The Airship

[XCandy and LunacyX]

"Why the <********>," Lawrence began, in a seething sort of hiss, as he fumbled with his pilfered pack of cigarettes, "Would I want to please her?" He hadn't smoked in years, not since Nicolae and Malakai were cherubic little children, but he found going through the motions disturbingly familiar. "The treacherous, manipulative, psychotic, lying little dictator of the grand Mayfair family." He suspected it was growing clearer that the fight that had taken place between the two of them, the screaming match, the snarled accusations that had turned to physical blows, had not been as one-sided as he had thought it would be. No, Antha had rounded on him. She had laughed at his outrage, and then provoked him. She had said things he had never in his wildest dreams imagined. 'Did you really think it was an accident?' she had taunted him, 'Did you think it was a stroke of fatally bad luck?' It had been at about this point that she had laughed and laughed at how she had pulled the entire world out from under his feet, and Lawrence had decided without a shadow of a doubt that Antha Evelyn Mayfair was the devil. 'You didn't want to see the truth.' When he had lunged for her, she had run and he had chased her through the echoing bowels of the airship, out for blood. He hardly even remembered the quarrel at the top of the stairs when he had caught her, or how she had struggled until his back was at them and then shoved him down, down, to what could have been his death. All the love that had existed between them yesterday was spoiled now, turned to bitterness and hatred.
But Antha loved this vampire that she was sending him out to hunt. She loved him, and he wanted to see something she loved meet the same grisly fate she had inflicted upon what he loved. "Find him?" he growled, pushing himself away from the crate he had been leaning against and going to lay his hand upon the brass lock.
Such a nifty little thing, that dial. To the right was the Mayfair Manor Attic. One notch to the left was a small, crude 'X', which once upon a time had led to the Satis House attic. One more to the left led to the airship. Finally, at the far left, there was the very heart of their havoc. All they had to do was focus on their target, their victim, and the thing found them. The thing made the final notch whatever door they needed to take their prey. "It's past noon," he continued, checking his watch, "The vampire will be dead. Let's get this the ******** over with."

The first thing Antha did when she rose that night was to shut herself in Julien's study, tucked into the window seat with the phone settled in her lap. She hadn't spoken to anyone, and didn't know if Dorian and Lawrence had spirited Vikteren away yet. All she knew was that she had to talk to Khayman, and it was gravely important that no one overhear her. It took perhaps ten minutes to deal with the matters at hand, for the witch girl and the vampire to whisper their secrets through the phone. When it was done, she added, "Ah, I almost forgot. There is a chance that a certain vampire will be passing through our city. Cyrus is his name---Vikteren's maker. If any of your coven should happen across him, I should rather like to speak with him. Can I trust you to pass the message along?"
"Of course," the vampire responded slowly, warily, on the other end of the line, "But do take care, Evie, if he is as dangerous as Vikteren says. And with your cousin as well."
"Lawrence will keep his mouth shut," she assured him quickly and sternly, "His life depends upon it." She hung up then, for a split second before she took a deep breath and picked the phone back up and dialed another number. "Good evening, uncle Barclay," she greeted the voice on the other end of the line, "I want you to listen to me very well. As the Designee of the Legacy, I forbid you to let anyone know of the following conversation, understand?" She proceeded to tell him how, rather than Julien's plans for her, she and Cian were to be married and she needed him to make the arrangements as quickly as possible. This was followed by a list of things she needed done---things that she explained she could no longer trust Lawrence with. It was only with his ardent (and somewhat fearful) assurances that he would not disappoint her that Antha hung up and left Julien's study.
Again, she sought out no one. She returned quietly to the attic by herself, to the old wooden door that she opened with trembling fingers, and emerged back in the dim and dusty halls of the airship. If they had managed to take him, he would be locked in the rubbish room down the hall. She almost didn’t want to go look.
Almost.  

[Okimiyage]

Dorian chuckled, nervously, as the dial turned--with a squeal that he would have not thought a pig capable of making, let alone inanimate metal. But then again, he had often suspected that the airship was not quite as inanimate as all that. (If only it were alive, how it would hate the children for their crimes. They would have long since been crushed within its steel-ribbed belly, and for just cause.) Wrapping a slim, lily-white palm about the door handle, Dorian nodded to Lawrence. "Come on. Let's get on with it." There was no particular point in fearing the vampire at this point in time; he was dead to the world as long as the sun was horizon-high, and it would be many hours before twilight threatened.

