[9] The Same Wrong Even More Ruthlessly

Flanz-le-Flore snapped her fingers. Charisma turned into a pumpkin. Flanz-le-Flore snapped her fingers. Charm turned into a squirrel.

That should've been the end of it, considering neither a pumpkin nor a squirrel were capable of flying through the air with the same speed and maneuverability. Flanz-le-Flore even turned her gaze and squinted toward the dust plume from which Olliebollen's voice came, holding unsnapped fingers at the ready. But Charisma the pumpkin, instead of hurtling into the ground as fast as gravity would force it, decided that being a pumpkin wasn't enough to stop it. In refutation of all known laws of physics it diverted its path at a sheer angle upward—directly into Flanz-le-Flore's face.

Flanz-le-Flore's head jerked back and her imitation of the Cleveland Browns hat spiraled upward as the pumpkin pulled back and plowed into her stomach. At the same time, Charm the squirrel caught up to her sister and latched onto Flanz-le-Flore's shin, where it immediately drove its thick nutcracking incisors and drew a bright globule of amber-colored blood.

Flanz-le-Flore snapped her fingers. The hat, reaching the apex of its upward movement, transformed into a sharp wooden spear that Flanz-le-Flore seized with her other hand and jabbed at the pumpkin as it attempted a third hit. Based on trajectory and momentum the pumpkin ought to have impaled itself deep onto the spear, but the same physics-defying force yanked it back at the last moment so the tip only dragged against the thick gourdy shell and spilled a small splattering of innards onto the grass.

That was when Jay noticed the silvery strings spanning from the pumpkin and the squirrel to Olliebollen's dust cloud. That was also when Jay sprung to action.

Two options: Flee or fight, and faster than the possibility of logically processing the better he chose fight. He made it one step toward Flanz-le-Flore with his metal bat raised when her bruised and battered face turned toward him and a single snap transmogrified him into—something.

Something small. His bat, his jacket, and his jeans—everything on his body that contained even some metal—plummeted to the ground around him, suddenly gigantic, while his vantage became that of an insect peering up through towering blades of grass. But he wasn't an insect. His nose, twitching, stood out in front of his eyes, spilling long whiskers. His hands were pink furless paws. And when he turned his head and saw his long tail, he recognized himself: a rat.

Jay wondered how exactly he could maintain human-level cognizance given the significant differences in physical structure between human and rodent brains, then decided he had better things to wonder about.

In the battle of titans above him, the wounded pumpkin was reeled back by the silver strings while Flanz-le-Flore turned her attention on the squirrel sucking the blood of her ankle and jabbed at it with the spear. Like the pumpkin, the squirrel jerked back with seemingly no physical impetus, while from its beady squirrel eyes spilled black tears that transformed into whipping tendrils. Even coming from a squirrel, Jay recognized Charm's fake paradise magic attack. Of course—Charm just gulped down a dose of Flanz-le-Flore's blood. Flanz-le-Flore was unsurprised by this development; a snap and Charm the squirrel became Charm the... small spiky ball. A sea urchin. A creature with no eyes. The tendrils tears, poised to wrap around Flanz-le-Flore's ankles, no longer possessed a source and splattered useless to the ground.

Makepeace finally entered the picture. He lifted his shield to cover his face while his other hand drew his sword. One snap, one instant, and that hand turned into a hoof. It fumbled against the sword's hilt, capable of holding nothing, and the sword dropped like Charm's tears.

But nothing else about Makepeace changed. If Flanz-le-Flore couldn't change Makepeace's nonmetal head behind his metal shield, then line of sight must be a factor.

Great to know! Better to know before Jay got himself turned into a rat, because as it stood he didn't have anything to do.

Makepeace meanwhile didn't give a shit about one hand being a hoof because he charged Flanz-le-Flore with his shield as potent a weapon against her as the sword. Flanz-le-Flore held out her hand in posture to snap, her bright eyes scanning with electronic speed every inch of what Makepeace presented to her for a weakness, saw none, and unaware or uncaring that Charm the sea urchin stabbed her boot elevated into the skybox as though drawn by strings of her own until she eluded Makepeace's reach.

"Jay, get out of here!" Makepeace shouted, until Flanz-le-Flore got high enough to see over his shield and snapped his head into—what else—an ass head. Then all Makepeace said was EE-AH, EE-AH.

