The Twilight Man: Blood Obligation (JJBA)

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Crosspost:

Erina Pendleton had never before met a person that she would trust with her children but not with her purse.

This is a wonderful description of Speedwagon.

Its interesting that someone else got Dio's ice powers. The fight scenes generally are really good, particually how everyone contributes. Even if Speedwagon still have his bad habit of screaming at the slightest excuse. The trio of Power (Jojo), Skill (Erina) and Tricky (Speedwagon) works really well.

The OT3 grows ever closer! Though Erina doesn't seem to have figured out that Speedwagon likes Jonathan yet.

Wammu is very interestingly alien.
 

Leila Hann

Member
Little Musgrave


CLbW5vD.png
 

Leila Hann

Member
11. Marry the Night​


The last of the throng shuffled out the front gate. The two men who brought up the rear each held a rifle. One held his weapon up toward the sky, as if he thought the crackling yellow flames of the nearby woman’s impromptu torch would reveal a winged demon about to descend. It was, Jonathan reminded himself, not such an irrational precaution. The last of Musgrave’s victims were likely dying already, even if Wamuu had left any uninjured, but who was to say there’d be no final act of spite from a vampire clinging to the outside walls? The second man, Jonathan was more irritated to see, was facing back toward himself in the castle gate. The barrel was pointed downward, but angled so that it could be raised at Jonathan with a single, easy motion.

“I’ll offer again,” Jonathan said, doing his best to ignore the man with the gun pointed his way, “I can escort you back to Windknight’s Lot. It’s most likely safe now, but I’d rather be sure.”

“We’ll handle ourselves.” The man pointing his weapon back said firmly. “We’re armed now. We can-”

“They saved us, idiot!” The man gasped in pain and nearly dropped his rifle as Poco’s sister loomed up beside him and stomped her foot down on the toe of his boot. As he swore and glared at the teenager, she looked up at Jonathan herself and gave him an exhausted, half-apologetic look. “Thanks again. We’ll stay out of your way while you finish searching. I’ll make sure. Come on now,” she grabbed Poco by the shoulder and pulled him away from Speedwagon, “we need to go home and figure out how we’re going to get by now.”

“Do you think we can move to London, with Mr. Speedwagon?” Poco asked. Speedwagon smiled humbly and tipped his bowler.

“WHAT? Don’t you know what happens to girls in the city?” She growled at her brother, making him recoil and look down at the snow.

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Poco mumbled. Speedwagon was now giving the girl a thoughtful look. Reluctantly, he looked back at Poco and nodded his head sadly.

“Come along. And the next time some frigid snob from Oxford comes here wanting to poke at the ruins, we’ll eat him first!

As the torch-bearing crowd left their tracks across the fresh snow away from the castle, Wamuu and Erina stepped back inside, forming a circle with Jonathan and Speedwagon. Erina was wearing both of the other Englishmen’s coats, and still shivering slightly. Wamuu had dried her off as best he could, and she was keeping her ripple breaths going to counteract the cold, but Jonathan knew they’d need to light a fire soon. He’d have made them follow the villagers back home for the purpose himself, if it wasn’t such a long walk through the freezing night. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close. She rolled her eyes a little, but squeezed him back. He was relieved to feel that she was still as warm as ever.

“Now,” Wamuu said, voice echoing around the stone hallway as he led them back into the castle, chains swishing behind him, “we will find the mask.”



Jonathan’s feet sloshed ahead of Erina’s, each step dragging through the ankle-deep water. It was warmer here, deep inside the castle, but any water still should have frozen by this point. He watched his lamplight ripple off of the murky liquid that filled the narrow, stone hallway, thinking.

“He poured this in here. Probably this last evening.”

Erina followed silently for a moment. “This is probably it, then? Some extra protection for the place he hid his mask?”

“Most likely.” Jonathan suppressed a grimace as he imagined how the battle might have gone, had they pushed Professor Musgrave back to his inner sanctum. Most likely, he’d have frozen them to the floor from around a corner, not even showing himself until they’d lost their feet to frostbite. Or, failing that, dashed ahead of them on his icy heels to set traps and prepare ambushes, while they fought their way through the painfully cold water behind him. “Though if he was preparing for a fight here, maybe he’d have hid the mask somewhere else? Somewhere out of the way?” He shook his head helplessly. “No, you’re probably right.”

Their lanterns lit up a wider patch of floor ahead, and a dry stone wall some yards across it. “It’s been years since I read about this fortress,” Jonathan said as he led the way through the aperture which had probably had a wooden door centuries ago, “but I think this is where the knights and squires who trained here were dined. A mess, I suppose you could call it, since there was nothing like a great hall.”

“I see,” Erina said as she sloshed up beside him inside the wide, nearly pitch black room. It was large enough that their lanterns could barely reach it all. A moment later, she raised hers higher, and shot a suspicious look to their right. “Why would he have set the table, though?”

“What?”

Jonathan looked where she was pointing her light. A great stone slab, long and high enough to be a dining room table, filled most of the right side of the room. A pair of heavy wooden chairs – centuries old by the look of them, but still strong – sat at either side of the slab. On the table between them sat a pair of brass goblets, glinting in the feeble light, and two plates filled with something Jonathan couldn’t make out. Stranger still, each of the chairs seated a limp, moldering skeleton.

“Are those…why would he just put them here?” Erina asked. Jonathan looked back at her, and saw that her eyes were wide with more than just the cold and the effort of breathing it away. Her knees were bent, ready to run.

“They might not have looked like that an hour ago,” Jonathan thought out loud as he squinted at the fleshless corpses. Wamuu had told him vampire slaves couldn’t survive long without their masters, just as the master would soon die without its mask. He hadn’t said what form that death would take, however. Perhaps this was the state it reduced them to? Although…why would these two have just been sitting here while the battle raged upstairs?

He took a step closer, holding out his own light, and he now saw the tarnished glint of rusted iron where it fell on the skeletons’ chests. Armor. Plate armor, no less. One of the skeletons was of a very large man, nearly as tall as Jonathan himself, if not as wide shouldered, whose body save the skull was all hidden in thick plating. The skeleton seated across from it was likewise armored, though in lighter plate that Jonathan could see spots of bone through the joints of, in patches that would have once been covered in mere padding. This figure was slighter, and a long tangle of desiccated white strands still hung from a few patches of mummified skin attached to the back of the skull. The rusty, cloying smell of blood stung Jonathan’s nostrils before he’d even seen the contents of the vessels arranged on the slab between them. The cuts of meat on the platters, he simply averted his eyes from.

“What on Earth…?” Jonathan stared from skeleton to skeleton, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. That these were Elizabethian era corpses, he had no doubt. The skulls had been scrubbed fastidiously clean, save for the smaller one’s scalp, but his lamplight showed enough dirt and dust on the rusty armor that he was sure they’d been buried in it. The blood and flesh on the dishes before them, though…like a little girl arranging her dolls around a table and setting out a tea party, only with refreshments cut and bled from live villagers.

“One of them has a sword,” Erina pointed out, as she stood at Jonathan’s side and grasped his hand with her free one. He looked at where she was indicating with her light, and saw the naked, tarnished blade leaning against the smaller skeleton’s armored leg. It was a hand-and-a-half Scottish baskethilt, and through the rust Jonathan could see there were letters engraved on the blade just above the guard.

Realization struck him. Slowly, Jonathan backed away from the macabre display. Even after all he’d seen, all he’d adjusted himself to these last two weeks, this felt like encroaching madness. If he and Erina left this room, would they find that it had never existed outside of the imagination?

“That’s Luck,” he explained in response to Erina’s anxious expression, raising a finger off of his lamp handle to point at the half-legible word, “the sword. These are Sirs Bruford and Tarkus, of Scotland.”

Erina looked up from the corpses and stared at him sharply. “What…the Sir Bruford? Take care, your highness, you must beware, the lucky Scott with the beastly hair?”

Jonathan nodded weakly, looking back at the remains. “There was only one, to the best of my knowledge. They were buried here after Queen Elizabeth had them executed, but why would he do this?” Even as Jonathan spoke the words, he realized the probable answer. Dishes full of blood. What gives a vampire the power to keep living, after it’s died? Mary and Elizabeth’s tragic rivalry had been one of Musgrave’s specializations. He had told them himself that he’d chosen Windknight’s Lot for a reason.

“Start ripple breathing again,” Jonathan said, even as he paused between words to fill his own chest, “I think he was trying to resurrect them.”

Erina choked on her ripple breath. “What?” She let go of Jonathan and took a massive step back away from them, sloshing loudly through the icy, ankle-deep water.

Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t know it for certain. And I don’t think he could have succeeded, even if that was his aim. Wamuu never said anything about vampires doing that. But I’d rather not take chances.”

He was reluctant, for just a moment, before setting his lamp down on the table and extending a pair of fingers toward each limp skull. If it turned out that Musgrave had somehow managed to bring back the centuries-dead, could Jonathan really just send them back to the grave without asking a single question of them? He told himself that anyone brought back by a vampire would probably wake up as vampires themselves; a pair of monsters with no more in common with the legendary Scottish knights than the creatures that attacked them at the town hall had with the modern villagers they’d once been. But…would it still be worth it? Even twisted into a monster, what might a resurrected Sir Bruford or Tarkus be able to remember, and willing to speak? No. No. That would be a monstrous crime against the knights themselves. A cruelty that no amount of petty curiosity could justify. He breathed in deeply, out sharply, and stabbed his fingertips into each bony brow. To his relief, there were no flames or smoke, and not a hint of motion or sound. The sworn swords of Queen Mary had remained, despite whatever Musgrave attempted, at rest.

“I think this is enough for me, Jonathan. I’ll find Speedwagon and Wamuu and then wait back by the fire.”

Jonathan pulled his hands away from the skulls and looked back up at Erina. Her face was dusty, and her hair disheveled and hanging down over her forehead. There was a sharpness, a desperation about her that Jonathan had seen all too much of from so many people in recent days.

“Erina,” he said, standing upright and sloshing toward her himself, careful not to move too fast. She looked all too easy to startle, at present. “Is everything alright?” He stopped in place after hearing the words, and then started feeling almost as worried for himself as he was for Erina if this was really starting to seem normal. “Let me rephrase that. Did something even worse just happen?”

“Well,” she said, reluctantly, “I just.” Her lips twitched upward in the lamplight, but didn’t manage to smile. Just grimace. “You were caressing those skulls so…tenderly…I was worried for a moment.”

Jonathan felt like he’d been struck with a hammer, as the realization that Erina Pendleton might have been afraid of him sunk in. “You mean,” he said, his voice quieter than it had been before, “worried that I’d gone mad?”

“Yes.” She nodded her head a little too hard, as if relieved he had said it instead of her. “Or that I was. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that to you. This is just…everything tonight, it’s all too much.”

Jonathan came closer, leaving his lamp on the stone table and lowering his head tenderly. Erina splashed back toward him, wrapping her arms around his chest and squeezing tightly, her warmth and ripple heating him in the cold keep as he hugged her back.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, “maybe I really am going mad myself.”

“You’re not, really, please, don’t worry!”

She squeezed him harder, nuzzling her blonde hair into the base of his neck. After a long, silent embrace, they released each other. Erina shifted her lantern into her other hand, to give her right one a rest after holding it away from Jonathan’s back.

“I was just thinking, when I tested those bodies. About a lot of things, but one of them was what Professor Musgrave said about this place.” He paused, eyeing the two hundred year old skeletons, and the sword that the Scottish government had been wanting back for as long. “He came back to the place he’d excavated. He tried to use his powers, even though he thought them evil himself, for some sort of…well, archaeology.” Jonathan was sure, irrationally perhaps, but sure nonetheless, that Professor Matthew Musgrave had been acting on similar thoughts to the one that slowed his own hand a minute ago when he exhumed the knights.

“Jonathan, what are you trying to say?”

He looked back at Erina again. “I’m not sure. But…he only sent one vampire to my house, when he could have sent half a dozen. He could have fled down here and frozen us in this water instead of running to the lake. He must have been planning to do just that, when he poured it all down here, but he changed his mind.”

“He also said,” Erina continued, thoughtfully, “that he remembered loving his wife. It sounded as though he…well, I don’t think he missed that exactly, but that he wasn’t happy about not being able to miss it.”

Jonathan nodded his head. “Yes. One of the mask wearers we fought before seemed all too content with her new situation, but the other one was also struggling with it in her own way. She also had something of a death wish, in the end, though that didn’t stop her from fighting us.”

They were both looking at the bodies again, and moreso at the grisly banquet laid out between them.

“They are still the same people, then, even with whatever the masks make them do?” Erina asked, sounding as disquieted as Jonathan felt.

“I don’t know.” He thought about that momentary reluctance he’d felt to flood Bruford and Tarkus with the ripple, that small temptation to exploit the masks’ power instead of destroying it immediately. Was that the part of him that would survive, if he were to succumb to the spokes of a stone mask or the bloodsucking fingertips of another vampire himself? Would the vampire version of Jonathan Joestar be him? Would he be inside of his mutated, bloodthirsty carcass, his identity pruned away into a vampire persona, or would he be dead and gone with some other consciousness in possession of his body and memories? When those spikes impaled a man’s brain, did they actually kill him before bringing him back to life?

“Sorry,” the echo of Speedwagon’s voice against the stone walls brought Jonathan back to where he was, “I got here a minute ago after I heard voices, but didn’t want to interrupt anything.”

Speedwagon was standing in another doorway, holding up his own lantern. He looked a little damper and dustier than the last time Jonathan had seen him, but otherwise healthy.

“We’d have appreciated some sort of notice,” Erina said, but she didn’t sound as snappy as Jonathan expected her to. Beneath the reproachful expression, he thought she might actually be relieved to see another living human.

Speedwagon put his hat to his chest, letting his murky blonde mullet flop out. “Sincerest apologies, then.” He raised it back onto his head, pushing his hair partway under it again. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen Wamuu, though?”

Jonathan shook his head. “Wasn’t he with you?”

“Well, he was.”

“It isn’t like him to just disappear like that, is it?” Erina asked.

He and Speedwagon both started to say no, but caught themselves at the same moment.

“Not…usually.”

“Well, sometimes he does, but not when he’s said he’ll be watchin’ your back. At least, not until now.”

Erina looked back and forth between the two of them, seeming anxious again. “There…couldn’t still be any vampires left, could there?”

Speedwagon held out his hands blankly. Jonathan said “I don’t think so, but one of Musgrave’s was there when we went after Lamkin. If she wasn’t his only vampire friend, then there could be some here who aren’t dependent on Musgrave either.”

“Enough to get Wamuu without him even getting a chance to make any noise?” Speedwagon looked skeptical. Jonathan shrugged, and shook his head. No, Speedwagon was right, that seemed distinctly improbable. It was with some relief that they then heard another, louder set of sloshing footfalls coming toward the same door Speedwagon had entered through.

“My apologies, Speedwagon,” the nightman said as he waded into the dining room, “perhaps I failed to get your notice when I turned back toward the kitchen area.” He turned his semi-luminous blue eyes on the table, and the bodies around it. “Is this an English ritual?” He asked.

Jonathan stared at him. Beside him, Speedwagon and Erina did the same, albeit the former seemed less outraged and more amused.

Excuse me?” Erina asked.

“No, then.” Wamuu looked back at the arrangement with a neutral expression. “I didn’t think so. Your people seem to prefer burying the dead and leaving them there. I wondered if this was a ritual exception of some kind.”

Jonathan thought of the testimonies he’d read about the Mexican peoples, and the jewelry-covered bones of their ancestors they still displayed and worshipped in broad daylight in some remote places where the Aztec and Mayan traditions remained strong. Wamuu probably had never been to England before, or at least not in hundreds of years. It was a reasonable question, taking all that into account. “I think he might have been trying to reanimate them,” he said. When Wamuu looked thoughtful, Jonathan continued, “Can vampires actually do that? Even just potentially?”

“I’ve seen vampires with a variety of powers. I have never seen that one.”

Jonathan supposed that was a small comfort, though he’d been hoping for a bigger one. Wamuu stepped around in front of the others, addressing the rest of the group. “Dawn will come soon. I know I need rest. The rest of you probably need it more. We can search more effectively tomorrow night.”

Speedwagon nodded his head. “Wish I could say I was good for the walk back to the carriage, to get the ‘victals, but I don’t know I’d make it halfway around the lake.”

Wamuu looked at Jonathan and Erina. Jonathan, after realizing the implicit question, looked at Erina as well.

“It won’t be the first time I’ve had to sleep on an empty stomach,” Erina said, “and I mean more recently than when I misbehaved as a child. I’ll be alright.” She sighed, letting her exhaustion show itself fully for the first time since she’d finished drying herself before the hearth they’d lit upstairs. “Let’s just…go back where it’s warm. I’ve never had to keep ripple breathing this long, and I’m…well…chilly.”

“Eh, business as usual for me,” Speedwagon said with a shrug, “at least, that’s how it was before business really took off.” He indicated his bowler hat. Jonathan was too drained, distracted, and – yes, now that the subject had been raised – exhausted to give him so much as a dirty look. Instead, he just looked at Erina, and then back at Wamuu.

“We’ll set out the cloaks again, for blankets,” Jonathan said, “Hopefully the rest of the wood will be dry by now.” Unlike the others, Jonathan hadn’t missed dinner in his adult life. In fact, he wasn’t sure he could remember ever going this long without food in his childhood either. His empty stomach was bothering him far more than the cold. His ripple-to-waves pattern was still strong and even, despite the exhaustion, even as Erina and Speedwagon were maintaining it for ever shorter periods and beginning to shiver again. Still, he knew he couldn’t count on his own constitution holding up for the entire walk back to Windknight’s Lot without sleeping first. Hunger was the lesser of two evils.

“Upstairs, then,” Wamuu said. There was something to the nightman’s expression that Jonathan found disquieting, but in the dim light of their lanterns it was hard to be sure, “We’ll end this mask come night.”



They stood beside the carriage, watching the last bits of skin and flesh turn to ashes and flake off of the bones to darken the snow. The sky was clear, and it hadn’t snowed since the previous night. The sun was half-hidden behind the rim of the crater valley, but enough of its rays still fell to do the needed work.

“I hope that’s all of them,” Erina said, somberly, as she looked along the line of ashy skeletons. They had all had flesh on them, before Jonathan and Speedwagon carried them out into the sun. The villagers would have to identify them the best they could when it came time for the burials. Cold, Jonathan had thought, but he couldn’t dispute Speedwagon’s calculation. The risk of any of Musgrave’s former victims still being even just barely animate when their families reclaimed them was not one worth taking. It was a good thing they’d eaten the biscuits and apples they’d brought before the grisly work; Jonathan doubted he was the only one of them who’d have lacked the appetite afterward.

“Hopefully Wamuu will remember where he left any others, when he wakes up,” Jonathan said. He hesitated a moment, casting a guarded look back up at the fortress walls. “Whenever that is.”

Erina continued her tight-lipped watching of the skeletons, but stepped sideways along the coach to lean against Jonathan. He embraced her, and she loosened a little. Standing against the other side of the carriage door, Speedwagon kept his own eyes on the bones as well, moving his gaze pointedly away from Jonathan and Erina.

“Wamuu said there were four masks brought to England,” Speedwagon said, “so, I suppose there’ll just be the one more adventure after this?”

The three were silent. The sun slid further down behind the craggy hills, only a sliver of it still lighting the valley.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said, looking down at the snow as he held Erina tightly, “I suppose the sensible answer would be yes, but speaking honestly, well…”

The other two looked at him. Jonathan found himself struggling with the words. With the very idea he wanted to convey, and with the question of whether he should even consider the subject at all.

“I never much doubted I’d be anything but the next Baron Joestar. There’s my studies, but that…well, how much can I really care about archaeology just for its own sake after this?”

“You want to go looking for MORE masks?” Erina asked, glaring at him in shocked disbelief from her perch against his side.

Jonathan shook his head. “No. At least, I don’t think so. But…to just go back to the way things were before? To pretend none of this ever happened?”

Speedwagon nodded his head slowly, raising a hand to straighten a lock of hair that had come looser than usual. “I’ve been thinking the same, honestly. Clara, Kenny, Tattoo, and all the others’ve still got to eat, of course, and I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do to make those ends meet. But, well.” He sighed and looked back at the bones. “I just feel like the world’s gotten so much bigger than I’m comfortable with, and I’m not sure how to shrink it again.” He looked up at Erina. “I suppose perhaps I ought to change professions. I got the healing touch now, and the hottest blood in London or anywhere else probably. At least one of those things ought to pay better. Think I’d make a good doctor?”

Erina couldn’t repress her chuckle entirely. “Well, you’ve got better bedside manner than most doctors I know. But…well, maybe you’ll be better at it than me with more practice. Your lungs are bigger than mine, after all. But you have to understand, healing someone else with the ripple is much harder than healing yourself, unless they can channel it as well. It makes a difference with my patients, but not usually a big difference on its own. And it's no use at all against deep infections, sicknesses, or tumors.” She looked at Jonathan. “Otherwise, your father would be on his feet again. Along with everyone else in the wards.”

“Jonathan healed me right fast, not too long ago.”

“So could some of the monks who taught me. That was why I first believed in the ripple, actually. I’d heard stories about the faith healers in the mountain temple, but I didn’t believe them until I saw a master sendogi heal a gangrenous arm in just minutes.” At the other two’s inquiring gazes, she went on. “Swami Straizo came to the field hospital my father and I were working at. There was a patient we had, an Italian, who’d been hurt out in the wilderness and came back already festering. The infection was gone in five minutes of ripple breathing. The bone was healed back together after ten. It certainly made a believer of me, and the Italian for that matter; as far as I know he’s still at the monastery. But there was only one other monk who could heal other people anywhere near that well, and that was Master Tonpetti himself.”

Jonathan was silent. There was a sort of uncomfortable, quiet acceptance that he had managed to come to work with, from his middle teens onward. When the weak, sickly Joestar heir had suddenly, over the course of mere months, become the largest, strongest, and healthiest boy in his class or any of the other classes for that matter. When he played his first game of college rugby, and shrugged off two of the opposing team’s leading players with minimal effort. He had always tried to train his body, of course. As a child, he’d resented his weakness, and despaired at his slight stature and poor coordination. He’d exercised and trained himself for years before the onset of puberty, and he’d never stopped since. But most of the change come on so suddenly, and with so little adjustment of his lifestyle at the time, that some part of Jonathan had always been afraid he’d somehow cheated and was going to have to give it all back someday. And now, just because of the size and structure of his lungs and heart, and whatever other factors mattered for the ripple, he was once again being compared to masters of the art when he’d only barely started to learn.

“Maybe you could make more of it.” Erina continued. “I’ve been afraid to, more than anything else. The kind of attention I might draw, if people in government here in England or somewhere like it knew…well, I suppose you’re more of a risk taker than I am, Mister Speedwagon.”

Speedwagon guffawed. “Am I really hearing this from the woman who jumped off a balcony into an ‘half frozen lake in front of a bloody vampire without any idea if it would work or not?”

“Well…” Erina stammered “…that’s a different sort of risk.”

“Hmm. I suppose.” He looked about to say something else, before changing his mind. “Well. You’ll go back to nursing yourself, then?”

Erina was still for a moment. Her dainty shoulders eventually rose a little, and then limply shrugged down again. “Well, I’ll be looking out for more vampires whatever it is I’m doing. One can’t exactly unlearn about them.”

Jonathan’s thoughts returned to the mask he’d carefully disabled, still laying on the desk in his bedroom. Was he supposed to change focus, now? Find a different ancient mystery to study? Pretend to be a historian or archaeologist of any note, when he’d parted ways with a four thousand year old man who knew an entire world of secrets hidden behind the veil of recorded history?

“I don’t think I can go back,” Jonathan finally spoke again.

“Your choice I suppose, then,” Speedwagon said, “my family’ve still got to eat. And, well, as far as vampires go, I could probably do more to keep people warned that they exist if I’m doing something other than roaming around the world like a madman who no one would listen to.”

“What if,” Jonathan said, after thinking for a moment, “your family’s housing and dietary expenses were all accounted for?”

“’Scuse me?” Speedwagon cocked his head.

“A man from your neighborhood saved my father’s life once, and mine. My father made sure he and his own son never starved. I haven’t kept track of which of us has saved the other more times at this point, but if there’s any risk of failing Father I’ll gladly assume the balance is in your favor.”

Speedwagon was silent for a moment. “Wait a second there, JoJo…you’re talking about Dario Brando?”

Jonathan nodded. “Dio’s father by blood, yes.” He regretted naming Dio as soon as he’d done it, as he felt Erina’s reflexive flinch. He hoped to change the topic with his next breath, but Speedwagon spoke faster.

“I’d been wondering what that was all about, but all this time I was too polite to ask. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Dario FUCKING Brando – pardon the aristocratic dialect, Miss Pendleton – saved you and your father’s lives? Just out of the goodness of his heart, eh? If that man ever helped anyone in his miserable excuse for a life, it had to have been by accident, and he probably regretted it after!”

Petting Erina reassuringly, and giving her an apologetic look, Jonathan replied “What Father always told me was that when our carriage slid off the road coming back from London – the same accident my mother died in – Dario saw us and risked falling himself by climbing off the road down the muddy slope over the river to help. It was too late for mother, but the only reason Father and I didn’t bleed to death or die of cold out in the rain is because Dario Brando came and helped us.”

Speedwagon’s stare was hot, hard, and disbelieving. “Well,” he said, “I can’t imagine why your father would be lying on that man’s behalf, so I’ll have to assume this was an honest misunderstanding. That just fits with everything else, doesn’t it? I never met a man both as selfish and as lucky all at once as Brando. Time and again he made sure he wouldn’t live the next fortnight, and somehow something always happened to get him off right free. If anyone but him had that sort of luck they’d have gotten out of East End and never had to turn back, but it just had to go to the one man as was best at WASTING good fortune in all of London. Every time he got handed something – every last bloody time – he pissed it away trying to get something else, or just because he couldn’t be bothered to put any work into it. Clara and mine’s own mama and papa, they let him talk them into investing in that rubbish hotel he bought with what I suppose was your lot’s money. Then the next thing you know Dario had Scotland fucking Yard – pardon the recurring use of continental vocabulary, Miss Pendleton – raid what to the best of our knowledge was just a normal hotel, and that was it! He never so much as said sorry! Was the same as anything else he lucked into. His health, his looks, his wife. Ruined everything he touched, drank it away, or just got bored and forgot about it!”

“So, then,” Erina’s voice spoke now, to Jonathan’s freezing horror, “he was basically the same as his son?”

“Almost.” Speedwagon’s bushy eyebrows narrowed. “I only knew Dio as a boy, and briefly earlier this December. But I know there’s one important difference between the two, and that’s that Dio’s as cunning as Dario was stupid.”

Erina nodded. Vociferously.

When he looked back and forth between his companions’ faces, and saw them tilting their heads in unison – saw the look of relief on Erina’s face in particular when she heard Speedwagon talk, the expression of someone who’d been desperate to be believed – Jonathan felt his breath catch in his throat. He’d been desperate to change the subject for fear of making Erina uncomfortable. Now, Erina looked more at ease with Speedwagon than she ever had before, and yet Jonathan realized that he was still desperate to change the subject. Why?

“Well, yes,” Jonathan said, affecting what he hoped might pass for a nonchalant expression, “for all his many, many faults, Dio certainly has a brain.”

Erina and Speedwagon each gave him an inquiring look. Not skeptical. Not interrogative, exactly. Almost more like…forgiving?

“Well,” Jonathan said, his voice sounding quieter in his own ears than it usually did, “he is set to graduate valedictorian. And the d…”

He looked back and forth between their faces again, and once again a memory struck him, so hard he nearly felt an impact on his skull. A rugby field, surrounded by whooping and hollering Hugh Hudson students and hangers on. Himself and Dio, clapping each other on the back. “Good block,” Dio said, referring to the feint Jonathan had just pulled before passing the ball to Dio for the final touchdown, “I told you, defense is your strong point.” Jonathan smiled back at his foster brother, who stood at the center of the cheering circle that surrounded both of them. “With my brawn and your brain, we really are unstoppable.” Dio raised a golden eyebrow at him, and grinned a playful grin that reached to just below his eyes. “You mean with my brain and your brawn.” Jonathan chuckled, shaking his head and looking down at the snow. “Well, if you insist.” The crowd parted, and the school newspaper reporters streamed in. The Joestar brothers’ dazzling victorious play. Gentle giant Jonathan, and brilliant and debonair Dio. “What can you tell us about your relationship with Jonathan, Dio?” One had asked after a slew of other questions. Dio repeated his playful grin, and embellished it with a half-ironic chuckle. “Well, that’s sort of an embarrassing subject.” Everyone laughed. Jonathan laughed with them.

“…epartment of law…” Jonathan closed his mouth. He hadn’t been ripple breathing, but he was suddenly hot and sweaty in his tattered winter jacket. Erina was starting to look concerned. “Sorry,” Jonathan said quickly, “I think I didn’t get quite enough sleep.”

Jonathan stared back and forth between the other two. They looked back, stopping only to blink the cold out of their eyes. He knew one of them would have to start talking again, but the only thoughts in his mind were ones he feared to acknowledge. Speedwagon looked like he was about to ask a question, but stopped. Had Erina given him a warning glance, just then?

“We should stable the horses,” Speedwagon finally said, “it’s getting colder.”

The three remained silent as they led the animals into the relative warmth of the fortress’ entry hall. As Speedwagon got to work with the rope and the feed bags, Jonathan found his thoughts growing harder to deal with. He could think them later, reassess half a lifetime of memories in the comfort of his home, when there was no longer a mask to destroy. For now, just to escape the silence, he said “I was serious before. If you – either of you – want to keep pursuing this after Wamuu leaves England, I can certainly afford it. I was planning to travel quite a lot as it was, with my field of study.”

Erina looked at him, curiously. “Are you serious about this, Jonathan? Just…drop everything else and do this forever?”

“Not just this, no. Speedwagon was right; we won’t be much use to anyone unless we keep a foot in the door to…well, to where most people live. There’s no reason to stop living in England, and doing what we were otherwise doing.” He stopped and looked over at Speedwagon. “Or…something in a different vocation, but still here. But I know I can’t stop following the masks now, and when we think there’s a worthwhile expedition to go on, well…we can?”

Erina looked down at the flagstones as she pondered. “I think I don’t have much of a choice, if I was planning to spend more time with you regardless.” She looked back up, and gave him a nervous smile. “Which I was. And…I really do think I’d go mad if I had to spend the rest of my life keeping all this to myself. Just living alone with the ripple was hard enough.”

Jonathan smiled back at her, a little guiltily. Their eyes met, and both of their nervous expressions thawed and blossomed into proper smiles. They grasped hands, and then Jonathan turned to Speedwagon. The man looked uncomfortable again, in a way that Jonathan still couldn’t for the life of him parse. Seeing that he was on the spot, Speedwagon leaned against the nearest stone wall and shook his head.

“I don’t think I’ve really got much personal say, do I? I told Clara I’d do whatever it took to keep us fed, and then extended that promise to the rest of the family we’ve got together since. If that’s part of your offer, well, like I said, not much of a choice.”

Jonathan sighed, and smiled wider. “That much financial support comes without strings. I’m sure you and Clara can make better use of it than the late Mister Brando did, after all. I don’t want you to stay a part of this unless you want it yourself.” He kept his left hand on Erina’s, and turned his body further outward toward Speedwagon. “So, you are welcome to participate. You don’t have to decide right now, of course.”

Speedwagon adjusted his hat, and looked first one way and then the other in the half-dark hall, as if seizing up an invisible crowd. “Oh…well, alright! Your offer’s got a scent to it I can’t deny, even if I didn’t want to otherwise. This nose can smell good investments, it can, and right now it’s telling me that this is an opportunity I’ve got to take.”

He stepped back toward the other two and extended his hand. Jonathan took it with his free right hand, and shook it firmly. Speedwagon flashed him a toothy grin. Jonathan’s smile broadened.

“Hold on,” Erina said, leaning against Jonathan’s side to look closer at Speedwagon herself, “I thought you said you could smell evil?”

Speedwagon gave her a very patient look and pointed to his nose with his free hand. “Well, I’ve got two nostrils don’t I?”

Just then, Wamuu’s voice echoed through the hall, bringing all three of their attentions to the stone staircase at the end he’d just entered from. “Good evening. There is more good news.” He reached under his ripped, perforated, and bloodstained cloak, and pulled out a handful of jagged stone shards much paler than the native rock.

“What?” Speedwagon spoke first as all three of them dropped their jaws and raised their eyebrows. “When did you-”

“Fate favors us, tonight moreso than ever before.” A meaningful glimmer flashed across his eyes as his gold-flecked lips smiled. “When I woke up and found you away and the sun not yet blocked, I made another search of the flooded section. The water is frozen, now, and must have pushed what was hidden beneath it upward as it turned to ice. I tested it to be sure it was no trick, and then destroyed it.”

“Just…just like that?” Jonathan gasped. Truth be told, he’d been hoping for Erina to be present for the sundering of Musgrave’s mask. She was the only member of their party who hadn’t yet seen one’s destruction.

“I’ve learned not to wait, when I have that freedom,” Wamuu said.

Jonathan’s eyes narrowed just the smallest fraction. “Is that so?”

The other two looked at him, curiously. Wamuu’s face retained its smile, but remained otherwise unreadable. “I don’t always have that freedom.”

Jonathan supposed there wasn’t much he really could say to that. He took a small step back, still clutching Erina in his left arm and holding Speedwagon’s hand with his own right one. Wamuu advanced into the hall, still smiling, chains hanging freely down from his cropped yellow hair and bronze circlet and over what was left of the hood behind his neck. “There is no need to stay here longer. I’m sure you would all like to return home.” He stopped in the middle of the hall and faced the trio, filling the center of the chamber like a larger-than-life statue. “But, I could not bring myself to interrupt your intimate moment, though I was on the staircase all along. You have moved ahead faster than I expected.”

“Erm…come again?” Erina sounded as uncomfortable as Jonathan felt. On his other side, Speedwagon released his hand and said “What were you expecting?”

For a brief, but very heavy moment, Wamuu remained still, seeming as he often did to have really become unmoving stone. He broke the silence again by nodding his craggy, bejeweled head to the hall entrance and the night sky beyond it. “Come with me. Tradition holds that these matters should be discussed beneath the sky.”

“Tradition?” Erina asked, still sounding confused.

Your tradition, you mean? The nightmen culture?” Jonathan couldn’t help but be excited, even if he was also unnerved. Ever since he’d met Wamuu, he had wanted to ask him more about his people. How they lived, where they lived, what languages they spoke among themselves, and so many other things. He’d been hoping Wamuu would finally give him a chance, once the masks and their wearers were all accounted for, and fearing that he might not.

