“It's bloody expensive, is what it is! We’re not spending that much coin on an enchanted rock, even if it can throw your voice fifty furlongs! Your brother made do without such trinkets, and so will you!” - Overheard conversation during the Ivory Fair of Vindabon.

  Natalie’s feelings about flying were extremely mixed. On one wing, every time she’d tried to take to the skies, it had ended in a spectacular disaster. But on the other wing, when everything worked properly, it was incredibly fun. Soaring high above Harmas’s dark streets, she basked in the sheer freedom of the skies. There just wasn’t anything comparable to the joy of sailing across the heavens on leather wings. Especially when the world below was painted in exquisite detail by the rippling sound of her chirps. Being a bat offered a unique perspective, one she would love to have more time to indulge in, but right now, time was of the essence.

  Yara’s unconscious form dangled from Natalie’s claws, the thrall's heartbeat a frighteningly slow drum tattoo that seemed to be counting down to the redheaded woman’s final moments. Spurred on by this grim thought, Natalie flapped her wings harder, cutting through the night air fast as she could. The western island was below her now, and it wouldn’t be long before she passed over the river again and reached the barge. There she’d find Deborah, Mina, and a whole cadre of priests trained in dealing with battlefield injuries. Once Yara was with them, things would be okay. In fact, they’d be more than okay, as then Natalie could start shuttling the entire team into Harmas. This would solve so many problems and also have the extra silver lining of giving her more time in the sky.

  Her flight took her close to the ruined clock tower, where everything had gone so horribly wrong. Peering down on the ruined stump of a building, she looked for any surviving carrion bats. Unpleasant as the creatures were, they’d shown their use, and perhaps she might be able to not just tame them but pull some pertinent information from their memories. She let out a high-pitched chirp, well beyond human hearing, and the sound bounced through the plaza. Yet, the returning echo didn’t speak of mutant bats or even shambling ghouls, but of a figure atop the ruined clock tower, one holding a drawn bow.

  Natalie reacted instantly and banked left just as the snap of a released bowstring cut through the night. But trammeled by Yara’s unconscious form, she failed to fully dodge the dark arrow zipping towards her. Cold steel cut a hole in her right wing’s membrane, creating a ragged wound that stung like a thumb-wide papercut. While doing her best to ignore this unique form of pain, Natalie tried to gain speed and altitude, only for three more arrows to zip through the air and into her. Two of them cut holes in her left wing, while the last sliced through the slender bone of her right’s middle digit. By pouring blood into the wounds, she managed to seal them enough to stay airborne, but this was just a stopgap. Escape would be impossible as long as that damn archer could keep loosing. She needed to deal with him, and to do so required setting Yara down.

  Swooping low while letting out a constant series of clicks, Natalie identified a collapsed thatch roof free of any obvious dangers. Ignoring the sixth arrow that had just slit the membrane near her armpit, she called upon the instinctual knowledge she’d stolen from so many bats and prepared to do some tricky airborne acrobatics. After killing her momentum with a few circular flaps, she managed to hover above the rooftop just long enough to set Yara’s stretcher down and leave a pair of spectral wolves to guard her.

  Now free from this cumbersome burden, she shot back into the sky and hurtled towards the ruined clocktower. Three more arrows came to meet her, but she dodged them all by pulling her wings in and accelerating her dive. Using her limited experience inside an owl’s mind as a template, Natalie grew long, sickle-like talons and prepared to strike the archer. The archer clearly guessed her intent and, in response, threw himself bodily off the tower, while firing a trio of arrows into her flank. These new projectiles were stubby, brittle things, but with a lot of power behind them, and their shafts shattered upon impact, leaving Natalie with three broad arrowheads in her side and gods know how many tiny cuts along her left wing.

  Momentum carried the Alukah forward, her talons cutting deep gouges in the tower’s broken top, but doing little to stop her from hurtling headlong towards the ground below. She flared her wings while doing her best to ignore the hundreds of papercut wounds in her membrane, and arrested her fall. So instead of hitting the ground with a wet splat, she merely skidded and bounced along the cobblestones, the elasticity of her bat bones absorbing much of the impact. No sooner did she come to a stop than she let her cocoon of blood-forged flesh dissolve into black ichor she greedily consumed.

