There was no time. No time to explain, no time to discuss, no time to breathe. Alex had been taken. Her love had been stolen by him right in front of her. Her life was at risk, and their unborn child was in mortal danger.
And it was all her fault.
“Check the body!” Jay shouted at the others while simultaneously casting Wings of the Succubi. “Everyone stays together!”
There was no time to tell her companions what she meant. She had to trust that they understood her meaning and would know what to do. She couldn’t stay. Nor could she take any of them with her, not when they were already split so much and even more surprises could be waiting in the wings. Thea, Severina, and Bridget needed to stay with Sabina and Sorcha, who were more vulnerable than the others. Jadis needed to go.
Syd had found her sword staff where it had been leaning against the wall. Dys had not found her axe among the debris of broken furniture. Jay had never recovered her handaxe from the hotel earlier. None of that mattered. The white tendrils of her ethereal wings were already spread.
“Jadis—!” Bridget cried out behind her but all three of her were already out the window.
It was her fault. All her fault. She had thought the Playwright was dead. She had crushed him underfoot and all of his activity had ceased. She had broken the staff, it had looked dead to her, and she was sure that a staff couldn’t act on its own anyway. But she had been wrong. She should have anticipated some kind of a trick, or a ploy, or something that could put her lovers in danger. She should have tossed the Playwright’s body into a fire along with the staff and made sure all was ash before coming off her guard.
But would that have even stopped him? Was the body in Aelius’ basement dead or alive? Was it even the real Playwright? The corpse could just be another elaborate trick, a clone that the cultist had made and setup for her to kill specifically for this outcome. It was so stupidly convoluted that it wrapped back around to making sense again. The madman wanted to make things as dramatic as possible, as terrible as possible, because he was putting on a show.
How many times had Jadis watched a movie back on Earth where the villain had struck one last time after the hero thought he was dead?
Well, Jadis was going to make certain that this was the last time. No more Playwright. No more madman cultist. No more.
Oddly, the reminder that the Playwright was an insane bastard who was manipulating people’s lives because he was trying to create drama gave her a tiny bit of reassurance that Alex was still alive. He wouldn’t want Jadis to show up and find her lover and unborn child already dead. He would plan for her to arrive to see them being devoured by a Demon or torn to pieces by a horde or some other equally horrible fate that Jadis didn’t want to think about yet couldn’t quite stop herself. What that meant though, was that she had to find a way to fuck with his script before it was too late.
Jadis flew as fast as she possibly could in the same direction that she had seen the winged form disappear. She still wasn’t sure what the creature was, but it had to have some insanely high stats to keep ahead of her, even with the head start. Jadis wasn’t sure how fast she was flying, but the terrain below her was a blur as her three bodies rocketed forward on plasma wings. She doubted even Severina could keep up with her at the speed that she was going.
The thought of her Seraphim lover caused Jadis to look behind her, just to make sure that she wasn’t following. It had only been a few minutes of rapid flight and already she couldn’t see Glanum behind her, though that might have been due to the lack of light in a nearly moonless night sky. Maybe Sev was dutifully following behind. If she was, that meant she would be arriving late, which might just be putting another one of her lovers in even further danger, which—
Jadis shook the thought off. Severina was a powerful warrior who had been leading attacks against Demons long before Jadis had even arrived on Oros, much less received a boost to her stats from her bonding ritual. She could take care of herself. What she needed to worry about was Alex and their child.
Alex was no helpless princess, either, Jadis reminded herself. She was a Greater Demon, with powerful regenerative abilities and a smite spell that even Jadis would be wary of getting hit by. In fact, when Jadis took a second to really think about it, how had whatever flying creature that the Playwright had employed managed to abscond with Alex in its clutches without getting ripped apart by the Demon paladin’s holy power?
Some kind of disabling spell, in all likelihood. A very powerful one, though not necessarily designed for Alex specifically.
As Jadis headed northwest, deeper into the Demon-infested territory of Volto, the analytical side of her brain took control. This was a battle. She wasn’t actively fighting just yet, not in the physical sense, but this whole trip to Glanum had been one long battle with no pause, at least as far as the Playwright had been operating. She was in control of her own actions. She didn’t have to be led around by the nose. In fact, she absolutely needed to make sure she wasn’t falling into the Playwright’s rhythm. That was exactly what he wanted. She needed to think strategically, the same way her enemy had been.
Had he been thinking strategically?
The Playwright had openly admitted that he had set things up in Glanum for Wilhelm, not her. That could have been a lie, but she didn’t think so. He had shown himself to be an egotistical asshole, which meant he wanted the Hero, not the wildcard. Her arrival in Glanum instead of Wilhelm and his party had been a major deviation from his plan. One that had come about because of her, not the Playwright. More specifically, it had been D who had told her that the best way to throw off the cultist’s plans was to have the Hero go to Lombardy, which was almost literally on the other side of the empire from Glanum. She had originally assumed that meant that the Playwright had some kind of secret in that city that the Hero would uncover and foil because of the surprise trip. But what if the real wrench in the gears was the fact that the Playwright didn’t have anything going on in Lombardy at all?
“Fuck you, D,” Jay cursed under her breath. “I should have known you’d give an answer that would fuck with all of us.”
So, chances were better than good that all of the things that the Playwright had done in Glanum thus far had been done with Wilhelm in mind, not her. Vinea’s attack, the amalgamation man, even Twisted Desire. All were part of a plot designed to counter the Hero and his companions. Probably the Playwright had been telling the truth about wanting to use a possession Demon on Jocelyn, but clearly the attack on the airship was an adlib on his part, and a bad one at that. How would he have wanted it to go down? If the Hero had really shown up in Glanum, how would the Playwright’s plan have actually proceeded, assuming that he was successful?