“Yes.” Wamuu led them out across the stone floor, and toward the snow and starlight. The sky remained clear, letting those faraway specks of white light and narrow sliver of late December moon fall upon the looming hills and slowly rising fog above the lake. “I once tried to follow the laws and customs of the day-tribes whose lands I passed through. There are so many, and they change so often. Over time, I realized that your people are seldom content with them yourselves.” He shrugged, looking down sadly. “The ways of my people may be no better, in the eyes of fate. The makers of the masks did come from among us. But they are the best that I have to follow, and to judge daymen with.”

“Ohhh,” Speedwagon exclaimed, clapping his hands together as his boots left their first pair of tracks on the powdery snow, “like when you made me and Dio go at each other with just our bare hands?”

“You and…what?” Jonathan looked at Speedwagon and then back up at Wamuu, but the latter simply nodded yes before continuing.

“There is a story we always told.” Wamuu stopped walking, and turned around to put his back to the rising mist and the crescent moon above his horn in front of them. “Some still tell it, though your astronomers have made others doubt its truth.” There was no condemnation in his words. No judgement or sympathies evident as he spoke of each party in the dispute. Just exposition. “According to our story, in the beginning there was only Earth.”

It took a moment for Jonathan’s mind to catch up to what he was hearing. A creation myth. That hadn’t been what he was expecting at all.

“Earth, who lay alone in darkness, did not move, and did not act. She was alone, and lonely. Finally, she called out into the darkness for company, and Moon heard her.” He tilted his head upward, radiant blue eyes reflecting the distant white glow from above as it fell past his headdress and horn. “Moon’s light fell upon her, and lit her body for the first time as they embraced. Earth loved Moon for his power and clarity. Moon loved Earth for her kindness and warmth. They were happy together, for a time, but something was still missing.”

He turned his head eastward, to where the last traces of daylight just barely tinted the sky from behind the crater rim.

“The two called out, together, and Sun came to join them. Where Moon was reserved and Earth gentle, Sun was wild, passionate, and swift. Every word and action burning hot, and then passing away in a moment. When Sun and Moon’s light both fell upon Earth together, she was finally able to give birth. All life was born from the union of the three. The plants and animals took most after Earth-Mother. Humble. Frugal. The daymen, after Sun-Father. Spreading everywhere at once, covering the world, but burning out after only a short time. The nightmen are like Moon-Father. Elusive, unchanging, and powerful. When Sun-Father is awake, Moon-Father can hardly be seen. When Sun-Father sleeps, you can see that Moon-Father was never away, only hidden among the other’s light or shadows. So it is with our peoples.”

He looked back at the three of them, and his smile returned. “Two men and one woman, sharing all that they have, pledging their futures to each other, and each others’ to themselves. Nightmen believe that this is the way to complete ourselves. By our customs, you are now married.”

The mist roiled silently, and the moon and starlight trickled down onto the unmoving snow. Jonathan turned his head toward Speedwagon, to see him still staring blankly at Wamuu. On Jonathan’s other side, Erina had both hands on her chin, paralyzed in thought. No one said anything.

“Well,” Erina finally broke the silence, “you are both quite handsome.” Her voice fell a little. She took in another breath, and tried to continue. “And responsible. Really, not a bad catch?”

Jonathan tilted his head at her.

“Sorry,” she said, shrugging her becloaked little shoulders.

“Come on now, it was a really nice sentiment, and I personally appreciate it very much!” Speedwagon trotted over and rested his hand on Erina’s free one. She took hold of it, with a half smile and just a hint of an eye roll. “Don’t be like that, Mr. Joestar.” He put his free hand to his chin, and scratched it thoughtfully. “Or…would that be Mr. Speedwagon-Pendleton-Joestar?”

Jonathan stared down at him. Cocked his own head. Speedwagon started looking nervous.

“And why,” Jonathan finally asked, “would your name come first, Mr. Pendleton-Joestar-Speedwagon?”

“We do not have surnames,” Wamuu said, his tone and expression unchanged, “do it however you want.”

Speedwagon was the first to start laughing. Erina followed just a breath later. Jonathan started with just a murmuring chuckle after her, but before long was laughing the loudest of them all. Wamuu remained silent.

“You are serious, though?” Erina finally managed to ask as the other two finished recovering. “And…erm…sorry for laughing, it’s just…I don’t think any of us knew how to r-”

“I know. I predicted your reactions.” Just as when he’d described the astronomical controversy before, Wamuu was matter of fact, unperturbed. “Perhaps I should have waited until you rested after returning home. No matter. If this commitment between three continues, you will remain married in nightman eyes. If it ends, you no longer will be, though traditionally there would be another to officiate then as well.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” Speedwagon removed his hat and turned to face Jonathan and Erina, clasping an arm around the shoulder of each despite the awkward differences in height, “we’ve been through too much together to get divorced, official or not! And you know what, JoJo, Erina? When you’ve had your first baby, I’ll be the best father a man could hope to share the job with! Assuming you’re both alright with sharing it?”

“I…can’t believe I’m saying this,” Erina said, “but, well. I’d love you to be the sort-of-father of our children.”

Jonathan looked over at her. “Children is a rather plural word.” He sighed, and chuckled again, shaking his head. “But I never could deny you.”

He looked back at Wamuu, unmoving, moon and starlight glinting distantly off his bronze circlet and golden ear and lip rings. He looked back down at the top of Erina’s flaxen head. He didn’t feel married. But, then, he wondered if standing on a church altar and having a legal certificate in his pocket would make him “feel” that way either. He had no frame of reference. Church weddings, as any man of his education knew, had not always been the way of his ancestors. Legal documentation of such, of course, was far more recent still. He would have to wed Erina by English law and custom, of course, and he supposed he couldn’t think of anyone else besides Speedwagon to be their best man. But, for all purposes besides property rights and preserving the Joestar reputation, would they be any more personally bound then than they already were?

Were they more bound now, after Wamuu’s pronouncement, than they had been an hour before it?

What did any ritual or ceremony actually do? Jonathan supposed that if he’d been a more religious man, he’d have a ready-made answer to that question. And somehow, blasphemous though many of his peers might find this thought, he decided he was grateful that there wasn’t an answer for him.

Erina looked up at him, and he leaned down to kiss her on the lips. He felt Speedwagon’s hand pat him fondly on the shoulder. He wasn’t sure what to think about Speedwagon’s part in their lives, of course, but for the time being…well, he wouldn’t be a bad assistant father at all, so long as he and his sister made certain life changes.

“We should head home,” Jonathan said, remembering that – whatever else they’d be dealing with in the coming days or beyond – they were still halfway across the Midlands and nearly out of supplies, “I’d rather be back by morning, as long as the weather’s this clear.”

“Aye. My lot might be worried if I’m not back by then or so myself,” Speedwagon nodded sagely, replacing his hat on his head.

“I told my mama and papa that it might be ‘a couple of days,’” Erina said, “so I don’t think they’ll be more worried than usual until at least tomorrow night. But, I’d just as soon let them know I’m alive sooner if we can.”

As the other two returned their attentions to the coach – after a final hug and kiss from Jonathan, in Erina’s case – Jonathan turned back toward Wamuu. He remained in place, still, face unchanged.

“Will you be coming back with us, this time?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes. There’s room in the coach. I am sure you have more questions for me.”

Jonathan nodded. “Yes. You could say that.” He held back other words. For now, he smiled cordially, and then followed the others back to the castle entrance to help prepare for the road. He stopped after a few steps. Slowly, he looked back around at Wamuu. The nightman was watching them, face still impassive.

“Jonathan?” He felt Erina’s fingers on his arm as she noticed him lagging.

“Go on ahead for now,” he said, patting her fingers with his other hand and nodding her back after Speedwagon, “I think there’s something I should talk to Wamuu about before we embark. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Erina looked puzzled, but didn’t press the issue. Once she’d slinked away toward the gate after Speedwagon, Jonathan – feeling more sure of himself, now that he’d made a commitment of sorts – strode back up to Wamuu.

“Yes?” Wamuu took a step closer through the snow-covered grass and shrubbery himself, breaking his posture for the first time since he’d finished the story of the celestial bodies.

Jonathan took in a deep breath of cold, damp air. “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of the others, in case I was wrong, but thinking about it more I really don’t believe that I am.” He let the breath out, locking his eyes on Wamuu’s. “You wandered away from Speedwagon last night, and somehow found yourself on the floor Erina and I had claimed. And then, this evening, you suddenly found the mask.”

“Yes. Why?”

Jonathan felt his gaze harden into a glare. Wamuu was silent, but something about his face looked like a deliberate challenge. He took in another deep, careful breath. “What about the curtains?”

Wamuu blinked, his head tilting a little to one side. “Which curtains?”

“The carmine ones, back at my house. Last night, you mentioned that they would conduct the ripple well. How much time did you and Speedwagon spend investigating those when you were dragging Dio through the house?”

Wamuu straightened up again. “Ah. I think what you really want to ask is why I have been lying and withholding information from you.”

Jonathan let this second inhalation out much more slowly. “Well,” he said, wondering if he should be relieved or afraid, “that is a refreshing dose of honesty from you.”

To Jonathan’s surprise, Wamuu’s lips turned up in a smile. “I was planning to talk to you the next time we met. I thought I should give you some time after this battle before explaining. If you know enough to be confronting me now, though, there’s no point in making you distrust me even more by not answering.”

“The fresh ham that went missing,” Jonathan said, “Dio accused me of grossly overeating the next day. And it was already sunrise when I sent you and Speedwagon away.”

Wamuu nodded yes. “I stayed in the building’s shadow, and then snuck back inside through a ground floor window when no one was watching. I slept in the cellar and left the following dusk.”

“And the mask. You found it last night, and kept it a secret.”

Wamuu didn’t bother to answer. His expression told Jonathan, quite plainly, that it was because there was simply nothing to add to that subject.

“Why? What are you actually doing?” Jonathan paused, wondering if perhaps he should trust his intuition this far or not before deciding that it had been right so far. “And what does it have to do with me personally?”

Wamuu stepped up beside him. He started to flinch when the nightman raised his enormous, tan-skinned hand, but he simply placed it on Jonathan’s shoulder. Not grasping or restricting. Just resting it there, like his father sometimes did.

“When we first met,” Wamuu said, “and I saw the mask in your room, I was going to destroy it and leave, no matter how you felt about it. But you blocked me.”

Jonathan raised one eyebrow. “Well, it was very important to me.”

“That is why you tried to block me. I expected that. But for you to succeed at stopping my arm?” Wamuu’s bright blue eyes with their catlike gleam were boring into Jonathan’s like moonbeams now, harder than they ever had before. “No dayman can block me. No dayman could ever block me.”

“I…well, I’ve played a lot of rugby.”

Wamuu shook his head, almost contemptuously. “I stayed in your house because I had to find out if my suspicion was right.” What he said next took Jonathan so completely by surprise that he nearly asked Wamuu to repeat himself. “Was your mother a healthy woman?”

“Erm.” Jonathan took a moment to recall all that his father had told him. “She was often sick, I think.”

“Nerve problems?”

Jonathan stared. “Did you steal a diary of Father’s?”

The hand on Jonathan’s shoulder leaned in just a little bit harder, and Wamuu’s smile returned. “No writing,” Wamuu said, “only pictures. Especially the painting in the studio.”

Wamuu’s other hand rose up, and extended its pointer finger toward his face, touching the skin right at the top of the spiral-shaped marking that adorned it. He moved it along the spiral, tracing his finger along the faint, tattoo-like pattern. Geometrically perfect, and a light blue in color.

“What are you…”

And then, Jonathan put his hand to the back of his neck, right where it met his shoulder. Wamuu released him, and grinned.

“No. But that’s…how…?”

“What do you know about her life before she met your father?”

Jonathan’s mind was reeling. He wanted to protest, but Wamuu’s question was the only comprehensible thing to latch onto. “Born Mary Holloway.” His voice was quiet. “She was born in South Africa. Her own mother came back to England when she was a baby, after her husband died.” He paused. “Father said she didn’t like to talk about her parents. I’ve thought perhaps the story might have been half-true, to prevent a scandal.”

“Probably.” Wamuu shook his head, and strode slowly toward the lake, encouraging Jonathan to follow him. He walked along weakly, almost involuntarily. “If a dayman leaves a nightwoman with child, it will die early in the pregnancy. Her body will absorb it before it can develop. If a nightman leaves a daywoman with child, the pregnancy will kill her, unless she has enough skill with the Sunfather's Unseen Hand to strengthen her body against the strain without killing the baby.”

“But…if the baby is part nightman…how does the ripple not kill it?”

“I have only met four who survived until birth. They were more like daymen, in how their bodies processed the ripple. It caused them sickness throughout their lives, and all of them died young. I never thought one would be able to have a child of her own, until Speedwagon and I broke into your house.”

Jonathan didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. His hand remained on the star shaped birthmark he shared with his mother, the mark that had had him declared a demon by the first person who’d ever laid eyes on it. Wamuu turned around to face him head on again, now half embroiled in the lake fog.

“Our strength, with their freedom to walk beneath the sun? Our vitality, conducting the ripples of the sun without cost? The first generation twilight men have most of the weaknesses of both peoples, and few of the strengths. But you?”

“Wait.” Jonathan managed to choke out. His mind was spinning, but it was still working. As the events of his life bombarded him, he managed to concentrate on the last two weeks and focus. “When you gave me the ripple…?”

“I didn't know what would happen, but I had to try. I knew it would not kill you, if the sun itself caused you no harm, but I was delighted when I saw that you really could use your body’s power to store and channel its ripples in the way that I hoped. Excuse me for a moment.”

Wamuu’s eyes rolled back, and his arms fell limp. Jonathan recognized the buckle of his knees just before he fell to the snow beside the lake’s edge, chains and ragged coat spread out all around him. Jonathan looked up into the fog, and stared across the steaming waters. His entire life. His entire life. He tasted blood. He had bitten one of his cheeks. When Wamuu got up again, Jonathan saw a gleam of reflected moonlight beneath his eye that hadn’t been there before. A bit of melted snow he’d rolled onto, or…?

“I've fought for almost four thousand years,” Wamuu said as he loomed back onto his feet, “but I gave up any hope of winning almost half as long ago.” His voice was calm again, expository and matter of fact. “The pillar men killed my mother and fathers before I could remember their faces. They destroyed our culture. I meant to devote my life to revenge. To hurt them as much as I could. Inconvenience them. Slow them. Return just a small part of the suffering they’ve inflicted, until I die of old age or am killed by their slaves. That is the best a mere nightman can do. But I think…I hope…that a being like you can do better than that.”

Jonathan was still looking out over the lake, toward the village hidden behind the fog. “Pillar men,” he repeated.

“That’s what we call them, now. The ones responsible for the masks stopped being nightmen a long time ago.” Jonathan felt Wamuu’s hand on his shoulder again. “I have much more to tell you. About them. And you. And why I have been doing as I’ve done since meeting you. I think you’ve heard enough for tonight, though.”

Jonathan’s head bobbed, very slowly, upward and then down again. He couldn’t remember the last time, save perhaps the night he’d been ripple activated, that he’d bit into something not even his curiosity could chew.

“Return to the fortress. Help the others prepare for the journey. I want you well rested before I tell you more.”




TO BE CONTINUED ->
 

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Ha. Erina and Robert literally married a (part)Nightman. I'm dieing here

Crosspost from Ao3:
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Poco and Poce's Sister (Did she have name? Here or in the original manga?) continue to be the best villigers.

Their married! The OT3 happened! Squeeee! So happy! Jojo still doesn't get it but everyone else does. I love the cultural difference (and creation myth) of Nightpeople having polyandry.

Poor Jojo. George really fucked him up by enebleing and assisting Dio's gaslighting. I get debts of honour but they should be contingint on all parties living up to them. Not just one party.

Ooooo! So Jojo was a nightman/dayman hybrid all along. I should have worked that out when you said that there was only the canon magic systems on Discord. That is a very cool way to tie everything together. I wonder if the new Hybrids breed true? Jonathan and Jotaro both seem to keep the benefits but Josuke, Giorno and Jolyne don't (admitedly I have not actually watched parts 4, 5 and 6 or beyond).
 

Leila Hann

Member
12. Poison

Jonathan did not, in the end, ask Wamuu many more questions during the trip back to London. He spent most of the ride staring out the window at the starlit snow by the roadside, or resting his fingers on the star-shaped mark on his neck as if it might start writhing or growing at any moment. At one point, about half an hour into the ride, he rubbed his upper forehead above the hairline. Was his skull just slightly bumpier than a normal man’s? The vestiges of what may have been a sharp horn on his unknown grandfather’s brow? If someone were to exhume his mother’s skeleton, what might they find she’d been hiding beneath her own thick brown bangs? Several times, Erina or Speedwagon asked what had so shaken him. He told them, honestly, that he’d fill them in as soon as he’d had time to finish processing it himself. As the hours wore on, they both began looking exceedingly concerned. He kept his arm around Erina as a reassurance, and kissed her now and again when his own mind needed a rest. Speedwagon stayed focused on the horses and road from that point on as best Jonathan could tell. Wamuu, sitting on Erina’s other side, just watched the others. When they came to a stop beneath the smog of London’s East End, Wamuu opened his side’s door and lumbered out as Speedwagon began dismounting from the driver’s seat.

“I’ll stay in the city until dawn. There’s one more mask in England, and I’m not sure of the location yet.” He looked at the other three, shimmering blue eyes seeming to probe them.

“Well,” Speedwagon said, “excusing your people’s marriage customs, Miss Pen...Erina and me’ve each got family of our own to check in on.” He gave the other two passengers an apologetic smile, and then yawned, unwrapping the scarf from around his face. “I suppose Clara’s got that spare bed still unfilled where Eliza used to live, but I’m not sure if-”

“That’s alright,” Jonathan and Erina interrupted with one voice.

The wedding thing. That was also pounding away at Jonathan’s skull. A few hours ago, if you’d backed him into a corner, he thought he’d have ultimately decided that Wamuu’s traditions were not his own, and that whatever any ritual does or doesn’t mean materially speaking he’d not consider himself married until he’d done it the modern English way. But now, well. Was the English way actually Jonathan Joestar’s way to begin with?

He felt a cynical chuckle pass, almost soundlessly, between his lips as he thought back to all those dinnertime scoldings from his father. “What am I ever to do about your table manners, JoJo?” “Jonathan, look at how perfectly Dio is cutting his steak!” “You can’t just rip meat apart with your teeth, JoJo! You look like a wild beast!” Had he really just been an ill-mannered child with no self control as Father so often despaired? Or was there a quarter of him that belonged in the jungles of Central America, where it ate its prey raw? After a moment, he sighed, and shook his head with another silent, self-deprecating chuckle. No, no, he’d never heard anything ill of his mother’s eating habits. That was all on him.

“I suppose we’ll need to hire a driver back to Aldershot from here for ourselves, then,” Erina said.

Jonathan nodded quickly. “Yes, of course, I’ll see if I can bribe anyone out of the station at this hour.” He nodded toward the coach service they’d returned to and climbed out the other door onto the thin, trampled slush. “We’ll be seeing you shortly enough, I’m sure,” he said to Speedwagon as he met him on the sidewalk by the horses.

“Merry Christmas, in case it doesn’t happen before then.”

Jonathan smiled, more genuinely than he had since before his private conversation with Wamuu. “I hope it will be. But yes, Merry Christmas just in case.”

Speedwagon stepped forward and embraced him. Jonathan hesitated for only a fraction of a second before hugging him back. Even without any recent ripple breathing, Speedwagon’s body temperature was notably higher than it felt like it should be. Had it always been that way, or only since his own respiratory procedure?

“It’s just mad when you think about it,” Speedwagon said as he released Jonathan and embraced Erina in turn, “all this started because I happened to rob Dio Brando at the old Chinese drugstore.”

Erina chuckled. Jonathan started to, but then stopped.

“Chinese drugstore?” Jonathan asked. “On Ogre Street?”

Speedwagon nodded as he finished hugging Erina goodbye.

“But…what was he doing there?”

Erina rolled her eyes. “Whatever he was doing, I’m sure he had it coming.”

Speedwagon shrugged. “Dunno. Seemed an awfully cheap choice, for a man of your lots’ means. Well, I suppose his old man was cheap too.”

Jonathan shook his head. What sort of ridiculous, family-reputation-endangering scheme was Dio getting all over himself this time? He decided he’d think about that later. He did, after all, have more than enough on his mind already tonight.

They made their final goodbyes, and then Wamuu and Speedwagon drifted away into the night.



“I hope he’ll be alright,” Speedwagon said, looking back over his shoulder at the maze of brick and gaslight they’d left the others behind in as they made the last turn and saw the gray ogre face glowering down at the dark, slushy street.

“He will be,” Wamuu said, forcing Speedwagon to trot to keep up with his own strides, “if none of these other trials have destroyed him, this will not either.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Speedwagon’s eyes narrow momentarily, as if in frustration. “How’ve I done on them trials so far?”

Ah. Of course. Wamuu tilted his head back a little, letting his eyes drift up at the eerily blackened sky. He still found that smoke layer disconcerting, even after spending most of his time on the island beneath it. Should it really stay in place for so long, even when the factories were not presently smoking? It reminded him too much of the ashy clouds that heralded an eruption of lava; one of the few truly fearsome things that not even the night could protect from. He closed his eyes to shut away that anxiety, and beseeched fate, if he had any favor with it yet, to send him to a land of clear skies or watery clouds after he finished here. Still, Robert Speedwagon was waiting for his answer.

“You’ve faced more than Jonathan has,” he said, “since meeting me, and before. But what I told Jonathan concerns him. I’m sure he will tell you and Erina soon. If he does not, then I misjudged the strength of your bond. But it’s his place, not mine.”

He avoided looking at the dayman as he answered. He knew his face would betray nothing, but Wamuu preferred not to make eye contact with him while discussing this subject. Not yet. Not until he was sure about what this was, and what role was Robert Speedwagon’s to play. He wondered if he could ever tell him the entire truth. Probably not. It was dishonorable. Contemptible. But Wamuu had been forced to sell away so much honor, bit by bit, that he sometimes feared to ask himself what the word still meant to him at all anymore.

What is this, to be so fond of a man, but to hope such a fate for him? What has desperation made of me?

Daymen didn’t last long anyway, of course. That was the brutal reality of nature. But that just made every sunlit day that much more important to each of them. He’d told Speedwagon, on the first night they met, the same thing he’d had to remind himself time and time again over the centuries. Brevity was not disposability, even if the daymen themselves often seemed to think otherwise. To forget that would be to start down the path of the enemy.

“Gave him a proper fright, whatever it was,” Speedwagon pressed on.

“Not fright,” Wamuu answered, “confusion. What I told Jonathan has changed his understanding of his own life. You’ll understand when he tells you, but it will confuse you much less.”

“Eh.”

They approached the door of the Respectable Establishment, the handful of predawn vagrants giving Wamuu a wide berth as he led Speedwagon to the entrance.

“Well, if you’re not going to say anything else about that,” Speedwagon said, “do you think we ought to head back up to Windknights’ and liberate those skeletons and sword? I’m sure the Scots would make it worth someone’s while, if you could just help me slip ‘em north. JoJo hasn’t got to know.”

Wamuu allowed himself a smile. “Remind me after the fourth mask is destroyed. It could be amusing.”

He stood aside and let Speedwagon open the door. Behind it, Tattoo was leaning against the wall by the window, stopping in the middle of a gruff conversation with Clara as they came in.

“Still in one piece I see,” Tattoo said, standing upright as Speedwagon wiped his boots on the mud-caked mat. “I hope you’re not gonna ask to borrow my coat after this one now!”

Wamuu hung back and let Speedwagon deal with his own people. He hadn’t talked much with the man nicknamed Tattoo, but he’d inferred that he and Speedwagon had been committed at some time in the past, and things between them were not yet fully resolved. Jealousy, Wamuu had long ago been disappointed to learn, was a vice daymen had in common with his own kind.

“Calm down,” Speedwagon sighed, “with what I just scored we might not have to worry about coats for a good while.” He grinned slyly and took off his hat, and then embraced his sister before continuing. “Married money, you see.”

Tattoo’s jaw dropped, and then started working itself silently as the man tried to speak faster than he could think. Clara’s arms went limp from where she’d been hugging her brother back, and she stared at him as if frozen by frog poison. “What’s this noise?” She cocked her head to the left and then to the right as she scrutinized her brother’s face. “What got switched around in that head of yours? Did you knock up some rich airhead?”

“Nah, I couldn’t get JoJo pregnant even if he let me try,” Speedwagon shrugged despondently, “Erina I guess I could, but she’s not exactly an airhead. Or exactly rich, at least compared to him.”

Clara started to say something else, but just stopped mid-syllable. Tattoo had stopped even trying to talk, and was just staring in blank, open-mouthed incomprehension.

“I’ll explain everything once I’ve rested and had a bite to eat. And to drink. Especially drink. For now though, just look at these historic pistols I liberated. They ought to make up for my not being on the job these last two days.” He reached beneath his coat and produced two of the smaller firearms that just last night had been firing at Wamuu as he crippled each of the vampires in turn.

“Those don’t look so old,” Tattoo said, raising an eyebrow.

“I found them at an historic site. That makes ‘em historic pistols.” He handed one to each of the others, who took them uncertainly. “Anyway, we can sell ‘em, maybe use ‘em?”

“I’ll visit our contacts,” Wamuu said, turning to Robert, “can I expect to find you here until dawn?”

“Aye. After that drive, you’d have to pay me to set foot outside again. Although…I do need that drink, and I wouldn’t so burden my sister’s limited supply, especially seeing as it’s meant for customers.”

Clara shook her head. “Not that we’ve had many. Robbie, are you serious about what you said before, about the money? You wouldn’t really be feeding us that kind of your nonsense after being away this long, would you?”

“Well, it could still fall through,” Speedwagon admitted, “but I don’t reckon it will. And if it doesn’t, things are going to be a lot different for all of us going forward.” He smiled, exultant, at the others. Wamuu saw the disbelief in their faces starting to give way to curiosity, and perhaps hope. “I’ll get us a bottle of something to tell you over, be back in just a minute. Don’t worry, we can afford this one even if the wedding goes to piss.” He followed Wamuu back out into the dirty slush under the tainted sky.

Wamuu let Speedwagon lead the way to wherever he wanted to go. Not that their destination mattered, of course. Wamuu only had to wait a few steps before he asked “Just one other thing I thought of. If you won’t tell me what you said to JoJo, can you at least tell me about the devil?”

That hadn’t been what Wamuu expected. He looked down at Speedwagon, expression quizzical.

“I thought it was just Cecily being her excitable self, when she started telling me and Clara about it,” the dayman said, “but then, well. You weren’t there when we met him, but that Musgrave chap told an awfully detailed story about meeting the devil, and twice in three vampires couldn’t be chance now, could it?”

Wamuu continued walking, silent for a moment. Speedwagon still led the way, but was looking at him expectantly.

“Someone,” Wamuu decided to answer, keeping his voice low and making sure none of Ogre Street’s handful of nighttime pedestrians were nearby, “brought the masks to England. Usually, they send an older vampire to do it. They used to do it themselves sometimes, but it’s been nearly six hundred years since the last time. I do not know why one would make the delivery in person again now.”

Speedwagon nodded his head grimly, making his long hair flow like a thick, murky river. “I thought as much, considering Ces was so focused on this window-watcher having horns specifically.” His eyes darted meaningfully up to the front of Wamuu’s circlet. “Frightful thought, that. Another one like you walking these streets, but without the merciful disposition.”

Wamuu shook his head. “He will be long gone by now. They only keep their bodies active for short periods, when they can help it.” They continued for a few more steps. “And he’s not another one like me. Not even close, not anymore.”

Speedwagon gave him a cautious, almost fearful look. Good, Wamuu thought, fear is right. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” Wamuu answered, “that their power is to mine as one of the stone mask wearers’ is to yours, without the ripple.”



Looking out through the large window, Erina saw the sky begin to pale and the stars grow slightly fainter along the eastern horizon. Behind the chairs she and Jonathan sat in, the small fire faded away to red embers, like a cluster of glowing eyes looking out from the dark stone cavity. On the studio wall, the painting of Mary Joestar hung, star-shaped mark displayed on the crook of her shoulder. She wondered, now that she looked at it, and at the top of Jonathan’s identical birthmark, how she had failed to recognize that particular shade of pale blue in Wamuu’s spiral mark.

“And there’s no way he could be wrong?” Erina asked, unsure if that would comfort Jonathan or just upset him further, but unsure of what else to say.

Looking down at the tea set, Jonathan shook his head. “That’s what I was asking myself the entire ride from Windknight’s to London. And… no, there really isn’t.” One of those shy, self-deprecating smiles lit up his crystalline face. Like always since their reunion, it struck Erina as almost otherworldly, seeing that vulnerable, childlike smile on the face of a giant. Like the boy who’d made her face pinken and her eyelashes twitch back in their childhood looking out through the visor of a mighty armor suit. “I’ve thought about everything. What Father told me about her. The…well, I never made sense, did I? Not much about me ever did.”

Erina allowed herself to smile. “I suppose I wouldn’t have taken an interest otherwise.”

He laughed. “Even after that time I threw a frog at you. Yes, I suppose you still wanting to be friends after that was one more detail of my life that never added up.”

Erina chuckled along with him, eyes examining the rugged lines that shaped his chin and nose as they moved with each giggle. Otherworldly. That was a word she’d never quite managed to arrive at, when thinking about him. It really had been the best one all along, though. Now that he’d told her what Wamuu told him, it was like her mind had been given the freedom to finally go there.

For a moment, she wondered if what drew her toward Jonathan might have been the same thing that led her to the Sendo monastery. If the one world she’d been born into was just never enough for her. She took another quick look at the painting that revealed Mary’s birthmark on the wall, and wondered, perhaps, if George Joestar was the same way.

“Well,” she said, when the chuckling subsided and Jonathan’s eyes seemed to be begging her to say something more, “does this mean your grandfather might still be alive?”

Jonathan sunk his rocky chin into his hands. “He probably is. I did think, during the ride, if you and Speedwagon and I are still doing this, if we should go there someday. To South Africa, I mean. If there was one nightman there, there are likely more.” He let out a helpless breath. “I don’t know if meeting them would help us, necessarily. I wonder, if we met him, if he’d recognize me as one of their own. But I’d still like to try.”

He stared down at the cooling, half-empty teacups, brow furrowed. Erina watched him for a silent moment before reaching out and laying one of her own palms atop his as he clutched his chin. “I can’t think of a reason not to.” She paused a moment, the next words hovering on her lips before she decided to let herself say them. “Maybe once we can introduce him to his great grandchildren as well.”

Jonathan’s bright blue eyes flickered back up to hers. An almost ripple-like feeling passed through her, as she felt his breathing change beneath their palms. “You were serious about that, before, then?”

“Did you think I wasn’t?”

“Oh, no, not at all!” Jonathan quickly sat upright and removed his hands from his chin, taking ahold of one of hers in each. “I suppose what I meant to say is that we haven’t even officially married yet. I always thought people made these plans in more of an order.”

Erina raised an eyebrow at him, feeling a little of that mixed impatience and fondness that he always made her feel in those occasional dense moments of his. “Which people?”

He was silent at that. Almost too silent. As if she had gotten him thinking about something much bigger and more complicated than she’d realized.

“It’s nearly morning,” he finally said, looking back toward the window while keeping her hands in his own, “are you certain you don’t want a ride home?”

Erina sighed, and shook her head again. “My parents will see the letter I sent first thing. I don’t think I can stay awake until a proper hour, and if I come home now I’ll just wake them up.”

“As you say, then,” Jonathan leaned a little further over the table, inviting her to bend forward and kiss him. The last of the tea’s heat was fading from his full, smooth lips. After pulling his head back again, he released her hands and stood up. “I’ll leave a note for Rory to deal with this when he and the others wake up.” He gestured idly to the teapot and cups. She stood up as well, and took his hand again.

“You’ll need a room,” he said, grasping her hand back and resting his other on her shoulder. She felt her heart rate pick up, and her spine shiver, as she looked up into his eyes. His expression was cordial, mostly. Proper. But there was also an uncertainty, and a desire. She waited, just for a second, before realizing that no, if she didn’t move forward he never would, no matter what he really wanted.

There was a pang of fear that came over her, then. One that she knew every woman was expected to have, thinking about her first time. It was, however, milder than she’d expected. Part of it was the assurance she felt, looking into those baby blue eyes of Jonathan’s and feeling the gentle grasp of his powerful hands. Part of it was the fact that she knew it couldn’t possibly hurt more than being thrown by an explosion, or sinking into an icy lake. She felt the trepidation, but it was like the low dip between two breaths of ripple-to-waves. Passing over and through her, but then drowned out by the next emotion.

“I had one room in mind, particularly,” she said.

Jonathan nodded his head. Even if he was too polite to initiate, he was not too innocent to understand. “Well, I…suppose this is our wedding night?” He sounded like he was asking for her reassurance.

She shrugged, and put on the bravest grin she could manage. “It’s your people’s tradition. If you tell me so, I’ll acquiesce to your judgement.”

He let out a long sigh. “Just put the responsibility on me, then.” He rolled his eyes.

She laughed. He chuckled along with her, at least as nervously. Her accelerated heartbeats were harder now, and she felt his more strongly as well. As they finished chuckling, she pulled herself up against his front, and raised her hands up along each swell and dip of his arms until they rested on his shoulders.

“Mister Joestar-Pendleton-Speedwagon,” she said, “I would appreciate it if you would escort me to your bedchamber.”

She felt him shiver, as his eyes remained, unblinking, on hers.

“Please,” he said after a moment, wrapping his own large hands around her waist, “It’s Pendleton-Joestar-Speedwagon.”

She glared at him, but she couldn’t repress her grin. A moment later, he returned it.

“This way, Erina.”



When Jonathan had, on occasion, read tawdrier material in between his bouts of studying, he’d always read about “sweat-slicked” or “gleaming with sweat” men panting to recover their breaths in the wake of such encounters. As he wrapped his body around Erina’s, he decided that either the heroes of those bawdy tales were shamefully out of shape, or his ripple practice had just done wonders for his respiration.

Or it just takes that much more exertion to exhaust me. Because I’m, well.

Encircled by his arms, Erina shifted a little in place, grinding her still-slick upper thighs up against him again (Jonathan had been much more taken aback by just how much of that fluid the process involved; the stories hadn’t prepared him for that). “Tired,” she whispered. It was a happy whisper, though, and not a pained one as he’d feared.

“I admit,” Jonathan said, playing his fingers along her upper arm where it emerged from the covers, “I was starting to get drowsy even before.”