  Natalie emerged from her bat form and sprinted towards where she’d last seen the archer. Seven of her wolves materialized around her, and she drew the silver-tipped shortsword Barnabas had gifted her. No sooner had she made these preparations than another arrow whizzed through the night. With her reflexes empowered by spent blood, she managed to knock the projectile aside.

  An appreciative whistle came from somewhere behind the ruined clock tower. “Not bad! I’d had you pegged as a Strigoi with that bat transformation, but now I’m wondering if you're an unusually open-minded Moroi.”

  Moving towards the voice’s source, Natalie bounded over the building's rubble and commanded her wolves to come from the side. She’d box this bastard in, then see what secrets were in his blood. But upon reaching where the archer should have been hiding, all she found was a palm-sized polished gem covered in runes. A faint light shone at the gem’s heart, and it spoke in the archer’s voice.

  “Surprise!”

  Natalie spun about as the hiss of an arrow reached her ears, but she was too late. The shaft struck with enough force to punch right through her abdomen and sever her spine. She dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, landing with her back against the rubble. No sooner was she on the ground than a bizarre sensation started to radiate out from the arrow wound. On the surface, the feeling was merely an odd tightness, as if her body were a string instrument being overtuned. But beneath that was something harder to describe, and infinitely more unsettling. Natalie felt like she was getting sick, like she’d contracted some cold or flu that was steadily working its way through her. There were no symptoms, just that faint instinctual feeling of infection and worsening sickness. Had she been poisoned? Could you even poison a vampire?

  Clumsily, she reached for the arrowshaft and was about to start pulling when that same lackadaisical voice said. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Looking up, she found a vampire casually walking towards her. Of average height with a lean, muscular build, the vampire wore a hunter’s jerkin on his body and an easy smirk upon his goateed face. In his hands, no, emerging from his hands, was a bow crafted from his own black blood. As Natalie watched, the archer’s weapon shifted from a heavy longbow to a more agile recurve one. Once he was two meters from her, he squatted down and gestured with another arrow. “Stargent-coated arrowheads are more fragile than you’d think. It's easy to have flakes of the stuff break off inside you if you’re not careful when removing them.”

  Natalie’s eyes flicked to the shaft sticking from her belly, and a snarl escaped her lips. She’d always thought of stargent as Cole’s personal bane, never really considering what effects it might have on her own reanimated body.

  Seeing her reaction, the archer chuckled. “I take it you’ve never been stuck with the stuff before? Well, if you get stargent out quickly and cleanly, it isn’t a big deal; just requiring a bit more blood than normal to heal the inflicted wound.”

  Voice tight with pain and worry, Natalie rasped. “I’m sensing a but.”

  “Smart girl. If the stargent is allowed to fester, then well, so will you. It shuts off all magic, including what keeps us nice and preserved. You’ll start to rot, slowly at first, and just near the wound, but with a bit of time, it gets real ugly real quick. At that point, even getting the metal out isn’t always enough to reverse the damage. I’ve heard stories of elders needing to sleep for decades to fully heal after parts of them went grody from stargent.”

  Natalie blanched at that, and the archer shrugged apologetically. “Not pretty, I know, but leverage is leverage, and I thought having some before we started our chat would make things go that much smoother.”

  After slipping the arrow he held back into his quiver, the archer held out his hand in greeting. “Now, first things first, introductions are in order. My name is Klaus, I’m a Black Feather Knight in service to Duke Umbria.”

  She stared at the offered hand and debated going through the effort of shaking it with her lower body paralyzed, but decided against it. “I’m Natalie.”

  “Well then, Natalie, I have some questions for you.”

  Silently, she considered her options. He could be bluffing about the arrow, but she doubted it. He was also close, maybe close enough to grab, but considering how quickly he’d used that bow of his at range, that would just get her another poisoned shaft. With the arrow in her, she couldn’t psychically call for help, nor use any of her abilities. Meaning right now, all she had was her wits and luck; gods willing, that would be enough.

  “They must be important questions if you took the risk of shooting me down.” Natalie snapped, with enough regal frustration to make Isabelle proud. She’d been mistaken for a member of the duchy nobility before, and maybe she could be again.

  Klaus raised an eyebrow and scoffed. “Aren’t you a puzzle with a pretty face. Earlier, you were throwing around the kind of magic a centennial like me would be proud of, then you were skittish and ignorant as a fledgling. But now, you're playing at being a prissy courtier with delusions of importance.”