The door-handle left flakes and smears of rust on Dorian's hand, which ordinarily might have annoyed him. The vista that the door opened upon, however, made him forget all about that.
The vampire had chosen an abandoned barn for his sleeping-place. In the distance, heather-gray mountains wreathed in mist made the horizon misaligned; withered wheat, the color of tarnished gold, swayed in the fields about the farm, stirred by a wickedly biting breeze. Dorian had no idea how far outside of Osiris City that Vikteren d'Argnet had made it, but judging from the sudden drop in temperature, he was inclined to guesstimate on the long side. And he'd headed north. The barn itself had once been brightly painted a seasonal red, but years of neglect had scraped the pigment from its planks, and now the dull grey of the wood was more apparent than the original paint job. The roof was falling in, and ancient hay bales a-riot with plant life could be seen through the cracked timbers and gaping tiles.
Dorian clutched his arms, teeth already chattering. He'd dressed lightly, not expecting to encounter a cold snap inside of the airship. "********," he muttered. Releasing the door handle, he stepped through and headed for the barn. The airship portal had, fortunately, opened not far away from the hingeless double-doors of the old barn. He could only presume that was where the vampire had taken shelter.
Dorian had to shift the doors aside on his own strength. Rot and rust had damaged the hinges to the point that they no longer even supported the door, and the last person to go inside the barn had simply propped the doors up to cover the entry-way to the barn. A sparrow flew out like a shot as soon as the first slit of sunlight fell through the gap between--Dorian nearly dropped the doors of shock.
Inside, sunlight filtered through a fine mist of hay-particles and dust. Mildewed saddles and abandoned farm equipment lined the walls; ahead, a huge mound of hay served as a means of access to the loft where ladders had, over the years, failed.
And in the center of the barn, half-hidden beneath a camoflage layer of straw, was a mound of earth that had been clearly, and recently, disturbed.

Dorian glanced around briefly, then went to the wall and pulled down a shovel more rust than metal from a rack of antique tools. "Ought to get digging, I guess."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Lawrence followed his cousin silently, sourly, across the crunching ground, pulling the cuffs of his sleeves down over his fingers. He wasn't sure whether he was angry or glad that someone had removed his jacket when they'd taken him to the sick room, because while it was warm, it was a really expensive jacket, far too nice for playing in the dirt. When they came upon the freshly upturned dirt, Lawrence only rolled his eyes at Dorian, muttering what he felt to be a well-deserved expletive, and yanking the shovel from his hands.
In his life, Lawrence Mayfair had never really done much physical labor. He had stood with the shovel in his hands before, just like this, with half a dozen of his cousins around him, all turning up soil in the garden as others dragged heavy bodies down the stairs and tossed them in. He had liked it then and he liked it now, the scrapes and bruises the shovel made on his delicate hands, the ache that began in his shoulders, and it was entirely because it was something to preoccupy him. On any regular day he would have paid someone else to do the physical work, but when he was handling their dirty little secrets, he liked it.
"Found him," he announced flatly, setting the shovel aside and reaching down into the dirt, pushing the dirt away from a very cold white hand before he began digging the rest of him out with his hands. It wouldn't do any good to go severing the vampire's body parts yet. When that was finished, he took Vikteren's hands and instructed Dorian to take his feet to haul him back through the door, which he was quick to shut behind him on the slim chance that someone had noticed them and came snooping, and down the hallway into the rubbish room, as he had been told to.
He left hastily when the very dead vampire was locked up tight---not that he couldn't go tearing through the rotting wood if he really wanted to---and waited silently in the altar room for Antha to reappear when sun set. Maybe he slept, maybe he only dreamed. All he knew was that he heard the door open and shut, her light footsteps fading down the hall, and the urge to slam her head into one of the walls was almost overwhelming.
But Antha paid absolutely no attention to her cousin, and in fact didn't really notice his presence. The only thing she noticed was the familiar figure on the floor when she went to peer beneath the door of the rubbish room. The day was just turning to darkness, the grimy windows in the first-class corridor outside of the altar room glaring in the golden light. He would be awake soon, and Antha found herself sitting beside the door waiting for it, her head resting back against the wall.
If it didn't absolutely destroy her, she was really going to love this.  

[Okimiyage]

The weeks away had changed Vikteren. When the dirt was first brushed away from his face, Dorian almost stopped Lawrence from digging, mistaking the vampire at first for a common corpse.
Even at the best of times, the vampire was gaunt; now, he was skeletal. His skin was bloodless, corpse-white, without even the faintest blush of blood in his cheeks. His hair was matted and filthy with dirt, his once-fine clothes stained and tattered; his long nails were black with blood and earth and god knew what else. God probably didn't want to know what else, actually.