“Well, yes, me as well obviously.” With some effort, she turned her head up and around to look him more or less in the eye. Her hair hung down all around her forehead and neck, in a way he’d only seen it do after the explosion in Windknight’s Lot. The contrast between Erina Pendleton as he knew her and the wild haired, simmering eyed creature he beheld now was…well, it felt right. Different. Surprising, but natural. “I wonder what time it even is, now.”

The drapes were a slightly lighter hue than they’d been when he and Erina first entered his bedroom. Dawn would come very soon, if it hadn’t already. On the desk before the window lay the notes Jonathan had barely touched in the past week or so, and the pale mask he’d broken and glued back together. He averted his eyes from the artifact. He could do with a break from thinking about that. He returned his full attention to Erina.

“You’re sure I didn’t hurt you?” He repeated.

She shook her wild-haired and flushed pink head. “Only a little, right at the start.”

Jonathan smiled, and nodded. “I’ve just read about the bleeding and pain when it breaks, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

Erina laughed. It was a lower, earthier laugh than usual, but still entirely hers. “That can happen without ever losing your virginity, you know.”

Jonathan felt his eyebrows raise. “I didn’t, actually.”

She nodded. “From what I’ve read, it used to be common knowledge in England, back when noble girls rode horses more often. I had it happen during shifting of sand exercises at the monastery.” Her face turned even redder, and she half closed her eyes at the embarrassing memory. “The monks were so surprised that I was so surprised about it.”

“Oh.” Jonathan paused, unsure of what he should say to that. And also a little ashamed himself, of having half-suspected what he’d half-suspected. “I suppose my history reading hasn’t focused on medical matters.”

Erina shrugged. “As I said, it isn’t as well known as it used to be. I don’t know why.” She chuckled then, and shook her head. “I always wondered what my papa would say if I told him I’d lost my maidenhead with the monks.”

It was a matter of seconds before Jonathan found himself laughing much harder than she, and he didn’t stop until well after she had. “Was the pretty, black-haired one present for the occasion? I’m sure your father would have loved that in particular.”

Erina gasped in mock-outrage and slapped his fingers where they clutched her other arm. “No, Jonathan, Straizo wasn’t there. He’d have never let me hear the end of it if he was.” She chuckled again, a bit more fatalistically, and laid her head back down on the pillow. “And papa, well…he’s made enough of a fuss just over you.”

Jonathan couldn’t help but feel just a bit of a kick from that, even if he wasn’t sure how serious she was. “What? Me?”

I want you to remember, Riny,” Erina cocked her head back and forth against the pillow as she performed an adequate impression of Doctor Pendleton, “money isn’t everything. Between his loud voice and his beastly table manners and his artist father. You know what they say about the artistically inclined, Riny, and I don’t trust a man who hires that many Irish. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he lets those boys drink wine at the dinner table!”

He raised his head off the pillow a little and stared at the side of her face. “Did…did he really say all of that at once?”

Erina snorted, and shook her head. “No, it just all melts together after a while. Those were just the worst ones I can remember.”

“Well.” Jonathan paused for a moment, trying to internalize that. After his mind failed to go anywhere useful, he just grinned a little and said “As long as I’m corrupting you anyway, would you care for some wine?”

“Hm, I don’t feel corrupt.” She said the words in a way that let him hear the pout. “But corrupt people often don’t, do they?” She rolled around on her back to face him. He missed her slick skin against his wetted manhood, but having her breath against his chin and her eyes peering into his more than made up for it. “I’ve never actually had alcohol before. But since I’ve already done this with you, I…do suppose I’ve always been curious.”

“What, really?” Jonathan was almost more surprised than he’d been when he realized she could use the ripple. Of all the people who’d have never even tried drinking…but then, he thought back to her father, and drew some connections.

“Ah. Temperance?”

Erina nodded softly. “You probably think it’s silly, what with how I’ve followed the rest of papa’s advice to the letter. But I’ve seen what drink can do to people, and well, even he’s not always wrong.”

Erina looked more withdrawn for a moment. Ashamed, perhaps? Jonathan half expected her to admit to something, but it passed and she continued.

“Well, even if you don’t. I do suppose it’s silly myself, now that we’ve…” she nibbled on his arm a little, content to let that serve as the end of her sentence.

Jonathan sighed affectionately, and stroked her hair with his unbitten arm. “I’m still waiting for a yes or a no.”

She grimaced, half-playfully, casting her eyes this way and that. “I…that’s a yes, just because it’s our wedding night or something. We’ll see how I feel after this.”

“How can you even say this is our wedding night,” Jonathan said after planting one last kiss on her mouth and hauling himself up from the bed, “when Speedwagon’s isn’t here?” He rolled his eyes, but didn’t realize until too late that he had the back of his head to her now and she couldn’t see it.

“You’re serious?”

Jonathan sighed, and hung his head. “As serious as you were about this actually being our wedding night.” He stopped, heart skipping a beat, as he realized what he’d just implied about their consummation. He just forced himself to laugh, and hoped she accepted that, as he finished getting up and striding across to the cabinet where he’d left the sherry. He’d meant to return it to the cellar, after sharing some with Dio that time, but between one thing and another since then he’d found himself keeping it in his room. And, there was significantly less in the bottle than there had been after his drink with Dio.

“Here,” he said, producing the bottle of bright red liquid and a tiny glass cup from the closet and turning back around, “it’s been my favorite since your father agonized over my father letting me taste it.”

Erina’s eyes quickly rose back to his face as he turned and crossed back to the bed, smiling at the bottle now. “I can just hear him. Just one night with that Joestar boy as your pagan quasi-husband, and you’re already drinking!”

Jonathan guffawed. “Let me guess, next he’d say that it’s the Irish help who have driven Father and I to drink?”

“He might well,” she said, sitting up on the edge of the bed and letting the covers fall off of her chest and stomach, “and once he was on that topic, he’d mutter something half-coherent about the butler poisoning him.”

He winced. “I’d rather not even joke about that.”

“Sorry.”

He unscrewed the cap, and poured the little glass about a third of the way full. Hardly anything, but it was the first drink of her life. “I’ve only the one glass in here,” he said, happy to change the subject again, “but as our mouths have already met I don’t think there’ll be much harm.” He offered her the cup, and then tapped the bottle against it as her fingers closed around the stem. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she smiled back. She inspected the liquid in the cup inquisitively before raising it to her lips, taking a cautious little sip. Her face stiffened a little, and she lowered the cup again after swallowing. Face still rigid. “My, it’s bitter.” She looked at him curiously as she tried to work the taste out of her mouth. “I’m surprised a man with your sweet tooth would be fond of this.”

“It is a sweet wine, though,” Jonathan said, not sure if he should be insulted or apologetic at her reaction.

“Hmm.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, before returning the glass to her lips and taking another, even smaller, sip. “I can taste the sweetness, but it is bitter as well.” She put her free hand to her throat. “It really does burn going down. Just like they all say.”

Jonathan took it back from her, and poured in a little more sherry before drinking the level in the cup back down. Erina hesitated, but took a third sip before letting him finish the glass and watching lustily as he crossed the room again to put it away.

“I do like the kind of warmth it leaves,” she allowed, opening her arms to embrace and pull him back toward her sitting body, “it almost reminds me of the ripple, just a little, and just around my throat and chest.”

“We really ought to get some sleep, unless you want to hold out until this evening,” Jonathan said as he lowered himself onto his knees, sitting gently on her thighs.

“I’m a little less tired than I thought,” she grinned back at him, “there must be something we can do about that.”



There was a weak, winter sun filtering through the drapes when Jonathan awoke. One o’clock in the afternoon, perhaps? Two o’clock? Somewhere in that general vicinity. Erina’s chest rose and fell beneath his arm, her buttocks still pressed against his groin and her hair spread out against his chest and collar. Waking up next to someone, not having the bed to himself…it was an entirely different experience. Her skin pressed against his under the covers was dry, but for a bit of fresh perspiration of hers; he supposed he ought to thank her for prompting him to wash before they’d fallen asleep. He watched the swell of her body rise and fall gently beneath the covers as she slept on, silent.

I suppose this is what happiness is meant to feel like? He watched the back of her head, and the curve of her shoulders. A thought later, he let out a little sigh. The opposite feeling will be when the doctor finds out what we’ve done. I’ll have to do my best to prevent that eventuality.

Come to think of it, he wondered what his own father would think. Jonathan imagined the tired, disappointed look in George Joestar’s eyes as he shook his head and chided him about how this will look if word gets out. Probably a follow up about how, while young men of Jonathan’s status were tacitly expected to explore this side of adulthood prior to matrimony, society had a harder time ignoring it when it involved middle class women, in the young man’s own manor. Of course, then he’d give his son a resigned semi-smile and say something like “I understand, JoJo. But you must remember that not everyone will.”

With a pang of guilt, Jonathan tried to think of how many days had passed since he’d last gone to visit his father. Before setting out for Windknight’s Lot, Erina had told him that her father expected him to be back on his feet and ready to return home within the week, and hopefully before Christmas Eve. But on the other hand, she’d also told him that a man who didn’t breathe had come knocking on his hospital room door, and only been narrowly deflected to his fatal encounter with Jonathan. His father being at risk had been part of the impetus to set out in search of the third mask-wearer so immediately, but Jonathan hadn’t realized until now that it also meant he hadn’t seen him face to face since before that incident. Now that it had occurred to him, it gave Jonathan a cold, guilty feeling to acknowledge that Musgrave’s minions had visited his father more recently than he had.

Well, that just meant he’d have to go today if possible. It wasn’t too late in the afternoon yet, and if Doctor Pendleton was on duty then he could ask Erina to come along…oh wait, no, everyone at the hospital had been told she was too sick to come in. Never mind that then, he’d go as soon as he’d breakfasted (lunched? Jonathan wasn’t sure which meal this would technically be. He’d always been prone to keeping his own hours when allowed, but he’d never needed a name for the resulting mealtimes) Erina and seen her home. How long had Father been without family visitors? Jonathan hadn’t even thought to ask Dio if he was planning to see him soon. In fact, he wasn’t sure that he’d so much as spoken with his brother at all since the night they’d met the assassin.

Jonathan sighed, and laid his head back down on the pillow beside Erina’s. He almost certainly had gone, come to think of it. Ever since their father’s bouts of illness started, it had been Dio who couldn’t be pried away from the bedside, to the point where sometimes Jonathan almost felt pushed aside. Jonathan supposed it stung Dio’s pride when George had begun spending time in the hospital. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, he remained stubbornly convinced that he could arrange better care at home. Jonathan shook his head. Dio just couldn’t ever admit to not being the best at something, even if that something was a profession as complicated as medicine.

Jonathan shut his eyes, and forced his growing irritation to cool down again. Perhaps he’d been listening to Erina and Speedwagon for just slightly too long. After all, Jonathan reminded himself, this must be much more nerve wracking for Dio than it’s been for me from the beginning. He’s already lost one father to chronic illness. The threat of it happening again…

Jonathan froze. His eyes shot open.

Ogre Street.

The neighborhood Dio had spent his childhood in. The place he’d lived, and known, when his own father’s illness began.

Chinese drugstore.

The look on Dio’s face, the night he’d first met Wamuu and Speedwagon, when Jonathan had asked him what he was doing back in the neighborhood he normally despised any mention of. He’d asked him if he was visiting his parents’ graves. Dio had said yes, while making that face he always made when he feared he’d been caught in a lie.

Once he was on that topic, he’d mutter something half-coherent about the butler poisoning him.

He felt the winter chill sweep over him, as if he’d just now realized that the window had been left open and his blankets turned to tissue paper.

He looked back at the sleeping Erina, heart thumping against his ribs like ice tumbling against stone. Very slowly, careful not to wake her, he extracted himself from the bed and stood up.



Jonathan wanted to put on a shirt before going out into the hall. He’d also been sure, after knocking on Dio’s bedroom door and receiving no answer, that he should go back to his own room and put one on before proceeding. He had placed his hand on the doorknob before forcing himself to withdraw it and move on down the hall toward the staircase. If he went back inside, he’d sit down and reconsider. The thousand doubts and second guesses pulling at him would get their chance, and he’d lay back down next to Erina and forget all about it. As he forced himself to continue, he ran through one panicked scenario after the next. What to say first. Which question to start with. What response he should be prepared for.

He stopped at the north tower entrance, and tried to figure out what he was so frightened of. That Dio would confess? That Dio wouldn’t confess? That he’d realize he’d gone mad and made a complete fool of himself? He imagined his foster brother’s expression, eyes narrowed, thin, pale skinned face glowering, or sneering, and…why did that scare him?

Jonathan felt more memories creeping in on the edge of his consciousness. Real memories? Exaggerated memories? Just dreams he’d mistaken for real things? Things from the time before he had to tilt his head downward to look Dio in the face.

His left eye stung, suddenly, making him wink. Consequently, he didn’t see the maid coming around the corner until she had gasped in surprise and dropped the basket of linens she was carrying, one hand rising to her mouth.

“Ah. Good morning…afternoon…Molly,” Jonathan breathed out. He started raising his arms in front of his chest, before deciding the damage was already done and dropping them helplessly back to his sides. “Oh! Would you happen to know where Dio is?”

“I…” Molly stammered, eyes darting down to the basket she’d dropped as if deciding whether to pick it up or apologize for dropping it before replying “…he’s reading in the foyer, or was a little while ago. Erm, good afternoon, Master Jonathan.”

“Thank you.” Jonathan gave her something like a smile before marching onward toward the central staircase.

“Should I change your linens?” She called after him while bending down for the dropped bedsheets as he dashed on past the green wallpaper and crimson curtains.

“Yes.” Jonathan took another step, before realizing what he’d just said and turning around to shout after her. “I mean, no! Not until later!” She blinked dazedly, but he could spare no more time. Couldn’t give himself an excuse to get distracted. He turned back around, dashed around the corner, and descended the central staircase into the foyer. The tall windows let in a crisp, pale sunlight, flecked by the drifting shadows of a light snowfall. A fire was burning in the hearth by the base of the staircase, next to the armor, tablets, and other artifacts of George’s collection, and Dio sat in the armchair in front of it, an open volume in his hands and a cup of tea on the stand beside him. As Jonathan descended, Dio looked up from his book, and raised one golden eyebrow.

“It’s not just yourself and Miss Pendleton in the house, JoJo,” he said coolly, half closing his book.

Jonathan stopped in place, nearly stumbling on the last few steps. How much did he hear this morning?

“Ah, well, sorry about, well, this.” Jonathan tilted his head down to indicate his bare torso before looking back at Dio and folding his arms in what he hoped looked somewhat more dignified. Dio was about to continue on that subject, Jonathan knew it. He could practically see the words forming behind Dio’s lips as they started to part again. He remembered the plan he’d decided on, and spoke quickly to head Dio off. “I was just getting ready to bathe, and realized I should ask. Have you by chance been to see Father since I left?”

Now it was Dio’s sharp, becoming face that took on a look of bafflement. “Father?” He tilted his head a little to the side, eyeing Jonathan quizzically. “I visited him yesterday. Where were you all this time?” His voice was harder than usual. More irritable. Considering the circumstances of their last conversation, and Jonathan’s prolonged absence since…well, perhaps he couldn’t be blamed.

“That’s…a long story, but, well.” Jonathan stopped and reminded himself what came next. “It just occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting Father. Glad to hear it’s just myself being so distracted.” He grinned ashamedly, channeling some of his genuine nervousness into the expression. “Hah! Did you bring him more of that nettle tea you’re always making him?”

Dio’s expression started looking less wry and more concerned. “How would I bring hot tea all the way to the hospital? Let alone convince them to let Father go off that dreadful diet they’ve put him on?” He slid his bookmark into place and set the tome down on the stand before rising to his feet. “Are you sure you’re alright?” Before Jonathan could answer, Dio raised a hand to his own temple and shook his head. “No, silly question. After what I saw that night, that monster. JoJo, what have you been doing to yourself? What was that? Can you please tell me?”

Jonathan felt Dio’s eyes piercing into his own, cutting him in a way he hadn’t expected. He wasn’t sure when the last time had been that Dio had seemed so concerned, let alone for his brother. The doubts and second guesses came rushing back in. Slowly, he lowered his head, looking down at the Persian carpet.

“You’re right, Dio. I’m sorry. And…no, I really haven’t been myself lately.”

It wasn’t that Erina and Speedwagon were wrong, at least in general principle. Rather, even if Dio really was still that same cruel, spiteful twelve year old inside, it wouldn’t change the fact that he’d been attacked by a demon and given no explanation since. What kind of person am I, really, not even thinking about what he must have going through these last three days? What does it say about me, that I just coldly shrug him off like that, and then suspect him of attempted murder with no evidence?

He gritted his teeth. He was sure Dio, who was scrutinizing his face carefully, would notice the suppressed grimace, but he hardly cared. No. This is what he’s always done to my thoughts. I came here to do something, and I’ll do it. I’m just going to test him. Just one little test, and if he passes it I’ll castigate myself as much as I deserve afterward.

“And,” Jonathan continued, “well, you’ve always been a sharp one. I’m sure you have a fairly good idea of what’s been dragging me down to this state.”

Dio’s lips twitched into a shadow of his usual smirk. “Well, I’d be surprised if your choice of companionship were that much more traumatic than whatever that thing that attacked us was. I’ll therefore assume it’s the latter.”

Jonathan decided to generously assume that he was talking about Speedwagon and Wamuu rather than Erina. All the same, that last barb made him feel slightly less awful about doing this. “You’re understating it just slightly,” Jonathan managed a mostly natural sigh and roll of his eyes, “but that’s the essence of it. I…truly am sorry, Dio. I was sworn to secrecy about this matter, but after what happened that night, well.”

Jonathan paused, choosing his words very carefully. Not sure how genuine the ones he’d already said actually were. Is this what being a habitual liar is like? Is this every day of someone like Dio’s life, never being sure if you meant what you’ve said even long after saying it?

“I’m not one for oath breaking,” he continued, “but I owe my brother better than silence.” Jonathan considered something for a moment, and then spoke a little more sharply. “Even if I wish he hadn’t put himself or me in this situation to begin with.”

Dio winced and hung his head a little. “Yes. I apologize again for that. Creeping after you and Miss Pendleton like a nosy child was not becoming of me.” He looked back up at Jonathan. “Although on the topic of creeping out of the house at night, I don’t think you can blame me for being worried about you. And for wanting to see for myself.”

Jonathan closed his eyes. How ashamed should he actually be of his newly-habitual secrecy? Whenever he was in a conversation with Dio, it was like his sense of what was normal and reasonable for a person to say or do had no frame of reference, and he had to puzzle even the most basic principles out laboriously. “Yes, of course. And I apologize for that as well. I haven’t been very considerate in how I’ve gone about this affair. Even with the toll I fear it’s taken on my sanity, I still should have thought of how all this would look to you.”

Should he have? Shouldn’t he have? He honestly had no idea if he owed Dio an apology here or not. Still, he had to play along for now.

“So, I’ll tell you everything before we end this conversation. I vow it.” Jonathan let his face relax a little, like someone glad to be changing the topic for the time being. Which he truly was. Maybe. “I was just asking where things stand with Father right now, before I make a fool of myself when I go to see him this afternoon. I feel ashamed enough of not keeping up on the news for so long, and I don’t know that I could bear it if he realized.”

Dio smiled a little bit. Jonathan gave him a humble, apologetic, almost pleading look. I gave him what he wants. I’ve admitted that he’s the better son. Now, hopefully that’ll be enough of a bribe to loosen his tongue.

“Well,” Dio said, with an air of reluctant magnanimity, “I still think he’d have been better by now had he stayed home. But he told me he’s convinced the doctors to let him return tomorrow. He’s been walking more each day, and really beginning to miss his oils.”

Jonathan smiled back, genuinely, at the thought. Using that genuine emotion like a tool, or a weapon. He’d never felt so lost and alienated from his own self. Not even when Wamuu had told him what he’d told him at Windknight’s Lot. “I’m still not certain I agree, but with the amount of effort you’ve been putting into aiding his recovery I suppose I can’t second guess you. Running back to Ogre Street just to get exotic tea ingredients takes some dedication.”

Dio’s expression didn’t change. Rather, something behind his face shifted, and although he looked no different than he had a moment ago Dio somehow drove down the temperature in the room and made Jonathan feel much, much smaller than he really was. Jonathan almost stammered, but managed to finish the words he’d planned out.

“Although…Ogre Street? Really? Was there really no better place to buy what you were looking for?”

Dio cocked his golden-haired head to the side, and narrowed his scorching amber eyes so that they focused painfully into Jonathan’s. “What in God’s name are you talking about, JoJo?”

“The night you visited your parents’ graves,” Jonathan said. “Before I’d even speak to him again, I made Speedwagon explain exactly what he did to you, and why.”

Dio scoffed at the last word, as if frustrated by Jonathan thinking that was even worth asking, but Jonathan continued.

“One thing he said, and which I can’t imagine why he’d have invented, is that he attacked you as you left a Chinese apothecary.” Jonathan’s throat felt dry, and his fingers shaky, but he pushed himself onward. “Other than looking for obscure cures for Father, I couldn’t imagine what you’d have been looking for. But why that apothecary?”

Dio’s glare tightened, and hardened. “Why does this matter to you?”

Jonathna swallowed. Shifted in place. Gritted his teeth. “I swore to speak about what you saw that night with no one, and I’m breaking that oath for your sake. The least you could do is be honest about your own midnight strolls in return!”

And then, realizing what he’d stumbled into, Jonathan seized it and pushed it in to the hilt.

“You say you’ve been worried about me, but how do you think I’ve felt ever since you ran off and got yourself beaten half to death in the worst part of London without telling anyone where you’d gone?” To his amazement, Jonathan realized that the outrage in his voice was real. It wasn’t right that Dio would have the audacity to pry into Jonathan’s private departures after what he’d just done himself.

Dio was silent. Outrage and frustration chased each other behind his eyes, accompanied by a kind of muted disbelief. As if Jonathan acting like this was a violation of natural law that science couldn’t explain.

Alright then,” Dio almost growled, turning his sharp features at a profile, ending their eye contact, “I’ll tell you, if it’s so important to you.” He sighed, and looked over at the crackling fireplace. “You aren’t the only one who’s sworn to keep secrets. A friend of mine who I owe a great deal to acquired an unfortunate habit during a trip to the Orient. One that would cost him his reputation, which is why I will not tell you his name. He wasn’t able to procure what he needed, so I went to the only place I knew that sold it, and where no one would see me.”

Jonathan’s muscles relaxed, hands almost falling limp, as he watched Dio stare resentfully into the fire. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected Dio to say, exactly, but this certainly hadn’t been it. If he’d taken a moment to think about it, to consider any explanation besides the worst possible one, Jonathan was sure he’d have realized it must be something like this himself. It was certainly more likely.

Except, he realized, just as Dio was starting to turn back around, for one more detail he’d heard from Speedwagon.

“This friend has been making you do this for more than a year?”

Dio stopped mid motion. Jonathan was watching him at a profile once more, and saw enough of his face to recognize that expression again. The look of a fox that realizes it’s been caught in a henhouse, and has to carefully plan its escape. The seconds ticked past. Then, Dio turned back around, stepped over to the armchair, and collapsed in it. Elbows in his lap. Face in his hands. Golden bangs streaming down over his fingers.

“There…there is no friend, JoJo.”

In his nervous, half-frantic state, it took a few more heartbeats for Jonathan to follow. “You mean…”

“Yes! I mean exactly that!” Dio removed his hands from his face and pushed them together before his lap. Lips tight. Brow furrowed. “There. Now you know. I can only beg you to be discrete.”

As Jonathan watched, silent, Dio turned his eyes back up to catch his own. The anger and resentment was gone. His fire-lit orbs were wide and pained, almost manic. Jonathan wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen Dio look this openly vulnerable.

He reminded himself that he hadn’t known, until Dio just now admitted it, that he’d been visiting that drugstore for more than a year. Speedwagon hadn’t been anywhere near that specific. The timeframe matched the one that Jonathan had sought to test. He blinked back the sympathetic tears that had begun their early sting at the corners of his eyes, and stared right back into Dio’s own.

“If there’s anything I can do to help you out of this,” Jonathan said, “I swear I’ll do it. But if you don’t think you can do it quickly, at least let me accompany you next time. You clearly need the protection.”

Dio launched himself out of the chair like a pouncing lion. Eyes narrowed, and blazing like the fire in the hearth behind him, teeth bared in a furious grimace. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

Jonathan was standing between the wall and the high stairway banister. Dio had always been slightly more agile and faster to react than him on the rugby court, but with Jonathan’s position it barely made a difference. Finally letting his own face contort in frustration, Jonathan grabbed him with both hands and spun him back around. Dio’s rage turned to shock as he found himself grabbed by the arm and shoulder and looking up at his foster brother once again.

“I will,” Jonathan said, very, very deliberately as he advanced on Dio, “as soon as you tell me what you’ve really been doing.”

Dio punched him in the face. Right over the left eye. Jonathan’s muscle memory took over. He felt the finger starting to stab out into his eye socket.

Before it could go further, he threw Dio backward into the chair, breaking it to pieces and bouncing Dio off of the wall behind it.



Erina had assumed Jonathan was in the washroom, or off to bring refreshments, when she heard the shouting from the foyer. Two voices, loud and angry, one of them Jonathan’s. Dropping her hairbrush unceremoniously onto the bed, she dug the one nightgown she’d packed out of her bag and threw it over her body, nearly tripping on it as she stumbled out of the room while still putting it on.

“What happened?” She demanded of the linen-carrying Molly as she staggered into the hall, nearly knocking into the maid as she extended an arm to brace herself against the wall.

“Eep!” Molly screamed, jumping into the air as Erina almost knocked her down. “M…Miss…Pendleton? I don’t know!” Her eyes were wide, and her posture twitchy and nervous, the laundry basket clutched so tightly her fingers were white. Erina quickly decided she didn’t have time to apologize, and ran down the hall toward the foyer terrace as fast as her half asleep body possibly could. She didn’t even realize she’d started ripple-to-waves until the crash of splintering wood startled her into botching an exhalation. By the time she reached the bannister and was looking down at the source of the disturbance, her body was charged and tingling.

“If you have an accusation to make,” Dio was growling, struggling up onto his knees as blood trickled down his angular chin, “then make it! Make it, and tell me what proof!”

“Your father,” Jonathan’s bare chest was heaving as he glared down at the injured Dio, “was ill for a year before he died. Bedridden.”

“AND?” Dio shouted, but then gasped in pain as he tried to stand up only for his right foot to give way beneath his weight. He grabbed the wall, and braced himself with it as he climbed back up onto his good leg. “He was a drunk. A whoremonger. Who even knows what that man did to his body? And who cares?

“YOU cared for him, Dio!” Jonathan retorted, shoulders trembling as he advanced toward him, arms raised menacingly in front of him. “You had to see it happen. You were the ONLY one who saw it happen. And he got worse and worse when you were caring for him, JUST LIKE FATHER!”

Dio threw back his head, managing to force out a pained laugh even as his grimace remained in place. Erina jumped back away from the bannister, but she saw Dio’s eyes catch hers and a jolt of sheer, burning malice shoot into her for the moment their gazes met.

“Is that what you’re saying?” Dio crowed. “Really? That I’m trying to POISON Father?” Erina heard a pained, bitter chuckle before he continued, a little less loudly. “Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed making a complete, screaming, half-naked fool of yourself in front of Miss Pendleton.”

She heard Jonathan’s horrified gasp. Mouthing something extremely unladylike under her breath, she pushed her hair back and walked back up to the railing. “Jonathan?” She paused for a moment as he looked up on her, silent, wide-eyed horror on his face. A pang of guilt struck her, as she saw that expression, and wondered if perhaps she and Speedwagon had had a role in the germination of some mad idea in Jonathan’s brain. Before coming to any conclusions, let alone regarding her husband(?)’s sanity, she decided he needed reassurance first. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Both men stared at her. Jonathan looking relieved, if rather taken aback. Dio looking like he would drive a sharp length of chair through her chest if she made the mistake of coming within reach. The intervention of an older, calmer voice with a subdued Irish accent called all three of their attentions to the eastern side door.

“Good grief.” Rory shook his graying head as he stood in the entryway, eyebrows raised behind his glasses as he took in the scene. “And we all thought you two’d grown out of this nonsense years ago.”

Behind her, Erina heard Molly tiptoe out onto the terrace as well. A moment later, other faces began appearing in other doorways. Jonathan, still naked and gleaming from the waist up, turned slowly around in a wordlessly placating gesture, but she saw his eyes, and they hadn’t softened. In the corner behind him, Dio had stopped moving, leaning in place against the wall and staring vacantly upward in a way that almost made her fear brain damage.

“Erm…good afternoon, Mister Kelly?” Erina offered.

The butler turned his gaze up at her, and she saw him wince. Lowering his gaze back to the destroyed reading gallery in the corner, he said “I would rather not be the one to explain that chair to Master George. I can only hope that Master Dio can walk again by the time he returns home, so the two of you can stand side by side when telling him what happened.”

Jonathan was silent. He looked from Rory to the other servants who had begun peeking in, and then back at Dio.

“Well,” Erina spoke up again, a little more loudly, “we’d better get dressed.” Her face burned, and she avoided eye contact with any of the others. They would talk. They would talk, and her neighbors in Aldershot would hear, and soon enough the whispers would follow her to the hospital. Well, if there was even the smallest chance left of me not marrying Jonathan properly, it’s gone now.

On the floor below, Jonathan did not look embarrassed as she’d expected him to. He barely seemed to comprehend the meaning of the watching servants and what they’d just seen and heard. He did, thank heavens, register her summons. He walked back around the corner of the staircase and began to ascend, one shoulder rising and falling heavily after its opposite with every other step.

“Jonathan,” she whispered, putting both of her hands on one of his as he reached the upper floor, “what was that? Did I hear something about poison?”

Jonathan turned his hand around to grip one of hers, and led her back toward his room. Molly retreated toward the back wall to make way for them. Another servant who Erina didn’t recognize backed away into the opposite hallway. Jonathan’s grip was tighter than usual. Less like it had been last night, and more like when they’d fought for their lives the night before. His hair was in worse disarray than hers, and his left eye was slightly bloodshot.

“We need to see my father. And then we need to talk to Speedwagon.”



TO BE CONTINUED ->
 
Last edited:

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Crosspost:
This was adorable and the sex scenes where very tasteful and loving.


The issues with Dio that Jonathan has been repressing coming to the surface is relieving and its sweet that Erina worried if she and Robert had pushed to far.


Dio continues to be the worst.


Speedwagon is so sweet I'm glad that Jonathan is starting to get more comfortable recipricating his affection.


Poor Wammu. Just. Poor Wammu.
 

Leila Hann

Member
Content warning for discussion of physical and sexual child abuse, suicide, and maximum Dio Brando.



13. The Devil Went Down to London​


George’s eyes were downcast as he rested his head in his hands. His hair looked blacker and sleeker again, more like it had before this most recent bout of illness started, and he sat straighter in his chair. It stabbed Jonathan deep inside to mar his father’s face with such an expression of sadness, but there was no better option.

“Just for Christmas Eve, then,” George insisted, “I promise I’ll let you throw me back in here as soon as the sun rises on the twenty-fifth.”

“Didn’t my father tell you to avoid traveling in this chill as much as possible after your release?” Erina sighed, shaking her head. “Even if it weren’t the middle of winter, if I’m right about the wallpaper it might only take another brief exposure to undo days of recovery.”

“Please, Father,” Jonathan continued from his seat across the small sitting table in George’s hospital room, “just wait until we can complete those chemical tests. It won’t take more than a week, and probably less.” He scratched a spot on the side of his nose as he spoke of the chemical tests, blocking his eyes from his father’s. He made eye contact again when telling him about the expected timetable; that part, he was telling the truth about. From where she stood beside him, wearing the same dress she’d had on under her winter jacket when they’d set out for Windknight’s Lot, Erina nodded her head meaningfully.

George’s head remained in his hands, elbows pressed down against the table. His moustache twitched. “Have you informed Dio of this?” He asked, his voice still defiant, but with a note of morose resignation beginning to set in. “I just told him I’d be home tomorrow. He was making arrangements.”

Jonathan looked back down at the table and rubbed some imaginary sleep out of his eyes as his mind raced for a response. Thank god – or sunfather and moonfather, whoever there even was for Jonathan to thank anymore – Erina was there to rescue him.

“We’ve spoken to him, yes. He argued, of course, but that’s his calling in life. Mine is medicine.”

She didn’t skip a beat, or look even a single degree askance, as she lied smoothly to George Joestar’s face. Jonathan himself, he realized, would have believed her. Nearly anyone would have. He found himself remembering their encounter with Dio in the back garden, and how the two of them had fought a battle he could barely follow without raising their hands or even dropping their smiles. Thinking back to what Erina had said about her father, and Dio about his, Jonathan wondered how skilled a liar he himself might have turned out were Father a different sort of man.

A long, bitter silence passed. George kept his head in his hands, not looking up from the table’s surface. Jonathan felt the weight of the pause on his own shoulders, and looked into his father’s downcast eyes as he spoke. “If it really is the wallpapers, I’ll have them out in time for New Year’s Eve. Without fail.” He allowed himself to smile at the thought. It was, after all, his genuine intent. “Dio and I will spend our Christmases elsewhere, and we’ll save our own pies and turkey roast for the thirty-first.”

George nodded his head, though without much enthusiasm. After a moment, he rested his hands back on the table top and looked up at Jonathan. Despite the sadness and frustration in his eyes, Jonathan was reassured once again to see how much brighter they looked, and how much higher he held his head than he had during the last visit. “I’ve spent decades in that house. So has Rory, and he’s far older than I.”

“It’s not a matter of who the oldest is,” Erina said, shaking her head with a frustrated, sympathetic smile, “the body develops new frailties as it ages. Your butler may never have such a reaction, just as you never did until the year before last.”

Jonathan wondered if that was true, in the case of at least some patients. “I’ll be sure to visit you again on Christmas day, and the afternoon before.” He had intended to follow that up with something to the effect of and I’m sure Dio will as well, but he knew before he got there that he couldn’t do it. Not convincingly. Not without his voice breaking. Instead, after an awkward pause that concealed some frantic thought, he said “Ahem. There…may also be something else to celebrate, not long after the New Year.”

That had the desired effect. George’s eyebrows rose, his head slightly perked up. “Oh?”

Recognizing her cue, Erina sidled closer to Jonathan, and rested her hand on the corner of his right shoulder. Jonathan, swallowing some nerves that he really hadn’t been expecting to have about this, raised his own right hand and rested its fingers on her forearm. The feeling of her skin against his own emboldened him.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve decided to get the paperwork taken care of now, while I have the free time for it, but you’ll be in perfect health in time for the celebration.” He felt himself blush, an involuntary grin coming on that he decided it wasn’t worth resisting. “Erina and I are going to marry.”

