Eunice stood very still on the rooftop with her fists clenched at her sides. Her whole body was shaking.
She was angry. She was also embarrassed, in the strange secondhand way that happens when someone you know is making a fool of herself and you are the only one watching. Anastasia was still sitting cross-legged on top of the rusted water tank, hugging her binoculars and humming a cheerful little tune. She looked like a child who had won a prize at a fair. Every note of that tune made Eunice want to scream.
'I could kill her,' Eunice thought. 'Right now. I could call every hex I have and bury her under swords.'
But she couldn't, and she knew it.
If she tried, one of two things would happen. Either she would be killed on the spot, or the fight would end in a stalemate that left them both too weak to continue. In that case, the rules of this world would decide what happened to her next, and Eunice would be sent right back to the place she had come from. She could not go back there. She had worked too hard to leave it.
So she did the only thing she could do. She groaned. She groaned for a whole minute, long and low, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead, while the wind blew across the roof and the faint music of the ballroom drifted over the road.
At last, when she had nothing left to groan, Eunice lowered her hand and asked the question that had been sitting on her tongue all night.
"When are we going to retrieve Syl?"
Anastasia did not answer. She was busy breathing on the glass of the binoculars.
"And when are we going to kill that bitch?" Eunice added. She turned around and pointed one finger across the road at the brightly lit window, where a girl in a dark gothic dress was laughing at something. "That one. The one with the grey eyes."
"Hm?"
"Also, we should hurry," Eunice said. Her voice was tight. "He's here because of some mysterious power, Anastasia. Something dragged him back into this world, and we still don't know what. I don't want our plan to be compromised by something we can't see. We should finish it quickly, before anything else goes wrong."
Anastasia took a small cloth out of her jacket and began wiping the lenses in slow, careful circles. She did not look up. She held the binoculars out to the moonlight to check for smudges, and then she wiped them again.
"Three months," she said.
"What?"
"Three months after this day." Anastasia finally lifted her sapphire eyes and looked down at Eunice from the top of the tank. She breathed on the glass again and rubbed it with the cloth. "Three months from now, we will retrieve Syl's soul and send him back to his original world. That's the plan. That's the date."
There was a pause.
"WHAT?!" Eunice shouted.
Her voice cracked across the rooftop so loudly that a pigeon, sleeping on a nearby pipe, burst into the air with a flurry of wings. Eunice did not even notice it.
"Three months?! Do you want our plan to be compromised?! Do you want something to go wrong?!" She stormed forward and pointed a finger at the dragon. "Fucking hell! I knew I shouldn't have trusted you!"
She turned away with a huff and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.
Anastasia sighed. It was a long, patient sigh, the kind that a teacher gives to a very stubborn student who will not do her homework.
"Patience, Eunice," she said. "If it weren't for me, you would be dead right now. Literally dead. Do you remember that? Your own daughter was this close to ending you."
Eunice's shoulders stiffened.
"She had planned it for a long time," Anastasia continued, and for once, her voice was not teasing. "She was going to destroy your soul, piece by piece, until nothing was left. And she would have done it, too. She had every reason. You hurt her father, and she never forgave you for it."
It was true.
Eunice did not need to be told. She remembered the girl's face as clearly as if she were looking at it now: the same snake-slit eyes, the same dark green hair, and an expression that was colder and harder than anything Eunice had ever worn herself. Her daughter had been the one to free Syl in the end. She had given her father the freedom he asked for, the only kind he would accept, and that freedom had come through death. It was the one thing he chose for himself.
But there was a second promise. Before she let him go, her daughter had made a vow to him. She had promised that she would destroy her mother's soul so that it could never hurt anyone again.
That vow had never been kept. Anastasia had snatched Eunice's soul away before the girl could finish what she began.
"And besides," Anastasia said, "it's not the time yet."
"So what?" Eunice snapped. She whirled around again. "I'm grateful. Fine. I'll say it. I am grateful. But this waiting is over! We have to act before the people who are protecting him find us and attack us!"
She was right, and she knew it. She had thought about this for many nights.
The man called Max was not alone. He was surrounded by people who were far more dangerous than they looked. There was his father's old mentor, for one. Dietrich's own teacher, an ancient vampire who sat at the top of the Vampir Councir, would not stay quiet for long. The moment he found out that two strangers were stalking his student's son, he would make sure both of them disappeared. He would not even need to raise his voice.
Some might call this cowardice. Eunice could see how it looked. She was afraid of a man she had never even met, a stranger she had only heard of in rumors. But she knew what an Elder Vampire could do. She had faced a fair number of them in her own world, in her first life and again after she regressed. She had nearly died to them many times.