When they threw him in the rubbish room, Dorian slapped his hands off on his knees to dust them off, and then shuddered. "Feels like I need a shower-and-a-half after handling him. Disgusting--"
Lawrence was quick to leave, he noticed--he didn't know the details of Antha and his cousin's little spat, but if this was the outcome, he didn't want to know. The tension between the two of them was almost thick enough to cut. And Antha--the way her eyes fixed on the figure, greedily, like it was the only thing that mattered in the world--she was making Dorian shudder even worse than the vampire had, and for entirely different reasons. "I'll just--leave you two alone, then," he called out, backing away towards the door.

Vikteren came alive at sunset.
It was not correct to say that he woke, which implied some, however brief, moment of pause between the two states of life and death. His mind did not require the same vital moments of assessment that a human's did upon waking. Instead, the vampire woke with the knowledge that the earth that he had buried himself within no longer entombed him, and--perhaps understandably, because fleeing one's ancient and evil vampiric sire for several weeks would make anybody a little paranoid, a little neurotic--jumped to conclusions.
Vikteren tore through the door of the rubbish room like it was construction paper. He looked like the devil. He felt like hell. He hadn't fed in a fortnight and yet his eyes, as he fixed them upon Antha, were the color of emeralds in the sunlight.
Within the span of a breath, Vikteren had crossed the room to her, and seized her in a death-grip that nearly crushed ribs before he remembered to check his strength. Antha. If he was not so acutely aware of his hunger, of her scent, he would have thought he was dreaming. But vampires did not dream, and nothing on earth--certainly not anything that his subconscious could come up with--could be compared to the fragrance of Antha's blood, hot beneath her skin, and the magnolia perfume that she seemed to produce like breath. No, he could not be imagining this.
And that meant wherever he was, wherever Cyrus's men had transported his body to while he was dead to the world, they had Antha, too.
He pulled away quite suddenly, but still did not let go of her. "Where are we?" he whispered. It was the first time he had spoken since he had seen her, and his voice was different from how she might have remembered it; hoarse from disuse, the harmonics strange and compelling in all the way a vampire's might be to prey. "How were you captured?"  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

The sound of splintering wood drew Antha back into reality from her daydreams, made her turn her gaze to Vikteren just before he took hold of her. "You look just dreadful," she purred once she had looked him over as the umbra that the airship was made of rushed him, separated the vampire from the aristocrat and tossed him backwards like a rag doll.
"I'm afraid you are laboring under a misconception, ducky. Your maker has absolutely nothing to do with the present accommodations." She flashed a twisted grin then, which was perhaps the sort of smile a wolf might give a lion that it had found in chains. "Welcome to the airship," she said at length, giving a sweeping gesture around them. She knew she had told him about the airship before, all of the terrible things they had done there and how the darkness had consumed them, made them cruel, homicidal little demons, and whatever she hadn't told him...well, he would be learning soon enough, wouldn't he? "The rules are simple---you're going to do as we tell you and play our games. If you don't, we'll kill you. Clear enough?"
As she spoke, the speakers began to buzz, to crackle and flash static, before finally the child Nicolae's voice came purring through the hallways. "Good e~evening, everyone." Antha's attention went immediately to the little speaker up in the corner, her eyes gleaming darkly, knowingly. "There has been a change in the aristocracy this month. Illium has been de-mo-ted." There was a short pause while the voice laughed to itself at the joke. "The new gegor is Vikteren. The gift of the month will be posted shortly."
Antha shook her head, shrugging her slight shoulders. So the others had arrived to begin the game. "Did you really think I was going to let you get away?" she whispered finally, those manic, threatening eyes settling back on the vampire, "That I was going to let you run away without consequence? You should know me so much better than that." Far off, in the great belly of the beast they called the airship, metal groaned and creaked and the sound wound back and forth through the labyrinth of hallways and rooms. "Tell me Vikteren, what made you believe the wrathful phoenix of a witch girl would not have you hunted down, would not drag you back and retaliate? What made you think that I would not tear your heart out for breaking mine?"
When her anger broke, her last screamed words dying off to a sharp echo, she was left shaking, looking very much like she might strike him at any moment, or otherwise find some small animal to take her knife to. "That is why you are here---the most severe of crimes against the Princess of the Red Rose. You are going to suffer for it, in every way our twisted minds can dream up, and then in all likelihood, you are going to lose the game and die here."  