While she hadn’t done much of worth in her previous life on Earth, Jadis had been an avid reader, and had consumed plenty of other media to boot. If the Playwright was telling a story, then she certainly had the experience to think through whatever trite idiocy he had thought to be brilliance worthy of legends to come. She just had to think like a madman.
Jadis doubted that the insane bastard would have been happy with just possessing Jocelyn in Glanum and then having Wilhelm immediately kill her. That wouldn’t be grand enough. He would plan for a more spectacular event. That was the purpose of the staff, she guessed. And the fast-flying Demon or whatever it was. The grab and snatch had to have been a part of the original plan, since Jadis doubted he could have arranged getting the creature in so short a time, which meant that maybe the Playwright really had been lying about possessing Jocelyn in Glanum. After all, why not use the possession Demon during the battle anyway? Sure, he wouldn’t be using it against Wilhelm and his party, but the plan was already ruined as soon as Jadis had shown up instead. Why not use the Demon on her or one of Jadis’ companions? There had been plenty of opportunities to do so during the battle, and even more afterwards.
Maybe the reason why was because the golden-eyed possession Demon hadn’t even been in Glanum during the battle?
Northwest. The creature that had kidnapped Alex had flown northwest, which was the direction she was flying after it, she was sure. That meant that they were heading towards Kastoria, the coastal city where the Demons had fortified themselves in Volto. It was the same direction Twisted Desire had been spotted heading after the battle, and it was where Noll had headed for, in pursuit of the Greater Demon. What if the possession Demon had been in Kastoria? The Playwright may have intended to kidnap Jocelyn instead of possessing her in Glanum, so he could then take her to the Demon controlled city. Wilhelm would have rushed after her, there would have been a huge battle, one so fraught with danger that maybe a few of his companions would have died in the process, especially considering their primary healer had been taken from them. Wilhelm would have triumphed, naturally, because he is the Hero. Only, when he finally rescued Jocelyn, she would have secretly already been possessed. Maybe he would have been forced to kill her, or maybe he would have let his guard down and been killed by her. Either way, it made for a tragic story. Exactly the kind of story the Playwright would have wanted to tell.
So, that was possibly the way the Playwright had wanted his story to play out. Maybe not in all the details, but Jadis guessed that the kidnapping and retreat to Kastoria had been a pivotal plot point for the cultist’s story. The question was, how did that knowledge help Jadis?
For one, she could now assume that Kastoria, an already presumably highly fortified enemy position, had all kinds of defenses pre-set up with the Hero and his party specifically in mind. Jadis was confident in her strength, but she wasn’t so narcissistic to think that she alone was capable of doing what the Hero’s party would struggle with together. Second, the kidnapping had been planned around Jocelyn, who was a non-combatant like Eir so far as Jadis was aware. Alex was a far cry more dangerous than a priestess. Third, and possibly most importantly, the Playwright had planned his abduction originally around the capabilities of Wilhelm. The Hero couldn’t fly on his own, but he rode into battle on a griffon. So, flight would have been accounted for; expected, even. But would the Playwright have planned for her flight speed? Probably not, especially since she only gained the Succubus wings over the past couple of days and she had just last night switched her Debauched Duplication around to a different passive, which had massively increased her maximum speed. The bastard had been a step ahead of her thus far, but he clearly wasn’t omniscient. His failed attempt at assassination on the Leviathan showed that much. He couldn’t know what she had done to her stats, or else if he had known all the details, his plans would have been more successful. Certainly, giving Jadis a choice between chasing after her lovers on the airship or her lover taken to a Demon stronghold would have been a far more dramatic twist.
All of the conjecture came down to the simple conclusion that Jadis needed to get to Alex and her abductor before they reached Kastoria. If they made it inside the city, it was a death sentence for her or Alex, or both. But if she could catch them before they got to the Demons’ fortifications, then Jadis had a much better chance of saving her love without sacrificing her own life in the process.
Not that she would hesitate for a moment if she felt that was what she needed to do to ensure the survival of her lover and her child. But damn it, she wanted to see her kids grow up, and she would not let the Playwright stop her from that goal, or any other.
As Jadis did all she could to increase her flight speed, she spread her three selves out so that there was almost a mile between each of them. She was worried that she wouldn’t be in time but also worried that she might overshoot the enemy she pursued or even miss them entirely. She had only a vague idea of where Kastoria was located in relation to Glanum from looking at maps, and it was always possible that the overrun city wasn’t the true destination of the abductor. All her thoughts were ultimately just guesses.
“Now would be a nice time for one of those gut feelings, Lyss,” Jay said through gritted teeth. “I could really use the help.”
To Jadis’ surprise, she felt an immediate response as a sudden, powerful instinct surged up through her being, telling her to move forward. There was no fear or worry mixed into the urgency; instead, the alien emotion was closer to conviction, or determination. The sense wasn’t of a true direction, just a solid certainty that she was on the right track, even if other parts of her were screaming in panic and despair. The way forward wasn’t just the only way. It was the right way.
“Thanks, mom,” Jadis whispered.
She wasn’t certain why she had added the second bit. It had just felt right.
Jadis was forced to recast her Wings of the Succubi twice more, which she used as a way to track time and distance. It was about ten minutes after her third cast, meaning it had been around forty minutes since she had sped off into the dark pursuing the abductor, that Jadis spotted them. A bright blue light flared to life to the front and left of her Dys self, causing all three of her to quickly adjust course. There was no mistaking those neon blue flames for anything other than Alex’s Bold Smite.
“I’m coming!” all of Jadis shouted, though she wasn’t sure that her voice could be heard over the distance and sound of wind. Still, she shouted all the same. “Alex! I’m coming!”
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