in the context of the rest of the world, but she assumed people would not fall off the horse enough times to notice a pattern, and she could get rid of it later regardless.
Next she needed some way for them to actually beat Pluxie. Pluxie was near death already, so mainly they needed to sever Lalum's strings, which would render her helpless. Easy. Couple vines, a swamp, an idea whispered into Makepeace's ear—something the egotistical dunce would certainly mistake as his own thought—no problem. It would've been best if Perfidia gave the glory to Jay instead, but Jay already got to stroke his dick over the spear shaft plan and she didn't want to think any harder than she already had.
Okay. Problem one solved. Problem two was what Olliebollen mentioned: Having ridden so far from the road, Jay and Makepeace would almost certainly run afoul of Flanz-le-Flore, the fairy queen of the forest. Honestly Perfidia had planned (or let's say hoped) they would stay on the road the whole time and dodge Flanz-le-Flore altogether, mainly because in the midst of figuring out everything regarding Archbishop Astrophicus and Princess Mayfair and Olliebollen's elves and later the Staff of Lazarus Perfidia never got the chance to look too deeply at Flanz-le-Flore. She was an old fay, a creature who existed in the time of John Coke, unslain by his hand solely because Good King John had a soft spot for the ladies (as long as they put out for him). Ostensibly, though, she'd want Jay for the same reason the archbishop did, which meant she wouldn't try to kill him. Very deliberately Perfidia made sure none of these enemies wanted Jay dead. To confirm, all Perfidia needed to do was fish the page about her out of the stacks and—
Olliebollen's screaming transformed into an unbroken stream of the letter A that quickly swallowed an entire scroll. Unleashing her most exasperated groan yet Perfidia cut the fairy off with her pen:
Calm down.
I don't know what to do, Master! You told me to never leave the hero's side and now he's gone, what do I do, what do I do? You have to tell me, Master!
Munching the feathery end of her quill, Perfidia thought for five seconds. Go back to Sansaime. Heal her. She can track them down and deal with Flanz-le-Flore too, as long as you protect her.
An interval of silence followed.
Well, it was always silent, because the words only appeared on paper. Stillness. That was the word, stillness.
Olliebollen said: Do I HAVE to?
Yes you have to! I'm telling you to do it, so do it!
Unfortunately, Perfidia did not see the scroll light up with text describing Olliebollen's immediate and unquestioning attempt to follow Perfidia's orders.
Is there a way I could save the hero and also let that ugly bitch die?
No.
If I heal her she'll just try to kill me anyway!
No she won't. She's not an idiot like you. She'll work with you if it's the best way to save Makepeace—which it is.
Still a sullen nothingness from Olliebollen's direction. Perfidia drummed her fingers.
Look, Perfidia wrote. Think of it this way. You want to exterminate all of the elves. That's a lot of elves. You'll need someone powerful to do that: The hero. To save the hero, you need Sansaime. So you have two choices: Let this elf die, fail to save the hero, and let all the other elves in the world live. Or save this elf, save the hero, and eventually kill all the elves, including this one. I may need to double-check my math, but I think "all" is more than "one."
Another pause. Finally, Olliebollen said: The hero never even listens to me. How do I know he'll kill the elves?
He will. Perfidia was well aware he might not. Now listen to me and do what I say. Got it?
Ugh. Fine. Fine! said Olliebollen, and finally the fairy flitted off to do Perfidia's bidding.
Another fire extinguished, but the problem with problems was how two more always cropped up by the time you fixed one. She quickly returned to the page depicting Jay and Makepeace on the horse to check if that situation was playing out the way she anticipated. Luckily, it seemed—
Someone pounded a fist on her office door.
Perfidia jolted. Her whole desk shook; from her antique inkwell three black drops flitted onto Olliebollen's scroll, thankfully in a location that didn't disrupt Olliebollen's current activities, which were appearing at a halting, but active, pace. Over the piles and heaps of papers Perfidia stared, at the dull office door half-hidden behind the corpus of Whitecrosse.
Who could it be? Perfidia had no appointments, not today, not for the next month. Nobody visited her otherwise.
Another knock. Even harder.
Poor timing all things considered, but Perfidia wondered. Someone who came to her without an appointment—they might be desperate, in need of something simple and fast. Money. Money people often came with that kind of urgency, and money people were quickest and easiest to convince to sign a contract.