[Okimiyage]

Vikteren was not amused.
He sat up slowly, with the weariness of an old man. The light in his eyes had not yet gone off--would not go off until he fed, and his starving body was sated--but the hollows and bruises about their sockets had become more pronounced, in the seconds that it had taken Antha's umbra to fling him across the room. He did not stand. One stood in the presence of nobility, and this--there was nothing noble about it.
"Games," he said; the harmonics of his voice, strange with a vampire's compulsion, too close for a starving body to talk sensibly with it's natural prey. "You brought me back here for your games?!" And the last word was a snarl that resounded about the chamber. Vikteren leant forward, very slowly, and put his hands on his knees so that they would not shake with rage. He said quietly, "This is not the time, Antha, and you reckon--with more than you know. These are not games that you play here, Antha, it is torture and death that results, and if that is all you want of me--" The vampire did not appear want to look at her any longer. He stood up very slowly, his limbs still rotten with bruises that had not healed instantaneously upon impacting the floor. "You should have left me buried where I was, and pretended I was dead. Was that not what I was--dead to you? You would not even see me when last I came to you, would not even speak to me, though I came only to--" Vikteren seemed to catch himself then, and his mouth snapped shut with such ferocity that he bit his lip, though no blood seeped forth from the dark hole.
Between them, silence, for a dark moment, and Vikteren turned his back on here. In his breast-pocket, he fumbled for something. When finally he faced her again, the vampire held her locket. "I had come to give this back to you," he said, in a low, harsh voice. "But when you would not see me, I thought I would keep it, as a reason to come back. This is--" he laughed, hollowly, an inhuman sound that scraped and bit the ears. "This is not how I imagined myself returning it." The silver pool in his hand seemed to glow in the haze low light of the airship, filtered through cobwebs and dust motes. He let the locket slip through his fingers, and the pool became a chain dangling from his grasp. Vikteren tossed it at her feet.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

"You are wasting your time," the girl spoke simply, taking up her locket and fastening it happily around her neck, tucking it beneath the neckline of her dress, "What's done is done, and there is nothing else to be done about it." Down the hall, there was an echo of snickering, hints of a whispered song. Antha only glanced in their direction, at which point Courtland and Jack went running back towards the stairs from where they had been peeping around the corner, their laughter ringing eerily through the hallway.
When Antha's gaze returned to the vampire, she seemed to really look at him for the first time, his weakened state. "You need blood," she murmured, taking up the space that existed before him, "You're welcome to mine, if you think you could stand it. And you really should, before things start getting out of hand as they always do. You'll lose terribly, in this state."

Meanwhile, in the altar room, things were already getting out of hand. It had begun with a fight over the gift of the month, what it should be and who should decide it, and had evolved almost into physical blows between Lawrence and Jack. The former had already crafted their monthly offering and refused to let it be anything else, while the latter argued that he was playing with fire and they would all burn for it.
Finally, Jack did bring his fist squarely against his cousin's stomach, sending him down to the floor in a fit of curses, doubled over and clutching the point of impact. The fight continued from there, escalating, as Eleanor took one of the crayons from the floor and put it to paper, scribbling as Courtland watched over her shoulder, his own shoulders shaking with the laughter he held back until she ran to the door and posted their new gift.
It was only the crackling of the speaker that stopped the aristocrats, that made them silent as it announced, "The gift of the month is...a wolf in sheep's clothing."
This brought them to silence. It wasa great deal more dangerous than Lawrence's idea, and a great deal more difficult. It was only Antha, still below in the hallway, who murmured idly, "Oh, is that what we're going to do this round? Betray one another? Alright then."  

[Okimiyage]

Vikteren found her last comment inexplicably intolerable.
"'Lose terribly'?" he said, his voice as soft as a snake's hiss. "Is that the only reason you offer it? You could not possibly have brought me here to win this game, Antha. I know enough about your Red Crayon Aristocrats to understand that. Are you so desperately bored these days that you would offer your own blood to prolong the life of a game played with the torment of others?" As he spoke, Vikteren had slowly advanced upon her, until he was right in front of her, until his lips breathed poisonous words mere centimeters from her own. "I understand you gave yourself title of 'princess', when you arranged for this...charade of a court to be brought about. You must think that dreadfully funny, the corruption of a word which once meant a woman of highest nobility."
His eyes were mesmerizing, ablaze beneath the tangle of his dark hair, too bright to be human, too bright to be anything alive. It was not difficult to understand how one might find themselves trapped in the miasma, the drug-like haze of a half-starved vampire's stare.
She had offered. And right now, Vikteren could not bring himself to abstain from the sweetest blood of all: that which was freely given.
He broke the velvety skin of her throat with his teeth, and drank from her jugular vein. It might have been more gratifying to Antha if he had done so like a wild beast, in a passionate rage, but he kept that fact well in mind, and drank from her in cold silence, and his hands, where he held her gently in place, were freezing, like ice.

They warmed slowly, as Antha's blood began to rush back through his dusty veins.
The vampire did not take as much from her as he should have, perhaps, but when he withdrew his fangs, and wiped blood from his lips, it was evident that her's had been enough to restore him. His cheeks were still gaunt, he was still filthy, but some of the old fluidity was back, in the panther-like grace of his sliding step backwards and the flicker of his eyes, no longer quite so luridly, murderously green as before, about the sloping ceiling of the chamber, as though this were his first time seeing it properly.