Risen above, bathed in light of her own invention, Flanz-le-Flore spread her arms wide, kicked the sea urchin off her foot, and hurled her spear like a javelin at Makepeace. His shield was already in position to block it, but Flanz-le-Flore snapped midflight and the spear became a boulder that bulldozed Makepeace backward, over the creek, into a dense tangle of weeds as his body flipped and turned.

The back of her hand wiped the blood from her upper lip as her gaze settled on Jay. Fight having failed, Jay decided to listen to Makepeace's advice and scampered the opposite direction.

Flanz-le-Flore's voice followed him:

"Intrude upon my court, my kingdom, my sanctuary? Wound my body? Befoulers of yourselves and all you touch; traitors to your respective races! Flanz-le-Flore is a just and benevolent queen, so for the sake of this world I'll, hm yes, I'll turn you into compost for this garden's flowers!"

The speech may have intimidated more if her voice wasn't phlegmatic with nose blood. Far more threatening was the sound of several snapped fingers in rapid succession.

"Bring me their heads, my very dear and beloved subjects. Do leave only the hero alive."

Out of the sky dropped objects. The objects, Jay's poorly-perspectived rat vision soon realized, were once Flanz-le-Flore's fairies and were now animals. A snarling wolf landed near the rosebushes, a bull and a unicorn in a row of topiaries. The gazebo exploded as an elephant came crashing through its roof and what remained teetered on a few stilt-sized supports. A tiger, then a lion, then a cheetah landed as a trio. A hawk swooped overhead, a hippopotamus thrashed in the creek and decimated the quaint wooden bridge, a giraffe showed up lacking any particular violent capabilities unless the idea was to instill vertigo in anyone who craned their neck to see its head rubbing the ceiling. A bear almost pathetic in appearance compared to Pluxie reared up and roared and once the whole spectrum of charismatic megafauna known to Middle Ages Europe had manifested out of thin air Flanz-le-Flore gave up on creativity and started, with hallucinatory speed, to snap her remaining followers into wasps, lots and lots and lots of wasps that filled the air with a fur-bristling buzz.

In front of Jay dropped an ordinary housecat, calico. Jade eyes with black slits for pupils stared him down. Compared to his rat self, it towered as tall as a house, and a dim fact heard somewhere rattled in the back of his rat brain: pound-for-pound the deadliest killer in the world. The most dangerous and widespread invasive species on Earth. Genocider of rodents and small birds to drop as gifts at the foot of their owner's bed.

Faced with this behemoth, Jay had ample reason for terror. But Jay once had a cat as a kid. Mushroom the cat. He saw her try to jump from the couch to the shelf, smack face-first into the wall, and flop to the floor. Cats were stupid. If these cats had the brains of fairies, they were even stupider.

The calico pounced. Stupid it may be, slow it was not. Jay darted left, right, left and right and left and right as the forepaws battered all around him, the frantic type of dance a cat probably won sooner or later with a rat, so he decided to do something the cat would not expect, which was leap with all the energy his back legs could muster and whap his paws into the cat's nose.

All of the cat's dumb face squished back into itself and its eyes squeezed shut. Obviously Jay did no meaningful damage, but that moment of stunned surprise gave him a window to bolt. Between the tall grass he sprinted, four limbs in perfect harmony like he lived his whole life in this body, back the direction he came from, where Flanz-le-Flore hovered in the sky rapid snapping more of her followers into wasps while Makepeace waved his shield wildly at the hippopotamus who for all its rotundity dared not take another step toward the gleaming metal.

Jay tried to look over his shoulder to see whether the cat had recovered and if so how close behind it was but he immediately realized his head lacked the same range of motion as a human's. Instead he focused on his goal in front of him, the parts left behind when he first transformed: his jacket, jeans, and baseball bat.

Even without sight, he could sense the cat racing directly behind him, the calamitous patter of its paws against the soil, the shuffling of hundreds of blades of grass as they made way for its gargantuan body. Rat instincts pumped adrenaline into him as he pushed his unfamiliar musculature to its limit, faster, faster, and in the span of one second from when he started he was there.