Her eyes slanted to watch as Makepeace sliced the strings puppeteering Pluxie while Jay landed unharmed after being bucked from the horse. Olliebollen meanwhile snuck past Lalum and the twins (Lalum being doubly distracted controlling Pluxie's body and stitching up Charisma's knife wound) and fluttered above Sansaime, expelling after a too-healthy pause a puff of healing magic. So everything, for the moment, operated smoothly.
Someone stood behind that door, someone with Humanity, someone who might render her need to wrangle Jay's tomfoolery null. She could at the very least take five or ten minutes to assess what they wanted, give it to them if it was easy, or pencil them in for a later appointment if it wasn't.
Perfidia chipped off the tiniest fraction of the partial Humanity she got from Jay Waringcrane, a fraction of a fraction of a percent, and used that power to make the piles of parchment vanish for a few minutes. Instantly her office resumed its ordinary tidy look, a homely cherry desk and a few shelves of tasteful technical books.
"Please come in," she said.
Her heart leapt when the door opened and not one but two people walked into her office. And it thudded, hard, like a big glowing rock against her ribcage, when she sensed their combined Humanity, Humanity that might satisfy not just her current quota but take a big bite out of next year's too. Then it all came to a cold dead standstill when she took one look at their faces and knew immediately one of them was Jay Waringcrane's older sister.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
It was her eyes—dark and sunken, raccoon-like—and her expression—sheer and sour—that gave it away. Otherwise she lacked his ramshackle demeanor, his eerily languid motions that could snap to rigidity in an unexpected instant. In a trim, professional navy blue skirt suit she possessed the exact kind of businesslike poise Perfidia herself tried to exude, but none of the forced clumsiness. All with her was an empire of economics. Clacking on heels she came to a stop midway into the office, shifted her weight, and placed a hand on one cocked hip as she levied her gaze downward to force Perfidia deep into the seat of her chair. Her partner, a broad-shouldered hulk of a man standing at least six foot seven, looked like her bodyguard despite the informal looseness of the tie around his neck.
"So what are you," the sister said, devoid of all heat, "some sort of demon?"
"Devil," Perfidia corrected, clearing her throat afterward. "My name's Perfidia Bal Berith, but you can call me Fidi. Would ya like to take a seat, Miss—"
"We'll cut the crap. My name is Shannon Waringcrane and this is my associate, Scott Dalton Swaino II. We're looking for my brother, Jay Waringcrane." Her wrist flicked, and seemingly out of her cuff like a magic trick she produced a small photograph of Mr. Exalted Hero himself wearing a high school graduation cap and looking like he'd rather be dead. "Have you seen him."
Perfidia leaned forward. Squinted, returned back to her seat to retrieve her reading glasses from their case. Putting them on, she leaned forward again, blinked a couple times, and shook her head. "Nope. Never."
A perfectly-executed lie, none of the previous anxiety that marred her interview with Jay two days prior. Perfidia didn't need to do much to handle this situation. As long as she gave absolutely nothing away, they lacked any power over her, no matter how much they suspected.
Shannon scrutinized her, seeking flaws where there were none. One heel clicked as she half-turned toward her "associate" and conferred with him in low tones. Perfidia kept her hands on her desk and twiddled her thumbs. Had these two already contacted the police? That should've been the end of it. Especially a woman like this, a woman of facts and figures. Did she not trust the police to do their job? Normally these types put utmost faith into any kind of authority, seeing in it the same power they saw in themselves. Or was Shannon one of those types who believed more in herself than even the towering edifices of her society?
It wasn't Shannon who moved next. It was the big guy, Scott Dalton Swaino (the Second), who frankly Perfidia hadn't expected to speak at all. He held in front of him an ID card.
The card was the one thing in this world Perfidia Bal Berith hoped never to see.
United States Department of the Treasury. Internal Revenue Service. This is to certify that Scott Dalton Swaino II whose signature and picture appear below is duly commissioned as: Internal Revenue Officer.
Soon after, Shannon quickly flicked out her own badge as though she only did so as a reluctant favor. Keeping deathly from her face to her shoulders, Perfidia slowly snaked one hand under her desk to the small drawer where she kept her last resort.
Why bother? Jay had said. To graduate and get a job as an accountant or something, like my sister?
He said accountant. He hadn't said IRS. Jay you bumblefuck, you didn't mention the important little factoid that your sister worked for the I-R-fucking-S, kind of fucking important you absolute sack of filth.