  Okay, maybe Isabelle wouldn’t be proud of her performance. This archer unfortunately, had eyes for more than moving targets. Silence would need to be Natalie’s first line of defense, not confusion.

  “How about we start with an easy question, one I imagine you’ll be eager to answer.” added Klaus.

  Natalie very much doubted she’d be eager to give him anything, that is, unless torture was involved. But before the terror of that prospect could properly settle on her shoulders, Klaus surprised her.

  “Tell me, how full of shit are the Ashen Agent and the Black Fly?”

  Those words knotted her chain of thought up like a stray sheep’s fleece. It took her several seconds to formulate the sterling reply of: “What?”

  “The rot hasn’t even started in your belly, let alone your ears.” He chastised. “What are Harmas’s other pair of newcomers up to? Because I doubt it's that cockamamie tale about enhancing the screaming plague. That smells like a cover story, just as how everything else they’ve done since arriving in the city stinks worse than its inhabitants. Which is why we’re here having this chat instead of me just following their orders to capture you and a man I’ve already killed.”

  Cautiously, Natalie asked. “This Ashen Agent… is he always smiling and being melodramatic?”

  “Oh, so you have met him.”

  More pieces fell into place, and several theories were confirmed. Now the question was whether sharing what she knew would be a good idea. Probably now, but she didn’t have any other options. So, she might as well buy some time by offering up what she knew and could guess at in hopes of fomenting discord in her foes.

  “He called himself Scapin when I dealt with him.”

  Klaus snorted. “It’s Scapino now. Strange code name if you ask me, even for a spy.”

  “He’s more than a spy. He’s an ashborn, half-vampire, half-demon, and serving a fell goddess rather than any duke or duchess. The same fell goddess, mind you, that Wolfgang sold his soul to.”

  Seeing a flicker of surprise in the archer’s face, Natalie pressed the attack. “They aren’t here on any duchy business, clandestine or otherwise. Scapin, Scapino, whatever alias he’s using, isn’t an Ashen Agent, or at least not anymore, and you wouldn’t be the first duchy knight he’s conned into doing his dirty work—a Scarlet Knight, one of Dracon’s own, ended up as soot after believing Scapino.”

  “A fell cultists pretending to be a ducal agent…” Klaus mused. “That is an awful lot to swallow, but so is what he claims about you and the man I killed on the bridge.”

  How much did he know about her identity and Cole’s? What would Scapino be willing to share with his latest group of stooges? Well, not enough to convince Klaus of Cole’s nature, judging by the skepticism in his voice.

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  Deciding letting him dwell too much on what was in front of him, and not on who was pulling his strings, would be bad, Natalie redirected things back to her grand-uncle. “As for Wolfgang? The plague he crafted, the faerie-tainted pestilence you helped him unleash, has been cured, that much is true. Also, like Scapino, he managed get more vampire knights killed while pursuing his own ambitions. Tallclaw and Shortteeth, I imagine you’d have at least heard of them, considering they were Duke Umbria’s favorite Strigoi.”

  Wounded and poisoned as she was, the predator in Natalie couldn’t help but luxuriate in the sudden worry on Klaus’s face. “Wolfgang is on the run from his masters, both Umbria and Voivode Igori. He sold himself to the Reaper of Sorrows to survive and has found a partnership with his fellow slave, Scapino. Whatever those two are doing its certainly fell, and probably fae to boot. That’s why they are here, hiding behind the river spirit and your neck. They know a reckoning is coming, and hope to succeed before it plows through you and every other poor bastard they’ve put in its way.”

  Klaus considered this, one hand slowly stroking his strawberry blonde goatee. “And that reckoning is you?”

  Natalie managed a shrug. “In part.”

  The archer looked past her, up at the ruined clocktower. “Well, I’m assuming poor Yefim and Feodosiya would at least agree to that. But even if you’re spouting truth that doesn’t change that-”

  He came to his feet and spun about just in time for something small and very fast to strike him right in the eye. Klaus let out a shout of pain and clutched at his right socket as smoke billowed from it. With a wet pop, he pulled a sizzling disc from his burst eye and quickly dropped it to the ground. It was a coin, a silver coin now coated in vampire ash. Natalie almost winced in sympathy; she knew exactly how it felt to have one of those embedded inside you as the result of one of Mak’s traps. Which… did that mean the mad paladin was nearby? If so, she might be out of the fire and into the frying pan.

