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“The battle was a rout, Jackson is ascendant, and the Guild’s enemies are on their last legs. Tomorrow will be a celebration worthy of a queen.”

I blinked and Gilbert was gone.

Another man stood in his place. He was younger, by at least a score, but he had the same gaunt look in his face that Gilbert had worn.

I looked back at Beatrice and she had turned white as a ghost.

“No,” she said. “It can’t … you’re dead.”

“Yes, well, the thing about killing someone,” said the man who had been Gilbert, “as I’ve learned recently, is that you need to make sure it actually takes. But now that you’re here, we can-”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” I said. “But who the fuck are you?”

“Tell her, Beatrice,” said the man. “Tell her what you did.”

“His name is Doug, and he was my first trainee.”

The name rang in my head and I recalled my confrontation at the bar, when I had accused her of killing Kate.

“And…”

Doug gestured for her to continue.

“And I killed him. You. At least I thought I did.”

“You would have, if someone hadn’t intervened to reverse what your lipstick had done.”

“Who?” asked Beatrice, who was now visibly shaking.

“Maybe I’ll tell you, after we sort out our business here. Or as I watch the life slowly drain out of you.”

“I don’t fucking think so,” said Beatrice and she charged past me, the Medoblad leading the way.

But Doug was faster, gracefully shifting his torso out of the path of the knife and in the same movement extending his elbow outward to hit Beatrice squarely in the gut. She staggered backward from the blow and fell to the ground, the Medoblad slipping free from her hand and landing at my feet.

I picked up the Relic and pointed it at Doug, but it felt like I was threatening him with a tree branch. Beatrice grunted and pushed herself up from the floor, clutching her stomach, while the soft glow of the amethyst stone in her ring began to spread up her arm.

“Don’t,” said Doug. “Wouldn’t want you to waste any of more of her strength.”

The purple light vanished in an instant and we stood in silence at the mercy of the man who had cheated death.

“Now, let’s get to it, shall we?”

A crooked grin permeated Doug’s face as he stooped down slowly to pick up the wooden box, all trace of his earlier calisthenics gone. Had he actually anticipated Beatrice’s attack or was it a stroke of pure luck?

He placed the box back down a foot or so from Frankie, and then dug something out of his pants pocket.

A small vial of black ink.

“Where … where did you get that?” Beatrice asked, her voice trembling.

“Where do you think?” Doug snapped at her. “From Polly. After you refused to help her find a cure for her dad’s condition, who do you think she turned to? She was only too eager to provide what we ne-”

“What happened to Steve?” I interrupted. “Last time I saw him…”

“He was barely holding it together,” said Doug. “And that was before the scar’s venom began to spread. Now, he probably has a few weeks left. Too bad Phineas sold his last vial of golden serum to some redhead. Oh wait, that was you.”

The words landed with the same force as his blow to Beatrice’s stomach and I felt my insides clench together.

“I was … we were trying to heal Frankie.”

“And I see you succeeded! But don’t worry, you’ll get the opportunity to try again, right now in fact.”

Doug reached into his pocket again and produced a pen and some paper, which he placed on top of the wooden box, before unstoppering the vial. His hands worked furiously and within a few seconds, he had filled the reservoir and reassembled the pen.

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“How are you doing that?” asked Beatrice.

“Doing what? Moving so fast? You should know. After all, it’s your buffs.”

“Mine don’t work like that. It’s all or nothing.”

Doug looked at her and shook his head.

“They didn’t when we bought them from Phineas. But I’ve had a long time to study them and make improvements, despite your refusal to share your prima materia source, and so now they do. Funny how so many of your decisions are coming back to bite you in the ass, it’s really quite amazing.”

“Shut. Up,” said Beatrice. “I’d do it all again, including killing you. But the Guild will probably do that for me, once they find out what you did.”

“No, they won’t, not after you open this box for me.”

“And how are we going to do that?” I said. “You said it yourself, Frankie holds the key and she’s not exactly in an unlocking mood at the moment.”

“Truth be told, I had thought that your nighttime excursion to Inwood would have provided the answer, “ said Doug. “The great and all-knowing Rita van Asch surely would know how to cure a Relic’s curse! But then Trinity here threw a firecracker at me and you got away.”

“I wish I had known it was you that night,” said Beatrice. “I would have finished the job.”

“And I would have killed you then and we wouldn’t be having this lovely chat now. Which I’m going to pause for a moment so that you can read this.”