He dove into the base of his jacket and burrowed inside, creeping under the long cool seam that contained the zipper certain in a few more milliseconds he'd feel the paw of the cat come down, shredding retractable claws through the fabric to dice him. Which had to be another instinctual rat thing, since he logically knew not only was the cat not supposed to kill him but also that it shouldn't want to get too close to the jacket's metal zipper. Sure enough, when the paws came down upon his snug, cozy, dark hideaway, they landed to the sides of him, patting instead of slashing: trepidatious. Jay would've breathed a sigh of relief if that was a thing rats did.

Instead he sat in his burrow, useless.

Outside, insanity raged. Animal howls encompassing fully disparate taxonomies mingled with erratic proclamations from Flanz-le-Flore, the growing whirr of a hundred wasps, and—increasingly—odd fleshy squelches Jay couldn't fathom the origin of.

Meanwhile Jay was a rat. He realized keeping himself safe from the cat didn't even matter. If he remained cooped up here unmoving, it served Flanz-le-Flore just as well as if the cat caught him by the scruff of the neck. Essentially, being here removed him from the fight, rendered him without purpose, his fate to be decided by the actions of various others irrespective of himself. Yet again he regaled Perfidia with a (mental) shrug of exasperation, wondering if this exciting turn of events was intended to satisfy him.

There was no Perfidia to respond. Only this black, furry jacket interior. And he remained there, a rat, railing at nothing, railing at Perfidia Bal Berith, a glorified used car salesman he already outsmarted. Didn't Flanz-le-Flore tell him? Everyone here was a husk, Makepeace, Sansaime, Olliebollen, Flanz-le-Flore herself. Only he had Humanity, only he possessed the power to change the world, and that was exactly what he asked for wasn't it? Exactly. Or maybe Perfidia made Flanz-le-Flore say that to—Jesus fucking Christ what was he doing? Becoming a rat really did morph his brain because apparently he lost all object permanence and believed just because he couldn't see anything there was nothing to do but sink into his own ridiculous logical self-destruction, like if there wasn't someone else to destroy he had no choice but to turn his weapons on himself.

His enemy lurked not a few inches away from him, peering intently at the slight bulge his tiny rat body made in the jacket. It purred softly, it pressed its paws to prevent him from escaping from either side. That cat was something he could outsmart. That cat was an especial sort of dumb; the kind that couldn't even learn from past mistakes.

Jay jumped up. This time he took with him the jacket under which he hid, including the metal zipper, and brought that zipper straight into the cat's face.

Expecting a yowl, he received a sizzle. It started soft, lost amid the animal cries, and for a few seconds Jay remained within the burrow of his jacket thinking that the brief point of contact between the zipper and the cat's face wasn't enough to do any serious damage regardless of what effects metal had on fairies. But the sizzle continued, it grew louder, more intense. Jay scurried to the neck of his jacket and poked his head out cautiously to watch what happened next.

A charcoal line, like a grill mark, spread vertically up the cat's face. It seared its chin and nose. Scent of burning fur overwhelmed the fruit and flowers and only when the sizzling streak spread to split apart the skin and drop thick strands of blood the consistency of broth did the cat-fairy comprehend its suffering and loose the yowl Jay expected. Skull shone through, white bone bleached without a trace of blood as the liquid transformed to steam and the edges of the wound cauterized.

Past the cat Jay also discovered the source of the horrific squelching noises he heard previously. Many of Flanz-le-Flore's animals lay slumped or writhing, stuck by shiny little needles that caught the gleam of the sunlight above, their howls morphing from animalistic to those of souls in Hell as the flesh dissolved where the pins stuck and the pins slowly slid deeper inside their liquefying bone. Towering within a plume of Olliebollen's pixie dust, Sansaime stood, her head tilted down so her hood covered her entirely, her hands spread with more of the shiny pins balanced on her fingertips. Jay wasn't sure if it was Olliebollen's dust, the complete concealment of skin, or some property of the cloak that prevented Flanz-le-Flore from transmogrifying her. Didn't matter. A bear, a wolf, a lioness rushed at her in a coordinated attack and with only the slightest motions she sent her pins into their faces, which promptly began to bubble.