  But to both her and her captor’s shock, a dry female voice cut through the night. “Get away from her!”

  Yara was awake, more than that, she was spinning up a sling in her good hand, and had an urn of some kind loosely tied to her front. The thrall loosed another coin, this one missing Klaus entirely and skipping along the stones beside him. With a scoff of derision, the vampire archer reached to his quiver, but hesitated when Yara dropped her sling and started running towards him. Something about the redhead spooked him. No, not something about her, something on her! That urn was one of Mak’s traps, a bomb ready to fill the air with silver shrapnel.

  With a hand on the urn’s lid, a look of mad determination in her eyes, Yara made it clear that if Klaus attacked her, she’d spend her last moments sending him to one of the Hells. Natalie wasn’t going to let that happen; she needed to get this jagging arrow out of her. Desperation inspired a mad plan, and she grabbed onto the shaft but didn’t pull. Instead, she clenched her jaw and started to push. Her logic was that the barbed arrow was designed to sink deep into flesh, so all she needed to do was give it a little help to pass all the way through her.

  One hand on the arrow shaft, the other on the small of her back, Natalie worked quickly, taking full advantage of the lack of pain brought on by her paralysis. Soon, she felt the arrowhead pressing against her skin, then slicing itself free. With as much dexterity as she could manage, she inched the stargent out of her.

  Success arrived in a surge of energy as the magic that animated her returned to its full power. After snapping off the arrowhead, Natalie yanked the shaft free from her belly and summoned her wolves. The entire pack, along with Grist the sheepdog, pounced at Klaus. Caught between bomb-carrying thrall and spectral lupines, the archer bolted. As fast as he was, the wolves kept at his heels, snapping and biting, keeping him from using his bow on either Natalie or Yara.

  The Alukah slowly got to her feet, putting freshly regrown nerves to the test. Yara hurried over to her, explosive urn still clutched tight. “Mistress! Are you alright?”

  “I should be asking you that,” Natalie muttered while making sure her pack hounded Klaus. Catching and consuming him would certainly make up for all the blood and time he’d cost her. Upon realizing he wasn’t going to be able to easily outrun the wolves, the archer changed tactics, his blood-forged bow reforged itself into a pair of long, curved shortswords he used to hack at the pursuing wolves. Natalie responded by putting her growing skill with her familiars to work. The wolves Klaus targeted turn into dispersed clouds, clouds that couldn’t attack but could provide cover for the other members of the pack. Phantom fangs lunged through seething ectoplasm and sank into the archer’s calf, hamstringing him.

  Klaus stumbled and the wolves set upon him, but before he could be torn apart, a cloud of red-black smoke exploded out of the archer, engulfing both him and the pack. Unable to see, smell, or even hear within the unnatural vapor, the Lupus Pack was quickly cut down. The bloody smoke flowed towards and then up the nearest building, masking Klaus’s retreat.

  Before Natalie could decide on how best to pursue him, Yara faltered. Alukah hurriedly grabbed Ancilla, stopping her head and the bomb she carried from striking the ground. Yara looked pale and sickly, even by her already worrying standards. That she’d managed to wake up, let alone intervene, was remarkable.

  Gently as she could, Natalie moved Yara into the ruined tower’s shadow, putting its bulk between them and any parting shots Klaus might loose. As if to vindicate her choice, the strange gem Klaus used to lure her into an ambush spoke with his voice. “Thanks for the information! Oh, and no hard feelings about the arrow I put in you, and the stone your pet put in me; that's just the price of doing business.”

  Yara’s eyelids fluttered, and she rasped. “We… safe?”

  “As much as we can be,” Natalie muttered, before looking at the bomb still tied to her thrall. “Where in the world’s name did you get that?”

  The redhead managed a one-shouldered shrug. “In an alley.”

  “No, I mean, how did you grab it without the damned thing going off?”

  “I saw Mak…” She trailed off, her overwrought brain struggling to find the right words. “I saw Mak disarm one before. Wasn’t hard to copy him.”

  Oh gods, Yara had been bluffing; she’d threatened Klaus with an inert bomb. Natalie shook her head and let out a small laugh. “I think we need to start a tally of how many times you’ve saved us all.”