"So yeah, we're with the IRS," Scott Dalton Swaino II said, a big booming bass voice that fit his big body to a T. "Cleveland branch."
"I suspect you may be somewhat unfamiliar with the standard operating procedure of the IRS, Miss Bal Berith," said Shannon. "While it is somewhat unorthodox for the IRS to meet you in person without sending you written warning ahead of time, given the severity and length of your suspected tax noncompliance we felt justified in a more direct approach. As a revenue agent, my job is to conduct audits to assess tax liability. I'm a member of the Small Business and Self-Employed division, so your case falls under my jurisdiction, and what I'm seeing here is quite concerning, Miss Bal Berith. Would you mind answering a few questions?"
She spoke in the dry, disinterested tone Perfidia knew well: the tone authority took when it no longer needed to impress or wow its subjects into submission, when it possessed full confidence of the power it held over those beneath it. Like she considered Perfidia chattel, or an insect even, something too insignificant to waste breath on if not for the general respect given to formality and the proper process of things.
But Perfidia could not allow injured Pride to even enter the picture. She had to think and focus, even though that disastrous sense of fear kept creeping and crawling higher up her spine.
Ignoring Perfidia's pause, Shannon continued.
"Now, am I correct in assuming that you are the sole proprietor of your business?"
What Perfidia had to remember, what she had to tell herself despite the panic, was that, IRS agent or not, Shannon Waringcrane did not come here, now, because of taxes. The tax shit was fluff, or a trap, or something.
"I wanna speak to a lawyer," Perfidia said.
"Allow me to stress that currently, your case is not a criminal investigation. Neither Mr. Swaino nor I are affiliated with law enforcement."
"I requested a lawyer."
A glint spread in Shannon's eye and the twitch of a smile spread and Perfidia got the same sickly feeling from her botched talk with Jay. These two were more alike than Perfidia cared for. "Miss Bal Berith, while your case is not currently a criminal investigation, it easily can become one. The line between negligence and fraud is quite narrow. You of course have a right to an attorney, but at any time I can refer your case to the CID—Criminal Investigation Division. I doubt you want that, Miss Bal Berith. On the other hand, if you can answer my questions to my satisfaction right now, there will be no need for any further action. Do you understand what I'm saying, Miss Bal Berith?"
Perfidia understood. And she assumed the only question Shannon truly wanted answered was the one she opened with: Where was Jay Waringcrane.
None of it mattered if the tax talk was just a bluff. "You still haven't told me what you think I did wrong."
"Miss Bal Berith," said Shannon, "when was the last time you filed Form 1040 or Form 1040-SR?"
"I don't know, I don't have these form names memorized, that's why I want to talk to an attorney."
"Let me simplify it then. When was the last time you filed any tax form?"
If Shannon let her call a lawyer, let her buy time and figure out exactly what documents she needed, she might be able to use Jay's Humanity to falsify them. Might. Because she only had a small fraction of his Humanity, and if Shannon actually dug into the records Perfidia would need to falsify many, many documents. Actually, Perfidia already knew she couldn't possibly falsify all the documents she needed with so little Humanity. She operated her business for over one hundred and fifty years in this country and never filed a tax return once.
"I file one every year."
"Only one form?" Shannon and Swaino said in extremely curious unison.
"I mean, my accountant files it. I don't know the specifics of how many forms there are."
"Miss Bal Berith, lying to us will only make the case toward willful malfeasance more clear. Let me remind you that negligence—meaning an accidental or unintentional mistake—carries only a monetary penalty on your tax bill, whereas fraud—knowingly violating a legal duty—means jail time. You should endeavor to be truthful when making claims we can easily disprove."
It cut. Cut bad. Because Perfidia knew Shannon hadn't walked into this office with an airtight tax case against her. How could she? Jay went missing only one day prior. There was no time. But Shannon operated from the onset with utter confidence in herself. Why? Because in the mind of someone like her, someone fully engaged within this world's machinery, a shady character like a devil must be cheating on their taxes, somehow. Those who are bad do bad things, those who are good do good things. No exceptions. And in this case, she just so happened to be right.
"Look," said Perfidia. "My company doesn't make any money. I don't make any money."
"Doesn't exempt you from filing," said Swaino.
"Furthermore," said Shannon, "Miss Bal Berith, you wear an expensive suit and a diamond wristwatch. You operate your business out of prime real estate in downtown Cleveland. How do you afford all this if you're not, as you claim, receiving any income? Even if what you say is true, I'm starting to see perfectly reasonable grounds for the CID to get involved."
