Chapter One: Serenade by the Sea
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August Samuel Hatch stood outside the service door with what he hoped looked like a sense of purpose. Getting there had involved the immeasurable frustration of not knowing exactly where he was going, so his arrival had been both lucky and quite sudden. Surveying the tall metal door, he stated to the form curled across his shoulders: "If I didn't know better, I'd say we hit the wrong spot."
"I almost wish we had." The response came as a lamentation.
"You don't mean that." August chided as he slipped on his black lacquer mask, adjusting it over his nose and eyes and tying it neatly in the back. The mask was a formality at best, unimpressive at worst, but practical in all the ways it needed to be. The instructions for attendees called for costumed attire and it was the easiest thing August could swipe on short notice without raising too many questions, but he longed to be able to don a more festive get-up.
Digging at the slight parting of the industrial door, he slid open the thick metal with a soft grunt, peering into the darkness beyond. Unlike the alley, which had the distinct pleasure of smelling of piss and ale, the soft breath of air from the warehouse was stale and cold. A tightness coiled at August's neck that had nothing to do with nerves.
"See anything?" August whispered.
"Nothing." Was Sairne's response.
"Nothing as in...?"
"Nothing that will kill you."
"Right." August stepped forward and dragged the door shut as slowly as he could, wincing as it squeaked on its rusted track. He reached out, grasping for any solid object, when his hand brushed a hanging thread. A chill went up his spine at the sudden thought of a spider crawling onto his knuckles. "What am I touching?"
"A loose wire, don't panic. There's a switch on the wall over there."
"What wall?"
A soft tug on his shoulder told him the direction and he walked heavily, each step an attempt to keep from tripping. Scrambling through the dark was an activity August had acquired a proclivity for, but when his palms hit the wall he was relieved. He felt along its grime, squirming inside at the thought of not knowing why the walls were so wet.
"To your left a little—up more, no, August that's your right."
"It's your right, maybe."
"We have the same right!"
His fingers finally skid over the round knob and he pressed at the worn button, allowing dim yellow light to spill across the room after a faint buzz of electricity. Its wide expanse was littered with rusted metal canisters and a few scattered steel scraps and barrels. A single broom wrapped in cobwebs sat leaning against a garbage pail and August wrinkled his nose at the sight of its woolly cocoon. He pulled the map he'd drawn from his breast pocket and flatted it on a dusty table, squinting in an attempt to consult its winding corridors for a clue as to their exit.
The warehouse they were in sat beside the theatre, and from its upper floor they could skirt a thin slice of space between the two buildings and hop into the theatre's second story. It was a roundabout way meant to the thwart discovery, for Stockade was becoming an increasingly busy neighborhood and he could hardly risk being seen waltzing up to a quarantined building across the street from a blaring movie palace. The other plan had been to enter through the theatre's back door, but he doubted the doorman would see the slight bump under his suit's shoulders and assume it part of his costume. Besides, he didn't have an invitation.
He took the dilapidated stairs with care and reached the tattered, half-torn rooftop by trying not to stretch out his suit or dirty it. Sairne poked her serpentine head out once they reached the upper floor.
Below them the big bellows of the movie palace created a cacophony of noise and lights, and August turned his head to its glittering spectacle, letting the wind spread across his cheeks. People in thin overcoats hurried into the open doors, flyers fluttered across the street, and he stood with one leg up on a loosened cinderblock, scanning the heights of the city's vibrant colors. He could get lost watching it all.
A soft tapping at his cheek brought him back from his observations and he slipped towards the windows, finding one with glass that had been punched out and placing a foot on the ledge. Below him was a bare strip of an alley, piled with refuse. The music from across the way was raucous and delightful, in stark contrast to their surroundings.
"I get why they picked this place." He said.
Once across and into the theatre's dark and creaking hall, he tried to survey the map in the poorly lit room they found themselves in, turning this way and that in an attempt to shine moonlight on the page.
"Let me see it." Sairne's lilting drawl came from his shoulder.
"I can read it." August tapped a finger at the inked map, "we're here, I'd think, in the storage room."
"Smells like a morgue."
August rolled the map up again. Dodging piles of discarded rags and odiferous puddles, he reached for the door knob.
The door burst open and August jerked back, nearly losing his balance, as two people spilled half into the room. The hall was so brightly lit it was exotic-seeming, laced with a gilded quality after his depravation of light. The brass notes of jazz came through like a sudden wave. A woman and man stood on the threshold in a tangle, their hair askew and lips pressed tight together. When they saw August they faltered and pried themselves apart.
The woman held at her nose. "Gosh, what is that smell?"
August shuffled them out, hands up as if he were just as disgusted. "I'll say, smells like something died in there. Although I wouldn't doubt it, this place." He gave a smile and tipped his hat. "Was looking for the bathroom and what do you know! Wrong door."