  “I just want to help you, mistress.”

  “Which you’ve done a wonderful job of. Now tell me, how are you feeling?”

  “Hungry, thirsty, and my head hurts.”

  Natalie winced, then looked up at the sky. She might have enough blood to transform back into a bat, but with Klaus still at large, odds were he might just shoot her down again. Leaving the city tonight wouldn’t be possible, but thankfully, Yara’s condition seemed to be improving. Perhaps it would be best to return to Cole and figure things out from there? Either trying to fly out in the morning, or pursuing any leads his tower-top scouting might have uncovered.

  Patting her thrall’s good shoulder, Natalie said. “Let’s head to Cole and get you some food and drink.”

  “Thanks…”

  “He can’t still be up on that damned tower, can he?” Fretted Natalie as she fruitlessly searched the commandeered apartment for any trace of her missing partner. Yara made an uncertain noise through her mouthful of rations, then went back to eating as quickly as she could with a single working arm. It had taken two hours for the Alukah to carry her thrall to the apartment; plenty of time for Cole to finish his observations and return before them. So where in the infinite hells was he?

  A mix of frustration and fear boiled within Natalie as she went to her pack and fished out a long strip of dark cloth. Cut from Cole’s enchanted cloak, the fabric could act as a compass, tugging in the direction of its mother garment. After anointing the strip with a drop of Yara’s blood, Natalie went to the apartment’s balcony and tried to figure out where Cole was. The piece of cloth pointed to the south-east, far from where she’d left him.

  “He promised he wouldn’t do anything stupid!” She hissed as her worry escalated. Moving back and forth on the balcony, then up on the building’s roof, Natalie got a good sense that Cole was somewhere on the eastern island. But why he was there was a whole other question, one with no good answers.

  Returning to the apartment, she found Yara curled up on the worn couch she’d been comatose on earlier. Blinking wearily up at her mistress, the thrall asked. “Where is Sir Cole?”

  “I don’t know… but I need to find out.”

  Yara nodded. “I’ll slow you down. Leave me here.”

  Seeing Natalie’s hesitation, the redhead added. “This is a good place to hide and heal.”

  She wasn’t wrong; the apartment’s security enchantments were relatively intact, with the balcony being the only safe way in or out of the suite. Kneeling beside her thrall, Natalie met Yara’s eyes and strengthened their psychic bond the best she could. “Stay safe, and stay alive.”

  “You too, mistress.”

  Natalie left the apartment and headed east. Leaping between rooftops, she tried for the sixth time to reach Cole psychically, and once again met an insurmountable wall of resistance. He was behind a ward, and a powerful one at that. That boded ill, hells all of this did. Cole would only break his promise under extreme circumstances. Circumstances, she could guess at considering Pankrator Marcus’s said Wolfgang was somewhere on the eastern island.

  Pushing herself as fast as she dared, the Alukah made it to the nearest bridge, where an unfortunately familiar scent caught her attention. Lying dead on the chain-suspended bridge was one of the flesh-crafted elk-horrors. It had collapsed onto its side, antlered head pointed westward, discolored patches covering its left flank. Natalie stared at the stretches of damaged skin, noting how some parts were stiff and pale, while others were black and swollen. She’d seen wounds like this many times before, in the wake of Cole’s magic. He’d killed this twisted creature.

  Natalie summoned some of her wolves and circled about the carcass. With Lupus’s help, she started to piece together what had happened here. A great herd of elk-horrors had recently passed over this bridge. No, not herd, a party, as they’d been ridden by people, or at least things pretending to be people. The steeds and riders first came from the central island in large numbers and at full gallop. Then, not long after, a noticeably smaller number of mounts returned at a slower, more haphazard pace, many of them and their riders injured.

  Spurred on by ground panic, Natalie crossed the bridge and onto the eastern island. She soon found swarms of ghouls busy feasting on frostbitten flesh, much of it belonging to fallen elk-horrors, some to the mutant creatures that once rode them. The riders had fled in such haste they’d left their dead behind.

  She returned to the rooftops to avoid the ghouls and headed south following the enchanted cloth. With every street she leapt over, the air got colder and damper to the point she even spotted half-melted ice in a few gutters. Power had been unleashed here, an incredible amount of power.