Suddenly, his gaze flicked back to Antha, and pinned her hard, like a butterfly upon collector's glass. "If you want to kill me, I'd rather you do it quickly, and grant me some kind of dignity in my final rest. There is no point in these children's games. I will not play them."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Antha did not move as he advanced upon her, did not say anything to the words he spoke, only let him take her blood still and silent. But blood was enough, when it was a witch's---blood held memories. It held the dark miasma that had settled over her thoughts, the infinite web of vile whispers that ordered her around. It held that moment in which she had asked Dorian errantly, angrily, what he thought of making Vikteren the gegor, and the moment in which Dorian had offered his name up in the altar room and Courtland, Lawrence, Jack, and Vittorio had seconded for the candidate. It held Dolly Jean's whisper in Antha's ear as they left---'But he could win, couldn't he? He's not as simple as the half-bloods...'---and more than anything, it held her anger, her pain. True heartbreak was something new to Antha, no one had ever dared to leave her, and she was hurt like a child, unhardened to the feeling.
"You are in the game whether you like it or not," she hissed, taking a step back, "If you do not play, you lose, and losing is not a death sentence. Losing warrants humiliation and pain, and it is collectively that they kill you." She turned on her heel then, stalking off down the hallway. It was at the foot of the stairs that she ran across Jack, spitting blood on the floor. "What happened to you?"
He grinned at her, somewhat angrily, with his bloody mouth. "Vittorio think I'm going to sell him out," he murmured, his hands clenched into fists, "We had a little fight about it. I just might, now."
"Everyone gets sold out in this game," she whispered quietly, which brought her back to the flash of anger when she had heard the announcement, driving her up the stairs and into the first-class corridor to find Lawrence, to drag him into the sickroom where they began to argue all over again. Courtland, who had his ear against the door, understood only that Antha was threatening him against telling something, and he was arguing that she deserved it. But this went on only for a few minutes, until words were not enough and things began shattering against the walls, furniture being overturned, yelps and snarls and all the other little sure signs of a fight.
The flood gates were really open now.
Eventually, they all began to drift off to different areas of the airship, each running over one another's secrets in their head. The object, of course, was to reveal a dangerous one to the rest of the court. The trick was to find something related to it to toss into the gift box. The trouble was afterwards, when they had all betrayed and been betrayed, and the demand for revenge was overwhelming. Eleanor in particular had really dug her own grave this time.  

[Okimiyage]

The vampire would have liked to protest; he would have liked to dispose of some of the incubatory rage that Antha's blood, in quenching his thirst, had given him the liveliness to act upon. It was difficult to be angry, after all, when one barely had strength to propose thought. But by the time he had found the words, the witches were gone. They had fled as swiftly as rats abandoned a sinking ship, Antha and her coterie after her.
Vikteren realized, momentarily, that his hands were shaking. He was not afraid. "Cruel," he whispered, "Idiot, cursed, coward. I--" He stopped, took in a hissed breath. "--am all these things." The vampire glanced about the empty room, and gave out a short, bitter laugh. "The red thread of fate ends in a noose, it seems." Stalking forth from the room, Vikteren ceded to Antha. Very well. I'll play. Why not? He had nothing to lose at this point, except his life, and that--that was rapidly becoming rather remarkably meaningless to him, as his night progressed.
Through the airship he roamed, through corridors wall-papered in spiderwebs and carpeted with dust. (Underneath that, unpleasant stains. At least, if he perished here, he would never be lonely for all the ghosts.)
Finally, he came to a room. The walls were lined with mirrors, which made the parlor seem much too large for the single object of furniture which it contained; a dollhouse.
Vikteren, his curiosity piqued, drew closer. The dollhouse seemed familiar, although he could not recall having seen one of such a design ever before.
It hit him then.
The dollhouse was Satis House. A perfect replica, right down to the pattern on the canopy lace. Every detail was exact, down to the lace pattern on the kitchen curtains. In one of the beds, a spill of red curls gleamed. It was more than a dollhouse; it was a work of art.
Until he realized that something was moving in the shadows of the attic.