"Such foul brutish beasts, rather foul indeed if I do say so myself," Flanz-le-Flore said over the growing graveyard of corpses. "You there, swarm that one together, she hasn't enough metal in the world to overcome you if you only strike at once. Probably."

She spoke to the swarm of wasps, who buzzed around Makepeace's ass head as he waved his shield wildly, and gave a taut imperial fling of her arm, the fingers still snapping to add to the multitude. The wasps obeyed immediately, leaving the bloated and miserable-looking donkey head and whipping in a corkscrew toward Sansaime.

Jay didn't get to see what happened next because the cat came back. Its face was splitting apart at the middle, its eyes becoming unloosened within their sockets, but in singleminded determination it kept to its goal. A paw raised with gleaming claws bared and this time it didn't seem to mind if it destroyed itself slashing at the zipper as long as it got to him.

His bat was lying nearby. He dove at it, his full weight rammed the handle at the same time the cat swiped. It wasn't anywhere near the force of a swing, but he managed to hit the handle hard enough to make the bat lazily revolve on its central point. The cat, already mid-lunge, its vision clearly fucked up, only realized at the last possible moment. Instead of bringing its claws down on Jay, it shot out all four limbs to catch itself. Its feline reflexes managed the feat, but it wasn't able to recover quick enough to stop the bat from gently spinning into one of its forepaws, rendering said forepaw a red melting mass in a matter of moments.

Jay lacked any moment of exultation because something immediately seized him from behind. The long claws of a talon gripped him as he twisted his body as much as he could and discovered he'd been snatched by Charisma, reverted into her normal state as she sped through the air. They traveled toward the cloud of dust that enveloped Sansaime, where the horde of wasps was charging. The front of the horde, as soon as it touched the cloud, immediately morphed back into the same eclectic collection of fairies Jay encountered in Flanz-le-Flore's court. Suddenly without stingers—and much bigger targets—Sansaime was making short work of them with her knife, even though they often flopped to the floor already regenerating from the effects of Olliebollen's magic.

Flanz-le-Flore snapped and Charisma became a snail, which lacked hands to hold Jay or his bat, but intuiting how little time she had left she'd already thrown him instants prior. His spastic rat body flailed in the air until another hand reach out and caught him and he found himself staring into the bloodshot and bleary eyes of Charm, who hovered over Olliebollen's cloud.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Immediately Flanz-le-Flore snapped again but Jay was already leaving Charm's hands before she poofed into a sunflower. Charisma caught him, back to normal after passing through the pixie dust.

The twins were playing hot potato with him. And it was working. He wasn't even getting his own chance to go through Olliebollen's dust. He remained a rat.

He and Charisma landed to the side of the spider girl, Lalum, and Charm—after a quick detransformative dip through the dust herself—soon joined. Lalum hunched amid a tangle of large tree roots, hidden safely behind the cloud of dust, and although Flanz-le-Flore continued to snap, it wasn't any of them who transformed.

"I got the hero!" Charisma said. "Let's scram while the rest are distracted."

Jay opened his mouth and drove his incisors into her clawed finger. With a yelp she let go, but before he even hit the floor a bundle of webbing wrapped around him and pulled him straight into the open door of the one of the cages Lalum kept around her waist.

"Rat bastard! Biting me like that, what's even the point? I hope I tasted awful you nasty brat, I hope I—"

"Heyeyey! I see you! Yeah! I see you trying to steal the hero!"

Olliebollen. She twinkled in the darkness of the forest landscape they'd entered the moment they left the artificial garden. A background of dust shimmered behind her while Flanz-le-Flore urged in desperate tones her forces onward into an increasing symphony of fleshy curdling. Olliebollen was shaking back and forth at speeds Jay only saw during her psychopathic fits, but she lacked that same wrath in her eyes. She was shaking fast to expel as much dust as possible.

Please, Jay wanted to squeak at her, but knew from Makepeace's braying that vocal chords didn't receive the same stability as brainpower post-transformation. Please just sprinkle some damn dust on me and make me human again. He was tired of being a rat.

For once, Olliebollen seemed to have the right idea. She fluttered toward him in a spastic zigzag, but Charm clipped into her path, hands spread and fingers twitching in preparation to snatch her.

What happened next, Jay didn't see. Lalum dropped the threads that controlled the twins and scuttled to make her escape with Jay in tow.