George’s eyes brightened further. Jonathan thought he heard a muffled choking sound from outside the door, but his attention was too focused on his father to be sure. It took George another moment before speaking, but when he did his voice was far more cheerful. “Hah! Why, I was right after all then, all those years ago.” In response to Erina’s raised eyebrows, George chuckled and spoke further. “The first day JoJo came home beaming and telling me about the girl he’d met, I had this thought, but I told myself it was just boyhood infatuation, and then when your family moved away I nearly forgot all about it. I suppose I should trust my instincts more often.” He chuckled again. His eyes looked damper, and for the first time in more than a year it wasn’t because of pain or frustration. “Congratulations. And…I’m so glad for you, JoJo.”

He reached out across the table, bracing his other arm beneath him, and rested his right hand on Jonathan’s left. Jonathan felt lightheaded, for a moment, as he realized he had the two people he loved most in the world in either hand. The last time this had happened must have been before he’d begun to form persistent memories. A burning sting began in the corner of his eyes, and he grabbed his father and lover (bride, or bride-to-be, Jonathan didn’t care to worry over the distinction just now) tighter in each set of fingers. They each clutched him back.

“Although,” George’s tone of voice changed, taking on the interrogative aspect Jonathan knew well, “I must say this came rather soon after your reunion.”

“Ah…yes…well…”

“We decided there was really no point in waiting, when it was really just so obvious.”

“It…it wasn’t as if I was going to…well, what she said, of course.”

George shook his head, shutting his eyes and grinning tiredly. “Well, I suppose I was young myself once, a very, very long time ago.” He leaned back in his chair, releasing Jonathan’s hand. “I doubt you’d permit me to say anything more.” Jonathan grimaced, but fortunately his father indeed did not delve any deeper into the subject. “Do you have a date for the ceremony?”

“Not yet,” Jonathan said, leaning a little further toward Erina in his seat, “it might be best to wait until I’ve graduated.”

“It’ll give me some time to make some arrangements of my own as well,” Erina said. She then cast a suspicious look toward the door, and said “Besides, it’ll give the guests more time. I’d love to invite all my monk friends from India.”

There was a louder, more distinct choking sound from outside, this time recognizably the voice of Doctor Pendleton. When the room fell silent again in its wake, the sound was followed by a slow, reluctant opening of the door. Jonathan felt Erina squeeze him tighter, and a quick meeting of their eyes told him that she’d much rather do this with himself and Father at her side than alone. Jonathan nodded understandingly, and turned around in his seat to greet his new father-in-law.

“Good afternoon, Misters Joestar.” He gave Jonathan and George a polite, formal head bow without taking his eyes off of his daughter. “Riny, when were you planning to speak to your mother and I?”

“Just as soon as we finished speaking with the baron, Papa. Marina said you were busy when I asked at the front.”

The broad faced man was silent, staring at the three of them with an expression Jonathan couldn’t readily decipher. “And you decided this since sending the letter last night?”

“Well,” Erina said, “I wasn’t going to say anything until Jonathan and I were completely sure.”

“Really, Thomson,” George said, “you must have been expecting this yourself.”

“Hmm.” Thomson’s head bowed down slightly before straightening again. “Yes, we have been, of course. The circumstances could have been otherwise, but, well.” He let out a very quiet, subdued sigh and let his face soften just minutely. “Congratulations, Riny. Mister Joestar Junior.”

…​

“That went so much better than I expected!” Erina said excitedly as she and Jonathan strode back out into the slushy afternoon. “It was a lucky thing that he was listening. I think it would have been worse without both you and your father present.”

Jonathan shook his head, looking down bemusedly at Erina’s hooded face. “Really? He looked awfully disappointed.”

She scoffed, shaking her head dismissively. “He looked exactly as disappointed as usual.” She took Jonathan by the hand again. “Well then. I suppose we find Speedwagon, now?”

He squeezed her hand harder in return, and nodded. “Well, of course. We’ll at least want him to be our best man.”

Erina tilted her head at him as he looked for a coach to wave down. “Wait…we’re doing that before looking into…well, into your suspicions?”

A strained, almost painful, breath escaped Jonathan’s lips, as if some of the tension was tearing its way out of him and doing even more damage in the process. “I don’t know what he’s going to do, Erina. Or when he’ll do it. He’s surprised me too many times, and with the way his mind works I’m not sure if we could see it coming. We…I…may have handed him some ammunition, letting everyone see us after last night. I don’t know how he’d leverage it, or what other thing he might try even regardless of that, but…I want our marriage in writing now.”

The look that she gave him in response, somewhere between surprise and concern, hadn’t been quite what Jonathan expected. Perhaps he had unsettled her, letting the extent of his fear and anxiety show itself. He wondered if it had yet occurred to her that it wasn’t very much for his own well being that he feared. Whatever Dio attempted, especially if it involved their courtship, Erina was almost certain to be at the greatest risk. Socially, and otherwise.

It seems so backwards, he thought, as he watched her silently nod her head and place her other hand on his as well, she’s so much better able to defend herself against vampires than against mere mortal Englishmen. He wondered, then, what it was that protected himself the most; his father’s name and wealth, or the deferred boons of his mother’s ancestry. All things I was just born with. Not because of anything I’ve actually done.

A cab coach finally caught sight of him, and turned their way at the corner. As the cloudy sky darkened and the wind took on its first really stinging chill, he led Erina to the vehicle that would take them to East End. It was a long, uncomfortable, frustratingly slow ride to Spitalfields, which was as close to Ogre Street as the driver was willing to drop them. The afternoon had given way to a pale, chilly sunset by the time they arrived. A pair of crouched, shadow-hugging figures sidled along the crumbling brick walls after them as they started down the path, but after Jonathan pointed them out and he and Erina gave them a sort of look that only one who has faced demons in hand to hand combat can manage, they slinked back away. When Jonathan knocked on the door of the Respectable Establishment, he was somewhat surprised to be greeted by Clara herself rather than one of the bouncers or employees.

“You’re looking for your husband, I’m guessing?” she asked, looking back and forth between Jonathan and Erina as if unsure of who she should be addressing.

“Well.” Jonathan wasn’t sure if he was relieved or annoyed at Speedwagon for disclosing what he’d disclosed. Beside him, Erina clenched her jaw. “Yes, madam. Would he happen to be here?”

Clara stared at him silently for a moment. “It’s true, then? How the hell does that even…well, he’s probably off at Kempo and Na Ying’s. Sit down in the…well, you know the room I mean. I’ll have someone fetch him. Try and keep it quiet if you can, we’ve actually got business tonight.”

Eliza’s old room remained cold, barren, and seemingly untouched since their last visit, accumulating dust. Jonathan started to wonder how long it normally took Clara to find new employees, before he remembered that it had been less than three weeks since Eliza’s death was confirmed. How could it have only been that long? Jonathan reached back to what he thought he was and the life he thought he’d been living until this Christmas holiday, and found them evading his mental grasp. He was as different from the man he’d been a month ago as that man had been from his nursery days. A moment after they entered, the door behind them opened again, and Clara tossed an armful of stained linens onto the cot.

“You lot drop by enough that I might as well make it cozier.”

“Thank you,” Jonathan and Erina said in unison. Clara was already closing the door again though, and didn’t have time to visibly react.

“Well, she’s certainly treating us like family now,” Erina half-smiled up at Jonathan.

“Your family and mine have some different customs in that regard.” Jonathan started to chuckle, but stopped before he could so much as smile. Had the Joestar house actually been the warm, loving place he always thought of it as, for the last several years? That sobering thought, of course, brought him back to his purpose here in London. Unsure of what else to say, he turned back to Erina and clutched her tightly against him. When she embraced him in return, and he felt his heart rise, he looked down at the top of her blonde head and found his eyes beginning to tear.

“God,” he whispered, “you were the only one, all along.”

“Jonathan? What do you mean?” She tilted her head up at him, expression turning concerned as she saw the dampness of his gaze.

“I remember when Dio first arrived. I tried to tell Father about…well, about some of the problems. He told me I had to be patient with him, that he’d had a terrible childhood. But then…he had better marks than mine. Better table manners than mine. And soon Father decided it was jealousy that was making me say the things I tried to tell him.”

Erina’s eyes widened. “You never told me any of this,” she whispered up at him.

Jonathan’s eyes closed, burning hot as he felt the first two tears squeeze themselves out under the descending lids. “I was ashamed. Of how he always won. He even won Father from me, so many times. My…my entire life, there’s only one person, one thing, he could never take from me. Even when he did his absolute worst.”

Her own, normally bright eyes began to dampen. He felt her arms encircle him more tightly. “Your father? Really?”

“It wasn’t his fault.” Jonathan raised one hand to his face, wiping his eyes as best he could while keeping the other clutching his wife. “Everyone believed Dio. To this day, everyone still believes him. I…I believed him too, after enough years. Once your family left, especially. But…not you. Never you.”

He took her in both arms again. She raised one of her own, and rested the fingertips against his quivering cheek.

“It did help that you beat him up after he did that,” she said.

Jonathan snorted, sniffing back the last of his tears. “Really, though.”

“Really.”

When he looked back into her face, she was earnest. She rose her shoulders in a shrug before continuing. “It’s not like anyone else has fought for me like that. Or risked as much, given that…what did your father even say afterwards?”

Jonathan sighed, shaking his head slightly. “Scolded both of us for fighting in the house and sent us to our rooms.” He felt his mouth pull itself into a slight grimace. “And scolded me extra because I’d kept hitting Dio when he was already down, when he walked in. I…suppose I expected to get much worse from him than I did.”

“Maybe he didn’t believe Dio’s lies quite as much as you thought, at least at that point?”

“Hmm.” He raised one of his hands to stroke Erina’s hair. “Thinking about it in retrospect…perhaps you’re right. At least a little bit.”

He wiped his face again to make sure it was completely dry before leaning in to kiss Erina. She pushed herself up on her tiptoes, pressing her face into his and locking their lips, one hand grasping the back of his head. Their mouths had only parted again for a moment when Speedwagon walked in.

“Oye! I was just planning to write you two myself. I’m guessing Wamuu went ahead and invited you over without giving Clara and me a notice? Just like him.”

When he saw the blank looks on their faces, he cocked his head to the side and held his hat up in front of his chest.

“Oh, he didn’t tell you then? Well, I suppose I oughta’, if that’s so. We think we’ve found the last mask already. Some bodies were found all cut up and buried together in some town out east, by the channel.” He paused again, finally seeming to notice the vestiges of distress. “What does bring you up here, then?”

Jonathan started to clear his throat, trying to get himself grounded again. Thankfully, Erina was as quick as always to pick up the slack. “The other night, you said you caught Dio coming out of an apothecary, didn’t you?”

Speedwagon raised his bushy, dark blonde eyebrows, clearly surprised. “Aye. That was the night Jonathan and I first met.”

“Do you know what he might have been buying there?”

Speedwagon snorted. “No idea. Maybe he’s got himself a dependency that he’d rather keep secret?”

Jonathan’s teeth clenched. Calming himself down took a moment longer than he thought it would, but Erina waited for him. “I don’t think that that’s it. Can you take us to that shop?”

“Well, of course. It’s just down the street a ways. Though Mr. Chan - that’s the Chinaman that owns it - isn’t usually open ‘til later.”

“Alright then,” Jonathan said, stepping away from Erina and toward the door, “while we’re waiting for that, would you mind accompanying us to a Vicar? It’s related, we can explain on the way.”

The other man shrugged. “There’s no place I haven’t gone with you yet. Me and Tattoo were planning to take care of some business tonight, but…well, I guess that’s not so important anymore, is it?” He clapped Jonathan on the shoulder and led the other two back out.

…​

“Well, s’like I said,” the one-eyed man repeated with a shrug of the tattered coat over his shoulders, “slanty eyed bugger’s slanty-eyed-buggered-off. Shop’s empty.”

“Do we still get paid?” The taller, younger ruffian asked. “We can still burn the place if it helps.”

The rushing of blood and the pounding of his own heart in Dio’s ears nearly drowned their voices out. Teeth clenched so hard they nearly fused together, he reached into his pocket and slammed a pair of florins down on the table. They each grumbled as they took their coins, but then fell silent and just bowed their heads and backed away respectfully when they met his glare.

It was at least four shillings more than these two were worth. But he didn’t want them getting bitter at him, either. He had more than enough problems as it was.

He got to him first. Somehow the muscleheaded OAF got to him first!

Outside the shuttered windows, heavy, wet snowflakes tumbled artlessly to the slush below. Inside the dimly lit and foul smelling pub, more men like the two that had failed him milled about. Shouting. Babbling. Drinking. Dio rested his hooded head in his hands, lips pressed shut tight, the pounding and rushing noises getting worse with every passing minute.

I had it. I had it all. It was just inches away.

As he’d long ago trained himself to do, Dio recounted the last month or so worth of events to himself. What did I do, and what should I have done? Determining where he’d gone wrong, experience had taught him, was always the first step to finding the way forward again. It had been seven years since the stakes had been so high. Perhaps they’d really never been. But nothing was beyond fixing. There was nothing he couldn’t do if he just set his mind to it.

I should have killed JoJo. The night of the break in. If I’d killed him in his sleep and then cut him up enough, it wouldn’t occur to anyone that the robbers hadn’t done it.

JoJo had become increasingly unpredictable, really, for months leading up to that night. Perhaps he should have acted at the first sign of trouble, instead of waiting for the escalation. Even if not, the instant that anyone from the Joestar household had begun keeping company from Ogre Street, Dio should have foreseen this possibility.

I should have killed him months ago, if I had a good opportunity. I should have killed either him or Speedwagon after I read the first letter.

No. No, no, he wasn’t being honest with himself. Clenching his teeth so hard they nearly cracked, pulling at his bangs with each hand, he finally gave in to that voice that part of him had known, all along, represented his better judgement.

I had no business keeping JoJo alive in the first place. I let myself get…no, not attached to him, but invested. I wanted him to see it, when I took everything. I wanted to make sure he understood exactly how and why he and George brought this on themselves. Stupid. Egotistical. I gambled too much of actual value on mere feelings.

Another long-suppressed thought breached the already turbulent ocean of his mind. With an audible growl, he looked up from the table and fixed the flabby, gray-haired barmaid in his glare. She froze in place, eyes going wide. Good.

“Rum.” Dio barked. “Now.”

As she hurried off to fetch the cup, Dio looked at the dirty wooden shutter that covered the window by his table. Wine stains. Vomit stains. Little patches of cleanliness, more likely the work of ants or cockroaches than people. He stared at the filth, layer caked upon layer, and thought about George Joestar.

That was the other mistake, wasn’t it? It had gone hand and hand with his first one, and once again his own ego was to blame.

Dealing with George first and JoJo afterward was idiocy. Sheer idiocy.

His vision turned red, as it always did when he thought too long or too deeply of his adoptive father. He’d told himself, during that first ride from London to his new home at age thirteen, that he could shrug it off. That he could swallow his pride and let one of those self-righteous blue blood fucks think he’d made a pet of Dio Brando. That he could live his life as a monument to some self-congratulating piece of shit’s ego, a token of superiority no different from the foreign curiosities displayed in the foyer, without succumbing to the need to lash out.

There was a time, however brief, when Dio had gone soft and begun to think that maybe George was developing some sort of genuine fondness for him, as a person rather than as a decoration. But then, of course, JoJo had had his miraculous growth spurt and become a star athlete, and just like that he was the favored son and Dio was the family pet again. Of course, it would have been a sudden growth spurt. Victories always just happened to JoJo. It wasn’t as if he ever did anything, any more than he’d chosen to be born rich.

The day of his arrival at the manor. That knowing, condescending smirk on JoJo’s face when he’d dared to put his hand on him. I’m everything. You’re nothing. Here, let me help you.

Dio was relieved, at least, when George never laid a hand on him. He’d been preparing himself for it for the entire lead up to his adoption, and continued expecting it for months afterward. To this day, Dio wasn’t entirely sure why he hadn’t. Perhaps he’d just been lucky, for once, and come under the power of the one blue blood in England who didn’t feel the need to express their mastery in that particular way.

It wasn’t as if Dio couldn’t have taken advantage of it, if he had, though. He’d swallowed his pride, held back his tears, and dropped his trousers for enough blue blood fucks. He’d have starved, otherwise. This was mostly in the time after his mother’s death, before he’d learned to win at cards or chess and make a few shillings that way. She’d come back from the factory after dark every evening, barely awake enough to hug and sing to him. His father would, evening after evening, assure her that this next scheme would set them up for life, and then drink and wench through her earnings. Dio was eight years old when she died. He was only two months older when his father had sold her wedding dress and ring. His first business transaction with a noble gentleman had been later that same year.

Where did you learn such impeccable table manners, Dio? JoJo, I think you could stand to learn by his example.

How he would have loved to actually answer George’s question, that first week after he’d moved in, and just watched the looks on him and his spawn’s faces. He’d kept it in, though. He’d kept it all inside. And then, after biting it back for so many years, he just hadn’t been able to help himself. George had to die. All throughout secondary school, all throughout college, George’s money and influence had been behind him, sucking away all of Dio’s achievements like a horsefly gluttonous for blood. George reminded him of it with every vapid smile, every empty platitude, every timely “rescue” that he didn’t need. No matter what Dio did, it would belong to George, unless George was removed.

His rum arrived. He snatched it from the girl without looking at her.

Stupid. Stupid. I was so unbelievably stupid.

He took a drink. It burned much hotter than he remembered. How long had it been since he’d had hard liquor? Not long enough. It was acrid. Toxic. It tasted of vomit and dirty snow. He took a bigger gulp.

He’d kept too much in for too long. His judgement had been clouded, his patience eroded. It led to him making bad decisions, and left him with insufficient attention to devote to the real threats. JoJo had only started getting willful after Dio began buying the poison again. He hadn’t made the connection until now, but as was often the case it was obvious in hindsight. The prospect of getting rid of George Joestar, of finally being free for the first time in perhaps his entire life, had made him overexcited. He’d paid less and less attention to JoJo, and in that window of opportunity, well…

He took another sour, fiery chug, and slammed the cup down on the stained wooden table, burying his face again in his hands.

Maybe this December was all just an ongoing fever dream, and he’d wake up and breathe the most earnest sigh of relief he’d enjoyed since he killed his father. A more recent memory broke through all the years of layered humiliations and outrages inflicted by George, and it was one that brought terror rather than hate. Blazing yellow eyes and teeth like hatpins, set in a bearded face the color of the surrounding snow. Cold skin and monstrous strength like a frenzied horse’s that threw him – picked him up and threw him – to the ground. The knowledge, the absolute, undeniable KNOWLEDGE, that he was about to die, that he would be killed by a monster straight from a children’s fairy tale out by the roadside, where no one would ever know what had happened and there would be nothing he ever could have done.

Until JoJo rescued him.

Of course.

He’d been grateful. He’d actually, for that one, pathetic, animalistic moment when he was too overwhelmed by raw fear to think rationally, been glad for JoJo’s intervention. However he’d done it. Whatever it was he’d done, when his muscular frame had surged into view and there’d been confusing heat and noises. Which had just made Dio all the more humiliated when he came back to his senses.

That wound was still open, and hurting. Then, just this afternoon, JoJo had torn it open so much wider, and now his very heart and brain and entrails were pouring out. Monsters were real. Demons were real. Magic was real. And JoJo took it all for himself. Without even trying, as always. Because he happened to own a mask, just like he happened to own everything. Even those swelling arms and chest and rocky, crystalline cheeks and brows. Dio had trained his body as relentlessly as he’d trained his mind. He’d ran, lifted, fought, swam, the lot of it, to gain the muscles that he had. Every morning, he went over his face and hair like an owl inspecting a field for mice, making sure Dio Brando was as beautiful as he knew he should be. And yet, Jonathan had been stronger – immensely stronger – just because he had a growth spurt. Women blushed and stared after him even when the oaf had clearly just stumbled out of bed and stank of sweat as if they were actually drawn by it. And yet, he’d completely ignored all of them, as if totally oblivious. As if nothing and no one else mattered to him at all. Except for that one conniving little whore of a nurse who, as far as Dio could tell, he’d picked out of a hat.

His grip on the cup was getting painful. He didn’t care.

Killing JoJo as soon as possible was probably the only option. He’d wanted to take his time with this, but that sentimentality was over now. Poison, of course, was Dio’s tried and true method, but JoJo would surely be taking precautions against that now. Kill him in his sleep, and let everyone assume his new friends were responsible? Possible. Not even Jonathan would be so foolish as to spend another night at home while Dio was alive and free, but it would be just like him to go spend them in Aldershot. Yes, that was the beginning of a plan now. Check the Pendleton residence. If he’s there, then Doctor Pendleton leaves his pipe burning and burns down the house with everyone in it. If he’s not, then pick up a trail from there to wherever he now sleeps.

He raised the cup to his lips to finish the last putrid sip, but choked on it, sputtering on the sour, burning sludge when he saw the man standing in the middle of the pub. Dio grabbed his blazing throat, sure that this really was a nightmare after all, either it was a dream or the world itself had never actually existed, that was the only way this could make sense.

“…Jojo…”

He started to whisper, but then the man spoke, and Dio realized – to his great embarrassment – that it wasn’t Jonathan Joestar after all. But sod it all, the resemblance! The towering, barrel-shaped chest that tapered down into steely curves and ripples. The mighty shoulders, connecting to arms impossibly graceful and agile despite their bulk. He managed to cough the last of the alcohol out of his larynx and steel himself against the residual burn as his heart slowly calmed down again.

“That’s it?” The tall, muscular man was asking someone sitting at the table he’d just stood up from, “no best of two out of three?” He clucked his tongue, and then almost immediately puckered his lips into a lilting little series of whistles that sounded like no tune Dio knew, but somehow conveyed disappointment. He spoke with an almost perfect upper London accent, but there was a hint of something foreign buried under it. Which country, Dio couldn’t say at all. Nor could he place the juxtaposition between the man’s bronzed skin and the flaming, almost unnaturally bright red hue of the hair that poked out from beneath his shadowy cowl.

The man turned around, flaming eyebrows slightly raised as he studied the pub for challengers. “No one?” He repeated, his cockiness joined by a note of truly artful affected loneliness. “Not another chess player willing to barter?”

Dio squinted.

To be quite honest, there was one other person who this man reminded him of, now that he was paying attention. The size, the almost fluid motions as he maneuvered his bulk around the pub as if it all weighed nothing at all, the dark skin and bright hair. If one were to take that man Wamuu’s complexion and dexterity, and apply it to Jonathan’s slightly slimmer body and features, the result would look quite a bit like the redheaded man seeking chess opponents. And yet, there was a…poise…to him that none of that covered. The sort of confidence that doesn’t come from just accumulated victories, but from a place of…Dio’s brain was already a little tipsy, but he could come up with the words...of not even having to fight. The confidence of a cat idly hunting birds it didn’t actually need, or an eagle in its own ability to fly. And yet, it wasn’t the brash, heedless comfort of someone like JoJo that guided every movement and word. It was all calculated. All deliberate. The body language of a man who knows exactly what he has, and exactly how best to leverage every ounce of it, at all times.

The man’s slim, light olive face with its subdued, feline smirk roved across the room until his dark, ruddy brown eyes met Dio’s. Dio sucked in a sharp breath, and of all things found himself raising a hand to fix his bedraggled bangs. By the time his hand had so much as reached face level though, the towering stranger’s gaze had moved on.

“Come on now, I’ve been told this is the place to come if one wants a challenging game and decently priced drink. Let’s make this interesting, then. How many of you would be interested in playing for this valuable little heirloom?”

He reached into his thick brown coat, and pulled out a pale stone mask with a serene expression and a pair of downward-pointing fangs.

If he’d had anything in his mouth, Dio would have choked on it again.

From around the half-populated room, some murmurs and head turns began to make their way into Dio’s frazzled senses. Dio didn’t have time to think about how this could be happening, what this even was, how he’d simply stumbled into another of those Mesoamerican things whose JoJo’s pursuit of had led to Dio confronting a demon in the flesh. All he knew, down to the very core of his being, on a level beyond doubt or analysis, was that he had to take what was before him. Coincidences were rare, incredibly precious things. All of the best turns of Dio’s life had come from seizing them before they passed by.

“Here!” Dio projected, raising his baritone above the rest of the interested babbling. He sat up straight against the stained wooden backrest, and tilted his chin up at the tall man, letting his own well-practiced confidence cover the anxiety and confusion like thick curtains coming down. Most heads around the bar and tables turned to face him. Good. Attention always brought more attention in turn. “I’ll play.”

The stranger’s head turned back toward Dio far more slowly than most of the others. When his gaze reached him again, though, it was bright and curious. Appraising. “Well,” he said, raising his crimson eyebrows almost bemusedly and tilting his head a little to the left, “aren’t you the enthusiastic one. Certainly.” He raised a mighty arm and beckoned to Dio with a tanned finger. “Come along over here, then.”

Dio scoffed. A condescending grimace of his own moving into place to counter the challenger’s. “I’m already sitting. If you’re that desperate for someone to play against you, you can bring the chessboard here.”

There was a round of chuckles from around the room. Dio’s grimace turned into a smirk. Cocky as this fellow was, he’d rather turned the room against himself, and now Dio was the hero of this performance. Off to a very, very good start.

“Suit yourself.” The tall man’s tone and expression were both perfectly gracious as he glided around a pair of central tables and was sitting down across from Dio with the chessboard on the table between them before the latter could even acknowledge the act of him sitting. It was almost as if he’d vanished from one spot an arm’s length away and reappeared sitting across from him, dark, reddish-brown eyes still narrowed appraisingly. Now that he was this close, Dio noticed the faint, blue marking – like a subtle tattoo – under the man’s left eye. A curving line running along the edge of his eye socket, with spokes pointing out toward his cheek and ear like the teeth of an engine gear, or perhaps a stylized eyelash. Hadn’t Wamuu had a tribal mark of that color, somewhere on his face? Dio thought back to the part of the conversation he’d overheard. What had the foreigner said about others of his race? He’d claimed that masks like the late Mary Joestar’s were their craft and rightful property when Dio was still in the room, but he hadn’t come back in time to hear much more about whatever obscure and alarmingly tall tribe he belonged to.

“So then,” the man asked, “what have you to bet against my artifact?”

Another overheard detail of that night returned to him, and a half-amused sneer spread across Dio’s face. “A pair of gold cufflinks.”

The man’s crimson eyebrows rose, letting a little more of the light fall on that gear-like mark over his cheekbone. “Perhaps something a little less prosaic?”

Dio kept his sneer in place. “If that old piece of rock were actually worth anything, you wouldn’t be wagering it here. Call it prosaic. I’ll call it charity.”

The handful of people still listening to the conversation erupted in another chorus of barely-suppressed chuckles. Dio straightened up, feeling more confident by the moment. One or two were also eyeing him appraisingly at the mention of gold, but the revolver tucked away under Dio’s jacket was there for a reason. The tall man, for his part, just winced dramatically before allowing Dio a deep, oddly melodious chuckle.

“Add three pounds to that scale,” the man said, “and a drink.”

“One pound. And you owe me a drink just for offering you that.”

The tall, tattooed man sighed. “Deal.” He began arranging the pieces on the board. “Shall we flip for white?”

“Take white.” Dio tossed his hair dismissively. “You’ll need it.”

Dio Brando felt alive in a way he hadn’t realized he’d been missing all these years. It wasn’t as if he needed money, like it had always been when he’d played in pubs like this in his childhood. But the atmosphere, the memories, the feeling of fighting to live and winning that fight, it all came back and animated him like electricity flowing through a copper wire. They were silent, for the first game. It was a short one. Whatever part of the Americas this tanned giant hailed from, he obviously hadn’t encountered some of the cheaper pub game exploits that Dio had added to his repertoire.

“One out of three,” the man said, looking and sounding as confident as ever, but his dark clay-colored eyes betraying him. “Interesting trick. I’ll have to use it next time.”

Dio smiled as he helped him replace the pieces on either side of the board. “What is that mask you’re so desperate to be rid of, anyway?”

The man shrugged. Dio had almost forgotten how wide his shoulders really were until that moment, so disguised were they by his catlike poise and fluid arm movements. “Merely a trinket from my homeland. Though one with some curious old legends attached to it. Many of us are still so superstitious, it saddens me to say.”

“Hah.” Dio moved his queen’s pawn out and began the second match. “Your countrymen are the superstitious ones, you say? And yet here you are, searching so desperately for someone to take it.”

The giant scowled. “I was looking for a good chess opponent. That’s all.”

The undertone of defensiveness in the man’s voice was unmistakable. Of course, Dio knew flattery when he heard it. However much this man knew or didn’t know about his own possession, he was definitely trying to make Dio think he’d rattled him more than he actually had. It gave Dio the same rush it always did, spotting the attempt at manipulation in action. However cocky this foreigner might be, there was no challenge Dio couldn’t take on if he set his mind to it.

“Tell me about these legends you don’t believe in, then.” Dio watched his opponent’s pawn move out in return, and then paused for a moment as he decided between his bishop’s pawn and his knight. “We can laugh at them together.”

The man gave him a severe look. Oh, that stung him, didn’t it? Dio would normally be wary of provoking an opponent of this man’s size and musculature. He’d had all too many experiences with sore losers and short tempers, back when he was small and weak himself and had been playing against adults in places like this. But he felt the hard, comforting weight of the dagger against his hip, and he didn’t back down.

“Supposedly,” the foreigner said as he moved his own pawn against Dio’s, “they turn any who wear them into gods.” He clucked his tongue. “That’s not always a good thing in my part of the world. Our old gods were a bloodthirsty lot.”

Chess pieces moved across the board. The pauses between moves took longer and longer, as pawns disappeared and more valuable pieces began to suffer attrition. Perhaps the man wasn’t so overconfident after all. Aside from how he’d fallen for that earlier trick, he was clearly a skilled player. The match became one of those grinding, crawling games, in which the winner would be whoever didn’t run out of pieces first. For much of it, neither of them spoke.

“Another round, sirs?” The young woman who’d brought the refills returned, approaching them rather cautiously.

“No, thank you,” the foreigner said, rather curtly. His castle had just gone off to join his knight on the table next to the chessboard, and Dio wasn’t giving him any escape routes.

“Water,” Dio said, smirking at his opponent and giving the barmaid an acknowledging nod. Alcohol was a sure path to defeat. Keeping well hydrated, on the other hand, had made everything from board games to law exams that much easier to handle.

“Are you sure?” The stranger’s own cocky smile suddenly came back, as he placed his massive fingers around the black queen. Then, in a blur of motion, Dio was suddenly facing checkmate. “I think you could use a drink about now.”

He stared at the board, eyes darting along each trajectory, and then each trajectory from and to each of those. No. Also no. Could he…no, not that either. Slowly, Dio brought his eyes back up to the towering foreigner’s.

“Two of three. I’ll have plenty of time to drink afterward.”

A catlike grin spread across the stranger’s craggy lips. “I admit, it was rather a cheap strategy of my own. The queen wasn’t always so powerful, you know. I imagine this might have been a more interesting game, back before then. Say, in Parsa, or Baghdad.”

Dio snorted derisively, and took another sip of water. “You sound like my foster brother.”

“Oh?” The man looked at Dio over his gear-shaped blue tattoo. “I imagine I should be flattered?”

Dio answered with a very loud, cold, and contemptuous laugh. His opposite number didn’t react. No more words were exchanged until Dio rotated the board and began arranging the black pieces in front of himself, while the foreigner got to work on the white ones.

“Two of three,” Dio repeated.

“Two of three,” the tan giant smirked with his insufferably perfect face.

What did I do, and what should I have done? The same two questions that he asked after every defeat, and before most of his victories. In this case, the answer was simple. His opponent was a patient, almost passive player. Reacting to each minor push and feint with one of his own. Exchanging pieces liberally as he waited for Dio to show a vulnerability. The first game, the one that Dio won, had conversely ended in just a few moves. Ironic, isn’t it? He’s doing what I’ve done all these years, with the Joestars. And now, as for what I should have done before...

Knights and bishops came out in quick succession, wiping out half the white pawns that had emerged and sniping a white bishop out of its home square. The reckless sacrifice of a black knight, but one from which opportunity was born. Dio saw his opponent’s murky brown eyes widen as he suddenly brought out a castle, realizing too late why he’d let him take that pawn. Attack, attack, attack. Dio didn’t need to declare a checkmate, when it came. They both knew as soon as it had happened, his castle, queen, and pawn pinning the white king against its native edge of the board in a deadly vice grip. The foreigner’s queen was, once again, on the brink of securing a victory of its own, but he was just one move behind. Dio had seen what was coming, and made sure to act faster.

“Actually,” Dio grinned through narrowed eyes, “I think I’d rather have a glass of hot tea. You can order what you wish.”

The tall man’s smirk was gone. He was holding still, as if turned to stone. Dio started to reach for his belt, where his dagger was hidden. And yet, somehow, he had the strangest notion that the blade wouldn’t help if this man really were to attack him. He remembered how the man had moved, seeming almost to vanish from his feet and reappear in the seat across from him. So swift, so soundless despite his size. Would he be able to draw before the man struck? Even if he already drew it, would he be able to connect in time? And Dio knew, one blow was all that this immense, stalking panther of a man would need.

“I’m not thirsty anymore,” the foreigner said, his voice growing almost petulant. Despite the fear and adrenaline coursing through him, Dio felt a rush of elation. He’d managed to knock that perfect swaggerer down a few pegs. “Enjoy your artifact. And, yes, of course, it’s not actually worth anything.”

Dio laughed again, shaking his head. “I’m sure I’ll find a use for the thing. I hope you found the game you were looking for, sir?”

The foreigner stood up. Once again, the blur of motion was so fast Dio nearly missed it. The chair somehow didn’t make a sound as he pushed it out of his way. Was it just his imagination, or was the wooden chair cracked where the tall man had put his weight on it? How big was he, really?

“I think I did. Yes. Just pray our paths never cross again.”

Dio rolled his eyes and gave his defeated opponent the most unimpressed expression he could manage. Without another word, the tall man placed the stone mask on the table, and then stalked out the door into the snow.

…​

There had been nothing more to do in London. Wang Chan the apothecary might have been a fixture of Ogre Street for as long as Dio could remember, but the chinaman was as slippery as he was old. How many times, during his childhood, had Scotland Yard come pounding on that particular door to find it closed and empty? He always came back, somehow, a week or two later. No one knew where he vanished to, or how he knew when the heat had passed him by. If Dio had a week or two to wait, he would do just that.

He had thought of visiting the hospital, but decided quickly that there was nothing to be gained from that. There was nothing he could tell George that would help, if JoJo really had the proof (or worse, the antidote) already. Not even killing the vile old moneybags would help, with what was now suspected, even if Dio could devise a way of doing it at the hospital without being seen or heard. Hunt down and kill JoJo? If he hadn’t already spoken to the police, it might work, provided the opportunity was perfect and there were no witnesses he couldn’t dispose of as well.