Dorian scrounged about one of the more commonly-used kitchen areas. s**t. Sheep and wolves, Courtland had said, and Dorian felt the itch of wool in his ears. He'd not been amongst the family good and proper for some time--probably years at this point, although he'd never kept track. His secrets were stale. Child's play. He'd nothing to barter with but the sympathy of his cousins, and it was not a good idea to depend on the noble sentiments of others to get through this game.
He could feel his heart beating high and fast and rapid, the heart of prey, and it was not a feeling that he'd ever had before and he didn't like it. But wolves in sheep's clothing was a wildcard game, a game where any one of them might fall. His station did not guarantee his safety. He had figured on his absence from the family to give him a diplomat's protection during the game, but no. They'd all had plenty of time (and the aunt's near-legendary ability to sniff out gossip on every single member of the family) to hear about his exploits.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

It had been hours. Long enough for most of the aristocrats to find what they needed---a little broken doll, pieces of paper with frantic scribbles, a lighter, a length of rope, and so on---and then to follow the shouts and screams to one of the desolate little maintenance areas in the back of the ship, to watch Antha and Lawrence threaten one another with every horrible thing their minds could conceive, building up to the point where Lawrence was thrown into the metal handrail and left clutching his stomach, glaring at Antha in such a way that she ran and he went chasing after her.
The girl had lost him by the time she stumbled into the kitchen, breathless and red-cheeked. "Dorian," she exclaimed quietly, falling to her knees beside the door, "What are you doing here? I hardly think there's anything worth finding in a kitchen that's never been stocked to begin with." Her voice was just a touch higher than usual, almost imperceptibly, her eyes a shade more panicked, but she tried not to let on about that. Instead she smiled, viciously, and whispered, "But I'm glad to find you. I have a present for you, Dorian my darling, one that you are desperately in need of." Her breathing having slowed and her color returned to normal, she rose to her feet, taking Dorian's hand in her own and laying a light little kiss on his cheek. "Do you want to know what Lawrence did yesterday after the funeral? He went to the Talamasca. He took them our family secrets and handed them over on a silver platter, sold them to satisfy his own curiosity." Antha smiled briefly, quietly, to herself, rounding Dorian and taking up the small knife on the nearby counter. "No one expects him to be a wolf, I imagine. They think poor little Laurie is the family martyr, that he gives everything for this family, but he's as twisted as the rest of us, really." She was silent for a moment then, wrapping the blade of the knife in a scrap of cloth from the floor and stashing it in her boot. Looking back to Dorian, she laughed shortly. "You can't imagine how we've been fighting lately, and it only promises to get worse when the game is over and he’s sold me out.”
There was a bang down the hallway, a door being thrown violently shut, and then another and another. Antha laughed despite herself, whispering against Dorian’s ear, “Better hurry…the game is almost over.” Then she was gone, fled through another door and into the darkness before Lawrence came bursting into the kitchen, flinging open cabinets and knocking over tables before following through the other door after her. But there was no way to find her now that he had lost her in the labyrinth of the maintenance sector, there were too many ways to turn and too many places to hide. The only thing he could do was clutch his offering, a little glass vial with dark red contents that gleamed in the dim electric lighting.
Meanwhile, Antha had wandered back the way she had come, following one of the smaller hallways to a room she didn’t particularly remember. It wasn’t surprising, the way the airship changed at will, shifted from one thing to another, that she found herself in a room of mirrors, which she most certainly didn’t remember, watching Vikteren as he studied a dollhouse. “What on earth are you doing?” she questioned quietly, on the off chance that Lawrence was near.  

[Okimiyage]

Dorian froze like a deer in headlights, and did not begin to unthaw until Antha had left the room.
He waited until he was certain that she was out of earshot, and then clucked his tongue against his teeth. "Darling Lawrence, I'd hate to be in your shoes right now. You oughtn't have pissed her off."
He knew he was being set up. Antha was just using him as a catspaw to rid herself of Lawrence. Their murderous princess had been getting more and more overt in her manipulations. Dorian was certain her impending death was to blame--could she not afford to be reckless, when she knew the day she would die? And there was nothing and nobody to stop her, here.
Dorian bit his lips nervously. To refuse her suggestion--Lawrence's warrant of execution--would certainly be an admirable act, noble and brave and reeking of the warmer sentiments.
Dorian had never been particularly brave. In fact, he knew himself to be yellow-bellied to his spine, a coward without a doubt. Antha was counting on that. He'd save his own skin before anyone else's--who else had a hide this pretty, after all?
But that included Antha, too, and sometimes he wondered whether she knew how disloyal her court really was.
Dorian sighed, and crept from the kitchen with his his hands in his pockets. He'd find Lawrence, first. If his beloved cousin really had sold them all out to the Talamasca, he would deserve what he got. If nothing else, Dorian wanted a good-bye kiss, before the taste of betrayal turned it sour.