Her eight legs moved fast but she paused frequently, glancing hither and thither, her hands gripping her shoulders. The world around them changed, a change aided by the darkness that made boundaries between things unclear. What at one moment was an open wooded area with tree trunks rising became within a few skittery spans a twisting castle corridor, the floor a green-black checkerboard and the walls stone brick and mortar, adorned by lavish tapestries and paintings of Flanz-le-Flore in costumes ranging from dresses made solely of flowers to a dirty and boyish pants and blouse that much better fit her worn boots. The boots were the only constant among the portraits, Flanz-le-Flore's hair and even skin tone shifting to better match any given ensemble.

Then the corridor ended and they emerged into a pastoral scene brightly-lit with no sign of forest canopy, only a sky strewn by picturesque clouds. Fauns piped to adoring nymphs in rapt attention, the sound of rustic music rendered subterranean by its immense echo. Lalum paused, her body jittering so hard it shook Jay's cage, and she held up her palms to shield her face from either the sun or the woodland amalgams who turned without ceasing their music to deliver invitations in some foreign tongue that she join their idylls.

Lalum panicked, picked a direction, and sprinted as fast as her awkward body allowed. She squeezed herself in a crevice between two large rocks and remained wedged there, breathing heavily and sending fitful stares at the narrow sliver of light above.

She worked threads between her hands and held her hands where Jay could see. The threads read:

DO YOU NOUGH THE WHAY OUT?

Nough? Oh—know. Weird way to misspell it.

"Squeak squeak," Jay squeaked, which was rat for "The same way you came in dumbass."

The faces of fauns and nymphs emerged in the light above and Lalum squeaked too before burying her face her hands. Makepeace said the monstrous women were once ordinary girls tricked by the archbishop. That in mind Jay could only feel sorry for Lalum. He remembered Pluxie, begging for help as she drowned in the mud...

He blotted his mind so he remembered nothing and tried to focus on escape no matter how improbable. It didn't matter. Above, amid the giggling faces, another face slowly drifted into view, and it was not giggling. Flanz-le-Flore.

"Oh dear. Have you gotten lost? I do apologize. I've made my court a labyrinth, haven't I? What a silly thing to do."

Snap. The first rock forming the crevice became sand. Snap. The second rock became water. The sand and the water splashed into Lalum and became mud, ruining her habit and causing her needlepoint limbs to slip and slide as Flanz-le-Flore's followers thronged her, uttering a low chant.

Only once Lalum whipped her head around and exhausted all other options did she hold up her hands and show Flanz-le-Flore a message:

DONT KILL ME THEY MADE ME DO IT IM SORRY

Accompanied by a doodle of Lalum's face with big pleading eyes and hands clasped to either pray or beg. GOD LOVES YOU ALL, the words shifted to read.

Flanz-le-Flore smiled back, a soft and reassuring smile, and then snapped her fingers and turned one of the fauns into a wolf. Another snap, another wolf, and another, and in a matter of seconds a ring of snarling muzzles surrounded them. Even still Lalum continued to nod her head along to Flanz-le-Flore's pleasant smile, grasping onto the slightest hope that smile presented, until the wolves tightened their approach, hemming her in, and the wayward scuttling motions of her legs took her only closer to yet another set of jagged teeth.

At last she realized and pulled the two metal cages from her hip to wave around wildly as her only weapon to protect herself. Jay slapped against the bars as she swung at the first wolf who leapt, missed entirely, and released the cage once the jaw clamped around her arm. Another wolf crunched down on one of her legs, and a third wolf, a fourth, a fifth, Lalum through her strained sealed lips screaming.

Jay's cage bounced, rolled, came to a stop so Jay could watch as a flurry of waving tails surrounded an increasingly less-visible Lalum, Lalum attempting to coat her own face and throat with thick wads of string, although Jay knew from experience her string didn't defend too well against anything sharp. Then a snap—and he was no longer a rat.

The webbing and the cage that confined his rat body burst around him as he sat on the floor, finally a full-fledged human again.

"There we go," said Flanz-le-Flore over the rips and tears of her brethren, "this is a form that much better suits you. Do bring the hero his clothes, my attendants."