And besides, there was only one place where he knew he’d have a chance of catching JoJo alone. So, one more reason among all the others to return to the manor. For what could, if Dio made so much as a single mistake from this point forward, very well be the last time. He hoped not. For all its pomposity and pretension, for all the miserable memories he’d accumulated there, he’d begun to think of the place as his home. More than the apartment he’d shared with his parents. Much more than the rotting old factory attic he’d later moved into with his father. His dormitory room at Hugh Hudson was, in some ways, a more comfortable and liberating environment, but for the constant reminders that it would never be his to keep. He really did want to keep this manor house. He wanted to be able to sleep in it, content and secure in the knowledge that it was his, that he’d earned it.

No, he realized, there was no mere wanting here. He had to have that house. He’d invested so much of himself into it, and everything that came with it. Dedicated so much of his life. If he ended up having to flee the country while JoJo kept the manor, he knew he would go insane. And there’d be no thinking his way out of that.

As the coach bobbed its way over the freshly snow-covered road, he shifted his fingers along the edge of the concave stone oval in his lap. In the darkness, it looked almost like a real human face, peeled off of a real human head and turned a ghastly marble white. The fangs pointed downward, like an exaggerated royal sneer, while its lips – full and perfectly formed – wore a look of dreamlike serenity. He thought back to the man he’d won it from, the Red Indian of whatever strange tribe had once created these artifacts. It was that same feeling that he’d read in that man’s swagger, before he’d beaten him. The sense of one who had not just won, but who lived in such a state of being that fighting itself was never necessary.

It was beyond the human condition, he knew. To be a man was to struggle for that which one desired. He’d come to that conclusion on his own, when he had fewer years to his name than he did fingers, long before he’d read any of the philosophers and authors who nearly all concurred. But the idea of passing beyond this, into a realm of…peace was too prosaic a word, as was contentment. Regardless, it was a dream that Dio Brando knew he was not the first man to have. So many Greek myths of mortals taking their place among the gods, even if a price had to be paid along the way. The “heaven” that the priests and vicars babbled about. He saw it, when he looked at the ageless face portrayed by the stone mask. He knew, with the familiarity of a child recognizing its mother’s smile, that this was the dream that had guided the hand who carved it.

And of course, just as in all those double edged Greek myths, there would have to be a price. The fangs, pointing coldly, sharply downward.

He wasn’t entirely sure he believed it all, just yet. If he was wrong, then the mask would simply be his death. Still, perhaps, if he couldn’t find another way to solve this problem, that would be better than the alternative. He couldn’t let JoJo take everything Dio had labored for. Not wouldn’t; couldn’t. He would do his best. Fight tooth and nail. Use every trick, every resource, every ounce of physical and mental strength he possessed, to keep himself in the will and out of prison. There had to be a way. There was always a way. But, if he did fail. If the only alternative proved to be dying by his own hand, at the time of his own choosing, well. Dio had long ago learned that sometimes, you could only choose the lesser evil.

He held the mask by the chin, raising it up to a safe distance above his lap. He poked it again with the tip of his left index finger, leaving a little red smear next to the others. Five curved spokes, as big around as fingers and with razor sharp barbs running along the edges until their needle tips, swished out from behind the stone face’s brow, eyebrows, and jawbone. Easily sharp and strong enough to puncture a skull and impale the brain from five directions. If the device in his hands really granted nothing but death, then it would be a painless death. Dio would never have to suffer the knowledge that he’d failed one last time.

But if it didn’t do that. If it actually did what he suspected. If this really was a world of witchcraft and sorcery, and the mask was of those forces…

The coach turned a familiar corner along the road, and the light coming from the foyer windows of the manor caught Dio’s eye. As the masks blades slowly withdrew back into their sheaths, almost reluctantly, as if disappointed to have not tasted blood and brain tissue, Dio turned his head to look at the approaching house. It was awfully late for so many lights to be on. “Early” might be a better adjective, at this point. At the next bend in the road as it circled around the little snow-covered hillocks, Dio had another good look at the forecourt. There were already two coaches parked in it.

One was a cab, like his own. The other, larger vehicle bore the dark coloration and glinting, metallic highlights of a police wagon.

His heart froze harder than the snow adorning the hills outside.

No.

The world fell into a sickly, spinning stillness. The sound of the horse’s hoofs fell away, as Dio’s jaw hung open.

No. Not already.

He’d taken too long nursing his wounds before going to London.

He’d been too afraid of showing his face on Ogre Street, after what happened the last time he’d gone.

He’d taken too much time finding thugs to hire.

He’d spent too long in the tavern, wasting himself on thoughts that led nowhere, until the foreigner bearing a mask came looking for worthy opponents.

He could see the scene inside. JoJo, face grim and arms folded over his sculpted chest. The look of pitiful, childish accusation, of sympathy, that would be waiting for Dio in those baby blue eyes as the officers slapped him in chains. “I’ll visit you in prison, Dio,” he’d say something like, “I’ll visit you every day until the hanging.”

As he was marched to the gallows, JoJo would be standing in the front row, handkerchief held to his face, crying stupid, doglike tears. And beside JoJo, slimy fingers oozing their way between every ripple of his stomach and breast, Pendleton would just stare at him as JoJo sobbed. She’d stare at him, and she’d smirk.

There was no room to turn around, with the road this slick and snowy. He doubted the coachman would do it even if he could, no matter what Dio offered him. Putting his knife to the man’s throat…no. Too complicated. What would the destination even be?

The window was open. As the coach slowed down at the next winding curve, Dio flung himself out of it, falling into the deep, wet snow filling the roadside ditch. He coughed as the snow forced its way into his mouth and nostrils. Suppressed a shout as the impact reignited the pains in his leg and back where JoJo had injured him. The muffled scrunching of hoofs and wheels pushing their way through snow was loud, at first, but in just moments it had left him behind.

Dio stood up. He was wet from the ruined golden hair that clung to his skin to the numb toes in the ends of his boots. Shivering. Before too much longer, he knew, he’d be freezing. The sky overhead was starless, dropping its silent, clammy load of snowflakes down all around. With the house and the departing vehicle both blocked by the hills, there was only the snowfall, the hills, and the road. Nothing else.

Despite himself, Dio felt a mad grin cross his face. Back to where I started. That’s just perfect, isn’t it?

England was hostile territory now, or would be by morning. The manor, a hostile fortress, held by his enemy. All he had to his name, now, besides the ice cold and sopping clothes on his back, were a pouch with a dozen pounds, the knife on his belt, and the stone mask he’d clutched in his hands while rolling through the snow.

His finger shivered as he raised the mask before him, staring into it like a mirror.

“I will die here,” he said, aloud.

He waited, as if expecting to hear a reply. Why, he didn’t know.

“This is mad. The mask will pierce my head and kill me. I am committing suicide.”

The snowflakes kept falling. The black, lightless dome of the sky pressed in overhead.

Dio looked down at his finger. The bleeding had died down, thanks to the cold, but when he squeezed it he still saw the red spot grow and bulge damply. He lifted the mask, and turned it around so he was facing its concave back. There were no holes connecting to those uncaring, perfectly carved eyes. Just a blank, empty bowl of stone.

He raised it to his face, holding his shivering breath before pressing the ornately carven rim to the edges of his face. It was so easy to believe that it was just a harmless, useless pagan knick-knack. It looked, felt, tasted like any other stone.

And so, the story of Dio ends here, alone in the snow. Or else, the introduction ends, and the real novel finally begins.

He pressed his finger to the mask’s cheek, and felt a sharp, jarring twitch all around and inside of him. Snow. Wet. Sparks dancing. He smelled smoke, and tasted ashes. He kept falling after hitting the snow, plunging in a mad spiral downward, downward, ever deeper into an ocean of still, silent black.

…​

He didn’t feel cold anymore. That was good.

He felt the snow all around him. He moved his fingers through it, and felt it shift. He felt that it was cold, but it didn’t make him cold. The strangest feeling.

The blackness around him was still spinning, a little. But not as badly. And, after another few moments, he became convinced that it was only spinning behind his eyelids. He opened them, afraid for a moment of what he might see. There was only flat grayness. The feeling of stone against the skin of his face.

He reached up, and placed one hand under each side of the mask, pulling. As if responding to his desire, there was a familiar click from within the mechanism, and he experienced a sensation that there had never been a word for in the English language as he felt them emerge through his head. Without even the slightest hint of pain. Just a feeling of motion, disconcertingly coming from beneath his skin and skull, and then an unpleasant emptiness, followed by a peculiar, light burn that he somehow knew meant that he was healing. There were heavy gray clouds behind the mask, dotted with the heavy, falling snowflakes.

Placing the mask down beside him, Dio pushed himself up. He blinked, staring around at the hills and snow-covered meadow as the sides and top of his head gently burned.

It was so white.

He stood up now, raising his hands to the puncture wounds just above each ear. They were tiny, barely the width of a carpenter’s nail, and closing even as he felt them. The snow all around him, so much brighter and whiter than before. Staring up into the sky, he suddenly realized he wasn’t seeing the darkness. There were the clouds, darker gray rolls passing along under the black layer above. He could see them. He could look up and see the clouds in the winter night.

On an impulse, he drew his knife again, and – hesitating only a moment – drove it through his left palm, so that the dripping blade emerged from the other side. The blood that dripped from it oozed out slowly, though, and it wasn’t red, but black. He pulled the blade out again, to that same painless sensation that was followed by the soft burn as the hand began healing itself shut before his eyes.

He turned toward the road, and threw the dagger, as hard as he could. It whistled through the air so fast, he could swear it whistled like an arrow. His eyes followed the object as it shot over the road, over the little mounded snow on the other side of the road, and thirty meters further until it hit the side of a hill. There was an eruption of snow there, as if the hill had been struck with the force of a boulder.

Confusion melted away. Elation replaced it.

It worked.

I…I’m…it
worked.

The corners of his mouth rose again. Another grin, but not a mad one this time. For the first time in so many years, perhaps in his entire life, Dio Brando smiled for sheer, unalloyed joy. Before he knew it, he had begun laughing.

I’m free. After all these years. I did it. I’m finally, finally free.

His deep, exulting peals echoed around the little hills and valleys. He feared they’d hear him all the way off at the manor, but just for this moment he didn’t care. As he laughed, though, another feeling came over him. This one, unlike the painless empty wounds, the low burn of his healing flesh, or the otherworldly feeling of cold that didn’t chill him, was familiar. Very familiar. It was probably the first thing he ever remembered feeling.

He put a hand to his stomach. His laughter stopped, and his teeth sliced painlessly at his tongue and the insides of his own cheeks. With acknowledgement of his hunger, they had grown into a cage of razors that filled his entire mouth.

“I told you to pray we’d never meet again.”

The clear, crisp voice rang out across the snowdrifts.

Dio whipped his head around, knees bending and arms rising up at his sides. What he saw perched along the side of the road made his eyes widen, and his mouth hang open. The man. The man who had wagered the mask. It was him, but not as he’d seen him. He stood naked in the snow, save for a loincloth slick and dripping with blood. Where the hot, red fluid dribbled down the swollen muscles of his thighs, Dio saw, it quickly vanished, as if sucked down into his skin like water into dry sand. His eyes burned a frightful gold that he’d seen only once before, and the blue mark beneath his left one gleamed a luminous blue. From the top of his head, rising from the vermillion hair that had previously been hooded, he saw…

“What...” Dio shouted, his eyes darting from the bronze-skinned devil that stood before him back to the manor, and then to the interloper again. “Where did you...?”

“I snuck along in one of the horses,” the giant said. “I left the coachman alive for you, with four broken limbs and a gag. You’ll need energy.”

Dio needed energy, he knew. His powers, as great as they were, would always need fuel. There was no apotheosis without price. No serene, beautiful face without downward-curling fangs.

“And what’s that to you?” Dio demanded, trying to keep himself defiant and unafraid even as he dreaded the possibility that the man should take even one step closer across the snow.

“After feeding,” the creature said, ignoring Dio’s question, “you are to hide the remains of the carriage, and then follow my footprints to where they lead. That is all it is to me, for now.”

Dio opened his mouth to retort, but the naked, otherworldly demon had already turned around and was quickly retreating around the snow-covered mounds. Fists clenched in rage at being shrugged off, he knelt low to the ground, preparing to spring after him, when he realized something.

I really do need to feed. I won’t be able to show him up unless I’m at my full power.

He thought again, frozen in place just as he was about to take his first step.

And I can follow his tracks easily in this fresh snow. There’s only a little bit still falling, it won’t hide them from me.

He turned back toward the manor. He saw the top of the coach protruding above the hills and drifts, unmoving. A smell of hot, living blood, full of life and pungent energy, wafted over. Eat, yes, and then hide the evidence. A perfect test of his new strength.

Free. He almost cried for joy as he started toward the carriage. Finally, finally free.



TO BE CONTINUED ->
 

Leila Hann

Member
14. Nowhere To Run

Silence reigned over the coach’s sealed cab, broken only by the clopping of hooves and the occasional squeak of the wheels. They had arranged for a large, eight-seated coach and driver this time, since their destination was not nearly as remote as Windknight’s Lot, with roads in better repair. Wamuu sat in the back, happy in a petty little way he wouldn’t have readily admitted to, for having room to spread his legs out comfortably. He took up three daymen’s worth of seating as he kept the bench for himself. In front of him, Erina sat between Jonathan and Speedwagon, the window curtains to both sides of them shut. They weren’t talking as much as he’d expected. Jonathan and Erina were doubtless still distraught over this situation of theirs with Jonathan’s foster brother. Wamuu doubted they would ever see Dio again, if he truly hadn’t returned home since yesterday pre-dusk, but he could hardly fault their preoccupation. What bothered him more was Speedwagon.

The scarred dayman was leaning against the curtained wall. A languid posture, but Wamuu could see the tension it belied, and recognized the performance of a skilled deceiver. He was notably leaning away from Erina, while Jonathan’s arm rested around her neck and shoulders. And, of course, they’d barely said a word since leaving the smoking towers of London behind.

I must be patient, he told himself while keeping his own face still and his eyes unexpressive, I’ve probably pushed them too fast. They will yet grow into their union.

Wamuu wondered if perhaps he should have waited longer before officiating. Let them grow more accustomed to each other, and to the roles that must be played. He briefly amused himself with the notion of them celebrating a proper wedding, with an elder to recite the tale of Earth, Moon, and Sun properly, a winding procession from dusk till midnight, and a free-for-all battle to dismemberment between the newlywed trio. Well, the full ritual might push the limits of dayman ripple-healing, but it was a nice thought at least.

He returned to the here and now, and locked his eyes again on the back of Speedwagon’s head. Crowned with a concealed weapon, just like his own. A man who’d spent his entire life – brief though it was – at war with the world, like himself. For the hundredth time, he offered Speedwagon a silent apology, and hoped his destiny would at least grant him some joy before his final role, and that his death would be an honorable one. He had far less doubt of that second wish coming to pass, of course. He could imagine, with some difficulty, Jonathan or Erina dying in disgrace, but Speedwagon never could.

Jonathan broke the silence again, speaking quietly to Erina. “Do you think he knows the police are searching for him?”

Erina shook her head, and sighed. “Not any more than the last time you asked me.”

“Don’t think it matters,” Speedwagon interjected before Jonathan could reply, “if he hasn’t showed himself in a whole day and change since then, I’d say he’s gone.”

“Without taking any of his things?” Jonathan asked.

“Didn’t you say you haven’t even been in his room since then?”

“Well, he keeps it locked.”

“Then how do you even know?”

Even a patience honed by half a lifetime’s worth of fruitless struggle could only withstand so much of this. He spoke just loudly enough to grab all three of his companions’ attentions while excluding the dayman who drove the horses. “What do you expect to find in this village?”

The three looked back at him over their shoulders.

“I only know what you and Speedwagon have told us,” Jonathan said.

Wamuu shook his head, letting his breathspinners knock against his skin. It was fortunate that all the Europeans he’d met in the last few hundred years shared those head gestures, and that they’d brought them across the ocean with them. Normally, he had trouble keeping each of their body languages apart when moving so far across the world. “You may know more than I about this mask-wearer. What did the last three share in common? Is there a pattern to whom the masks have been given? I know more about the masks and their makers, but you know this island and its inhabitants.”

The three looked back and forth at one another. Wamuu knew the chances of a pattern emerging were low. Sometimes he or a companion would find a common thread, but most often there simply was none. Sometimes masks were left in public places, with instructions for their use in local script. Sometimes a mask-wearer would be given a new set, and told to sell them to the highest bidders or to seek out the most cunning and ruthless candidates. Sometimes, daymen would simply be forced. He’d long ago concluded that the pillar men were experimenting with new wearers as much as they were with new versions of the mask. Still, there was occasionally a logic that mortals could discern behind their methods, and this might be one of those instances. It was, at least, a more productive use of their travel time.

“Two women,” Erina mused aloud, her pale blue eyes turning down toward the wooden backrest, “one man.”

“That Musgrave chap said he was forced to put one on, didn’t he?” Speedwagon asked Jonathan. When the latter bobbed his head yes, Speedwagon continued. “From what you told me back in Brighton, Lamkin wasn’t.” He let out a pained breath, and looked down as well. “We never found out what happened to Eliza, did we?”

“Different ages,” Jonathan took over, “at least, I think. Professor Musgrave was in his sixties, I believe. Lamkin said she had grandchildren. Eliza was…?”

“Her twentieth birthday would’ve been this February,” Speedwagon said.

Erina and Jonathan looked nearly as pained as Speedwagon, at that. Wamuu simultaneously pitied and envied them, but kept his own face still.

“A lady of the night,” Jonathan recounted, “a…nursemaid of some sort, I think she was, even before she impersonated a hospital nurse. A university professor.”

“Wait,” Erina said, looking back up at Jonathan and speaking a bit more loudly, “in that order?”

The other two looked at one another.

“Your sister said Eliza disappeared about a month before we found her,” Jonathan said.

“The murders that led us to Lamkin started…what was it, again?” Speedwagon turned his scarred, long-haired head back at Wamuu.

“Twenty-five days,” Wamuu answered, remembering the first report of what had become a trail leading southward.

“And then Musgrave seemed…well, pretty recent, I’d say?” Speedwagon looked from Jonathan to Erina for agreement, and they each nodded.

“Poor, middle class, academic,” Erina whispered. “If they actually did happen in that order.”

Jonathan rested his chin in his hand. “If that is pattern rather than coincidence,” he said, pausing a little before finishing his thought, “this one would be…titled, perhaps? Someone from a noble family?”

Erina cocked her head. “Why would someone like that be in a place like Saltpoint?”

A grim chuckle escaped Speedwagon’s lips. “You’d be surprised what supposedly prim and proper nobles get up to, out where no one they think matters can see ‘em.” He saw Jonathan’s expression. “Present company excluded, of course.”

“Or,” Erina said, starting to smile a little as she rested a teasing hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, “maybe present company included as of this month?”

Jonathan sighed and lowered his head deeper into his hand. “I’ve been caught. You’ve uncovered our secret, Erina; We noblemen hunt vampires in our leisure time. Every single one of us.”

Speedwagon snorted, contemptuously. “Oh that would be the day.”

Wamuu carefully studied Speedwagon and Jonathan’s expressions as they spoke. He didn’t like what he was seeing. There was a guardedness to Jonathan’s cast when he spoke of secrets and Speedwagon spoke back. In turn, there was no hint of wonder or sympathy in how Speedwagon addressed Jonathan besides the same lust and longing that had always been there. Jonathan had told Erina of his heritage, of that Wamuu had been certain as soon as he met them again tonight. And yet, even though they had spoken at length since returning from Windknight’s Lot, it seemed as though Jonathan had not told Speedwagon.

Another unnerving twinge of doubt gnawed at the edge of Wamuu’s consciousness. He reminded himself, once again, that he was being impatient. But still, some part of him couldn’t shed the notion that this felt wrong.

…​

Jonathan had been about to say something else in response to Erina’s jest, but stopped himself just in time. Now though, as he watched Speedwagon roll his brown eyes behind that flowing, murky blonde mane, he felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t right at all, that Speedwagon was now alone in his ignorance. Plucking up the courage to tell even Erina about his genealogical revelation had been difficult, and he’d decided then that he’d wait until he knew Speedwagon for longer before telling him as well. But as they sat side by side in the creaking, bouncing carriage, headed into battle for reasons that Speedwagon knew less about than any of the others, Jonathan knew that it was unfair to him.

On the other hand, he reasoned, though perhaps it was cowardice rather than logic that spoke, it wouldn’t do to distract Speedwagon with such news just before another deadly fight. It was bad enough that Jonathan himself was already so preoccupied with it. After the battle, he decided, perhaps before returning home, he would take Speedwagon aside and tell him as well. For some reason, he thought he’d have an easier time of it if they were alone, without Wamuu or Erina there.

“Well then,” Jonathan said, more because the new silence was starting to feel oppressive than for any other reason, “possibly a noble. Do we have anything else?”

The others shook their heads in turn. Jonathan wondered, just as he had when Erina first proposed the idea, if this vampire’s name would be another one familiar to him. Worse still, what if it was a man or woman he knew in person? A friend of his father’s, perhaps? He couldn’t think of any who had mysteriously vanished or had family members do the same within the recent past, but the possibility was disquieting to say the least.

“Saltpoint!” The voice of the coachman saved Jonathan the trouble of having to continue the conversation.

The vehicle shook to a halt, and the horses whinnied their relief. It hadn’t been a particularly long ride, but the most recent downhill stretch had – based on the movements of the wheels and the sounds of the coachman and horses – been snowy and treacherous. Reminding himself again that he’d need to talk to Speedwagon as soon as this battle was behind them, Jonathan opened the door and made way for the others. Perhaps we can take our honeymoon in Africa, he thought to himself. We can set out as soon as the term is over. I’m sure my mother’s family would be more approving if Speedwagon were with us and in the know, if we find them. What a scandal it would be if I came with only one spouse.

The snow was crisp and dry, befitting the frigid night. It had been an exceptionally cold and snowy winter, but tonight Jonathan felt the bite in a way he hadn’t since before his teenage growth spurt. He reflexively put an arm around Erina, though he knew that between her thick coat and the quiet little ripple breaths he heard from beneath its hood she didn’t truly need it. And, of course, when Speedwagon came around from the other side of the cab, Jonathan could swear the air all around them was actually heating a degree or two. As Wamuu’s heavy feet crushed the snow behind him, Jonathan looked out at the half-abandoned village.

Saltpoint, yesterday’s hurried research had told him, was a fishing village of minor note until earlier in the century, when the mouth of the Thames had grown black with industrial waste and the codfish and crabs yielded it to London’s conquest. A few families remained, but stepping forward through the snow and beholding the rotting roofs and empty black windows in at least half of the houses Jonathan was only now realizing how few they truly were. Out on the ice-flecked bay, a handful of wooden corpses that had once been boats sat heavily in the surf, barely visible against the cloudy night sky and black seawater. A few threads of smoke made their way from a half dozen of the town’s chimneys, losing themselves almost immediately in the greater darkness. It had been long enough since sunset for the sea-breeze to finish, and the air was still. Over the crisp, masking chill, Jonathan smelled brine, tar, and rotting thatch.

Speedwagon advanced a few steps before himself and Erina, the man’s beaky nose twitching as he raised his sharp chin. A second later, he grimaced and let out a heavy snort. “We’re in the right place, I’d say.”

Once he fell silent again, the only sound was the distant lapping of the waves against the rocks. Jonathan’s eyes moved from one abandoned house to the next, sweeping over so many empty sheds and boarded up cellar doors. If I were a vampire, he concluded, grimly, this would look like a perfect place for me. No matter who I was before.

“The…erm…victims were from all up and down the coast, weren’t they?” Erina asked.

“Ayup.” Speedwagon’s head bobbed, hair swishing below the brim of his hat. “All the ones as were identified, at least. Not enough people in this here town to feed a vampire, but good enough place for one to hide between hunting in nearby ones?”

“I was just thinking that,” she replied.

“If the known victims all came from along the coast,” Jonathan thought aloud, “and none from inland, then that might suggest how our new friend has been getting around.”

All eyes rose back to the sea, rasping coarsely against the nearly invisible shore.

“I’ve seen them do that,” Wamuu contributed from behind them, nearly making Speedwagon jump, “they only need to breathe once in a while, as long as they get enough blood. There are a few who live too deep for me to even try chasing. But those are all very old ones.”

Jonathan looked back at Wamuu, trying to even envision what the nightman was saying. Wamuu’s gold-flecked face was as impassive as always, but Jonathan didn’t think he’d be japing now. Upon seeing his stunned expression, Wamuu continued.

“Learning to move and hold their breaths for so long at a time takes practice, I think. Or else they just cling on to the land and people they used to be part of, until they’ve been monsters for long enough. I’ve never heard of one taking to the sea less than ten years after first donning its mask.” He was silent for a moment, as if in thought. “It is possible that this one may have powers that aid it in doing so. A few others have. But if it’s leaving all of its victims here instead of out at sea, then it is living here at least part of the time.”

“Well, that’s um. Comforting.” Erina accelerated her ripple breathing and renewed her own scanning of the dark village.

Wamuu pushed past them and produced the latest flask of potion from beneath his own cloak. Another few sniffs and consequent scowls and coughs from Speedwagon brought them crunching forward through the snow, between the first pair of abandoned shops. Jonathan let out a foggy white sigh of relief when neither Wamuu’s flask nor Speedwagon’s nostril indicated the buildings. The people behind the lit windows and beneath the smoking chimneys, it seemed, were unscathed, and no ambushers awaited them in the empty shells either. When they reached the village square, where the two proper streets of Saltpoint crossed, Wamuu stopped his advance and raised the flask higher, blowing on it again and watching beadily. A moment later, he lowered it, and cast his faintly luminous eyes a few degrees east.

“That way.”

All heads turned in the indicated direction. A general store, intact enough that Jonathan thought it might still be in use, though the windows were too dark to tell if there were any goods on the shelves. Behind it, a crumbling, long abandoned cottage, and a small boatshed with a stone ramp leading onto the beach just behind it. Then just black, lapping water, and the hulk of what might have been a half-sunken barge breaking the barely visible line between dark ocean and dark sky.

Jonathan looked at Speedwagon and Erina, who returned his silent head nods from below their hat and hood. Keeping himself alongside Wamuu at the front, they approached the final cluster of buildings. Eyes moving constantly back and forth between the liquid in his flask and the moldering structures, Wamuu guided them around the shop, and then the boathouse, without ever glancing at the abandoned home. Soon, they were standing on the thinner snow of the rocky beach, a few paces short of the slick black stone that the waves had kept clear. Wamuu lowered the flask again, and stared out at the hulked barge that lay in the harbor, perhaps three hundred feet ahead.

“Only from there?” Jonathan asked.

“Only from there,” Wamuu answered.

Speedwagon craned his head upward over the sea and inhaled. “It’s coming from out that way somewhere. If your homemade brown sauce says it’s from that ship in particular, then that’s where it is.”

On Jonathan’s other flank, Erina looked back at the half-empty village. “They’ve just been leaving all the people alone? Why?”

“Avoid suspicion, I’d say,” Speedwagon offered, “get coppers looking for the missing folks in every place except the right one.”

“So, they’re using that hulk as a base, with the unmolested villagers as a sort of camouflage, then?” Jonathan repeated, suppressing a shudder as he imagined a band of once-humans slithering in and out of the water onto the abandoned boat like grisly seals.

“There might not be a they.” Wamuu addressed him in return. “Not all vampires can create slaves, and some of those that can choose not to.”

Speedwagon hummed at that. “Poor Eliza only made one. Could she have made more, if she’d chosen?”

“There’s no way to know. Maybe she did, and they weren’t able to reach us before sunrise.”

“Wait,” Erina spoke again, “what if this is another trap, like the town hall at Windknight’s Lot?”

“Oof,” Speedwagon winced in painful recollection, “another vampire with a liking for gunpowder, you mean?”

Jonathan frowned, shaking his head as he kept his gaze on the barely-visible wreck. “That could be,” he said, “but I can’t think of anywhere else to investigate.”

Speedwagon looked around at the others, a devious grin starting to play across his lips. “Well, hold up a moment, then. Why don’t we just blow the thing up ourselves?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention?” Wamuu raised his voice slightly, making Speedwagon jolt back away from the nightman’s shining blue glare. “An explosion won’t kill a vampire unless it either smashes its entire brain, or destroys its mask. Blow up that ship, and we’ll have no way of knowing if we succeeded or not until it comes back for revenge.”

“Ah.” Speedwagon lowered his head, putting his hands together in front of his chest. “Sorry. That was stupid, wasn’t it? I suppose we’ll just have to paddle on over and die like men…erm, present company excluded, Erina…if he bombs it himself, then?”

Erina glowered at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll die like a man just the same as you.”

“I’m the least likely to die from a blast,” Wamuu spoke over Speedwagon and Jonathan’s coming replies, “and I’m the best swimmer. I’ll go first. You’ll follow me if the ship doesn’t explode.”

Speedwagon grimaced, but couldn’t seem to think of an alternative. “Well. Hope to see you again afterward either way. I think we oughta’ keep a bit away from it until you call us.”

“Yes,” Wamuu said.

“Alright then,” Jonathan said, turning back toward the village, “I can’t say I approve of this plan entirely, but for want of alternatives I suppose I’ll see if any locals are willing to rent us a rowboat.”

…​

“I only started rugby because no one on the rowing team liked me,” Jonathan explained as their boat shot across the frigid, oily water.

“What? Why’d none of them like you?”

“I kept beating them. So, I joined a team sport, and my reputation turned around quickly.”

Truth be told, Jonathan was taken aback himself. The last time he’d rowed, he’d provided the brunt of the momentum, even seated at the front of the boat. With Wamuu’s oars rising and falling in time with his own, it was like…well, he imagined that this was how most of the other boys had felt sharing a boat with their hulking instructor during their first few months. He barely even felt the waves as the rowboat almost seemed to float above the surface. Try as he might to keep his thoughts on the task at hand, he couldn’t help but wonder how he’d have done with his grandfather’s people as competitors. I suppose they’d have found me a weakling. Would that have been better, or worse? The more he thought back on his athletic career, the more he felt that he’d been cheating without ever knowing it.

The barge, and the upper rocks of the reef it had run aground on, rose high enough in front of them now to be easily distinguished in the light of Erina and Speedwagon’s raised lamps. Slimy wood, stained with brine and tar where the rocks had punched through its hull and let the sea inside. It sat heavy in the water facing them, but the light showed just enough of a tilt to the upper deck above to suggest that the rocks held it higher on the other. The hold couldn’t be more than one quarter full of water.

“I think around here would be best,” Jonathan spoke again, holding his oars in the water and turning the blades to slow their approach, “if there’s another bomb, I think we’d be alright at this distance, unless we’re unlucky with debris.”

The boat stopped, a loud swish of water and a spray of droplets from either side announcing that Wamuu had backpedaled them to a halt. The rock of the water beneath them returned. The skeletal barge sat about twenty feet away, its wall of soggy timber rising like a bulwark from the reef.

“I’ll go, then.” The little rowboat rocked dangerously as Wamuu stood up and shed his cloak, exposing his crowned blond head and nearly naked body to the night. Looking over his shoulder, Jonathan was struck again by just how wrong his muscles looked, like steel machinery packed under human skin. He supposed he would get used to it, soon enough. The word “human” had a far wider definition than he’d once thought. Pulling his circlet off around his horn (which elicited a little gasp from Erina) and placing it atop his cloak, Wamuu slipped off the back side of their rowboat, slipping below the greasy black water with far less of a splash than anything his size should have made.

No one spoke as the boat rocked in place. After a moment that felt too long, Jonathan heard a quiet splash, and Wamuu’s dripping body rose into their lamplights atop the reef. He turned his horned head back toward them for just a moment before sloshing his way through the ankle-deep water over the rocky reef toward the largest breach in the barge’s side. He disappeared inside, and then a minute later reappeared, holding up one massive, dripping arm through the opening.

“That’s the signal,” Speedwagon whispered.

More relieved than he’d been expecting to see Wamuu reappear, Jonathan raised his oars back out of the water and began rowing again. The boat began moving, and soon he felt the keel bumping against rock. Rising to his feet, he handed the oars to Speedwagon, who in turn took the rope from Erina and handed the end to Jonathan.

“Anything?” Jonathan mouthed at Wamuu, who had emerged from the breach again and was wading in the water beside him.

Wamuu shook his damp, ivory-browed head. “Not in the main compartment, where a bomb would be. I’ll need the flask in my cloak.”

Jonathan stepped out of the boat, lowering one boot and then the other into the icy cold water that filled the bottom of the hold. He took in a deep breath through his mouth and pushed out a sharp one, then another, and then a third, before the stabbing chill in his feet and ankles became manageable. Looping the rope around the point of one of the emerging rocks and tying it in place, he extended his arm to help Speedwagon inside, and then Erina after him.

The lamps barely seemed to make a difference in the darkness within the barge, and the smell was so rank that the air felt thick. Stepping through the frigid water and silt sent sloshing echoes reverberating all around them before Jonathan even realized they were making them. If there were vampires anywhere below deck, or even above it, their party’s element of surprise would be gone now. It was with great relief that Jonathan saw Wamuu gesturing toward a rust-covered iron ladder leading up toward a hatch in the slimy wooden ceiling. After pondering a moment, Jonathan waved Erina and Speedwagon ahead of him. He decided he’d best bring up the rear, in case one of them slipped and fell as they climbed through the choking stink. Jonathan’s own lungs were already protesting as he filled them with more and more of the sulfurous fumes, but he needed to keep the ripple flowing through his body against the cold.

Wamuu looked at the ladder, and scowled, seemingly not trusting it to bear his weight. “I’ll climb up outside,” he whispered to them, “meet me on the deck.”

It was Speedwagon, therefore, who pushed the wooden trap door open, letting the meager remnant of starlight that managed to pierce the clouds filter down into the hold. He climbed up, a little too eagerly, almost losing his bowler in the process. Erina quickly followed, and Jonathan relaxed just a little as he heard Wamuu’s heavy footsteps on the wooden planks above. The ladder creaked and sunk in place a little when Jonathan hauled his own weight onto its rungs, but it held long enough for him to reach the deck and take a much needed breath of clean air.

Wamuu, draped in his cloak once again, stood near the lowered port edge that he had just scaled. His flask was open again, and he blew on its surface while Erina and Speedwagon swiveled their lamps to illuminate the barren timbers and broken railings all around. Across the water behind the nightman, the meager window lights of Saltpoint were the only other reprieve from the darkness.