Vikteren whipped around as soon as she entered the room. He'd sensed her coming from hallways-aways, but had harbored the vague hope that she would pass by the room. No such luck. He should not expect luck tonight, if the previous events of the evening were to set a standard.
"Antha," he said, through a throat husky with dust, and stepped swiftly away from the doll-house. He stopped for a moment, a thousand thoughts racing through his mind--he half expected Antha to hear the rushing of their escape as they fled past--and then seemed to realize that she had asked him a question.
His movements seemed stiff tonight, but that was to be expected. Never before had having a mortal in a room with him made the vampire so tense. Admittedly, Antha Mayfair was not your common mortal. He shrugged, woodenly, and answered, "You tell me. It's in your airship."
Turning his attention back to the doll-house in a vain attempt to distract himself from the witch's presence, Vikteren answered seriously this time. "If I were to guess, though, I would say some sort of dream-construct. I've never seen one in this form, but it would not be surprising to find one...here. This airship is not exactly part of the real world, is it?"  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

"The real world?" The girl laughed in spite of herself. "Ducky, I do not even know if the airship is real at all. For all I know we are asleep in the real world, dreaming this all up. It would explain the peculiar lack of physics. Have you ventured to the windows or to the top of this thing yet? There is no land beneath us, only a sky that displays whatever time of day is most convenient. And this room? It never existed before, not until you came across it." Her eyes fell across the dollhouse again as she spoke, her gaze narrowing and brows furrowing. "Is that my house?"
There was the sound of footsteps at the end of the hall, passing by, and she knew it was Lawrence and that he had given up for the moment. Good, she had an errand to run anyways. "I don't have time for this," she sighed finally, shaking her head at the odd dollhouse and turning on her heel. "If you will excuse me, I need to pay a visit to the fish tank. There is at least one corpse there that has not already gone rotten."

That was where Courtland came upon her, amid the throng of corpses strung from the ceiling that looked all the more colorless and dreary against the watery backdrop they had painted. “You should know I’m giving our secret up for the game,” he informed her lightly, placing his hands on her waist to steady her as she balanced on the railing, grabbing Illium’s body by the wrist and pulling it closer, “I think it just might be fun.”
“I thought you might,” she sighed errantly as she took her kitchen knife to the corpse and set about mutilating it, “I’ve already told Lawrence. If only you could have seen the look on his face…”
The boy smirked as she turned in his grip and put her hands to his shoulders so that he could lift her and set her down onto the floor. “You’re going to ruin him~” he sang lightly as they began along the catwalk, past the decomposed evidence of their past crimes.
Antha laughed. “He knew what it meant when he decided to betray me. The best I can do is match what he’s throwing out into the open.” She pouted then, with her usual dramatic flair, and lifted the hem of her skirt a few inches to display the blood-edged slash in her stocking, “Look, he cut me! I never thought I would see Laurie turn into such a barbarian.”
Courtland went to his knees at that, to kiss the wound and ask, “All better?” Antha only grinned, and so he checked his watch, the hands of which moved erratically in the airship. “I think it’s getting close to time. All ready for the bloodbath?”
“Quite so,” she answered pleasantly, taking the hand he offered her, “Shall we check up on our gegor?”
“Let’s.” And so the pair retraced the girl’s steps, back down the hallway that had never existed, skipping and giggling like the children they had been when the first game began to peek at the vampire. “He looks just dreeeeadful,” Courtland murmured in delight, as if his supernatural hearing wouldn’t pick up his words, “Remind me never to leave you, Evie. I’m too pretty to end up like him.”  

[Okimiyage]

Vikteren felt suddenly certain, watching Antha leave the room, that he was going to die here. It was an unpleasant feeling, like raindrops on his bones, prickling and cold. But watching Antha leave the room, in a rustle of skirts, gave him a feeling of dread the likes of which he had never encountered. He remembered a time when they could not bear to be apart. Now it seemed as though that time had never happened, and she could not bear his presence for more than a few minutes.
She was busy, he supposed. It was difficult being a princess--even if your country was comprised mostly of airship, and your subjects were your own murderous cousins. They'd have no difficulty finding some amusing secret with which to betray their family, those whom they'd known their whole life.
Vikteren only knew Antha. And he did not have any of her secrets; even if he had, he did not know whether he would have been capable of giving them up. "You should have left me in the ground," he said aloud-- addressing the air, addressing nobody.
But it was too late for that now.
Vikteren took a deep breath that he did not need, and plunged his hand into the shadows of the doll-house attic. Something fluttered beyond his fingertips--a rushing stirred the air about his skin--and then his finger seized about something solid, and he drew out of the darkness--
a doll, about the length from palm to fingertips, with red curls matted with dirt and what had once been, beneath the filth, a white night-dress. The face was strikingly similar, but he did not know anyone of such tender years. And while to his eyes, the doll was motionless, inanimate--a child's grimy toy--in his fingers, where he clutched the porcelain frame, something squirmed.
The vampire nearly dropped the doll, but at the last moment something tightened his grasp. The airship had shown him this room for a reason, hadn't it?
He needed to find Antha.