She was not going to die to one more.
"Every day we wait is another day that someone can find us," Eunice said. Her voice shook. "So say something!"
Anastasia did not say anything. She only listened. She sat on the water tank with the binoculars on her knee, and the moon painted a thin white line along her cheek. Her face was calm. It was too calm, and she did not react to any of it.
"Hey! Say something!" Eunice said again.
Nothing.
"ANASTASIA!!!" Eunice finally screamed. Her hair rose around her shoulders as green sparks crackled along her fingers. "If you are the reason that our long, well-planned plan fails, I swear I'm going to kil-"
Anastasia lifted one finger.
It was only a single finger, lazily raised, as if to point out something in the sky.
And Eunice stopped speaking.
It was not that she chose to stop. Her mouth simply would not move. The word she had been shouting was stuck in her throat, and the sound of it hung in the air like a bubble that refused to pop. Her eyes widened. Her arms, which had been waving in anger a moment ago, were frozen in place. She could not even blink.
'What the hell just happened???' she thought.
She tried to move her hand. Nothing. She tried to turn her head. Nothing. She tried to scream, but her lungs would not fill. It felt as if she had been dropped into a sheet of clear glass.
Then she noticed the silence.
Not a sound came from the ballroom. The violins, the laughter, and the clink of glasses had all vanished, as if someone had pulled a plug. The pigeon that had flown off earlier hung in the middle of the air with its wings spread wide, not moving. A paper cup had been blown out of a trash can and was suspended above the street like a tiny white ghost. Down below, the headlights of a taxi were frozen in the middle of an intersection. A woman crossing the road stood with one foot raised off the ground, her handbag hanging in the air behind her.
Even the wind had stopped.
'Did she-!!!' Eunice's mind screamed.
She understood. The truth hit her all at once, and her stomach dropped.
Time had stopped. Not in this rooftop. Not in this city. In the whole world. Every person on this planet, from the farmers in the fields to the soldiers on the front lines, had been frozen in place. Every ocean wave, every falling leaf, every beating heart had come to a halt, all because a woman on a water tank had lifted one finger.
'H-how could she do this?!'
Her skin crawled. It was one thing to hear about Anastasia's power, and another to feel it wrapped around her own neck.
Anastasia was not frozen, of course. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned. Then she went back to her binoculars as if nothing unusual had happened. She polished them for a full minute, humming softly, and then slipped them neatly into the pocket of her jacket. She patted the pocket twice, to be sure that they were safe.
"Right," she said at last. "Now we can talk."
She hopped off the water tank and landed on the tar roof without a sound. Her blue hair swayed as she walked, and the crescent moon behind her cast a long shadow across the ground.
"I tolerate your temper, Eunice," she said. "I want you to understand that. I let you shout, I let you stomp, and I let you wave your swords at me, and I only laugh. I do it because you are necessary for my plan. That is the only reason. There is no other."
She stopped a few paces away, and her head tilted slightly.
"And because you're interesting. That's a little bit of a reason too."
Eunice's eyes followed her. It was the only part of her body that could still move.
"But to question my plan," Anastasia said. Her voice was getting lower and slower, and every word dropped like a stone into deep water. "To question my choices. To stand in front of me and demand that I explain myself."
She took another step closer.
"That, I cannot let slide."
The temperature on the rooftop dropped by twenty degrees.
It began as a heaviness in the air. Then it became a weight, and the weight pressed down on Eunice's shoulders until her knees began to shake. It was the will of a dragon, ancient and terrible and mixed with so much killing intent that it was almost solid. It pressed against her chest. It crushed her lungs. It slid under her skin like cold needles.
'Th-this killing intent,' Eunice thought. Her thoughts were frantic and shaking. 'It's slowly killing me!!!'
She looked into Anastasia's face and saw that the playful sapphire eyes were gone.
The teasing glimmer, the lazy amusement, and the childish smirk had disappeared completely. In their place were the eyes of something far older than a girl named Anastasia. They were bright, cold, and slit like a lizard's. They did not look at Eunice the way a person looks at a friend. They looked at her the way a mountain looks at an ant. It was the face of a creature that was only a few steps away from forgetting why it should care about a small human like her at all.
Anastasia lifted one finger and pointed it down at the ground.
She said only one word.
"KNEEL."
-WOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!
The whole rooftop trembled. A pulse of invisible force rolled outward from her finger, and the sound of it was like a giant bell being struck underwater. Eunice's body slammed forward. Her knees hit the tar with a crack, and her hands pressed flat against the ground, and her forehead dropped almost to the roof. She could not stop it. She could not even fight it. It was as if the world itself had grabbed her by the neck and bent her down.