A clutch of fluttering fairies dropped two articles of clothing in front of him: His jacket and his jeans. Jay glanced down and realized he was wearing only his t-shirt and boxers (and hat), which made sense but was frankly embarrassing.

"Your friends have done their absolute best," Flanz-le-Flore continued, floating down to him, extending her hands to him, "but they only serve to annoy me."

A splatter of blood and a severed spider leg flopped not far from Jay's clothes. He glanced at the seething mass of fur under which there was no longer any sign of Lalum, nor any screams, and with his head tilted low to hide his eyes under his hat grimaced.

"I'll kill them all, you know." Her arms remained spread, and Jay watched her hands carefully. "They cannot escape from my court as long as I am its queen. So if you wish to end this needless bloodshed now, you know what you need to do, yes? It's rather very simple, very simple indeed. Simply submit to me, become my husband!"

A heave and the wolves were pushed back as Lalum, now mostly sealed within a cocoon of her own bloody silk, managed to raise her head and gurgle something deep in her throat. She stitched words onto the threads that covered her face: HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME, each successive HELP ME increasingly disheveled and unreadable if not for the context of repetition. Jay suspected the only reason Lalum hadn't been completely eviscerated yet was so Flanz-le-Flore could use her life as a bargaining chip. Which indicated a total lack of understanding about Jay and what he wanted.

Nonetheless, he said: "Okay." He paused, looked again at Flanz-le-Flore's hands, and said it louder: "Okay—okay. Sure. Whatever you say."

"Oh! I knew you'd come around eventually, hero." Flanz-le-Flore nodded to the wolves and they backed away from their prey. The mass that was Lalum flopped to its side, leaking blood, totally motionless. "Fear not, I shall be a dutiful wife to you. How could I not? I've sampled all other entertainments in my time. But I've never made of myself a helpmeet. Of course, we shall know physical pleasures together too, oh yes I rather suspect we will."

Right. Physical pleasures. Flanz-le-Flore liked to get touchy-feely, he knew that from their talk before. In reciprocation, Jay reached his arms to her, matching the gesture she made as she drifted slowly closer.

"Yes." Jay said. "Yes. Right. We will."

Their hands met. He threaded his fingers within hers and stared her in the eye. A romantic gesture of two soon-to-be newlyweds. At least that was how Flanz-le-Flore saw it, her head at a slight loll as her lips parted into a coy sigh.

Jay clenched both his hands and bent back her wrists.

Flanz-le-Flore must've thought he was harmless disarmed of his metal bat. She must've thought she had him in a corner. Even when he had his bat earlier, she hadn't been afraid of getting close to him, wrapping her arms around him. After all, wasn't it her who told him he was weak, too weak to survive this world without help?

"Don't underestimate me," he said.

Small hands. Small, brittle bones that splintered as he put all possible force into his grip. She screamed and her face became something awful, something pained and imploring and for a moment he wanted to stop but knew he couldn't, felt her thumbs—the only fingers he didn't have in his grip—try to strike against his wrists as though that'd somehow conjure the snap needed to render him inert again. He crumpled his hands into balled fists, her hands trapped inside, and through the pulsing of tendons felt her fingers snap.

The wolves rushed forward to rip him apart but he relinquished Flanz-le-Flore's ruined hands and wrapped his arms around her head and shouted: "Get back or I kill her, it'll only take a moment!" Of course he had no idea how to snap a neck like action heroes did in movies, if that was even possible or just Hollywood artifice, but the wolves bought it—for the time being. They backed up, crouching low, snarling.

Flanz-le-Flore held up her hands and the fingers on each dangled bent and twisted. A sob rose in her throat and tears rolled down the sides of her face. "Why? Hero, why? Why!"

When Jay glanced over his shoulder the wolves behind him had advanced an inch and when he glanced back the wolves in front had advanced too. How long until they got bold enough to risk an attack?

"I truly wished to love you," Flanz-le-Flore moaned. "To serve you, hero. To be your adoring helpmeet. To live if even for a little within the glow of your Humanity..."

Did this place even have an exit? It looked like rollicking hills under blue sky in every direction. Somewhere walls must exist, convincing illusions to simulate endless terrain. Where?

Then, out of one of those walls, Makepeace appeared.