The woman gave him only an appraising look with her heavily black-rimmed eyes and then spun her partner in pursuit of some other place for a tryst. August turned from them and attempted to adjust his collar and smarten his suit. He flitted down a set of stairs and into an expansive storage area that boasted a number of dilapidated chairs, tables, and even a lopsided chandelier. Eventually he found a stoic waiter bustling through a set of once-resplendent doors, the varnish heavily faded, and at its opening the music slipped out.
"Well, at least it wasn't a false lead this time." August managed as a terse whisper. Sairne had tucked herself as deeply in as she could, her small serpent's body curling along his right arm.
"I'm not sure that's a good thing."
"Don't worry so much, Sairne, everything's Jake." He nudged his shoulder slightly and he heard her long, theatrical sigh in response. Unconcerned by her usual dispassion, August made his way down the corridor with a jaunty gait.
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Serenade By the Sea wasn’t technically anywhere near the ocean. It was set like a crusted-over jewel in the middle of the eastern district of Central, known as the Stockade, the only neighborhood not beset by a shore on any given side. Years of hounding investors and poor management had run the Sea into the ground, and it had been assumed for years to simply be an example of the cooling corpse of vaudeville theatre—springy still when poked, but most assuredly dead. In the absence of shows, the abandoned theatre had been allowed to manifest a new pastime. The one to which August had come to bear witness.
He swept past the few occupants lingering outside the theater doors and noted with a wave of relief that some of them had chosen to dawn more simplistic costumes as well—masks like his, or feathers sticking up from their hair or worn down the backs of their dresses. When he stepped into the theatre itself the smooth music and crinkle of conversation sated the silence he had carried inside him since their infiltration, soaring as a beckoning towards ebullience that made him smile. He had to hold onto a whistle that threatened to sail out past his lips.
It was the extravagance that caught him first. Compared to the dank and moth-eaten theater interior, the attendees were simply brimming with lush and risqué attire. Their soft voices and light laughter, their poised conversations, the tiered trays of food, the way the masked servers wove in and out of the crowd bearing drinks of sparkling liquor; all of it spoke some deep-pocketed expenditure. Very few seats still actually resembled their upholstered originals, so people had gathered to lounge on whatever remained. It left most of the floor and aisle to be taken up by clearly marked groupings, most of which were ostensibly coordinated.
The staff that flitted among the seated attendees with trays vaulted high over heads seemed harried by comparison, and August noted with a start that the high sleeves of their uniforms purposefully exposed their bare wrists and necks—and the distinct lack of curled gold that would mark them as guardians.
They were wardless.
He hadn’t expected anything less, but he felt the familiar anger settle in his stomach. He tried to brush their presence from his mind for the time being, offering only the small courtesy of a smile where he could. He tried to ignore his discomfort as he approached a server holding a tray. The woman was thin and flush with haste. She quickly held a drink out for him without looking. “Champagne, sir?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“For free?”
She looked around in what could be an attempt to find the answer, a brow raised. “Um…yes?”
“Oh, perfect, thank you.” He took the drink, sipping it and turning to once more face the crowd and hoping he hadn’t just given himself away.
It was good champagne. He shouldn’t be surprised. Taking another tepid sip, he observed the various pockets of conversation and tried to find one in which to cling. Normally August found events such as this one replete with existing potentials, but he knew the company of this particular space and it curtailed his excitement enough that he was feeling left-out and nauseous.
He couldn’t be entirely certain, but he thought there was a subdued air to some of the attendees, and he wondered if these were the guardians: forced to a night out at the ward’s behest.
It wouldn’t do to simply approach a lone guardian—that was very often still considered a faux-pas—but he might be able to sidle up next to one if their ward was close by. And he had too much riding on this night to get the jitters now.
Following around rumors and chasing back street urchins to bribe information out of them with offers of money and egg creams, asking around at shops with less-than-stellar reputations who were, by all accounts, leery of his station. August was staking a lot on this night, his instincts being one of them, and he imagined it wouldn’t do well to lose his nerves at the start of it. He straightened out his collar, cleared his throat, and bucked up his courage.
He made his way towards the front of the stage to stand an acceptable distance beside an older woman with orange scales glimmering on the side of her face. She was without a costume of any sort outside of a beautiful gown of deep red. The back of her left hand bore the black-mark runes he couldn’t read, and was reminded that all guardians in attendance with their wards had been bound to their human forms and rendered harmless as flies, so aside from any real differentiators he would be hard-pressed to tell them apart from their wards. It was a prerequisite to attendance that Sairne and August had bypassed by simply not coming through the standard entrance. Sairne now hung conspicuously under his shirt. Or, inconspicuously, depending on who was paying attention, but August was betting largely on ignorance, costume, and drink to bear him away from the weight of others’ suspicions. He was grateful Sairne’s Eidos was quite small and, to his guardian’s constant consternation, a bit adorable.