“Strange,” Wamuu whispered, just loud enough for the others to hear, “the ripples come from where we just were.” He looked back toward the edge he had just climbed over.

“Is it underwater, then?” Erina asked.

“I think so.”

Jonathan let out a frustrated breath, interrupting his ripple-to-waves sequence. “What do we do, then?”

Wamuu kept his eyes on the water beyond the downward-tilted deck, thinking. “It can’t be deep. The source would have stopped being ahead of us much further away if-”

He was interrupted by an immense splash, and the jarring crack of splintering wood. Jonathan jumped, as did Erina. Speedwagon screamed and nearly dropped his lamp, his hat sliding from atop his mullet and slipping onto the damp, thinly snow-covered wood.

“The boat!” Wamuu shouted.

“What?” It took a moment for Jonathan’s mind to catch up. The splash, the crash of breaking wood…coming from below and landward, right where he had tied up their borrowed vessel.

Jonathan turned his head wildly around, and just as he did so, he caught a shadow moving on the raised starboard ledge above them. “There!” He shouted, pointing wildly at the silhouette. Erina and Speedwagon’s lamps converged on the spot, and a man appeared before the broken railing, framed against the black winter sky. He stood still now, eyes catching the lamplight and shining it back like a pair of glass mirrors.

Then, with almost nonchalant slowness, the man took a step toward them. Water dripping off of bulged, machine-like muscles, the lamps catching the olive hue of the sinew that barely seemed to cover them. Long, red hair, tangled and dripping like crimson seaweed dragged up from the ocean, slithered down his naked back and over either of his Clydesdale-like shoulders. His face was narrow and his features were sharp, with cheek and jaw bones like iron seams. His lips sat in a tight, tense smile, like a cat crouched to the ground and watching a bird. From the damp red bangs that covered his forehead rose a pair of ivory horns, pointing up into the sky.

Jonathan’s eyes flew to the horns, and then down to the faint darker lines – just barely visible in the lamp light – that wrapped along his cheekbone, under his glowing left eye. Comprehension sinking in, he then saw that the reflective, painfully glaring eyes were locked not on him, Erina, or Speedwagon, but only Wamuu. Wamuu was frozen, eyes wider than Jonathan had ever seen them, hands hanging limp at his side.

The newcomer opened his mouth, and a low, oily collection of syllables poured forth. Jonathan couldn’t understand them, but anyone could recognize the tone of smug, mocking victory.

…​

“You seem surprised. Were you expecting someone else?”

Wamuu heard the words, even in his mind-clearing while his hands hung limp and his knees buckled. He couldn’t let himself go completely. Having these emotions distracting him in the coming escape would make things even more difficult, but if he let himself collapse to the deck for even a moment he knew he would never get up again. After letting his jaw hang slack and his fingers loose for as long as he dared, he bent into his combat stance again and locked his eyes on the newcomer’s.

“Can you blame me?” Wamuu replied, his voice cold and venomous. “I was starting to think you’d grown too lazy and gluttonous to ever leave your holes again.”

The redhead raised his chin and tittered. Boyish. The voice of a man half his true age, if not less. “You know, until just a century ago that invitation was still open. But you’ve finally caused more annoyance than even we can forgive.”

“It took that long? I must have not been trying hard enough.”

Beside him, Jonathan looked insistently at Wamuu, but he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the enemy’s. One blink. One twitch. That’s all it would take. “What are you saying?” Jonathan whispered frantically. Wamuu simply raised his right hand and pushed Jonathan away.

“What’s this now? Something different?” A vermillion eyebrow rose, and his two-horned head cocked a little to the side. “I remember last time we met you let your pets distract me while you escaped. The honorable Wamuu, so characteristic! That won’t work this time. You can’t swim like I can. You can’t fly. You’re not leaving this ship.”

He had to force himself not to shudder. He’d known it was coming. He knew he was going to say it before he did. Preparing for it, however, hadn’t helped in the slightest. He saw them all again, as he’d seen them last. Gybiaaw. Bhayanak. Farid and Rami. Mana. Amadou and Mariam. Every one of them had gone willingly to their deaths, when faced with a pillar man in the flesh. They had all known that their sacrifice would allow Wamuu to flee, and in so doing to slay more enemies of the day-kind long after even their ripple-lengthened lives could have otherwise lasted. They’d died the kind of deaths that Wamuu only prayed his own would be like. But that did not change the simple fact that five times and counting, Wamuu had fled and left his companions to die protecting him. It had been hundreds of years since the last time, as the pillar men grew ever more reclusive, but his honor had never healed.

To his right, Jonathan was crouched low, burning the air around him with his rising ripple-breathing. Erina had taken a step backward and opened her umbrella, holding it in front of her like a shield as she sent deadly pulses of her own through its material. Speedwagon, meanwhile, had come forward a step, and had one hand on his headdress and the other before his chest. And, between them and the monster, there was only Wamuu.

To him, sometimes, it seemed no different from leaving his many other companions behind him, often alive and healthy, when he left a region after ridding it of the mask-slaves. He always left knowing they’d be long dead by the time he ever returned. It was easy to say that it made little difference; however he left them, they’d be gone by the time he looked back in their direction. But to them, it was not the same at all. To a dayman, every moment lost was the theft of one of their precious few. To forget that was to become like the creature before him.

“You’re right, Santana,” Wamuu said, still in the native language he’d spoken so seldom it felt as foreign to him as a day-tongue, “I’m not.”

Then, eyes still on Santana’s, but voice raised for the others, he spoke in English. “Run!”

There was silence, but for the waves lapping greedily against the rotting hull. All eyes were now on Wamuu.

“Say what?” Speedwagon stared at him open mouthed, freeing his long hair from his headdress and extending the blades from its sides with the familiar click. “What about-”

Santana pounced, cutting the salty air like lava through skin. Roaring defiance, Wamuu lunged between him and Speedwagon, raising his breathspinners and calling forth the wind.

…​

Jonathan thought he’d been ready for the speed. He’d spent enough time with Wamuu, seen him fight on enough occasions, and clashed with enough vampires that he was sure he knew what “fast” looked like. He’d been wrong. He’d been completely wrong. He saw only a red and olive blur through the flimsy lamplight, and by the time he felt the wake – no, not just from Wamuu’s conjured wind wall, he was actually feeling the attacker’s wake as if Jonathan were a soldier who’d been nearly missed by a cannonball – that living streak was no longer even in his sight. Frantically, Jonathan turned toward Wamuu at his side, where it looked like the red-haired and twin-horned man had been running, but…Wamuu himself was already gone as well.

A long, high cry of terror split the night, making Jonathan and Erina jump and gasp as the latter spun her lamp around toward the barge’s half-raised prow. Wamuu was standing up above them, knees bent, chains whipping furiously in a cloud of whirling bronze around his head, making his blonde hair ripple and sway. Higher up, and further from him, stood the attacker, and he held a struggling, screaming shape up above his head with one hand.

It was only then that Jonathan realized that Speedwagon was no longer next to himself and Erina, and that the struggling, screaming shape had his flailing mullet and was swinging his dagger uselessly against its captor.

“How…” the word slipped out between his gasping lips without him even meaning it to. The ones that would have followed it were left unspoken. How could he be that fast? How could anything be that fast?

The deep, oily syllables of the strange night-language flowed once again down the tilted deck, as the redhead raised Speedwagon still higher above the tuning fork outline of his brow. Jonathan couldn’t understand what the man was saying, and he was too far away in the darkness to read his expression, but the gloating, mocking quality of his tone remained unmistakable.

“Really?” Wamuu answered in English, chains still whipping and making the wind shriek around him. “And here I thought daymen weren’t important.”

The enemy tilted his shadowed head a little, and spoke his nonchalant, unintelligible answer. As Jonathan ran up the slimy deck, feet thundering below him as they’d never done before and threatening to punch right through the spoiled wood, he heard Erina shout after him, but didn’t stop. Passing Wamuu and feeling himself start to bounce off of the cyclone that surrounded him, Jonathan judged the direction of the wind and jumped forward, throwing himself onto the gale and spreading his arms to catch it beneath them. Wamuu too shouted at him, but it was too late for Wamuu to change the direction or force of his winds. Jonathan was sailing above the deck, hands coming together as he reached forward at his target.

He nearly lost his nerve when he beheld the pair up close. Speedwagon’s screams had fallen into gurgling chokes, his eyes rolled up inside their sockets and his limbs twitching spasmodically. The vermillion-haired giant held him by the scruff of the neck in one massive hand, but the other was raised to Speedwagon’s forehead, where his first finger extended under the skin of his captive’s brow, bulging the flesh around it obscenely as it twitched beneath. The skin around the puncture wasn’t white with blood loss as Jonathan expected. The bulged area was receding, as if the meat itself was shrinking and disintegrating from underneath. The towering monster’s liquidy-brown eyes followed Jonathan as he flew into him, but fast though this creature might have been his action seemed to have surprised it. Jonathan lowered his arms in a sharp chopping motion, channeling the energy down his forearms in a single, sharp burst. He extended his fingers into wet skin, his entire body crackling with ripple as he pushed out a sharp breath and straightened his arms to make a clean line from his heart to his fingertips.

“JONATHAN!” Wamuu’s anguished cry rose over the wailing of his own gale, and even over the pain and healing tingle as six fingertips broke against a chest harder than any metal.

Jonathan dropped to one knee on the deck, just barely managing to avoid losing his balance. He looked up at the creature standing before him, which had dropped the gasping, choking Speedwagon to the deck a few feet away and was now staring half-incredulously at Jonathan.

There were six red spots on the redhead’s chest. Two of them, where Jonathan’s middle fingers had struck and carried the greatest charge, looked slightly blistered.

“That hurt,” his opponent said, in lightly accented English.

Jonathan gaped. Had he done something wrong? Was the ripple not flowing through his arms, for some reason? No, the tingle as his fingertips healed was as powerful as ever. He’d executed that attack as well as he possibly could have.

“Run along home, boy.” The demon said with a sigh, almost pouting as it inspected the burns on its chest. “See if you can make it. This battle is for people.”

Then he picked Jonathan up with one arm and threw him overboard. The ship, snow, and sky tumbled around him, and then he hit the water below, breaking three ribs and dislocating his shoulder against the rocks of the shallow reef.

…​

A rain of broken, wooden spears flew ahead of Wamuu, burying themselves forearm-deep into the deck and tearing chunks off of the wooden railing, sending more debris splashing into the sickly water below. Santana rolled out of the way, before jumping back up onto his feet at the side of the prow, where the railing had already long ago fallen away.

“I never could understand you,” the pillar man said, languidly, “but this grows ever more perplexing. What makes that dayman so much more important than the first?”

Wamuu had just barely enough time to change directions, sending one air current east into his own flank and the other west just in front of him, and then jumping up into the air eastward. Santana was blown off-course in the middle of his lunge, streaking passed him trailing his long, crimson hair as Wamuu flew the other way. At the last moment, there was a snap of breaking bone, and Santana’s leg bent itself sideways at the knee, swiveling out away from his body and grazing Wamuu’s own foot. The pain of losing a toe was nothing new to him. He merely hoped, as he crashed to the deck and cracked most of the timbers under his weight, his own blood splattering down atop the injured foot, that it wouldn’t completely ruin his balance. On the other side of the deck, Santana landed gracefully on all fours, the wood sagging just slightly beneath him. His knee had already righted itself. Wamuu saw a bloody little knob of flesh, a shade darker than Santana’s own skin, wedged into the side of his foot, bleeding profusely from the end sticking out. My toe. That was my toe. Less than a second later, it had sunk below the lighter skin beneath it, and the bulge where it had once been sank back down as it was digested.

Santana was perched on his fingers and toes, which splayed out beneath him like so many little spider legs. Holding perfectly still. Eyes narrowed, and locked onto Wamuu. Waiting for movement. Any movement.

“Erina!” Wamuu shouted, keeping his body motionless but for his lips and keeping his eyes unblinkingly on his opponent, “Speedwagon! Help Jonathan, and ru-”

He’d fought atop warped and rotting wood before, and normally he’d have heard the creak and felt the sag of the wood giving way. The last he saw of the deck was Santana shooting at him like an arrow before he was surrounded by tarry bulkheads and slick, ice-flecked water, splashing into the bottom of the hold and breaking through still more wood until the rock underneath cut into him. He rolled to the side across the foul water and curved hull, as another spot in the deck overhead exploded outward and Santana dropped through it like a monkey from a tree bough. He hung in the opening, arms and legs bent and held before him combatively. Santana’s chest was shrunken, deflated, and shapeless looking, and had a pair of holes in either side, but no ichor flowed from them. Instead, four ribs, unnaturally thick and bent the opposite way of how they should, stuck out through them like insect legs, hooking each of their points onto the deck above and spreading out his weight around the new opening.

“Oh, that was clever.” Santana grinned, flashing brilliant white teeth as he hung from the ceiling by his own deformed ribs, hair trailing down around his bare waist. “Though I don’t think it would have helped even if I’d fallen for it.”

Wamuu stayed still, half crouched and half standing, among the rocks that rose through the ruined hull and murky fluid, glaring back up. It took him longer than it should have, perhaps, but when he realized what his pursuer was saying a shadow of hope embraced him.

“I laid it on a little too heavy, didn’t I?” Wamuu affected a nonplussed grimace.

Santana laughed. Just like his face, it was too young of a laugh, too boyish. Like the voice of one not yet passed his five hundredth year. “Perhaps if I’d been hungrier I might have been tempted. But even with the head start, you’d never outswim me.”

The darkness embraced Wamuu further, and he had to suppress a smile. On the deck above, he heard frantic footsteps, and then soft thumping against the eastern hull. They would live. All three of them would live, through this night at least. His eyes stung, as tears welled out to mix with the saltwater already running down his cheeks. That could not have been chance. He began trembling, the emotion gripping him. He couldn’t mind-clear now, with Santana hanging literally over him, not even slightly. His lip-ring chafed as the flesh around it trembled.

I was right. It was them. Destiny calls at last.

Santana’s ribs snapped back into his chest, the wounds closing behind them instantly as he plunged down into the hold. Wamuu jumped upward and back, launching himself off of the broken wood and watery rocks and breaking through the ceiling once again. A vortex of breathspun air behind him lifted him the rest of the way through this third deck breach, and slowed the monster that rose behind him.

Destiny has come for them. And, at last, for me.

…​

Erina would have preferred silence to the moans of pain rising from the reef below the wooden railing. Seeing Jonathan unconscious after the blast at Windknight’s Lot had pushed her further than she’d ever wanted to go. Hearing him in pain, his breaths rising ragged and helpless like one of her patients’…the wrongness of it nearly made her sick.

“There!” Speedwagon was at the railing beside her, pointing downward toward the half-submerged rocks with his bladed hat. He had dropped and broken his lamp against the slush-covered deck, and his other hand was clutching his forehead, blood oozing out between his fingers. She winced at the sight of him; she hadn’t seen what, exactly the devil-horned man had done to Speedwagon when he’d raised his hand to his forehead, and for the first time since getting over the sight of open Delhi boils she was glad that a wound was hidden from her sight. She’d make herself look later, when Jonathan was safe. If he could even be saved.

She raised her open umbrella and held it upward, motioning frantically for Speedwagon to grab her. Gasping out pained excuses for ripple breaths, he stumbled up and clicked the blades back into his hat so he could safely wrap his arms around her. She was too panicked to even notice the smell of his unwashed clothes and hair when he approached this time, but the heat of his heaving body nearly made her gasp. The wet fabric over his chest was actually steaming, she realized, and she wondered if it would risk catching fire if it were dry.

“Hurry!” Speedwagon yelped, voice high with pain as he pried his blood-covered hand off his head and wrapped it around her midsection with an unpleasantly damp pressure. She saw the source of the bleeding on his brow; an empty, hollowed-out tunnel in his flesh, like the abscess left behind after a particularly fat guinea worm was pulled out, save that the back end recessed into the skull itself, as if eaten by acid. She gasped as she saw the white bone gleaming out from behind the flowing blood, and realized that whatever made that wound must have reached nearly through to his brain.

She nearly lost her own ripple-to-waves sequence at the sight, but holding out her own lantern and seeing Jonathan’s weak struggling on the rocks below scoured everything besides resolve from Erina. She bent her knees, guiding Speedwagon to do the same, and clutched the umbrella handle tighter as they jumped. She realized too late that she couldn’t hold on with just one hand, and, with a too-deep ripple inhalation, dropped the lantern into the black seawater below to add her left one to the handle. They fell through near-total darkness until the icy sea bit their feet and sucked them in. Speedwagon shrieked, then sputtered and thrashed as he tried to position them onto the unseen rocks and chunks of rotted wood hidden below the waves.

Erina let her umbrella go as well. She needed both hands and all of her concentration to shut out the blistering cold and the sharpness of the invisible rocks as they cut her grasping fingers and sliced into her shivering ankles and thighs. She heard Jonathan’s breathing, and nearly collapsed onto the reef before him, half-submerging herself again and cutting her legs against still more rocks as she extended her hands to grab onto his skin. Speedwagon was just behind her, and soon he had knelt down in the polluted water and cutting debris between them, hugging both of their shivering bodies against his hot torso as the ripples of the sun thrummed and flowed between the three of them like a shared heartbeat.

From within the hull beside them came the crashing of wood, and a splashing like that of wild animals charging furiously through water. Then another crash, and the entire barge shook as if struck by cannon fire.

Through the darkness, Jonathan’s wide eyes managed to find Erina’s as he grit his teeth and breathed in tandem with the other two. Between sharp, deep breaths that buried her senses under the ripple’s static tingle, his lips mouthed the name “Wamuu?”

Erina shook her sopping head and shrugged her shoulders helplessly, eyes stinging from more than just the foul seawater as the sound of an explosion tore across the deck up above and shook the three of them to their bones.

…​

The vortex he’d built was so fast and condensed, it felt like rock against his arms as he wrapped them around it to help contain the release. Bits of his skin came off from the friction and stained the windball a light pink. By the time he released it, his head was in agony beneath the rim of his circlet, and when the breathspinners fell back against his cheeks and neck they were hot enough to ignite paper. The air exploded forward, knocking Wamuu off his feet and making him roll heels over head along the deck. The sound was like a thunderclap. Timbers tore free of the deck and flew forward, breaking into clouds of splinters as the shockwave drove them before it. Santana was caught dead center, wooden slivers punching deep into his body as the blast seized him as well and threw him back off the raised prow. The pillar man didn’t fall into the sea, though. Instead, his entire torso split open, each rib breaking itself in three places and stretching the skin and muscle between them as they spread out. Santana raised his arms, and with them his new, grisly wings. Flapping them like a fleshy, flattened-out bat. He flew over the trailing end of the breathspun blast, his exposed organs writhing and coiling around each other like a nest of snakes as they clung to his spine seemingly without support.

Wamuu saw his chance, and – shutting out the pain as he flexed those overused muscles and blood vessels in his head and neck again – spun a thin, sharp wind into the flapping thing’s exposed guts as it flew overhead. Before it even struck home, however, Wamuu realized that this was just what Santana must have been expecting. The ribs each snapped again, much louder, as they broke at the spine and opened themselves all the way, pointing up along his back as wings became something more like a dorsal fin. Without his spread chest-halves, the wind’s greatest force shot up around the fleshless monster, and Santana plummeted down toward him.

Wamuu had to jump up into the air himself, and force another pained blast of air to propel himself out of the way before Santana punched through the deck where he’d just been, breaking some of the few remaining timbers of the upper barge. The ship was now a naked, empty shell with nearly all of its deck blasted away. Wamuu felt the hull shift under his feet, as the loss of so much weight ground it against the rocks and let more water rush into the empty space below.

“You’re not making this any less painful for yourself,” Santana’s voice rose from the flooding ship carcass, as his ribs clicked back together somewhere in the churning water.

Wamuu spat. “And you are?”

He ran along the eastern ledge, where railing had stood until a moment ago. Down in the flooded belly that had just been exposed to the night sky, Santana rose to his feet, the churning sea flowing around his knees and thighs. His chest and stomach were closed again, with no sign of having ever split.

“Have you really been waiting for me here an entire month?” Wamuu continued, eyes locked again on Santana’s. “How much of your reserves did that eat up?”

“Hah.” Santana threw his head back, soaked vermillion hair flying all around his shoulders and chest. “Compared to what you’ve cost us since last time? Give yourself credit, Wamuu.”

He had had too much stress without an opportunity for mind-clearing. Wamuu growled, venting his frustration into the night air. He’d been so stupid. So careless. It had been hundreds of years since the last time the pillar men had delivered their poisoned gifts in person rather than by slave-courier. He had wondered why they’d start again now. He should have known as soon as he heard the daywoman’s description of the man in the window that England was a trap.

No. A deeper part of him, the voice of faith cut in. Not so. They may have trapped me here, but it is their own fate they’ve sealed. Because of their snare, I’ve found the three. I’ve brought them together in union. If this is the price, so be it. Let the pillar men choke on me.

Santana made as if to leap back up onto the little that remained of the deck, but then dashed to the side, shaking the barge again as he punched through the eastern hull below Wamuu’s feet and splashed out onto the reef, breaking Wamuu’s line of sight for a moment before reappearing off of his flank beside the ship.

Then he leaped.

…​

More crashing sounds. More groaning and rumbling as old wood tore and collapsed under its own weight, followed by ever heavier splashes. Jonathan watched as the barge shrank, not just from distance, but from piece after piece flying or falling off. Through his seawater and tear-clouded eyes, he saw two shadows against the winter night sky, barely distinguishable in the meager starlight, racing and evading each other amid the cloud of debris.

“Go back!” Jonathan repeated, grimacing as he stopped his ripple breathing to shout and the pain surged back in his broken bones. “He’s still there! Turn around!”

“WE CAN’T HELP!” Erina’s face was twisted into a haggard, pallid scream as it loomed over him. “WE CAN’T!”

The mass of floating debris, lashed crudely together with the rope they’d tied their ill-fated rowboat with, creaked and swayed as she shifted her weight. Even as she screamed at Jonathan, she was laboring at her oar, just as Speedwagon did at his own.

“Jonathan!” She dropped it, and put her hands back on his shoulders. “We’re GOING TO DIE if we can’t escape!”

She was crying, he realized, but not just for him. The terror. The pain. The misery and distress carved into every detail of her scratched, shivering face and soaked hair. Afraid for her life, because of where he’d brought her.

He blinked, mouth opening silently. On the other side of their slimy, half-sinking raft, Speedwagon said nothing. Simply staring, blankly, eyes distant, as he used all of his breath for rowing. The heat had stopped beaming off of his body, and he too was beginning to shiver.

Jonathan pushed himself up onto one side, foot hanging into the icy sea, as he looked back at the barge. The sea around it churned with the vibrations of blast after blast. Before his eyes, both ends of the vessel began to sink downward, the center of the hull rising above the reef amid the loudest series of cracks so far.

Jonathan shut his eyes. His own tears were flowing. Resuming his ripple breathing more to help blot out the pain as he pushed his half-healed bones into a sitting position than anything else, he raised his good hand and let Erina hand him her oar.

…​

Wamuu stumbled back through the water, feet punching through the soaked hull and against the jagged rocks. The barge was no more. On all sides, chunks of broken ship half-floated and half-sank over and around the reef. He was panting. Bleeding from more wounds than he could keep count of. Exposed to the sky, the shore, and the empty horizon over the eastern sea.

The water frothed before him. He knew he couldn’t raise his breathspinners. The arteries on either side of his neck had ruptured, and more blood was trickling from his ears in the wake of his last wind blast, and he was too exhausted to heal. His body screamed for fresh meat and blood, but there was none. One of the breathspinners had been severed, its chain hanging uselessly over his ear, and the one behind it on the same side was cracked. Instead, he grabbed half of the iron ladder that had once allowed his companions to ascend from the hold, and swung it with both hands. The corroded metal struck Santana right in the side of the head as he rose from the water, and promptly broke against it. Santana’s head and neck snapped to the side with the force of the blow, and a little spurt of ichor splashed out from above his ear, but that was all. Wamuu was exhausted and slowed. Santana, too, was slower than he’d been at the start, but it wasn’t enough.

One hand grabbed Wamuu’s shoulder, and the other his neck. Santana stood before him, staring coldly into him with his clay-colored eyes. The ancestor-mark above his left cheekbone faintly luminous with his exertion. Wamuu grabbed the pillar man’s wrists and tried to pry them off, but they barely even shook. Finally, he stopped trying, and went limp in Santana’s clutches.

The redhead just stared. The silence went on far too long for Wamuu’s taste, so he broke it.

“Are you waiting for something?”

Santana let out a low, quiet breath. “I’m just thinking about how easily you and I could have been brothers. It was such a near thing, wasn’t it?”

Wamuu tasted bile mixing with his own blood. He grimaced harder. “And? What does that matter? Any two men could have been brothers if things happened differently.”

Santana chuckled. Not quite sadly, but there was a hint of…remorse? Maybe not that either, but something was on his mind. “Of course. You’re right.”

His fingers sank into Wamuu’s flesh. Digesting. Assimilating. It hurt less than Wamuu had been expecting.

My death was as I always hoped. I’m coming, mother… Iranti. I’ve missed you so much.

Santana’s features grew indistinct. Before it all faded, Wamuu latched onto that dark silhouette and in one last surge of hate brought back the feeling in his own fingers as he scratched at his killer’s face.

And I’ll be seeing you again much sooner than you thi-



TO BE CONTINUED ->
 
Last edited:

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Crosspost:
Poor Wammu! :cry: At least he died acording to his honour code and accomplished his objective of getting the OT3 away and spiting the pillarmen.

Speaking of, even if things where a little rocky at the begining of the chapter I think the three can come together stronger form this.

The fight between backwards rib cage guy and wind guy was awesome. You did an excellent job of getting across the power gap but also the difference in state of mind between the two of them (and also the humans) in how they faught. The way Santana casualy mutilated and reformed his own body contrasted really well with Wammu pushing himself beyond his limits just to keep up. Daypeople and Nightpeople both approach their bodies in understandable ways, Pillermen are almost completely disconnected.

Not much to say about Erina, Speedwagon or Jonathan this chapter. Though Erina and Jonathan continue to be sweet and Jonathan and Speedwagon still have an issue with their class assumptions and expectations. Erina and Speedwagon seem to be getting more comfortable around each other. At least in the heat of combat. The three of them all being a well oiled machine that still stood no chance against Santana just due to the power gap was a neat detail.
 

Leila Hann

Member
Content warning for extreme body horror and gore.


15. Time to Burn​


“What do we do now?” Speedwagon banged his fists against the side of the coach, startling the already jumpy driver as he hurriedly re-hitched the horses. The bandages that Erina had just retrieved from the vehicle wrapped around Speedwagon’s head were already soaking through, and the man gasped in pain as the force of his own fists jarred the wound.

“We go home,” Jonathan said. He stood with his back to the entrance, watching the black night ocean where the barge once sat. It was too dark to see what was left of it, if anything was.

“What about Wamuu?”

Jonathan shook his head. “He told us to leave. We’re leaving.”

“And just leaving him?”

Erina’s head reappeared in the window by the door. “Speedwagon, I don’t think there’s still a him to leave!”

Speedwagon twisted his head up toward her. He was still sopping wet and shivering. He had stopped ripple breathing, Jonathan realized. If he didn’t start saving his breath again soon, the combination of cold and damp would rob their party of yet another member by dawn. His hair clung in a dank tangle around his neck and shoulders, and stuck to his forehead and cheeks where it ran over the bloodstained bandage. “You don’t know that!”

“We can’t help.” Jonathan said. His voice was quiet. He barely even heard himself say it, or felt the air pass his lips. He resumed his ripple-to-waves breathing, the tingling electrical sensation still not quite masking the stabbing pain in his ribs every time his lungs pressed against them. His left arm was covered in pins and needles, worse than ever after he’d forced it to help row. He didn’t think he could lift it at all now. Hopefully, over time, the ripple would undo the damage he’d done to it, but even if it did, he had no idea how long that would take.

“Bugger that, we can try!”

Jonathan turned around in place to face the shivering, red faced Speedwagon. He knew he had to say something, but he had nothing to say. He was tired. Exhausted in a way he couldn’t ever remember being. Too tired to think, or even to feel. He just looked at Speedwagon, and breathed.

“If he’s alive, he’ll come back himself.” Erina spoke again, quieter but just as urgently as before. “We can’t make any difference.”

“If he’s alive-”

“Speedwagon.” Jonathan spoke again. The other two looked back at him. “Please.”

Speedwagon’s dark red face locked its eyes on his. His cheeks, Jonathan saw, were glistening with new moisture, with more leaking down from the seams of his eyes.

“Breathe,” Jonathan said, “you’re getting cold.”

Speedwagon turned his bedraggled head back toward the village, mouth opened again, but nothing coming out.

“Breathe.” Jonathan repeated. “Please. I think you’ll need to help me into the coach.”

All was silent, but for the distant, lapping waves against the slushy rocks. Speedwagon trembled harder, whether from the cold or from silent sobs Jonathan couldn’t be sure. He forced himself to step away from the doorway and up to Speedwagon, and to wrap his good arm around him. Speedwagon wordlessly embraced him with both arms, burying his ocean and tear salted face in Jonathan’s chest. Jonathan felt his own eyes begin to sting as well. Perhaps it was just sympathy. He couldn’t say he was grieving yet. Or even quite believing. He barely felt anything at all, except tired. He managed to breathe in deeply to the bottom of his reshaped lungs, and then out sharply again. Two breaths later, Speedwagon began doing the same between empty sobs. His wet skin became warm against Jonathan’s, and the shivering decreased.

“The driver’s getting back in!” Erina urged them.

Out of the corner of one stinging eye, Jonathan saw the jacketed and hooded man climb in. He’d been looking more and more afraid of them ever since they’d returned, dripping blood and seawater and breathing ripples-to-waves. He picked up the reins and gave him and Speedwagon a very reluctant stare.

“Can you help me climb in?” Jonathan asked, again, coming up from his ripple breathing.

Without looking up, Speedwagon dropped off of his torso, and led him toward the carriage door where Erina waited.

“Where?” She asked as she and Speedwagon did their bests to laboriously haul Jonathan’s bulk up the steps.

“I don’t know. My house. Your house. Away.”

“I…I think your house might be a better idea,” Erina panted as Jonathan stumbled into the compartment, leaning against one of the backrests with his right arm as Speedwagon climbed up behind him.

“Sure.” He looked back at the driver’s compartment. “Start toward Hampshire. We’ll guide you along the way.”

Jonathan took one last look at the midnight village behind them, not sure if he should be expecting a wounded Wamuu to come struggling through the snow, or an unstoppable flaming-haired devil to flap down at them on wings of stretched flesh and broken ribs. He saw neither, nor heard anything else from the reef, as the coach began moving.



It was perhaps four in the morning when the manor came into view around the snow-covered hillocks and ghostly white trees. The snowfall had stopped, and the sky partly cleared, so there was enough light from the handful of stars and thin sliver of a moon to highlight the shingled turret roofs and the black, empty windows beneath them. No one would be awake at this hour, apart from one of the groundskeepers making their rounds. That was a blessing, Jonathan supposed. He didn’t know how he’d explain Speedwagon’s head wound, if anyone besides himself and Erina happened to see. His own ribs and arm were better, thanks to the ripple breathing sessions he’d gone through over the course of the ride, but it would be at least a day before they healed completely, and he expected the ache would continue well after that. Erina’s waist and legs were still marked from the deep cuts they had suffered on the reef. They had all healed themselves and each other as much as they could, but so much of their ripple power was consumed just by staving off the cold and exhaustion, and Erina’s lungs had overexerted themselves hours ago.

“That’ll be all?” The coachman asked. He was starting to sound exhausted himself.

“Yes.” Jonathan tipped him the rest of what he had in coins – probably worth half as much again as the ride itself, he was barely paying attention – and then opened the door and extended his uninjured arm for whichever of the other two followed first.

“What are we doing, now?” Erina asked as she took his hand and climbed down before turning around to help Speedwagon out as well.

“I don’t know.” For at least the half-dozenth time, Jonathan repeated those words. Of everything that could have gone awry, up to and including his own demise, this had never even occurred to him as a possibility. He still wanted to think that Wamuu would be back in a night or two. Or, at least, that the creature his ripple powers barely stung would not see fit to pursue them. Of course, Jonathan never spoke of his suspicion aloud, but he was nearly sure that that was why Speedwagon had chosen to come with them instead of returning to London. If the pillar man – for that must surely be what it was – was tracking them tonight, at least, it wouldn’t be led to Clara. Or the Pendletons.

“Sleep, then,” Erina said after a moment’s pause while Speedwagon’s boots punched into the snow and the door closed behind him, “we’ll talk after we’ve rested?”

“I suppose.” Jonathan wanted to say more, but he had no idea what. He wrapped his good right arm around Erina’s shoulders, and with the left managed to cling to Speedwagon’s hand as he led them across the forecourt and past the iced-over fountain. They had scarcely gone a few steps before Speedwagon stopped, making Jonathan and Erina halt as well. His head was tilted upward. The eyes beneath his bloody bandage wide with alarm.

“I smell something.”

“What?” Jonathan felt himself release his grip on Speedwagon’s hand. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Speedwagon repeated, voice getting higher, “that I smell something very, very evil coming from that building.”

“The devil…pillar man…thing?” Erina asked, looking up at the turrets and balconies in alarm.

“Could be. It’s not just your sorry excuse for a housemate, JoJo, I came here in his presence once before. There’s vampires, or something just as bad!”

“Do you HAVE to bring Dio up right now?” Jonathan growled, louder and angrier than he knew he was going to.

Speedwagon jumped back, and raised his hands placatingly. “I didn’t name any names.”

Jonathan dropped his face into his good hand, letting out a long, grimacing sigh. The sounds of the retreating coach had already softened to nearly nothing as it made its way back down the road behind them.

“My house?” Erina offered, sounding very uncertain. “Mama and papa won’t be happy, but-”

“No.” What little clarity of mind Jonathan could muster made itself heard in his voice. “If the pillar man beat us here, he’ll look there next if we don’t follow.” He paused, the cold, starlit silence reigning as his thoughts continued. “He, or they, whatever this is – if it followed us here, it can follow further. The only difference is how many more people get in the way first. We don’t have a choice but to go in, and… maybe there are still living people in the house who need our help.”

A half dozen faces appeared in Jonathan’s mind. Agnes the washerwoman, who had wished him well with nothing but sincerity before he started his first year at college. Jan the cook, who had tossed him grapes and strawberries when she saw him heading out with his dog when he was a boy. Rory the butler, who has lived here longer than Jonathan himself and might as well be an uncle.