No longer an ass, shield in one hand and sword in the other, he manifested fully formed from the blue, swung his head around until he spotted Jay. Sansaime appeared behind him. No sign of Olliebollen or the twins.

"Jay! Your bat!"

Makepeace drew back his arm and threw Jay's baseball bat. The throw couldn't have been more accurate despite the awkward distribution of weight, a perfect parabolic arc—a football pass.

Jay tossed Flanz-le-Flore aside and caught the bat to immediately slam it into the first wolf that lunged at him. The bat might as well have been a sword, it ate into the wolf's side and left it reeling and rolling with an exposed ribcage steaming the smell of charred flesh. Wildly he whipped the bat behind him expecting an attack from his blind spot and barely missed a wolf that danced back to keep out of his range. A third wolf fell, seemingly for no reason, until four burning spots appeared where small metal pins stuck out, and then Makepeace and Sansaime were there.

With his real sword, Makepeace cleanly decapitated a wolf and waved the sizzling bloody blade at two others. The remaining wolves lost any thought for attack. They formed a living wall between them and Flanz-le-Flore, whose motionless wings carried her across the plain in full flight. Makepeace hurled himself at the wall slashing and slamming his shield and both types of attack were equally devastating as the wolves came apart in pieces. Sansaime plunged through the gaps that opened between them and sprinted full speed in pursuit of Flanz-le-Flore with a dagger bared. Jay, meanwhile, standing in his underwear, suddenly felt like a rat again.

Whatever, he told himself. He won the fight. If Flanz-le-Flore had fingers, currently, things would look much different. This—was just cleanup.

"After her, Jay," Makepeace said as he chopped through the last wolf whole and willing enough to stand in his way. Jay scooped up his jacket and pants and followed as Flanz-le-Flore disappeared into a blue spot in the sky and Sansaime clambered up the sheer face of empty air to cartwheel in after her. Makepeace disappeared next, and Jay, after nearly smacking against the blue-painted wall, took one last look at the absolute carnage left on the pastoral landscape—full swaths of grass running red, steam rising from all the burning skin, pieces of dismembered animals, and the motionless cocoon that contained Lalum—and followed.

He entered a theater. Rows of benches in a fan pattern around a central stage bordered by velvet curtains. Compared to the bright sunny scene of the previous room almost everything here was drenched in shadow. Only the stage itself had any light, a cone that streamed onto it from above, and in the center of the cone the same seat of sticks and leaves that was Flanz-le-Flore's throne. Actually, as he stumbled past the first few rows of seats, he thought the layout of this room matched Flanz-le-Flore's throne room, with only the benches added and the lighting changed and a few curtains strung up to conceal walls that weren't walls but large and leafy trees. He wondered if this actually was Flanz-le-Flore's throne room, with only the aesthetics changed. And with an empty, desolate quiet.

It didn't matter. Flanz-le-Flore, despite trailing blood and holding her ruined hands uselessly in front of her, drifted with maintained ethereal elegance toward the stage while Sansaime hurried after her.

There was nothing obstructing the stage and Sansaime's cloak ruffled as with barely any perceptible motion she flung several small pins at Flanz-le-Flore. The pins went directly through her thin translucent wings and Flanz-le-Flore dropped onto the stage in front of her throne with a strangled cry. Her ugly worn boots kicked at the wooden surface as she pulled herself onto the chair and struggled to turn around.

"You'd," she said, her breath heaving, her hair a clumpy mass, "you'd kill a queen of the fae? You'd kill me?"

Sansaime climbed onto the stage. Out of her cloak appeared Olliebollen, who floated to the side. "Uh, hey, yeah! Maybe we shouldn't, you know, kill her. Right? There's no need to do that, right? We can just leave now. I know the way out." She looked straight at Jay. "Hero, there's no need for more killing, right?"

"Kill me, elf," said Flanz-le-Flore, "and my court goes extinct. Where will your income come from then, you cursed daughter of cannibals? Do you think you were merely clever when you crept around my forest before, capturing choice morsels among my friends and family to sell to those humans in the castle? I allowed it. My court and that castle have existed together for hundreds of years, and there have always been ones like you. I allowed it! I allowed it, in the name of peace and stability. And for that peace this is how you repay me?"