He chanced a glance at the rune on the woman’s hand as discreetly as he could manage. When she caught August’s eye she smiled and nodded her head deferentially. He returned the gesture with a genuine grin.
“I remember this place in its heyday.” He started.
“You seem a bit young for that.”
“My mother took me when I was young, probably too young to come, honest.” The lie was easy. August had found long ago that lies often came easy to him, and it wasn’t a trait he liked to acknowledge. “I have some fond memories of the place.”
The woman glanced up at a series of ropes that hung overhead, the history of use something August realized he might have to invent. “It must have been quite the exciting show.”
“It was.” August thought of the missing chairs, the ripped curtain and mottled wood of the stage, and tried to conjure an image of its grandeur before it had fallen into disrepair. He had a vague idea thanks to Sairne’s searching through the Patrol’s records, but only a few grainy photographs remained of its past. “The curtain was the boldest crimson I’d ever seen.” He remarked as if falling into reverie, “stunning, really. I always loved seeing it rise.”
“Ah. So tonight’s events are not strange to you?”
“Strange?” He laughed. “I’m anticipating it with bated breath. Let’s give the old girl a proper send off.”
“I wasn’t aware she was going anywhere.” The woman mused, bringing her languorous gaze to the stage. “Although it’s a pity she’s in this state.”
August shrugged. He thought this place had been planned for demolition, so news that it wasn’t came as some surprise. He tucked the information away or a later analysis. “Hoping they’ll fix her up?”
“Tonight might be the start of that.”
“A baptism of blood, as it goes.”
She smiled wistfully. “Aren’t they all.”
“Marlene!” The call came and the guardian turned slowly to face a tall man who came to her side. “I just finished having the most delightful of conversations with Jeremy—you know Jeremy Baatar, yes?”
She nodded.
“His father runs that old cannery on Steepleton?”
She nodded again, and August got a feeling she did that often.
“We’re set for dinner at his estate next week, Chloe and I! Why, Father would have kittens if he could see—” his gaze floated up to August and hardened. “Who’s this?”
“I don’t quite know.”
August held a hand out. “Tennyson Myers.”
“I’m unfamiliar with the name.”
“I should hope so, I just made it up!” He said as they shook hands.
It took a moment for the man to realize this was a joke and he laughed in an uproarious manner that made the guardian at his side soften her serenity into a smile. “Myers! Where have you been all evening?”
“I’m not even sure where I am right now!”
The man gave another sturdy laugh and shook August’s hand with renewed gusto. This was the song and dance August often employed in the presence of strangers he hoped to easily win over, a miming of vexation as comedy. Everyone loved a bright-eyed idiot. “Delighted. I’m Paris Forsythe, perhaps you’ve heard of Forsythe conductors?”
“Well, I have now.”
“My father’s invention. Known the world around for, oh, particles and currents and such. Very useful in bringing this,” he gestured up at the light overhead that had been kept in tact, their glass still burning yellow, “very possibility to life.”
“Well, what do you know! I’ve never met a scientist before.”
“I’m a businessman, dear boy, but my father—well, I did inherit some of his brains.” He tapped at his head, his ruddy face wide and welcoming, so much so that August had a hard time trying to pin this man as anything but a jovial, ignorant drunk.
Paris turned swiftly at the hollering of his name by a woman in a white dress, her cigarette held up in her gloved hand. August braced himself to be introduced to the man’s companions when the lights spontaneously shut off.
He jerked, sloshing champagne onto his suit, only to realize it was the start of the show. A light blazed on the center of the stage, burning a bright white circle on the dusty floor before the curtains. A voice boomed introductions as August tried to dab at his shirtfront with a grimace and simultaneously polish off his champagne.
“Now that we're done with all of the greetings, here's what I'm sure you're all waiting for.” August glanced up. “The commander who gives sway to fate's tempestuous winds, the thief of our hearts, the call to our soul’s desires—The Mad, the wondrous, the Divyne: Madame Haliforte!”
Smoke whirled along the stage, rising like steam, and a dark form soon took shape in the muddled air, placed directly where the spotlight was burning a waiting hole into the wood.
August’s heart swelled in his chest, beating noisily and with such fervor he was frightened his neighbors might hear it. The room was suddenly too large, too all-encompassing. He wished he had another drink.