"I," said Perfidia, "I receive gifts."
"Gifts? Oh, excellent!" Shannon's professionalism cracked into a ghost of a smile and Perfidia flinched. "Gifts in excess of $10,000 annually—which I'm certain constitutes your office rent, if not that rather flashy Rolex—must be reported to the IRS by the person who gave them. Why don't you tell us who gifted these things to you so we can check their records to confirm?"
"Uh—Um."
"I wonder, Miss Bal Berith. Truly. If we look deeper into the money you're spending, what would we find? Where, I wonder, did the money really come from?"
Shannon's face shone bright under the tasteful fixtures of Perfidia's office. That face was daring her: Go on. Make up any excuse. Call a lawyer even. The gaze of the IRS is that of a gorgon. You'll be dust by the time we're done with you, one way or another.
She'd backed Perfidia into a corner.
That was her mistake.
Perfidia's fingers gripped the underside of her drawer and slowly maneuvered it open bit by bit. Shannon operated in a world of order, where even criminals adhered to some baseline of law. To an extent, Perfidia did too. But underpinning Perfidia's world, underpinning that black maw humans once named with such awe and terror—that world called Hell—was a chaos mankind wished to never see again.
Congratulations, Shannon Waringcrane. You outmaneuvered a devil, just like your brother. But unlike your brother, this devil didn't need something from you—no matter how much Humanity you had. So the devil had no reason to sit here and smile. No reason to take your oh-so-elevated attitude, your mechanical sense of superiority, your clipped clean professional bitch shtick. No reason for the devil to stew in her Pride. No reason for the devil to eat another acid defeat.
Her hand wrenched open the drawer that she'd already half-opened and her other hand shot inside to seize the revolver kept there. This was Perfidia's chaos. To any lowlife crook on the streets it probably looked more like order than chaos. But to the Shannon Waringcranes of the world, the bureaucrats and pencil pushers, this small chrome object was anathema to the entire organized world they inhabited. One simply cannot resort to brute violence! One simply cannot murder! There are laws! Well, see what all those human laws mean, see what all your tax forms matter against the chaos of Hell!
Perfidia wanted to watch those sunken sleep-deprived eyes so smugly stoic in their sense of authority change, twitch, snap out of that banal righteousness and exhibit for a moment the true bestial fear of the base organism hidden beneath the heaped layers of tidy society. To Perfidia's now twice-wounded Pride, no sight could provide more satisfaction, and so rising from her seat she flourished the gun with the same theatrical aplomb she typically reserved only for her slavish at-your-service act, just to savor the final flash of life those eyes would ever make before a bullet traveled at unfathomable velocity between them—
A force hefted Perfidia from halfway standing to in the air to on her back. Her head clapped against the hard tile floor. Her thoughts flew out of her alongside the single harsh exhalation ripped from her chest and before she even remembered the gun her fingers were horrifically pried apart and it flicked out of her grasp. That was the least of her concerns. The next moment a fist made of solid brick rammed into her solar plexus and her body involuntarily spasmed an agonized shudder.
Scott Dalton Swaino II was on top of her, his bulk eclipsing the light above to transform him into the looming surface of a moon before her dazed and watery vision. He loosed a wolflike howl:
"FUCK YEAH!" And another: "FUCK YEAH BITCH!"
How had he—how had he—
"That's right bitch! That's fucking RIGHT! That's Buckeye ball for you! That's how we fucking did it in 2012 bitch! UNDEFEATED!"
He rose, standing over her, pounding both pectoral muscles with a barrel drumming motion of his fists, lifting one foot high to bring it down with a seismic clap inches next to her head before leaning over and screaming directly into her face:
"Four fucking sacks on the season bitch. That's fourteenth highest in the best division in college football! BIG TEN BABY! OHIO FUCKING STATE BABY! I STILL FUCKING GOT IT BITCH! I coulda gone pro bitch. I coulda gone fucking pro and you wanted to fuck with me? WITH ME?"
Oh god. He was going to maul her face off chimpanzee-style.
But he drew back, gesticulating one tree-sized arm to Shannon. "I once sacked Kirk Cousins. Kirk FUCKING Cousins. And this bitch thought she could get the draw on ME? I am a god. I am a deity. I am fucking DIONYSUS HIMSELF."