He took in his first new ripple breath in the better part of an hour and forced it out. His half-healed bones tingled, outlining the pain in the fizzing static sensation of the sun’s energy concentrating around the injuries as the cold withdrew from his skin. “Speedwagon,” he raised his right hand and touched his fingertips to the skin of Speedwagon’s brow, above and below the bandage, to dull the pain to whatever temporary degree he could, “there’s no wind. Can you smell exactly where it’s coming from?”

Speedwagon sighed back. His head hung for a moment, ruined dark blonde hair clumping down over his bushy eyebrows and scarred face below the bandage. But, when that moment had passed, he breathed in deeply and out sharply through his own mouth, and then craned his head back up to sniff.

“From inside, for sure. But that’s not all.”

He sniffed harder. Eyes narrowing as he adjusted his ice-flecked hat over his inclining head.

“Side. Right side. Closer.”

Jonathan’s eyes moved to the copse of leafless trees that lined the house’s north wall, filling the space between building and fence as it led toward the backyard. He crouched, bending his knees low against the complaints of his aching ribs, and resumed ripple-to-waves, muffling the sharp exhalations as best he could with his better hand. The lanterns remained in their packs, which they left in the snow where Speedwagon first smelled danger. As Jonathan led the way around the corner, he had to force down a gasp to avoid breaking his ripple breathing. There was a dark silhouette standing beneath the snow-laden branches of the third tree in the row. The figure was peering in through the downstairs hall window, which was wide open, and clutching a rifle in its hands. That window, Jonathan realized, would give him a clear line of fire down the hall and across the foyer entrance. Covering both the front door, and the northern servant door. The inside of the manor was darker than the night outside of it, but the figure seemed to be watching without strain.

It turned its head, revealing a clean-shaven face with square, masculine features, as Jonathan took another step closer and the crunch of the snow warned of their approach. Glowing yellow eyes flashed beneath the brim of the man’s hat as he opened his fanged mouth and released a familiar, piercing whistle that echoed over the moor. He spun the muzzle of his weapon forward, just as Jonathan breathed out and dove forward, putting his right arm straight out in front of his chest and driving his fingers into the snow. Slush and steam erupted upward from the spot like a glistening fountain, and when the gunshot boomed out in the wake of the vampiric shriek Jonathan heard no outcry from either of his companions as the bullet flew wildly through the cloud.

With a flex of his arm and legs, Jonathan was back on his feet in less than a second, and bowling toward the vampire gunman. He had to throw himself aside at the last minute to avoid a second shot, and this time his right side exploded in burning pain as the bullet grazed him and shot on past in a trail of his own blood. Knocked off course, Jonathan stumbled down into the snow, damp whiteness enveloping his world as his new wound burned white hot and fizzed like dry ice in water as his ripple-filled body began the healing. When he raised his head out of the snow, he saw the vampire, his auburn hair and brickish face now clearly those of Kingston the gardener, staring in surprise at his dropped rifle. One of his wrists had Speedwagon’s hat embedded halfway through it. An instant later, Erina tumbled into the snow just at the middle aged bachelor’s feet. More steam and flying snow, followed this time by another piercing whistle as the fanged mouth and blazing eyes stretched wide in pain. Using both arms, ignoring the protests of his left one as the shoulder exploded in pain again with a strained bark, he sucked in another breath and intercepted Kingston’s head with both hands just as he was bending forward to sink his claws into Erina.

Jonathan wanted it to be quick. It normally was quick, at least compared to this. Erina and Speedwagon’s screaming were drowned out by Kingston’s whistling shriek, which persisted well after his skin and flesh. Afterward, the three of them stood, panting, Jonathan looking away from the thing in the half-melted snow as he fought to keep down his empty stomach’s fluids. It must have been only seconds, however much longer it felt, before the gardener’s dying whistle was answered by others from inside the house. The vampiric shrieks were followed by frantic, shouting voices, loud enough for Jonathan to distinguish the words “side door,” “Kingston,” and “shoot them.”

Then, just as Jonathan scampered away from the window and Erina got back to her feet, there was another shouting voice, this time from high above them in one of the towers. A female voice, screaming one word again and again.

“HELP!”

“Oh no.” Speedwagon’s own voice was high itself as he looked up from where he was crouched, cleaning his hat blades in the snow.

The three looked back and forth among themselves, seeing the same answer in all of their eyes. No, this probably wasn’t a trick. Musgrave had kept living captives, for replacement vampires and probably for food, when he knew his lair would be attacked. Why would this group behave any differently?

“We couldn’t outrun them anyway,” Jonathan whispered as footsteps came racing up the hallway behind the windows and servant door. The three of them ducked down and ran back the way they’d come, rushing quickly beneath each window.

“Jonathan,” Erina suddenly whispered, pausing in her ripple breathing and grabbing his coat to get his attention, “the curtains!”

It took a moment for Jonathan’s mind to catch up, but when he made the connection he felt his first spark of hope since leaving Wamuu behind. He stopped, and looked at Erina as Speedwagon raised his bushy eyebrows in confusion below his bandaged forehead.

“Do you think we can?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Before she’d even finished her retort, she and Jonathan were both running back along the front of the building toward the main entrance. It occurred to Jonathan that surely some of the vampires should have left the building to pursue them by now, but with all the muffled shouting from inside he couldn’t tell what exactly was going on. The two windows on either side of the front door had their carmine drapes closed, as always on such chilly nights, behind the glass panes. With a hasty nod to Erina, and a motion for Speedwagon to stand back, Jonathan raised his right leg and kicked its thick winter boot against the glass. There was the stab of guilt, perhaps even of sympathetic pain, as he felt his own front window break around his boot. The broken glass rained down around the windowsill and into the snow before his feet, with many more shards bouncing off the drapes and tumbling to the floor inside the foyer. There were more pointed shouts from inside, and a moment later Jonathan saw the drapes begin to tremble, as if fingers were grabbing them to fling them aside.

He and Erina exchanged a final look, and raised all four hands upward before straightening their arms to channel forth the ripple charges they’d been building and grasping the dyed fabric.

There was a chorus of overlapping whistles, so high and piercing in their combined power that Jonathan’s hands shot reflexively to his ears, and Erina and Speedwagon both fell to their knees. Across the front doorway, the other foyer window cracked. Fiery yellow lights danced madly behind the drapes, and Jonathan felt a wave of heat break through the chill.

Erina started picking herself up. As the firelights faded away, Speedwagon did the same.

“What was that?” Jonathan couldn’t hear anything in the wake of those screams, but he read Speedwagon’s lips.

“Shifting of sand,” Erina was close enough to him that Jonathan could just barely make out the words of her explanation.

They turned their attention back to the building. Jonathan wasn’t sure if it had gone silent, or if it was just his ears not yet working right again. At the very least, no bullets were fired at them from the upstairs windows.

“How many?” Speedwagon asked another question as Jonathan’s ears began to relay more sounds than his own heartbeat with any clarity. “How many servants?”

“I…” Jonathan shook his head as the number eluded him. Two maids. The assistant groundskeeper. Jan. Rory. Then there was the washer, the new watchmen that Dio had just hired… he could list them one by one, but he couldn’t put the numbers together, not now. “Let’s just go!”

He rushed to the front door, and started to reach into his pocket for the key before shaking his head with an anguished growl and making another, even stronger, kick. Wood splintered and metal snapped. The finely carved double doors swung inward, and Jonathan led the way inside.

The room looked as it always did, save that there was no fire burning behind the hearth by the reading table and curiosities. None of the lamps were lit, but there were still glowing embers and small tongues of yellow flame rippling across the pair of bodies on the tile floor by the windows. One of them was still twitching, but only barely. The dying firelight played across the wallpaper and brass chandelier overhead, and highlighted the bannister lining the stairs and second floor terrace.

Speedwagon sniffed, and then began coughing. The stench of burning flesh and singed hair assailed all of their nostrils, but Speedwagon was reacting to something else. Jonathan felt his stomach turn. Had Speedwagon ever been effected that strongly by the smell before? Even in Lamkin’s basement, or Musgrave’s tower?

Before either he or Erina could ask how much worse it was this time, and if Speedwagon had any idea as to why, a loud, clear, click brought Jonathan’s attention up to the terrace. A bootheel, clicking against the tile floor. It was followed by another, and then by a third, as Dio stepped out from around the corner and looked down at them from above the staircase.

Jonathan’s mouth fell open. He heard Speedwagon gasp, and saw Erina jump backward, hands raised to her mouth.

As the last of the burning embers that had once been people died out, their company returned his smiling face and flowing golden curls into darkness. After a moment, he spoke. “JoJo. I’ve been waiting.”

Speedwagon’s eyes were wider than Jonathan had ever seen them. Erina had retreated backward, letting Jonathan stand between herself and the foyer.

“Dio.” Jonathan said, after a long, quiet moment. “Are…have you been…?”

“I think this is yours.” The darkness hid his face, but there was a cruel mirth in Dio’s voice that made Jonathan’s blood run cold, and his spine twitch. That tone of voice. He hadn’t heard it in years. It struck him, like a spear to the heart. Everything he thought had changed. Every bit of growth and softening he’d seen his foster brother go through. Every kind gesture he had ever extended, every act of brotherly cooperation. Not just gone, but Discarded, as if Dio was reverted to his thirteen-year-old self – or the real Dio Brando had just been in hiding for all these years.

Dio raised his right hand, and Jonathan saw something flat and oval shaped clutched in it, the size of a human face. Then, before the implication could strike home, Dio reached back and threw the mask at him. It turned over as it sailed through the air, tumbling down past the chandelier and toward Jonathan. Dio had always been good at the passes, on the rugby team. Jonathan, acting on those same learned instincts, raised his own hands and caught it a foot before his own face. Shock turned to confusion again as Jonathan turned the mask over to look at it, and his fingertips felt a familiar hairline crack running down the middle of the cold, haughty face. The faultline where he’d broken his own mask and glued it back together.

“It’s useless, of course. I found a better one.”

“And you wore it?” Jonathan started out quiet, but his throat had a mind of its own, and he shouted the last two words so loudly he almost choked on them. “Why? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO YOURSELF?

Dio laughed. He tilted back his shadowed chin and bellowed, long and deep. It was a sound that belonged in a nightmare. Though it was too dark to see many details, Jonathan was sure he saw fangs poking out as Dio turned his silky face into profile as the chuckles died down.

“Only you could ask a question like that, JoJo. ” His heels clicked against the tiles again as he stepped up to the banister and leaned over it, placing his hands atop the railing. “Not everyone is a wonder boy like you. Some of us have to think to get where we want in life. Some of us have to take risks, and make sacrifices.”

Jonathan shook his head. “Killing yourself is a worthwhile sacrifice?”

Dio straightened up again, and his hands gestured to his torso. “Do I look dead to you?” Another razor sharp chuckle. “I assure you, I don’t feel it. All-”

“Oh, you’ll be feeling it soon enough!” Speedwagon strode forth beside Jonathan, hat clutched in both trembling hands.

Dio’s response didn’t come in words. Rather, there was a flurry of movement, and then a deadly whistle as something shot through the air. Speedwagon shrieked, stumbling aside as a trail of red blood droplets flew past his arm and onto the floor behind him. There was a loud crack, and Jonathan felt the vibrations as the knife Dio had thrown stuck in the stone tiles halfway up the blade.

“Nice reflexes,” Dio said as Speedwagon clutched the fresh cut sliced across his upper arm, “don’t interrupt me again. Now. All you’ve ever had going for you, JoJo, is luck. Sheer, dumb luck, for a sheer, dumb man. You had your place in this house bequeathed to you. I saw mine, and risked everything I had to take it.”

“What?” Jonathan shouted, eyes darting back and forth between Dio on the terrace and Speedwagon clutching his bleeding arm beside him. “Father made sure you always had your part! You didn’t need to do anything to get that!”

Dio’s head rolled slowly sideways, and Jonathan could tell that behind the darkness, he was being given a look of utter condescension. “I needed to kill Dario,” he spat his father’s name, the venom in his voice so thick it was almost incomprehensible “to even get here, you imbecile!”

“Jonathan,” Erina said quietly, having already crossed over behind him toward Speedwagon, “I think we should leave.” Her own eyes were locked on the Dio’s shadowed silhouette, and her lips were thin and pale.

Jonathan’s heart accelerated even further. He’d heard someone screaming for help. There were people, probably people he knew, still trapped in the house, and now Dio – he shuddered and forced himself to continue thinking beyond this point, his opponent this time was Dio, his brother, Dio – had lost vampires and would need to replace them. It was his house. His home. But his lungs were tired, and his ribs and arm bone still stiff and aching. Speedwagon had been wounded even before this new laceration, and his and Erina’s ripple generating abilities were at least as depleted. From the side hallways, he heard more footsteps approaching. Who knew how many more Dio had already turned? Was his ceiling as high as Musgrave’s? Higher?

“Alright,” Jonathan said, speaking to Erina and Speedwagon while keeping his eyes on Dio, “let’s…let’s go.”

He started to take a step backward, but Dio’s laughter froze him in place again.

“Oh, you might be able to escape, JoJo. But how quickly do you think you can make it to the hospital?”

Jonathan’s breath left him. The foyer spun. Mouth hanging open, he stared at the figure before them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a look of frigid terror overcome Erina as well. Doctor Pendleton and father, both conveniently in one place, unsuspecting…

“You wouldn’t,” Jonathan said, but he knew, before the words even left his mouth, that he really would.

“And why wouldn’t I?” Dio gave voice to Jonathan’s next thoughts, holding up his hands at either side. “It’s not as if I haven’t been killing George for nearly two years already.” He paused, and Jonathan heard a deep, exultant intake of breath. “You wouldn’t believe how good it feels to say that aloud. All this time, it’s been such a burden keeping it down.”

The red curtains and green wallpaper felt distant and insubstantial, like nightmare versions of themselves. The statue in the center of the foyer, the fireplace and suit of armor off to the right of the stairs, seemed to host monsters in every crack and shadow.

“Dio,” Jonathan said, his voice fallen to little more than a whisper, “how many people have you…? How many lives have you taken?”

Dio shrugged. “Do you mean before the mask, or afterward?” He chuckled again. “Though I suppose it also depends on how generously one defines ‘people.’ Ah, what perfect timing!”

The footsteps from the south hallway to Jonathan’s right grew louder, and he turned to see the new arrival. At first, Jonathan was sure it was a man wearing a mask. Then it stepped out of the hallway entrance and onto the foyer tiling, and the snout twitched, the glassy eyes narrowed, and the long, canine jaws opened to reveal a mouth full of vampiric needles. It had the head of a German shepherd, but the fur turned to pale, human skin at the neck, and from that point downward it was a man’s body wearing a gardener’s uniform. It held a metal-headed shovel in both burly hands, and walked with a stooped, hunched forward gait. Drool trickled down the fur of its lower jaw, and dribbled onto the floor between its boots.

“I thought about you when I made him, JoJo.” Dio’s voice narrated the ghastly spectacle as the dog-man with the glowing eyes and batlike teeth of a vampire shuffled closer, making all three of them jump back away from it. “I wasn’t entirely sure that it would work, but since then I’ve gone much further.”

“What…” Speedwagon gasped, still clutching his wounded arm as he lost his faltering attempt at more ripple breathing all over again “…how is…that?”

“And it’s only my second night!” Dio crowed, throwing his head back and his hands upward, hair – more unkempt than he’d ever let it be in life – swishing out in the shadows behind his neck. “My second of who knows how many! Just imagine what I could make with a month of practice, Or a year, or a century!”

Jonathan’s stomach was empty, but he heaved and tried to empty it nonetheless. It was hard work just to stay on his feet and keep his eyes on the approaching chimera. Every vampire is different, Wamuu had told him. Eliza’s blades. Lamkin’s boiling ichor. Musgrave’s icy touch. But this?

The sight of Speedwagon raising his hat despite his bleeding arm helped ground him. Fight. He had to fight. Had to put whatever was left of this man and this animal out of their suffering. Had to stop Dio, or his father would be next. As if on cue, the voice he’d heard from outside rang out again, hoarser and even more desperate than before, from somewhere upstairs.

“HELP!”

Jonathan opened his mouth, and forced the dry heaving down with a deep inward breath. Taking another step back from the approaching wretch, he contracted his chest, wincing at the pain and tingling in his injured ribs, and forced the air back out. Speedwagon backed away toward the door, knees bent, hat still ready to be thrown while he held his knife in the other hand. Erina kept behind Jonathan, umbrella clutched in both hands, as she looked back and forth between the chimera and Dio.

“I’ve been neglecting my other guests, so barbarous of me!” Dio turned on his heels and waved a saucy goodbye. “Feel free to follow me, if you’re able. In the meantime, the butler shall help see to you.”

He vanished down the main upstairs hallway then, and another, much larger, figure loomed out of the darkness beside him as it came the other way. Before Jonathan could see who or what it was though, Dio let out a short, eerily mundane whistle as he withdrew. A pair of quick notes that Jonathan recognized from when he’d watched the groundskeepers training their hounds as a boy.

The monster with the dog’s head opened its mouth, and let out a high pitched, whistling bark, almost like the sound of a nightmare screech owl, and then raised its shovel and charged.

Speedwagon’s hat flew into the monster’s flank, slicing deep, but having no effect. It had probably been aimed at one of its hands, but Jonathan could hardly fault him for missing. Pushing out another breath and feeling the fizzing warmth grow stronger around his protesting ribs, Jonathan lunged forward to intercept the dog-thing and grab the shovel as it swung it forward. His fists closed around the oaken handle, arms held out straight between his chest and it to conduct the ripple into the wood. The dog-head let out a whistling whine as its fingers burned, but unfortunately it let go of the shovel before it could lose more than them, and the open jaws closed in. Jonathan did the only thing he could and jammed the shovel handle forward into the attacker’s chest, making the fanged snout snap just centimeters from his face. Jonathan fell onto his back, breaking his ripple breathing and sending more spears of pain into his chest and shoulder as the monster pushed down, scrabbling with its fingerless hands and trying to push its snout forward. Rancid drool flew out onto Jonathan’s face as it screamed and barked with its snapping, fang-laden jaws.

Laying on his back, Jonathan closed his nostrils against the stink and pushed the shovel handle upward, levering the chimera off him. His arm muscles burned, and his bad shoulder screamed. He couldn’t resume ripple-to-waves; he needed every bit of breath to keep wrestling. A tiny thread of smoke emerged from the human torso’s shirt collar, as the last of the ripple charge in the shovel handle burned out against the skin of its chest. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, he knew, that moving-of-sand charge would have burned away the attacker’s hands and chest entirely, and he’d have since landed a finishing blow. The dripping, hairy jaws snapped together again, over-long teeth slicing through their opposing gums only for them to heal again as soon as the mouth opened once more. Closer to Jonathan’s nose with every chomp. Realizing that he had only one way to get free before his arms tired, Jonathan braced himself, bit back a whole new level of revulsion, and released the shovel handle to bring his hands together around the chimera’s snout just as its jaws were opening again.

The creature thrashed its dog head, nearly throwing off his grasp, but in its surprise at his action it also took its weight off of him, and Jonathan took the opportunity to roll the two of them over so that he was on top. Ruined, fingerless hands reached up, about to encircle and crush him, but before they could he pressed the snout backward and then twisted. There was a horrendous tearing sound, and even worse vibrations, as a soft, still-developing layer of flesh, scar tissue, and half-gelatinous bone ripped in half.

Jonathan didn’t look at the body, which was now twitching aimlessly under him. The head kept trying to open its jaws, but he was ripple-breathing again now. He looked away as the yellow flames appeared, and the head twitched harder still before stopping.

“JoJo!” Speedwagon’s voice forced him to open his eyes long before he wanted to. “If you can!”

Jonathan threw the burning thing in his hands away while being careful not to look at either it or the trembling torso under him, and turned his head toward Speedwagon. He and Erina were both standing near the middle of the dark foyer, knees bent and faces panicked. Speedwagon held his knife out in front of him, while Erina brandished her umbrella like a sword, both breathing pained, laborious ripple breaths. They were both facing the corner by the staircase, where a hulking, asymmetrical figure crouched before the curiosities and fireplace. A pair of fiery yellow eyes glared through the darkness, and a low, whistling murmur of pain came from their direction.

“Jona…” Erina started to say, but stopped. Either her words failing her, or realizing that she needed to save her tired breath for ripple-to-waves. Speedwagon took his eyes off of the corner just long enough to find his blood-covered hat where it lay on the tiles near the front window and start backing toward it.

Jonathan stood up, making himself take the breaths in and force them out in time, keeping his ripple breaths smaller and lighter to save stamina. The figure in the corner turned to the suit of armor standing by the fireplace, and pulled the spear out of its right hand. Other hands rose up in a warding gesture, fingers clawed toward Speedwagon and Erina. One of its hands was smoking, and Jonathan thought there were fingers missing.

Wait. Four arms. Is that two people or…

Hefting the spear in its two larger arms, the creature straightened up and strode toward him, away from the corner. Jonathan’s ripple breathing ended in a horrified gasp as he recognized Rory’s graying hair, wrinkled face, and black uniform. He lost the ability to breathe at all when the other face – female, missing its eyes, and protruding from Rory’s chest so that his chin was nestled in its hair – opened its fanged mouth and spoke.

“Master Jonathan? Master Dio said you’d be back.”

Molly. Her voice was barely recognizable, rising and falling to keep up with breathing not of her own. As the creature stepped closer, Jonathan saw the legs – twice as thick as they should be, and twisted like badly welded steel under the bulging trouser legs – that supported a man’s torso, but with Molly’s eyeless head bloating out of the front beneath Rory’s own like a speaking tumor. A pair of smaller arms sprouted from womanly shoulders halfway down the torso, clawing their half-burned fingers as Rory held the spear in his own hands. Jonathan’s eyes were nearly too overwhelmed to notice that while Rory’s eyes burned with vampiric fire, his mouth was missing entirely. As if his lips had simply vanished, and his skin grown together over the opening.

Jonathan’s mouth and eyes were frozen open. He couldn’t move, even to breathe.

“Our punishment,” Molly continued, “me for seeing Master Dio beaten like that, and Rory for daring to scold him afterward. Master Dio will forgive us if we prove ourselves tonight.”

Rory’s arms lowered the spear toward him, the thick, welded-together legs crouching lower as the burning eye narrowed.

“I’m sorry.”

Jonathan was weightless, senseless, motionless. His only sense of time passing came from the heavy footsteps and growing silhouette of the two-headed chimera, and of the massive spear it pointed toward him. He wasn’t breathing, and the floor grew unsteady. He couldn’t even tell if his heart was beating. He didn’t inhale again until Speedwagon’s hat sailed into his field of vision and sawed into the hand holding the back of the spear. There was no sign of pain, but amid the spray of blood a pair of fingers fell to the floor, forcing Molly’s unburned hand to reach back and take the place of Rory’s. The point of the spear tilted to the side as the chimera reestablished its grip and glared with Rory’s burning eyes in Speedwagon’s direction, and in that time Erina had charged forward with her umbrella in hand, stabbing the point of it into Rory’s other forearm.

Molly’s mouth flew open and released a whistling shriek. Either the noise or the sight of Molly’s good arm pulling back to swing the spear like a bat at Erina pulled Jonathan back into his body. Rory’s left arm was smoking, skin blackened and peeled away around where Erina had stabbed it, and its fingers hung loosely. Molly’s own good arm, despite being as slim and girlish as ever, had no trouble swinging the ten-foot length of hardwood, and Erina was still off balance from her own lunge. Jonathan leaped forward into the path of the shaft and grabbed it in both of his hands, gritting his teeth and bending his knees against the vampire’s strength. He was knocked off his feet, and the spear handle slipped from his fingers to strike him across the face, exploding pain like a cannon shot lancing across it and filling his vision with stars, but he’d slowed the blow too much for it to break bone or cut much deeper than the skin. He let the force of it send him reeling back, out of reach of Rory’s bleeding claws as they swung around for a follow up. A moment later, Jonathan heard a pained grunt as Molly’s elbow caught Speedwagon on its way back from swinging the spear, accompanied by another whistling shriek from her as that elbow burned.

Jonathan straightened back up, breathing in and out again. The fizzing warmth around his bones was even weaker than before, and only slightly better in the cuts on his side and across his face. Healing himself wasn’t important right now, though. He took more ripple breaths in and out as fast as he could without ruining the rhythm, burning more precious stamina and sending his chest into ever greater pain in order to build the charge up faster.

Speedwagon was on the floor, clutching his chest and coughing. The chimera’s hands, those belonging to Rory, were both crippled, one missing fingers and the other hanging loosely from the point of the ripple burn Erina had inflicted, but the former was already starting to close up, and new fingers appeared to be budding beneath the skin to replace the ones lost. One of Molly’s hands had its fingers burned away and their stumps cauterized, but the other was only moving a little bit slower than before its elbow burned against Speedwagon. It was using the last of these to swing the spear rapidly in Jonathan and Erina’s directions, while the double-thickness legs stomped their way toward where Speedwagon lay. Erina, face pale and eyes wide with silent terror, moved forward and backward across the tiles, waving her umbrella to keep the monster back while recoiling away from each swing of the spear.

Jonathan concentrated. A breath in, a breath out. A breath in, a breath out. His chest felt ready to explode, or collapse. His ribs and lungs protested each sharp exhalation, and he still wasn’t anywhere near a full charge. Nine tenths of each breath’s worth was stolen away as soon as he took it in, and shunted off to his bleeding face or burning ribs where they barely helped. Was there a way to prevent the body from doing this? For a ripple-user to keep the energy away from their wounds and keep it all for deliberate use? He’d have to ask Erina, if they survived this. As Erina withdrew again from the swinging metal blade, Jonathan lunged into the opening left behind it and raised his arms in front of him. Rory’s half-healed hand rose to block him, but Jonathan chopped downward with his arms to point them straight away from his chest and met that hand with both of his own. Molly let out her loudest scream yet as the spear flew out of her hand and onto the staircase, clattering as it rolled down the steps. Rory’s head thrashed and twisted above hers, the skin covering his mouth bulging and bleeding where fang-tips poked through from beneath. The hand Jonathan had grabbed was gone, pieces of blackened bone falling to the floor amid a cascade of ash and golden embers. He breathed in and out again, and jumped onto the pair of fused bodies, driving one set of fingers into each screaming, wildly bobbing head. A moment later, a collection of half-ruined arms all seized and pushed him at once, sending him flying away again with their combined strength. Jonathan hit the floor hard, ribs combusting and driving his breath away again in a hammer-blow of agony. Once again, the foyer was spinning, and his vision blurred. Through the haze, he heard another whistling scream begin, but then fall away into hollow gurgling, accompanied by the distant crackle of flames.

The shadows and muted colors came back together as he caught his anguished breath, becoming the image of Erina standing over a smoldering, wriggling heap. She was breathing heavily, and it had nothing to do with ripple-to-waves. She had one hand on her mouth, while the other clutched the trembling umbrella at her side. She wasn’t looking away from the writhing, half-burned flesh on the floor. Of course not, that wasn’t her. Her eyes remained open, and locked directly on it, as her shoulders heaved and her hands whitened.

“Eri…” he started to say before coughing on the words, his chest boiling over with red hot pain again. He laid his head back down against the tiles and spent a few more moments just breathing – the normal kind of breathing – before making himself force down and spit out a pair of tiny ripple breaths. “Erina, it’s alright.”

She craned her head over toward him, and away from the fused bodies that were finally still. Her hand was still over her mouth, and her eyes open as if their lids were sewn taut. She shook her head no.

Jonathan remembered the first time he had killed a human being, or what had once been a human being, in the storeroom under that hospital in Brighton. He had gone into the building expecting battle, expecting at least one death either by his own hand or another’s. On top of that, Lamkin and her minions had all been strangers to him, most of them nameless until he read the newspaper coverage.

“Erina…” he repeated, before falling silent again when he realized he had no idea what to say. Finally, he groaned and pushed himself into a sitting position. “Here.” He opened his arms.

She trembled harder for a moment, before dropping her umbrella and falling to her knees in front of him, wrapping her arms around his midsection as gently as she could restrain herself to and sobbing into the crook of his neck. He hugged her back, as if he hoped his encircling arms could still her trembling sobs. I told her I’d protect her when I let her come along, but why did I think I could protect her from what we were actually doing? Is she just upset by the depths of Dio’s cruelty, or shaken because of what she’s just done herself?

He wanted to apologize to her, for bringing her into the horrors, but he knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. He didn’t know what she did want to hear, if there even was such a thing, so he held his tongue and hugged her. On the foyer floor behind her, Speedwagon finished pushing himself up onto his elbows and coughed a few more times before visibly panting. A moment later, he resumed his own inexpert ripple breathing. Jonathan raised one hand off of Erina’s back and beckoned him over. They could heal more efficiently with the little ripple they could charge in this state by doing so together. Speedwagon nodded, his blood-soaked bangs clinging gruesomely to his forehead against the motion, and began working his way over. Jonathan gritted his teeth, and pulled Erina up onto her feet with him so they could close the distance themselves. Erina removed one of her arms from Jonathan long enough to introduce Speedwagon into their embrace, and the three began an almost-synchronized ripple to waves sequence. Jonathan wondered if he was still the one contributing the most raw power to the other two, with the amount of healing he’d had to go through on the ride back and the attacks he had performed since. Were the other two’s chests, even in the wake of Speedwagon catching that spear handle, burning as badly as his own? Had he reached the point where not even the size of his lungs and the fortitude of his nightman heritage could outpace Erina’s practiced technique? The charge warming and tingling around his wounds was present, and the cuts on his face and arms started closing, but it was simply not enough.

“What…do we do now?” Speedwagon managed to whisper between labored ripple breaths.

“I think…you need to run,” Jonathan said.

The other two glared at him, eyes disbelieving as well as pained from their tired lungs and battered ribs.

“I…well…” He paused to breathe a few more cycles. “Without Wamuu, I’m the one who can hold out the longest. And inflict the most. I…I know my house.”

“And you think your chances are better WITHOUT us?” Erina snapped, breaking down into ripple-less panting after barking out the words.

“Our chances…” Jonathan paced his words with breaths “…are awful either way. If we all stay…I think we won’t-”

“MOVE!” Speedwagon interrupted him, coughing in pain after barking out the word as he threw his weight forward into Jonathan and Erina. Startled, Jonathan pitched over backward, Erina with him, when a sharp gasp escaped her lips, her head jerking abruptly to the side. Something sang through the air over Jonathan’s head, and then clattered across the tiles toward the staircase.

Erina’s eyes were closed, and her mouth hanging limply open. There was a patch of skin torn loose from her scalp, and hair missing from all around it, and her head around it was already starting to swell. Another kitchen knife lay on the floor, on its side, where it had skidded to a stop after its hilt grazed Erina’s skull. On the other side of the room, the curtains they’d used to kill the first set of vampires were being held aside, and Dio leered in through one of the windows by the front door.

Dio!” Jonathan growled, blood turning hot and acid filling his throat. On the floor in front of him, Erina was still breathing, but otherwise still. Speedwagon was already getting to his feet, but nearly tripped and fell as he attempted it.

“You should be thanking me, JoJo. She was only interested in the family fortune, I guarantee it.”

Jonathan shrieked so hard he nearly vomited in pain. “YOU MEAN LIKE YOU?”

Dio laughed, shaking his head and throwing his golden hair this way and that before the snowy backdrop. “Not like me at all. You see, I’m alive, and she’s dead or close to it.”

Jonathan and Speedwagon just stared at him. Jonathan didn’t let himself scream or shout. He knew that would just give him more satisfaction. Dio’s grin framed his gleaming, crystalline fangs like a perfectly fitted scaffold around a monochrome painting. He was wearing his best button-down black overcoat, Jonathan could now tell, the one with the cape that had the gaudy feather lining going around the collar and down to the chest, that he only wore to the most lavish events. The ones he gets most excited for.

“Run if you think it’ll help you. Or stay and face me. You still get tired, JoJo, and I don’t. You need to breathe to hurt me, and I don’t. I have a thousand ways to hurt you without a drop of exertion. Run, and I’ll chase you down. Fight, and I’ll crush you. Stay right where you are, and I’ll throw as many knives as it takes to do the job. I’m going to kill you. And you.” He raised a finger and pointed one elongated claw-tip at Speedwagon. “And your father too, JoJo.”

Jonathan leaped to his feet, and rushed toward the window. He was blind to the pain as he breathed in through his mouth and out through his teeth. Another dagger flew toward him, and he knocked it out of the air with his good hand, bruising it and sending the missile spinning away to the side as he flew toward Dio. Just as he was pulling back his arm to stab his fingers into Dio’s face, the latter leaped up out of sight, leaving a cloud of disturbed snow and a mad howl of laughter in his wake. Jonathan’s hand speared out into the frigid night air, but a scrabbling from overhead told him that Dio had already climbed up the wall toward the second story windows.

“Useless!” Dio’s crowing voice, higher and more exultant than Jonathan had ever heard it, echoed down and across the forecourt. “I told you, it’s USELESS! Follow me, or don’t! It doesn’t matter! Nothing you can do will EVER matter now!”

Then there was silence, but for Jonathan and Speedwagon’s furious breathing and the pounding of Jonathan’s own heartbeat in his ears. Erina lay on the floor near the center of the room. Unconscious. Probably concussed, at the very least. Jonathan ran back over to her and knelt down, building his ripple charge back up amid renewed chest pain and laid his fingertips on her scalp around the wound. The bleeding slowed, and after a moment the swelling began to lessen, but she didn’t wake up. Abject terror of a kind he didn’t think he’d ever felt before welled up inside of Jonathan, until Speedwagon’s hand lay itself on his shoulder.

“I’ve seen people get bumped there. Don’t think it broke anything you need to think important things with, at least.” He grinned grimly. “So long as she remembers how to ripple breathe, she can fix everything else, right?”

Jonathan didn’t humor him with so much as a look. Instead, he just craned his eyes back at the windows and door. And then at the terrace above the staircase. And then at the two side doors. He can come from anywhere. He, or whoever and whatever else he’s been creating.

He looked back down at Erina. Laying on the floor, unchanged but for a little less swelling.

“Speedwagon.” He looked back at the windows, and then at the stairs again. “Robert.”

Speedwagon swallowed before speaking. “What, JoJo?”

Jonathan looked at the side doors, and then back at the windows. “Take Erina, and leave. Bring her to Aldershot. Or anywhere.”

“Now wait just a minute there, if you think I’m leaving you-”

“You’re taking her,” Jonathan repeated, now locking his eyes motionlessly on Speedwagon’s, “and you’re leaving.”

Speedwagon started to open his mouth, but then stopped. His own eyes moved down onto Erina’s comatose form, and he shifted in place. His lips stammered, but again no sound came out.

“Is there anything we can ride? Or drive?”