The woman that emerged from the smoke was certainly eye-catching. Blond hair curled in a neat bob that brushed her thin, elegant neck. The top half of her face was fixed with a lacquered mask of checkered black and white, a red feather rising from the right side. Her lips were painted a blood-red, teeth gleaming and white peeking from between them. She wore only a black bodice trimmed with gold, dark stockings, and a long, split coat of deep red that was, he had to admit, expertly fashioned. A white cat slinked between her laced boots in a pattern of slow figure-eights.
“This is most definitely an honor.” The woman’s voice was light and airy, of a sylphic quality that made her appearance more demanding of attention. “I don’t think we’ve been able to host a proper show in too long a time! I’ve been rather preoccupied with making sure our little hellhat friends are too busy chasing their own tails to chase mine. Lucky for me they die just as easily as the rest of us—oops, did I say ‘die?’ Careless of me—I meant vanish!” She did indeed vanish at the last word in a puff of white smoke. It was so sudden that the audience gave a collective gasp. When she appeared moments later in one of the boxes overhead the spotlight jerked its way over to her. Once the light hit her she vanished again. And again. And again. Each time the audience’s laughter rumbled like a low thrum, growing into a giddiness until she finally appeared back on stage after the chase, her chest rising and falling breathlessly beneath her bodice. In that light, she was perhaps more beautiful, August thought, and than quickly slapped that thought from its tracks so it wouldn’t gain traction.
She was the Mad, after all—a frightening, savvy street rat who’d grown into a remarkably well-liked criminal. She was also going to answer a very important question of his and, if she answered it satisfactorily, he wouldn’t have to shoot her.
“Golly, you’re all raring to go! Let’s get on with the show!” Her voice was so singsongy it danced to its own melody, making her seem young and rarified and glittering in her emphatic joy.
August felt Sairne coil around his shoulders ever so slightly.
The cat at the woman’s feet surveyed the crowd a moment before stretching its paws forward. And then it shifted. The form change was a tempest of white. The fur that coated its body gave way to a taller, elongated shape in a snap of new proportions. A blink's span later August was staring not at a fluffed white cat but at a white-haired woman dressed in nothing but a lace-trimmed and jewel-encrusted bodice draped under a fur shawl. White lashes danced over delicate eyes. She unfurled a fan before her to shield the lower half of her face.
So this was the Mad’s guardian. Rumored to be powerful—more powerful than was normal—and wicked as hell.
The woman they called the Mad moved across the stage with a prowling ownership of it. “Are you ready?” She asked. Roars of agreement let her know they were. “Then let’s meet our guests!” She stepped back and gestured to the curtain behind her. Spotlights found movement on the far edges of the stage. A man ascended the stairs with a hand waving to the crowd and behind him, being dragged into the bright light by a frayed rope tied around her wrists, was a wraithlike woman hidden beneath a dark curtain of hair.
August tightened his grip on the empty glass in his hands.
The bound woman stumbled to her knees amidst an uproar of jeers. August could see the set of her jaw as she tried to pull herself together under the assault of commentary and laughter. Sairne shifted against his shoulders once again and he nudged her. His eyes wandered to the crowd and the staff who wove through the aisles flashing smiles and slips of paper and cash for betting. At the sight of these exchanges the world seemed to suddenly center, and he conjured the image of a brown-haired young man waving bills in the air, smiling and eager. It was a specter superimposed, an attempt to memorialize what might have been his final moments. How could he have come to a place like this? Why hadn’t he told August?
And what had happened to him?
A rumble through the crowd broke his reverie and the young man snapped out of existence. August recovered enough to see that at the other end of the stage a man was pulling another man forward. This captured man was smiling at the rowdy crowd, his hair shorn and telltale signs of his Fading already manifesting as cracks of white along his arms. There was a hush at his entrance but it was followed by an even more thunderous applause. This was likely the favorite, and August didn’t doubt the man’s strength. In comparison the woman looked frail, frightened, and resigned. It wouldn’t even be a contest.
The two men lead their captives to the stage before unbinding their wrists with the rapid retreat of letting a cat out of a bag. The newly freed man rubbed absently at the red welts the rope had left, the woman simply let her arms down at her side, defeated. August felt the reassurance of Sairne at his shoulders, a tightening that kept him in place. There were too many people here eager for the coming violence. He couldn’t even glance at them, couldn’t even stomach the soft conversations between them as if it were an evening on the town. He thought of Marlene and Paris somewhere in the crowd behind, watching or betting or cheering. On a basic level August understood the common capability of villainy, but he did not imagine it wearing the faces it so often did.
“Looks like we’ve got our match.” The Mad’s voice boomed. She eyed the two opponents before moving back to far end of the stage. Her guardian followed, eyes crinkled with a hidden smile behind the fan.
The crowd was quiet. A hush swept like a wave over them all. The Mad’s smile grew to a lascivious grin as she spread her arms wide, “let’s begin!”
The man on the stage charged.