  In the distance, she caught hints of light and movement. After feeding blood into her eyes, she made out lantern-bearing figures standing atop a short wall and a series of buildings behind said wall. Were these sentries left behind by the riders? No, that didn’t make sense, but then who or what awaited her? Perhaps this… shipyard, yes, shipyard she approached was where Wolfgang and the other vampires were hiding? Sure, the duchy agents didn’t need lanterns, but any thralls they had would.

  The shipyard soon came into better view, and Natalie nearly mistimed a jump upon catching sight of its entrance. The street leading into the yard was a calamitous ruin. Torn-open buildings spilled their broken innards out onto cracked and upheaved cobblestones. A hole large enough to drive two carts through had been torn in the shipyard’s wall. Scattered masonry and splintered timbers lay in uneven piles with a few pieces of debris having somehow made their way up onto surrounding rooftops. Corpses littered the street, rather literally in a few cases, where the body was in shockingly small pieces. But on top of all this was the ice, the ever-present layer of frost, and the myriad massive shards that gouged at their surroundings like the jagged teeth of winter itself.

  “Oh, Cole, what in the infinite hells did you do?” Whispered Natalie as she stared out at what an outsider might mistake for a runaway glacier’s handiwork.

  She managed to scavenge up some of her composure, then leaped down onto the destroyed street. Walking through this thawing battlefield, she saw more and more signs of violence, some familiar, many profoundly alien. One of the buildings she passed seemed folded in on itself like a crumpled-up piece of paper, while a nearby frozen puddle vibrated slightly, creating a constant musical note that was slowly fading away. Natalie avoided getting too close to said puddle and instead stepped over the bisected body of a man with moth antenna in place of eyebrows and hoofed legs with backward knees.

  Her foot brushed against what she’d thought to be a piece of black ice, but it rattled like metal. Reaching down, she picked up a bent steel plate of the sort Cole’s armor was crafted from. That got her brain to push past the shock of all this carnage and return to fear for her lover. Natalie hurtled down the ruined street and into the shipyard. The immediate inside of the yard matched its exterior, showing signs of extreme violence, both physical and magical. Eyes alight with growing panic, she looked for any sign of Cole.

  She found a severed hand, its scarred digits still clutching onto a blood-stained and battered Requiem.

  “Fixed stars,” Natalie swore as she followed the piece of Cole’s cloak over from his hand to a stretch of stained pavement. Parts of torn-open armor lay scattered amidst a welter of gore, and the tattered scraps of a long black cloak.

  Before the full horror of this sight could sink in, movement from somewhere to her left pulled Natalie’s focus. She turned just in time to see a haggard man with messy grey-fringed hair lunge out from behind some debris with a spear. After easily catching the weapon’s haft, she yanked it and its wielder towards her. Grabbing onto the vampire thrall’s throat, she prepared to enter his mind, but stopped upon realizing his neck was unmarked, and he didn’t smell of the sting. Slowly spinning about, she looked at the frightened people hiding in the surrounding buildings. These weren’t thralls, they were… survivors?

  Letting go of her would-be-ambusher’s throat, Natalie growled. “Where is he? Where is the paladin?”

  After a few hacking coughs, the man spat at her, which she also dodged. She’d thought this man a thrall, and he thought her one of the duchy agents; what jagged good symmetry. Natalie quickly pulled her amulet from her clothes and thrust the yew hourglass at the longhaired man. “Listen to me, I’m not one of the leeches who murdered your city. I’m an agent of Master Time, sent here with the paladin to help. Tell me where he is!”

  “He fought for us,” the man rasped. “He just came out of nowhere, and he fought for us. I…I thought no one was hearing our prayers. But the Pantheon sent him, and he kept fighting; he just wouldn’t stop fighting, no matter what they did to him.”

  Grabbing his shoulders, Natalie practically screamed the question whose answer she didn’t want to hear: “Where is he?”

  In answer, he pointed north-west, towards the central island and the palace at its heart. “He’s dead, and the court took his body with them when they fled.”

  Natalie shut her eyes and went deep into herself, to where a small grove of yew trees stood amidst red lilies. When her eyes opened, they were bloody red and filled with the wrath of an ancient tyrant. This city, this jagging city, just kept taking from her. That ended right now. She was going to take back what was hers, and anything or anyone that dared get in her way would die screaming.

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