'SHIIIIITTTTT!!!!' she screamed inside her head.
Anastasia walked up to her slowly. She crouched down until her face was level with Eunice's bowed head. Then she reached out one slim finger, slid it under Eunice's chin, and lifted her face up until their eyes met.
"So," she said softly. "Next time you want to question the way I execute our plans..."
The pressure grew heavier.
"Make sure that you can beat me. One hundred percent. No excuses. No tricks. No luck."
Eunice's eyes were wide and wet with fury and fear. Her teeth were clenched so hard that blood trickled from her gum. But she was not a fool. She knew when she had lost.
With a great effort, she forced her head to move. It was only an inch. Then another. She nodded, slowly, once.
"Good," Anastasia said.
The smile came back. It was bright and sweet and nothing like the face of a moment ago, which made it a hundred times more frightening. She snapped her fingers.
The pressure vanished.
Eunice collapsed forward onto her hands, gasping for air. Cold sweat ran down her neck. Her whole body shook like a leaf.
Anastasia straightened up and brushed some dust off her knees. "Though I admit," she said lightly, "the only ones who could ever beat me at one hundred percent are very few. Syl, with all of his power. That would be Chrono, and Emhyria too, if she were here. And lastly..."
She paused, and a faint, strange look crossed her face. It was almost like respect.
"The previous rulers of the Raven Empire. Emperor Revan the Founder, Van Valraven the First, and Empress Marriane Margaret the First, Van Valraven."
Eunice lifted her head slowly. Her breath was coming a little more evenly now. "Those two...?"
"The first rulers of the Raven Empire," Anastasia confirmed. "And Syl's parents."
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
"Or should I say," Anastasia murmured, "that they are the parents of Syl's true name."
She looked out across the frozen city. The lights of the buildings looked like little golden coins that had been pinned against the dark.
"Aurelius Theodoro the Greatest, Van Valraven the First."
The name hung in the still air. It sounded like the name of a king in an old song. It sounded heavy and grand and far too large for the man laughing happily in the ballroom across the road.
Then Anastasia burst into laughter.
"Hahaha! Nothing, really. Don't mind me." She waved her hand. "I'm just feeling nostalgic. It happens when you live as long as I do."
She stretched her arms over her head and yawned again.
"We should go now, Eunice. We're done dilly-dallying here. I'm bored."
Eunice stood up slowly. She wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, and her knees wobbled for a moment before they held. When she spoke, her voice was rough, but it was steady.
"Fine," she said. "Have it your way."
She lifted her chin. Her eyes were still burning.
"But if this plan gets compromised because of you, I will blame you for eternity."
Anastasia laughed and did not reply.
Eunice raised her hand, and dark green hexes rose from her fingertips and spun in the air like a swarm of fireflies. They wove together, brighter and brighter, until a round gate of swirling green light stood in the middle of the rooftop. Its edges crackled, and beyond it there was nothing but a deep, shifting darkness.
"I'll go first," Eunice said.
"After you," Anastasia said sweetly, and she made a little bow.
Eunice stepped through the portal without looking back. The green light swallowed her whole, and she was gone.
Anastasia was supposed to follow. She lifted one foot and was about to step forward when she stopped. She turned around and looked back across the road.
Far across the frozen street, the ballroom windows still glowed. Through the glass she could see a tiny, perfectly still figure with amber hair, stopped in the middle of laughing.
She smiled. It was a different kind of smile from any she had worn all night. It was soft and a little sad, and it looked almost fond.
"You're lucky this time, Syl," she said quietly. "You are really lucky this time. It seems that fortune favors you, and that the Writer who calls himself..."
She stopped, and the air in front of her rippled. A line of glowing text appeared in the dark, written in the language of fate itself.
[The Watcher Who Hates God]
"...really seems to be trying to save you this time."
Her smile faded as she studied the glowing letters.
"I don't know what happened in that specific round, the twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-ninth," she said. "But I know that he is connected to it. It's the one place I can't peer into. I can't even watch it. No matter how hard I look, there is a veil in front of it."
The letters slowly dissolved into the night air. Anastasia watched them go, and for a long moment, she was silent.
Then she shrugged, as if she were brushing something away, and stepped through the portal. The green light closed behind her. The gate shrank to a single point and vanished.
On the empty rooftop, in the stillness that came after, only her laughter remained. It floated up into the frozen sky, wild and high and cruel, as she thought about what would happen soon. She was laughing about the retrieval that was never going to succeed, and about the soul of a man that was never going to be taken.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Then time began to move again.
***
The pigeon flapped its wings and flew away over the roofs. The paper cup tumbled down into the street. Inside the ballroom, the violins picked up the note they had been playing, and no one in the whole city noticed that they had paused for even a second.