Skipping through the halls, Dorian sang out--"Lawrence! Lawrence, Laurie, light-o'-love, light of my life--where the devil are you?"
Turning a corner, he caught sight of an open door, and Dorian stopped in his tracks. In the airship, an endless loop of hallways, this was not a common sight. If you went into room, you shut the door. It was common courtesy; the walls were not as paper-thin as they seemed, and whatever amusements the airship provided were best kept behind closed doors. Otherwise the screaming would have kept them all awake until the wee hours of the morning.
Dorian, of course, was destined to investigate. "Laurie~" he whispered, pursing his lips to emit the thin whistling tune of a waltz. Creeping closer down the hall, he peeked inside the room to see--
Nothing. Chairs, all aligned in neat rows, and velvet curtains in emerald green that covered every wall. The cobwebs that swayed in the air currents of Dorian's movement indicated that it had been a very long time since those chairs had been moved. They looked prepared for a performance. Above, a chandelier shrouded in dust tinkled gently; as Dorian stepped over the threshold, the candle-wicks lit themselves serenely, and spread their dusty light about the room. "The hell is this place?" Dorian muttered to himself, his brows knitting in irritation. He had expected something interesting. But if he was the only one here, there was no point in staying. Turning on his heel, he made as if to return to wandering the halls once more.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

While Courtland snickered to himself, Antha watched the vampire very carefully. She knew him well enough to realize something was wrong, and in the airship when something went wrong it could easily turn disastrous, deadly. "I don't like this," she murmured as she shook Courtland loose of her and slipped in the room, eying the little dollhouse, "Whatever this is for, it simply can't be good."
"But the question," Courtland purred, drawing up behind her and draping himself over her shoulders, "Is who is it going to be bad for?"
Above them, in the little speaker that occupied a corner of every room, there sounded the static that always alerted them to an announcement. The game is almost up, everyone. Who's going to get punished?
"Everyone," Antha sighed, quite as if she didn't care anymore. Lawrence was her only target now, the only one she needed beaten into the ground.
It was Courtland, still draped comfortably around Antha's shoulders, who blinked at the vampire and asked lazily, "Shouldn't you be digging up some secrets to offer as tribute? You don't want to lose right now. Antha is in charge of dealing out punishments, and with everything that's going on with Lawrence...well, I'd reeeeally hate to be on the other side of a knife from her right now." And he laughed at that, because he didn't think the vampire stood a chance.
"Hush," Antha ordered him shortly, to which he went obediently silent as she neared the dollhouse, holding only to her thin little fingers with a certain sense of comaraderie particular to these two cousins.
And then, suddenly, he said, "Do you think this has anything to do with you seeking out his sire? Cyrus, was it?" He knew instantly by the look she shot him that he was in dire, disastrous trouble---as hard as he tried not to smile, he did anyways, because secretly he would have loved to be on the other end of a knife from her right now---and all he could do was look away as if he hadn't said anything at all.
Suddenly, she laughed. Madly, hysterically, as if it didn't matter anymore. "'Little girls who play with fire get their fingers burnt, or else it catches and they are consumed by it,'" she purred in imitation of the coven master she had charged with getting her message to Vikteren's dreaded maker, "I always liked fire, you know that better than anyone, Courtland dearest." He laughed with her then, darkly, at some secret scrap of a joke they shared. Then, turning to Vikteren with that mad, spiteful grin and a certain darkness in her eyes that did not match it, "Besides, I am quite dead to our gegor already, I think."
Courtland knew that look. He had seen her grace Nicolae with it at least a thousand times back in the day, and knew from it exactly what she was thinking. The consequences of her rash actions, which promised immense danger, were irrelevant. All that mattered to her anymore in her vicious mind and spiteful, broken heart was making the object of her fury suffer.

Meanwhile, down the winding, creaking halls, Lawrence was petting the little vial he clutched in his hands, gleaming a dark crimson in the light. He knew he was losing it, much in the way he knew the things his family did were wrong. He saw it, recognized it, knew how to stop it, and actively made it worse. Oh yes, he was embracing that bitter insanity now that had always existed in the deep, dark core of his Mayfair genes, letting it take him over in the hopes that it would grow so great, so intense, that he could wrap it around Antha and strangle her with it.
He ignored Dorian for a while, because Dorian had always been a pest even when Lawrence was in the most patient of moods, but eventually he seemed to have no choice but to follow the echo of the boy's voice through the halls, through one he couldn't recall to a room he surely didn't remember so that when the boy turned he was there in the doorway, shoulder pressed to the wooden frame, a worn and ragged version of himself that would unnerve any of his cousins, or anyone that had ever known him. "What?" he hissed at the boy, as if it cost him wild stores of patience to speak and now he was worn thin.