"I believe Hermes would be more fitting." Shannon picked up the revolver and handled it with utmost delicacy as she carefully returned it to the open drawer of Perfidia's desk.
"Hermes Ares Hercules I don't give a shit. I plowed that bitch into the GRAVE. I destroyed her. I fucking ANNIHILATED her."
As the rattle in Perfidia's brain subsided coherent thought recoalesced and she realized what happened, the exact series of events that divided her drawing the gun from her supine on the floor. She blinked away the dancing brutish shadow of Scott Dalton Swaino II and wondered at her error as he bellowed on: "Kirk Cousins! Kirk Cousins, I was on that skinny bitch's ass faster than—" Pride. Pride, the error of them all. Oh well. Was it blind luck that Shannon happened to bring with her an accomplished takedown artist or was it something else, some sort of compensation for weakness, a willful magnetism to the disorderly within Shannon Waringcrane's ordered world?
Swaino, erratic collection of whizzing gaseous molecules on infinite rebound through the narrow confines of the office, now cared only for himself; even Shannon dropped out of the imperial breadth of his aggrandizement. By chance he stepped and his foot appeared not far from Perfidia's waist. Shannon had stupidly closed the drawer with the gun in it and left herself unarmed, and both of them in ignorance believed a devil needed the weapons of man to rend flesh. While Perfidia remained where he threw her, the lithe tangle of her tail slowly unraveled, baring the barb at its tip as it curved like a snake, poised to gore—
"Dalt," said Shannon.
Without even looking Swaino brought his foot down and crushed Perfidia's tail into the tile, grinding with his heel until she screamed and bent up double.
"Now get off your grandstand and keep her down," said Shannon, and after having spent the past minute acting like an ape Swaino at once transformed into a dog and did exactly as master asked.
Needless to say, he gave her zero leeway, even rolling her over so he could fold her arms behind her back and keep a better eye on her tail in a maneuver she could only assume he learned from watching Hollywood actors pretend to be cops on TV.
Shannon's heels clacked across the tile before she crouched with two hands tastefully holding down her skirt beside Perfidia's face. Her legs were smooth and young and pretty and Perfidia despised her, despised her even worse than her idiot guard dog, because at least he only overpowered her with a brute physical prowess Perfidia never professed to possess. It was Shannon, though, whose simple presence revolted her, who would've driven Perfidia even in this compromised position to spit in her face if Shannon wasn't smart enough to keep her face out of spitting range. Maybe with luck Perfidia could get a good globule on an ankle.
No. Perfidia Bal Berith you stupid idiot get your head on straight and focus, now was not the time for petty displays like that. The situation was bad but it wasn't over. She still had some Humanity from Jay. Not much. Not enough to do anything crazy. The cost of using Humanity ramped up when a human saw directly the changes you made to the machinery of the world—they were never supposed to see the gears in action.
And Perfidia, cooling off, realized that even if they took their eyes off her and she manifested a weapon and killed them, she might still be in trouble. She had friends in the police department, sure. But murder was the type of serious offense that couldn't always be swept under the rug, especially not when it was committed brazenly in one's own office. Previously, blinded by Pride, Perfidia hadn't considered that even a successful kill would cost Humanity to clean up. Then what was her move? She had tools. Options. If she acted like a maniac she'd only get the tables turned on her again, and at that point she might as well not even wait for the cullings, she might as well just stick that revolver in her mouth and blast her brains to kingdom come.
"Well, Miss Bal Berith," said Shannon, "I guess after that stunt you pulled we can dispense with the smoke-and-mirrors."
What could Perfidia do? There had to be something. Use your fucking brain. Be smarter than these stupid, easily manipulated humans. Shannon—and Swaino—must have a weakness. Play on that. Give them what they want until they were watching nothing but the prize you held before them—that was when you made your move.
"Now, if you don't want your life ruined financially and otherwise," Shannon said, "you'll tell me where my brother is."
The idea blossomed instantly. It had risks. She needed Jay to remain alive on his own, without her guiding hand, for at least the next few hours. But neither Flanz-le-Flore nor the archbishop wanted him dead, so that shouldn't be a problem. Emphasis on shouldn't. A risk she needed to eat, though, because this idea was her best option otherwise.
"Fine"—Perfidia putting on the best face of wounded Pride any had ever worn—"Fine. I'll tell you. No, I won't just tell you—I'll show you where he is."