After the dance, Max and Bell found a small round table near the edge of the floor and sat down together. Their cheeks were still pink, and their hands were still linked on the white tablecloth, though neither of them had noticed. A waiter brought them two fresh plates of food, and they went back to eating, only more slowly this time, in no hurry at all.
Bell was in the middle of describing how much she disliked the olives on her salad when two young women approached the table.
They were both very pretty. One had long chestnut hair that fell in waves over her shoulders, and the other wore a short red dress and a diamond necklace. They walked slowly, in step with each other, with the look of people who had practiced a conversation on the way over. The one in the red dress gave Max a bright, careful smile.
"Hi," she began. "Excuse me, I hope we're not interrupting. I just wanted to say that you two danced so beautifully, and I was wondering if..."
She never finished her sentence.
Bell had turned her head.
She did not say a word. She did not even move, other than that one small turn of the neck. But her grey eyes, which were usually so calm and thoughtful, had gone cold and flat like two pieces of grey stone. She looked at the girl in the red dress. Then she looked at the girl with the chestnut hair. Then she looked at the hand of the girl in the red dress, which had been halfway to resting on the back of Max's chair.
It was not a glare so much as a verdict.
Her sharp intuition, honed by years of reading the faces of people who wanted something from her, had sensed what was coming from the moment the two of them started walking. She did not need to hear the question. She already knew it. And she had already decided what the answer was going to be.
The girl in the red dress froze with her mouth open. The other girl took half a step back. For a long, uncomfortable moment, nobody said anything.
Then the girl in the red dress let her hand fall, cleared her throat, and gave a tiny, nervous laugh.
"Ughh, let's just go," she muttered to her friend. She turned away, and the red dress swished against her legs. "Geez. I just wanted to talk with her boyfriend."
"Yeah, let's go before she kills us!" the other girl whispered back, and the two of them hurried off into the crowd, and they did not look back.
Max did not stop eating.
He lifted his fork, speared a piece of roasted vegetable, and chewed it thoughtfully. The whole scene had passed him by. He had noticed the girls, of course, but he had not been the least bit interested in them. He did not care if Bell glared at them. He did not care if they cried. He did not even remember what color their dresses were.
'Like I care about them,' he thought. 'Even if they tried to talk to me, I'd just ignore them. Besides, they look pretty average.'
The thought did not come from arrogance. Anyone in the room would have disagreed with it. Those two girls were beautiful, and a hundred other men would have stopped breathing if they had been approached by either one of them. They were the kind of women whom crowds turned to look at.
But Max saw things differently. His standard when it came to women was different from everyone else's. It always had been.
He could count on one hand the people who had ever made his heart race. They were very few. And each of them had made it race so hard that he had almost died from the sheer, helpless feeling of being full to the brim.
The first was Emhyria. Even now, thinking of her name was like reaching into a pocket and finding a warm stone. The second was Jeanne, the vampire woman everyone in the game called the 'Optional Villainess', because her route had been entirely optional. You could choose to make her your enemy or not, and he had chosen not. And the third, the one sitting right in front of him with a fork in her hand and a smear of sauce on her wrist, was Bell.
'You could say my standards for women are really high for an anti-social guy like me,' he thought. 'But whatever. My type of woman can't be understood by normal people anyway. Only cultured men and wise people would get it.'
He smiled quietly at the thought. Then he picked up his glass of wine, swirled it once, and drank the last of it in a long, easy swallow. He set the glass down on the table with a soft clink.
"Bell," he said. "Let's go. I'll bring you somewhere."
Bell, who had been glaring in the direction where the two girls had vanished, blinked and turned back to him. The cold look left her face at once, like a cloud blowing off the sun, and her expression turned bright and curious.
"Alright!" she said.
Max could not help himself. He reached across the table and patted her head, and she leaned into it without any complaint at all, with her eyes half closed.
'She really acts like a cat,' he thought. 'Or maybe the closest thing would be a dog? Naaaahhh. She's definitely a cat.'
He laughed softly to himself on the inside, where she could not see it.
Max pushed his chair back and stood up. He straightened his jacket and smoothed down his hair. Then he turned to face her and held out his hand with a slight bow, just as he had done on the dance floor. The light from the chandeliers shone on his amber hair, and his eyes were warm.
"Shall we go, my lady?"
Bell looked at his hand and then up at his face. She smiled, a full, happy smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. She placed her hand in his, rose from her seat with all the grace she could manage, and lifted her chin in the manner of a noblewoman from an old story.
"Yes," she said. "I shall accompany you, fine nobleman."