Sansaime approached slowly, while Makepeace stopped between the first row of benches and Jay trudged up behind him. Jay wasn't sure if Sansaime was taking her time to consider Flanz-le-Flore's appeal, or simply being cautious.

"If I let you live," said Sansaime, "then next time I come here, you kill me. Your kind's vindictive like no other."

"Come on Sansy, let's get it over with," said Makepeace.

"Very good then." Flanz-le-Flore leaned her head back against the top of her throne. "Listen to your master, since you've become such a good dog for him, such a wonderful little dog. Go on, kill me. But know that if you seek to repair the scars that cover your body, little girl, it will not be human power that makes that happen."

That last sentence made Sansaime pause and the instant the pause occurred Flanz-le-Flore kicked her boot and snapped one of the sticks at the base of her throne. No, it wasn't a stick, it only looked like one, and it didn't snap. It was a lever. A trapdoor dropped under Sansaime.

Sansaime tried to lunge but nothing was under her feet. She caught the edge of the trapdoor as she fell and her body swung hard and she lost her grip and disappeared into the hole.

Makepeace leaped onto the stage and rushed with his sword but Flanz-le-Flore kicked another subtle lever and from above came crashing a giant crescent moon. It wasn't a real moon, it was painted onto wood and suspended by rope, but it took up half the stage and landed directly on Makepeace.

"Olliebollen Pandelirium!" Flanz-le-Flore shrieked. "Heal me now. Side with your own kind over those who would rather see you dead. Heal me and I shall vouch for your royal bloodline when the fae next meet to discuss the fate of your court!"

Apparently Flanz-le-Flore knew what to say to people because Olliebollen remained motionless in midair, not even doing her normal fidgeting as she gawked at Flanz-le-Flore and at the groaning form of Makepeace pinned under the giant moon.

Which left only one useful person. Jay Waringcrane. As he climbed onto the stage Flanz-le-Flore already had her boot raised to hit another lever. He didn't give her a chance. He threw his bat and it clanked against the base of the throne, forcing Flanz-le-Flore to tuck her legs up onto the seat as he rushed toward her, stooped, and snatched his ricocheting bat. He swung it the only way he knew: hard.

The bat connected with her head before he had time to think about it and by the time he did half her face including one eyeball was already melting, running down off her skull like her flesh had only been paint. He reeled back from the sight and she launched off the throne and wrapped her arms around him, pushing her grotesque face closer to him, opening a jaw where one cheek was no more than a few gooey sinews and saying: "We could've been so happy. We could've been—" But then her tongue flowed between the shattered gaps in her teeth and her voice degenerated into a gurgle.

Her body weighed next to nothing and her grasp immediately weakened. Jay whirled, forced her away from him, and dropped her into the open trapdoor.

She plummeted into the dark and disappeared.

Jay staggered back, let go of his bat, and fell into a sitting position on her throne. He glanced down; on his black t-shirt a smear of Flanz-le-Flore's face remained.

Dear god.

Makepeace heaved the moon off him and rose, nursing an ugly-looking wound to the back of his head that was hard to care about given Olliebollen could heal it. Olliebollen, however, stared at the trapdoor as though shellshocked.

"Maybe," she said, "maybe we shouldn't have done that..."

A hand shot out of the trapdoor and Jay jolted, horrified in expectation of the disintegrating zombie of Flanz-le-Flore to rear her horrible head, but it was Sansaime who climbed up instead.

Sansaime glanced around the stage. "A body dropped past me. Her, I assume."

Her.

Makepeace passed the throne, holding the back of his head with one hand. His other landed on Jay's shoulder. "You did what you had to, Jay. Just like with that bear. Now let's get moving before more of her court shows up. Would you kindly tell your faerie to patch up this bloody spot on my crown?"

Jay gripped the sides of the throne. He didn't—he didn't know why Makepeace thought it was necessary to reassure him. He didn't need it. He only needed a moment to rest after running around and fighting for so long. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his cheeks. He was doing what he needed to do. To be a conqueror. As though Napoleon hadn't gotten thousands killed, millions.

"You dropped your clothes, my man." Makepeace indicated Jay's jacket and jeans at the edge of the stage.

In his underwear, Jay sat on the throne, taking only a moment to rest before he would continue forward, continue doing what he needed to change this world. To make a difference to this world.