I glanced down at the box and the piece of paper was gone, and only the uncapped pen remained. When had he written something with the ink? I looked back up at Doug only for the paper to suddenly appear in right in front of my eyes.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” the words said and as I read them, the command suddenly floated above the paper like I was watching a 3D movie and hit me square in the face.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” Doug’s voice whispered in my head and I flinched. The words repeated again, except louder and more forceful, and my hands began to shake. This was worse than Beatrice’s original command to me to put on the ring. That had been easy to comply with. But this, this was asking me to do the impossible.

From behind me, I heard Beatrice shout something, but Doug closed the gap between them in a flash and doubled her over with another elbow to the gut. But I couldn’t worry about her right now. I needed to reverse the curse on Frankie, like the voice said.

I closed my eyes and an avatar of Doug appeared in my mind. He was translucent, like a ghost, but his will was absolute.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” he said.

I nodded and suddenly I was in a vast library, with shelves of books reaching to the ceiling.

The me in my head ran to and fro, fetching volumes from different shelves and arranging them on a big center table made of ornate wood. The books each opened on their own accord, and when they did, voices spilled out from them.

“Regardless, if you actually possessed the Blad, like you claim, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with,” said Dalia at our meeting yesterday.

“Its restorative properties were soon demonstrated to be almost unparalleled, capable even of reversing the effects of Relics now lost to us,” said me, reading Rita’s entry from the Compendium.

“Half of its needles are venomous and half are curative,” said the old man with the half-moon spectacles named Phineas.

“… we’re dealing with a knife, so not sure how that helps us,” said Beatrice at the coffee shop a few weeks ago.

The voices swirled above the table, and I imagined them as pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t stay still long enough so I could grab them. And the bits and pieces of my memories were so disparate that I didn’t see how they fit together at all. We didn’t have the beak of a dodo bird, I had used up all but a few drops of the healing serum, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what Beatrice was talking about.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” said Doug again and I so wanted to stab him with the Medoblad, if only to expel him from my mind. The blade suddenly appeared in my hand and the memory of that horrid night flew down from a shelf and set itself on the table with the rest. I grasped the imaginary Medoblad and walked toward Doug’s apparition, but he uttered the words again and my mental self was forced back to the table.

Dalia’s voice sounded again and that gnawing feeling from earlier returned. Why did she think the Medoblad was so important to curing Frankie? What was I missing?

I squeezed the Medoblad’s ivory handle harder as my frustration and fury rose to a boiling point and it disappeared into a puff of smoke, the now-unsupported blade floating in mid-air for just a second before falling to the ground. But that didn’t satiate my anger and I unleashed it further on the table, toppling the massive wooden beast on its side and sending all the books to the ground.

But Doug was unfazed and as the words of the command formed again on his lips again, I let out a guttural cry.

It was then that I heard it.

Beatrice’s voice, from one of the books. I had listened to it moments ago, but not all of it.

“The Medusa legend doesn’t really touch on reversing the curse.”

I froze as the rest of her words spilled forth.

“Even killing her didn’t undo it. The best I found was a mention of two veins in her neck: blood from one would curse you and blood from the other would purify you.”

Two veins, two golden needles, two opposing forces: one to curse you and one to heal you.

The library scene dissolved as I opened my eyes, and I saw that the real Medoblad was still in my hand, the ivory handle intact.

I would soon change that.

Beatrice was slumped on the ground, and I walked over to her and propped her up against the wall.

“What are you doing?” Doug asked.

“What you told me to,” I snapped at him before turning my attention to Beatrice. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was heavy, and I wasn’t sure if she was still conscious.

“Hey. Hey! Snap out of it. I need some of the strength from your ring.”

Beatrice’s head rolled back and I was afraid that the ring and Doug’s attacks had already taken too much of a toll on her. But then I remembered that barely empty vial of gold that I had tucked away in a box, and I hurried to the back of the house to retrieve it. Two drops of the shimmering liquid still remained at the bottom and I unstoppered the glass quickly before pulling open Beatrice’s mouth and letting the serum trickle free.

The alchemy took only seconds to work and Beatrice slowly opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Activate the ring,” I said, grasping her right hand.

“No … I … why?”

“Please.”

She nodded and shut her eyes. The purple glow was dim but I felt the tiniest bit of raw strength travel from her hand to mine. I stood slowly, careful not to let our hands fall away, and stared at Doug.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” I said as I shattered the handle of the Medoblad.

Next: The final showdown.