Jonathan shook his head. “You saw that dog. If the horses are still in their stables, you won’t want to go near them.” He thought for a moment. “There’s a couple of farmhouses, about halfway between here and the village. Take her to one of them.”

Speedwagon nodded, and sniffled. His eyes went back to Jonathan’s, and were wider and wetter than before.

“I’ll walk you out the door,” Jonathan continued. “I’ll meet you and her in Aldershot, if I win.”



TO BE CONTINUED ->
 

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Crosspost:

Even being able to see that it was coming and even if we only know most of the victims through Jonathan's narration it was still upsetting to read about Dio's petty evil being visited on the inhabitents of the Jostar mansion.

Power reveals and at the end of the day Dio is a small minded petty tyrant. Even accounting for the personality/mind control ability of the stone masks. If it wasn't for his victims I would feel sorry for Dio rather then scared of him (said with the benefit of not having to face him in combat). As it is I just want him stopped.

Still not much to say about our heroes really. Jonathan keeps stringing Speedwagon along without consiously acknowedging his feelings which is going to come to a head soon I think. For now Erina and Speedwagon have been removed so that Jonathan and Dio can have their (first?) climax undisturbed.
 

Leila Hann

Member
16. Die Young​


Back in through the northern door. The foyer was too open, and had too many entrances. Jonathan would have to avoid spaces like that, or the boiler room. It occurred to him that the latter would be a perfect place for Dio to try to lead him, but then, to lead him anywhere he would have to come within sight again. The next time Jonathan saw his foster brother, he would have to try as hard as possible to make it the last.

He looked out the nearest window, in the direction he had sent Speedwagon carrying Erina over his shoulders. He saw nothing but darkness, snow, and leafless trees. He hoped that they were invisible from the upper floor windows as well, and that no vampire marksman was waiting to shoot them from one of the towers or descend to chase them as soon as they were spotted. He’d walked them as far from the house as he’d dared, but that wasn’t very far.

Turning his head back from the window, he looked back up the hallway away from the foyer. There were the doors to the servant quarters and spare kitchen, and the side staircase leading up to the second floor. Jonathan strained his ears, but heard nothing over his own tired heartbeats and pained breath. Did Dio have a creature watching him at this very moment, peering or listening from somewhere unseen? No way to know. No way to plan around it.

It wouldn’t be like Dio to hide in the servants’ rooms, would it? Jonathan thought as he crept warily toward the base of the stairs. The cellar or boiler room, maybe. But I’m not going where it’s that dark. For the first time that he could remember, he placed a hand on the wall to brace himself as he slowly ascended the stairs. Every bit of breath he could save, he would. The pain in his ribs and side were less piercing than he expected as he climbed each step. The bits of ripple breathing he’d managed over the course of the night were adding up. Not healing his wounds, but at least numbing them enough that he could still fight.

I just need to touch him. He paused and took a few deep, chest-relaxing breaths of winter air before the last few steps. My fingers to his head, and this nightmare ends, just like with Lamkin. I can do this. Visions of rugby match after rugby match, wrestling spar after spar flashed through Jonathan’s memory. Then an earlier memory; thirteen-year-old Dio’s face bruised and bleeding, eyes wide in pain and disbelief, as Jonathan beat him to the ground in the foyer. He was a better fighter than me then, and I still managed. I can do it again.

The thought of how this would have to end, his own brother dead by his hand, no longer gave Jonathan pause. Not after he’d seen Erina fall unconscious and wounded from Dio’s knife. What will Father think, when he learns? How could I ever look him in the eyes again? He climbed the last few steps into the upstairs hallway. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be able to look him in the eye if Dio kills him either.

The part of him that had rebelled at the notion had died at that moment, leaving only a cold, iron-hard determination in its wake.

He placed his foot on the last step below the wooden hallway floor, and a vampiric shriek echoed down the corridor, so close that it would have deafened him had Jonathan not been hardened to them. He shrank back down the staircase, finding something like secure footing and crouching to leap forward or drop down as needed. His lungs only had time to protest two sharp ripple inhalations and one painful exhalation before his opponent scrabbled into view around the corner. The sleek, black and tawny body of a German shepherd slid across the smooth floorboards as it turned a hair’s breadth too slow, and Jonathan - crouched on the steps as he was - came face to face with the new assistant gardener his father had hired for Kingston. Dark brown hair, hanging long past his chin. A small, razorlike nose. Eyes wide and glowing, and mouth gaping to reveal the new rows of crystalline spikes.

The other halves. Jonathan choked as the abomination straight out of Greek myth let out another monstrous, piercing shriek. The man’s head and the dog’s body!

The world around him frozen in a mad fugue, Jonathan tried to remember the sharp-nosed man’s name. He had spoken it at least once. He had spoken to him, at least once. It had started with a W, he thought. William, perhaps, or Walter. Had there been an L in it somewhere, too? Wallace?

“HERE!” The distended mouth shrieked, the man’s country accent distorted into a high pitched wheeze as the dog’s chest worked itself deliberately. “I FOUND HIM! HE’S HERE!” The syllables rose and fell in a ululating rhythm, too loud and too quiet all at once.

It definitely had an L in it. Probably two syllables. Jonathan brought his hands together around the half-healed human neck as the chimera pounced. It was faster than a rugby ball, but slower than Musgrave. Jonathan tried to remember if it hadn’t been a nickname he’d met the man under, as he sidestepped the momentum of the creature’s charge with his fingers grasping its neck, lifting it off its paws and swinging it around over the descending steps around his body with its own force. Willy? Wally? The possible names Jonathan spoke in his mind didn’t quite drown out the pulsing, whistling scream as he continued his ripple breathing and averted his eyes, or distract from the burning head between his hands.

He could hear nothing over the screaming, the crackling flames, and his own ripple-breathing, but Jonathan’s aching feet saved him as he felt the tremors of another footstep coming down the hall. For want of weapons or free hands, Jonathan gave up his ripple breathing with a roar of exertion and swung the burning chimera back around himself, slamming the burning, struggling, wreck into the newcomer before they could round the corner. There was a surprised hiss, and then a thump as a human body crashed to the floor with the half-disintegrated chimera on top of it. A moment later, another whistling scream as whatever final ripples of the sun still in the burning monster made their way into the vampire under it.

Jonathan nearly fell down as he lurched up into the hallway. He couldn’t resume ripple-to-waves. Not after that last effort. Not with his chest exploding with pain and the enclosed hallway air foul with the sting of burning hair and flesh. He saw a woman, a bit older than himself or Erina, throwing the thrashing dog with the burned-away human skull dangling from its smoking neck off of her. The white dress she wore, now stained with ash and scratched by canine claws, was unfamiliar, as were her broad face and short, chestnut hair. Before she could push herself up into a sitting position, Jonathan had forced his aching body up to the slightly burned vampire.

There had been moments, throughout the last two or three years of his life, when Jonathan Joestar looked back on something he had just done and wondered how he could have done it. Often, he didn’t even notice he had until someone else pointed it out to him. The street sign he had torn out of the pavement and driven back into it through Eliza’s body was the most recent. There was always a sense of disconnection, that Jonathan felt, looking back at the feats he performed while lost in the moment and heedless of his own limits and expectations. This time, he did it deliberately. Filling his mind with the memory of Wamuu standing over Aaron’s crushed body, Jonathan bent down and grabbed the remains of the dog-thing, still flaming and wriggling, and jammed it back down into her rising torso, pinning her to the ground with it. Before she could pry her arms free again, he stood back up and kicked her head backward, recoiling at the pain as his toes struck her hardened flesh, and then raised his boot and brought it down absolutely as hard as he could on the woman’s exposed neck.

The crunch of bone and the spray of lukewarm gel wasn’t as bad as what Wamuu had done to the Whitechapel killer’s skull. But Jonathan knew that it would still haunt him for the rest of his days, assuming he had any remaining.

He stumbled forward, trying to imagine that it was just mud or slush his right foot was slipping on, as the woman’s headless body thrashed and clawed wildly and the canine body finally stopped smoking. Before him, the green paper of the hallway walls formed a straight passage to the bannister, where Dio had stood just a few minutes ago. Behind him were the doors to a pair of spare bedroom suites, and the empty trophy room that his father had always said he’d collect some heads for once he made it to Africa. Perhaps it would be best to take refuge in one of those rooms, and recover his breath by the open window until he could build at least a little more of a ripple charge? Or should he risk advancing to the bannister, and brave the open foyer to retrieve a weapon from one of the armor suits? He should have picked up that spear again when he came back in, but he’d feared the visibility of the front entrance.

The sound of footsteps from up ahead shook Jonathan out of his inaction. He looked left and then right, trying to decide which door - if either - he should hide beyond. Before he could decide, Dio’s voice boomed out from around the corner on the bannister up ahead.

“That sound had better not be you killing him, you cheap cow!” A door flung itself open, and the voice grew louder. “I did make myself clear that you were to wait for-”

Dio stopped in place as he emerged from the door leading deeper into the house’s upper floor, eyes gleaming across the dark corridor from above his feathered collar. Jonathan bent his knees and took in as deep a breath as his chest could handle, ready to dive in whatever direction the hallway’s limited space allowed if Dio threw something. Dio’s expression was hidden by the shadows, but Jonathan saw the glassy eyes widen.

“Why JoJo, you absolute savage!” He laughed, raising a hand to his richly buttoned chest. “It’s hardly an elegant job you’ve done, but perhaps I still owed you more credit!”

Jonathan kept breathing, eyes locked on the cackling silhouette. Dio’s wild hair swished around his neck as he shook his head, and spoke again.

“I never thought I’d see the day that you would set a dog on fire, I must say.”

Another long repressed image churned forth from Jonathan’s memory, and he felt his lips pull back and his teeth bare themselves in a snarl. “So you’re not even denying that anymore?”

Dio’s shoulders rose. “Deny what?” He affected the most insincere faux-innocent tone Jonathan had ever heard him use. “I was just remembering how distraught you were after what happened to Denny.”

Danny!” Jonathan growled. His face was going hot again, his fingers curling back into fists.

“Whatever.”

Jonathan didn’t have the energy to lunge so far, or the speed to connect before Dio could withdraw. The burning rage that coursed through him as the image of Erina, concussed and laying on the foyer floor, was joined by yet another from his childhood was overwhelming, but Jonathan forced it down. He kept his eyes on Dio’s, and his voice flat and controlled.

“Well, Dio? Are you going to approach me?”

Dio’s unkempt head cocked a little to one side, and the glimmering eyes narrowed. “I’m in no hurry.”

“Of course not,” Jonathan replied, “you need your puppets to do the fighting for you. As always.”

The glassy eyes narrowed even further, piercing into Jonathan like cold spearheads. He bent his knees lower, ready for the attack.

“You have the nerve,” Dio said, his voice louder and harsher than it had been a moment ago, “ to speak to me this way when you have never had to do anything for yourself in your entire life!”

“I was lucky,” Jonathan admitted, lowering his head as he let another breath out, “I never had to. But what’s your excuse?”

Dio scoffed, raising his chin. Jonathan didn’t move, or blink. When Dio took a long moment to respond, Jonathan took the opportunity for himself. “Send more people for me to fight, then. Go ahead.”

Dio’s voice was quieter when he responded. Angrier. “Every vampire I turn is through my own power. They are me, now.”

“You don’t sound very sure of yourself.”

It almost worked. For a moment, Dio’s knees bent and his arms began rising in front of him. Jonathan, forcing his body into compliance, took a deep breath in through his mouth, and pushed it out sharply between his teeth.

Then, almost faster than Jonathan’s eyes could keep up with, Dio had turned back around the corner and disappeared deeper into the house. “Nice try, JoJo.” His voice echoed behind him.

Jonathan grabbed his burning chest as he relaxed his lungs, letting normal, oxygenating breaths move in through mouth and nostrils alike. Had he succeeded, there, or failed? Could he have built up enough ripple to land a killing blow in the second it would have taken for Dio to be upon him? How fatal a mistake had he nearly made?

No, Jonathan steeled himself, that wasn’t just a failed baiting attempt. That was informative. However the mask’s changed him, he’s still Dio. He still has those tender spots that he can’t quite cover.

He continued his breathing as he advanced, slowly, toward the banister.

He’s not going to let me get close until he knows I’m too exhausted to harm him. But I don’t need to get close to him. I just need to get to his mask. Dio had carried Jonathan’s old mask, the one his mother had left him, when he came out to greet them. It wasn’t likely he’d had room on his person for both, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to risk mixing them up. More likely than not, he wasn’t carrying his own mask around with him by habit. He had it hidden somewhere.

He’s still at least mostly himself, and he’s hidden his mask. Where would Dio hide something?

The thought of the boiler room and root cellars that he’d hoped to avoid came back to him. Dark even in daylight. Well protected from invaders. But also exactly where you’d expect a vampire to hide its treasures. Dio never liked being predictable. Always resented falling into others’ expectations, for better or worse.

More than that, Dio hates the cellars. The dirt and stuffiness of places like that always annoyed him.

Not the cellars, or boiler room. Not the servants’ quarters, laundry, or storerooms, either.

His bedroom.

Of course. The perfectly arranged and scrupulously locked boxes and safes. The door that he always kept locked, and the curtains nearly always drawn. When he wasn’t reading in the foyer, or exercising on the grounds, that was where he spent nearly all of his time at home.

That would be around the corner on the terrace and up the central hallway. Exactly the direction Dio had gone in.

Jonathan moved forward. One hand on his chest, to ease the pain of his breathing. The other at his side, ready to defend himself. As he exited the protection of the hallway and looked out over the dark foyer with its broken and charred contents spread across the tiles, he prepared to throw himself to the floor to escape a hail of projectiles. However, there were none. The empty space with its soot-covered curtains and broken two-story windows was as lifeless as he and the others had left it. He crept up to the central hallway, and peered around the corner; here, too, there was nothing but wallpaper, closed doorways, and darkness.

Was that woman the one we heard screaming for help? Jonathan thought, looking back the way he had come at the two corpses before the staircase that had finally stopped twitching. There had been no mutations that Jonathan could see. No parts of other bodies twisted into her own. Did that mean that Dio had turned her in a hurry, just minutes before? No. Kingston the gardener looked himself, aside from the fangs and glowing eyes. That woman could have been turned any time since Dio put on his new mask. The one calling for help could still be alive somewhere.

He finally turned his back to the bannister, and started down the central hallway. Had it always been this dark and drafty, inside this corridor at night? He’d walked through it thousands of times before, but until this moment he’d never realized just how long it was. Why did we ever need half this much space? Or even a quarter of it? An instant later, he felt a different kind of chill as he realized how wrong the word “we” even felt.

This wasn’t his house. It looked exactly like the home he had known. The wallpaper, the carpeting, the curtains, they were identical to the last thread. But it wasn’t his own. This was a cold, empty fortress, full of thick darkness that always filled back in as soon as he turned his head away. Unnatural, uncanny, and utterly hostile.

He followed the hall to the T-shaped intersection at its end, and made the left to his and Dio’s bedrooms. A sour, coppery smell assaulted his nostrils through the frigid air. He looked down, and saw the pooled blood. The side hallway was nearly covered in it, tracked and splattered up and down and under at least half of the doorways by dozens of foot and paw prints.

He was always so particular about cleanliness, Jonathan thought as he steeled his eyes and nostrils. Either the mask had robbed him of that, or it had changed him so that blood and carnage were no longer impurities to him.

As he’d expected, the thickest pooling of blood, which all the other tracks seemed to have dragged it from, was from beneath Dio’s bedroom door. Jonathan stepped forward, and took his hand off of his chest to try the doorknob. It was locked, unsurprisingly.

He took a moment, with the cold metal under his hand, to grimly amuse himself with the irony. How many times had he wished he could do this, back in his early teens? Banishing those distracting thoughts from his head, he released the doorknob, took a step back, and kicked the wooden door off its hinges with an echoing crack. The noise was sure to alert every remaining enemy in the building to his location, but Jonathan had no other options.

Dio’s bedroom was exactly as it had been during Jonathan’s last visit earlier that month, save for the half-frozen blood pooled all across the floor. The drapes fastidiously drawn. The locked boxes and pocket-safes arranged neatly on the desk, alongside the perfectly rectangular stacks of blank and used writing papers. The clothes closet and bureau were likewise closed perfectly shut. The bed, aside from part of the sheet being stained with blood, was only slightly less organized than before.

Jonathan put his hands together, warming his fingers in their own grip. It had been several minutes since he’d last done any ripple breathing, and he was beginning to feel the chill turning to numbness in his finger and toe tips. He looked from the desk shelves to the closet to the blood-covered floor under the bed. Where would he be most likely to hide it?

His first action was to step through the slick puddles covering the floor and use his slightly warmed fingers to light the oil lamp on Dio’s desk. The darkness retreated behind the furniture, turning the black blood into dark brownish red. Jonathan turned to the closet, and pulled it open. Inside, Dio’s collection of coats, jackets, and cloaks hung on their hooks, and several pairs of shoes and slippers sat in neat rows beneath them. No pocket or pouch bore any suspicious bulge. Jonathan took hold of the thickest dark purple cloak and pressed his hands through it, to see if its volume concealed anything, but he felt nothing larger than its buttons and clasps. Pushing the hanging cloth aside, he inspected the back corners, behind the shoes. There was nothing.

He turned around to look inside the desk drawers next. It would be best to eliminate them first, before covering himself in frigid blood by inspecting under the bed. The loud shattering of glass and a furious, wild motion out of the corner of his eye stopped him in place, as something came thrashing out from behind the window drapes and toward his face.

Jonathan brought his fist up and around, slamming it into the object before it could reach his head. There was a familiar, painful resistance beneath his knuckles as they struck vampiric flesh and bone, and the dark, thrashing thing went flying into the bedroom wall, releasing a shriek so high pitched he could barely hear it. The next creature, flying right in the first one’s wake, latched onto Jonathan’s extended forearm and tore through sleeve, skin, and flesh.

Gasping in pain, Jonathan brought his right arm close again and used his left to grab the black, furry body that was ripping and clawing at him. He actually had to stifle a cry of pain as its teeth ripped out a little chunk of skin and meat when he pulled it off, a rivulet of his own blood pouring out in its wake to mix with the older pool on the floor. In his left hand, the bat turned its long-eared head around to snap at his thumb, drawing another oozing, crimson line in his skin and nearly making him release the tiny monster. Grimacing in both pain and disgust, he shut out the agony in his ravaged right forearm and brought that fist back into the thing in his left hand. Tiny bones crunched, and membranous wings tore. He threw the screaming, mangled animal to the floor, and turned around as he saw the first bat that he had thrown against the wall rise into the air again. Jonathan took a deep, chest-burning breath into the bottom of his lungs, and pushed it out sharply between his teeth as he intercepted the bat with his fingertips. It fell to the floor again, screaming and smoking. There was no visible flash of yellow flame, but he could see the black fur on its head and neck curling as if by heat. Still reeling from the pain of that ripple breath, and conscious of the blood pouring from his arm, he raised his leg and stomped on the bat, cracking the wood under it. When its fellow came crawling, weakly, on its own remaining wing toward his feet, Jonathan repeated the process. This time though, the force of his own stomp shook his other foot on the blood-slick floor, and Jonathan lost his balance. He tried to catch the floor with his hands, but his right arm rebelled, and his body fell to the blood-covered wood, jarring his half-mended ribs and setting them on fire. This time, he cried out. He couldn’t help it. His eyes watered. The room spun.

There was a tapping coming from the window, Jonathan heard through the haze of pain. No, a scrabbling. As of something climbing the outside of the wall. Something much larger than a bat.

No.

Gritting his teeth, allowing himself to whimper in pain, Jonathan dragged his hands onto the floor on either side of him and rode out the white hot flash of pain as he pushed himself upward. His face and body were all covered in blood. His own, whoever’s was covering the floor, and the bit of tarry ichor that had come from the bats. He crawled on his knees, panting with each leg movement, to the wall beside the window, and watched both the flying drapes playing in the wind from the broken pane, and the door he’d left open when he came in. If he could escape notice for even half a minute, for just a few more seconds, he could just maybe start to build some small amount of ripple charge.

He’s going to kill me. Jonathan realized. He felt his determination slowly dripping away, just like the blood from his lacerated arm. I can’t run, like this. I can’t fight him, like this. When he shows himself again, he will kill me. He saw his father’s sad, disappointed expression from his last hospital visit. He would be getting another visitor, tomorrow on Christmas Eve. He would be killed, at best. At worst...Jonathan shook his head, trying to convince himself that Dio wouldn’t reanimate his father as one of his slaves, wouldn’t twist his body and fuse it with others to endure untold years of torment, wouldn’t survive long enough to retreat under the ocean and bring him with him to suffer for all eternity. Would Erina escape? Would Speedwagon?

“JoJo?” Speedwagon panted from the broken window. “JoJo, are you in here?”

Jonathan gasped, raising his head higher. Was this a trick? Could Dio have found a way of imitating voices, or deceiving the senses? The next possibility that occurred to him, and that weighed him down more heavily than any amount of exhaustion and blood loss, was that Speedwagon and Erina’s escape had been cut short, and that the creature at the window was no longer the man Jonathan knew. Jonathan tried to take in a ripple breath, but coughed on it. The scarred, long-haired face in the window still had bloodied bandages around its forehead, but that could still be part of the deception.

“Speedwagon?” Jonathan whispered. He didn’t know what he was asking, exactly.

“Aye. I left Erina with the neighbors and borrowed their horse. I hoped I had the right room when I saw the light on.” Speedwagon’s head turned this way and that, and leaned further inside the window. Finally, his searching eyes found Jonathan crouched against the wall beside it. “Holy...JoJo!”

This time, when Speedwagon spoke more loudly and faced him, Jonathan saw the cloud of white steam escaping with his breath in the lamplight. The heat of his body, clear as day. Jonathan let out a deep sigh of relief and let his arms relax, wincing as he did so at the pain in his right shoulder and the tightening agony in that same forearm. “You shouldn’t have come back,” Jonathan said.

“Like hell I shouldn’t have! You look near as dead as the bloody vampires!”

Jonathan started the laborious process of rising to his feet, but Speedwagon had hauled his grunting way inside the window. He was panting, but not nearly as badly as Jonathan had expected, and while his clothes were tattered and soaked in snowmelt and half-dried blood, he was moving nimbly. Without regard for the thick, sanguine mixture that Jonathan was soaked in nearly from head to toe, Speedwagon knelt beside him and wrapped his arms around Jonathan’s burning chest, pressing his fingers against any exposed skin they could find and clutching. The heat of him took Jonathan’s breath away just as he was starting to recover it. He hadn’t even realized how cold he was getting, covered as he was in wet blood in the frigid december night air. Had he been shivering? He wanted to warn Speedwagon away, to tell him that more monsters could descend at any moment, that Dio himself was most likely on his way back at this moment, but he couldn’t bear to make that warmth go away.

Speedwagon started his ripple-to-waves pattern, or as close as he could come to the proper rhythm. Jonathan closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and breathed with him. Matching deep inhalations, and guiding Speedwagon’s own sharp exhalations with his own more carefully timed example. Their chests pushed out against each other, and then pulled sharply back, over and over again like the walls of a single, beating heart. As Speedwagon’s skin turned from warm to hot, the tingling electricity of the ripple resurged deep within Jonathan. The pain he was inflicting on his own lungs and ribs shrank back from Speedwagon’s own infusion of ripple, and for a moment Jonathan almost didn’t feel the pain. His chest was just awash with buzzing, fizzing static, and his mangled arm and shoulder likewise. He raised his good, left arm, and wrapped it around Speedwagon’s back, pulling him closer every time they breathed out, to keep the heat and lightning against his own front.

It didn’t last long. Speedwagon broke the pattern, and started panting and wheezing, his body temperature quickly falling back to where it had started. Afraid of the pain returning to his exhausted lungs if they tried to work on their own power, Jonathan stopped as well. He tilted his head back down, and looked into Speedwagon’s haggard face as the man recovered from his wheezing fit. He couldn’t smell his breath over the old blood and foul ichor that covered the floor, but he felt it washing over his face and neck.

“Is Erina alright?” Jonathan asked. Speaking hurt much less than it had a minute ago.

“She’s not up yet,” Speedwagon replied, clutching his own chest now, “but she’s not getting worse. They’re taking care of her. Think we can finish this in time for them not to notice the missing horse?”

Jonathan looked down at his right arm. The scratches were thinner and shallower than they’d been, but they were still open and bloody, and the crater of missing flesh that the bat’s teeth had torn out still oozed a fresh red. The pain of the wounds was returning, as the fizzing of the ripple in them died back down. Soon, he knew, the damp, biting chill would return as well.

“No.” Jonathan shook his head. “We can’t.”

Speedwagon grimaced. His long, pale hair hanging down over his blood-streaked and bandaged face. “Then what?”

Jonathan looked over his shoulders, around the room. The birch floorboards with their beeswax varnish, covered and soaked through between their cracks with blood. The dark crevices, too many and too deep, each potentially bearing a hidden mask, or a waiting horror. The dozens of locked boxes and safes, stacked up and secure beneath the wallpaper and across from the tattered drapes.

“You’ll have to leave again, Speedwagon.”

The other man’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Why? Why do you insist on doing this alone?”

Jonathan swallowed, and spoke again. “He’s too fast. He has too many monsters. There’s too many places he could have hidden his mask.” The truth of those words struck Jonathan with its extent only after he had uttered them. Dio must have been expecting him to look for his mask. Expected Jonathan to try to think like himself, and search the likeliest hiding places. The mask wouldn’t be in Dio’s room, or any other favorite haunt of his, at least for tonight. It could be hidden in a dustbin in one of the servant rooms. Or tucked behind a randomly chosen stack of books in the library. Or buried in the snow under one of the hedges just outside. He’d underestimated his foster brother, once again. “I told you already. If we both stay, we both die, and I don’t… I don’t want you to…”

He had a thought then. One that, if his mind had anything else to think about, he’d have dismissed on reflex without even noticing he’d had it. He felt the sandy, weathered texture of Speedwagon’s warm fingers still wrapped around his arm and chest. Saw the begging, desperate light in Speedwagon’s bright brown eyes, and knew he owed him a thousand apologies, for the things he thought he could wait until he had more time to say, until he was absolutely sure, until whatever excuse he could think of magically made itself come true. He didn’t know what to start with. What he could even get out in this moment. Words were suddenly failing him.

Sitting up straighter, Jonathan tightened his grip around Speedwagon’s body and pulled his head forward, pushing their lips together. Speedwagon’s eyes opened wider, surprised and perhaps confused, but he made no resistance. His lips were rougher than Erina’s, taking Jonathan slightly aback. He started to play at them with his own, guiding them just the smallest fraction of an inch open, before the unfamiliar texture unnerved him and he pulled his face back again.

As Speedwagon blinked at him, mouth opening and closing as if he were torn between choices of words, Jonathan wondered if he should try that again now that he knew what to expect. It wasn’t like kissing Erina, but the way it made his lips tingle was similar enough for him to know it wasn’t just a spur of the moment that led him to do it. For a second, he felt a jolt of hesitation inside of him when Speedwagon brought his face forward again, but he held it down and opened his mouth as he brought it to meet Speedwagon’s own lips. He kept his tongue between his teeth, meeting Speedwagon’s and rasping against it. His head turned to the side, adjusting the angle, as they squeezed each other tighter. Exhausted, battered, and covered in blood, they kissed until Jonathan knew they could risk waiting no longer. Speedwagon was panting as Jonathan pulled his lips back. Jonathan felt his fingers twitch indecisively on his shoulder and side. More reluctantly than he expected to be, Jonathan pushed Speedwagon a few inches away to give himself room to rise.

“Please, listen to me. You need to leave again.” Jonathan groaned as he shifted his feet under himself, and let go of Speedwagon to brace himself against the wall as he stood. As Speedwagon, still flushed and wide eyed, backed off to give him more space, Jonathan finished standing up and then walked across the room, passing the crushed bats in their nests of cratered floorboard, and returned to the desk. “I’m going to make him come to me.”

Speedwagon started to ask one question, but stopped to change course when he saw Jonathan pick up the kerosene lamp he had lit from the desk and hold it next to the wall.

“JoJo, what are you doing?”

“Dio wants this house,” Jonathan said, growing more sure of himself with every syllable, “and he’ll fight for it. I just need to make him come close.” He let out a low, tired sigh. He still felt the pain in his arm and chest, even if it was more manageable now. “I’ll try to come out of here. You…” Jonathan felt twin stabbing pricks in his eyes, as a hotter liquid welled up from their corners. “...go and be with Erina. Be safe. And… please take care of each other.”

Speedwagon bounded up to him again. “I’ll do my best for Erina, but that doesn’t mean you need to go on a suicide mission! Now come off it, let’s get-”

Jonathan turned his head away from Speedwagon’s. As much as he wanted to turn his back to it all and run away with him, start a new life in London or wherever the three of them would go, He couldn’t let himself doubt this. He couldn’t waste any more time than they already had, and he couldn’t allow himself to let Dio escape. Any hesitation would lead to more people dying. With a tightening of his jaw and a flick of his arm, he threw the lamp against the inside wall, just above the part of Dio’s bed that was driest and furthest from the bloodsoaked floor. The glass shattered, and with the stench of kerosene and the soft rumble of a rising flame, the sheets and the wallpaper above them were alight.

The heat washed over Jonathan, harsher than Speedwagon’s. Cold, oxygen-rich air swept in through the broken window, lifting the curtains and feeding itself into the blaze. Already, the sheets were turning black and the wallpaper curling off of the wooden wall panels, and the kerosene’s molten light had spread beneath the bed where it floated atop the slushy blood. As the heat played against his skin, as if trying to scour away the covering of blood and ichor, the deep dark shadows between the furniture turned into a churning chaos of flickering reflections.

“JOJO!” Speedwagon screamed, jumping back from the bed so quickly he nearly slipped and fell himself.

“You should start climbing down again, Robert.” Jonathan felt an unbidden, perverse touch of a smile pull up at his lips, even as his eyes continued to dampen. “He’ll see the light soon, and he must have heard that.” He took Speedwagon’s hand and squeezed it. Speedwagon’s other hand came over, and clutched his own as well. Looking into his horrified face, Jonathan felt more words come to his throat, but he couldn’t say them. Instead, he released Speedwagon’s hand and pushed him toward the window, forcing him to release his own grip.

“JOJO!” Speedwagon screamed his name again, even louder, and longer. “YOU CAN’T DO THIS! NOT AFTER WAMUU!”

As the flames climbed to the ceiling and began flattening and spreading across it, he turned to the door and walked back out into the hall.

“I can’t do anything else, either.”

Flaming kerosene flowed out from under the bed, forming a layer of fire atop the slushy ichor. The underside of the bed itself began to catch, flames licking upward around the corner to catch on the bloodier part of the sheets and blankets. The wall and ceiling continued to burn.

“We’ll be waiting!” Speedwagon said, almost shouting. “We’ll wait for you there!”

“Thank you. Now, please, you’d better start climbing. It’s too dangerous to go out the door.”

…​

Jonathan heard another very high, almost inaudible, whistling shriek from behind Dio’s bedroom door accompany the growing crackle of the flames. Standing out in the hallway, feeling the heat from the door intensify and watching the smoke pour out from the crack above it, Jonathan ended his lungs’ merciful relaxation and began ripple-to-waves. When the window at the end of the hallway shattered and a smoking, flapping thing charged through the air toward him, he was ready. He raised his less injured left arm and brought it down sharply, extending the two middle fingers to stab the bat with its own incoming momentum. It didn’t have time to whistle out another shriek before yellow flames engulfed it and it crumbled to the floorboards at his feet.

He must be in the attic, if he’s finding so many bats, Jonathan thought as he stopped his ripple breathing, clutching his chest with both hands, including the one with the bunched up fabric in its bloodied grip, as his lungs and ribs rebelled at having been put back to work again.

Even through the closed door, the smell of burning cloth and paper began to sting at his nostrils. He moved back toward the front, looking back and forth between the corner around which the staircases leading up to the loft and down to the foyer could be found, and the broken window that the bat had just come through. The air grew fresher again, free from the stink of fire and blood as he put distance between himself and Dio’s room. Then he heard the heavy footsteps from around the corner, and began fighting his screaming ribs into ripple-to-waves again.

“Are you burning something, JoJo?” Dio’s voice called out from around the corner, getting louder with each syllable. “What are you trying to do? Burn your own house down?”

My house? When did it stop being only yours and become mine again? Jonathan was tempted to call back, but he couldn’t afford to stop his ripple breathing. Speaking between ripple breaths was a challenge even at the best of times. He could ill afford to waste pain and energy on it now. Instead, he just breathed more intensely, his eyes tearing up again at what he was doing to his chest. He tottered, but managed to tiptoe a little closer to the intersection.

“Do you really think I can’t hear you, idiot? Your useless breathing trick would give you away from across the house!” The voice was from just around the corner now, and no longer getting louder. Jonathan was just inside the corridor himself now, breathing mightily and painfully as he stared into the wider hallway it intersected with, and which Dio had just walked down. Jonathan still didn’t answer, and didn’t stop breathing.

Yes, Dio, you know I’m here. But that doesn’t help you get through me, does it?

“Are you trying to destroy the entire house? How do you think that’s going to help you?” Dio’s voice grew louder, angrier. Jonathan still didn’t answer.

“JOJO!” Dio’s composure finally broke, and he roared, Jonathan heard him claw at the wall just inside the corner, either in wild frustration or the beginning of a climb. Just close enough. Just near enough. Jonathan raised his tingling, fizzing right arm and flung the tiny jewelry box tied up in carmine-dyed fabric around the corner. At the same moment, he extended the left arm that held the other end of the long strip he’d torn off the window drape away from his chest, and pushed out his final ripple breath.

The improvised flail struck home, and Jonathan felt a strange feedback in the tingling energy of the cloth. Barely half a second later, there came the horrifying sound of a familiar voice twisted into the whistling shriek of a vampire in pain.

Jonathan didn’t dare to hope that that had done the job. He was still at a fraction of his usual strength, and he didn’t know where or how much the cloth had struck Dio. But the chilling, ear-stabbing scream invigorated him. If I hurt him, then I can kill him. The pang of guilt that shot through Jonathan when he heard himself think those words shook him, but not as much as it would have yesterday.

Jonathan started to round the corner, building the ripple back up in his body for what he hoped would be a final lunge. Before he could though, there was a mighty crunching sound, followed by the clatter of bits of wood and plaster falling to the floor. Jonathan started to fall back into the hallway, unsure of what he was hearing, but then he heard Dio’s footsteps stomping past him through the row of bedrooms. It wasn’t until he cautiously poked his head around the corner and saw the gaping hole punched into the wall that Jonathan realized what had happened. Through the hole Dio had torn through the wood and brick, smoke was pouring, and flickering orange light fell out across the main hallway. Dio stood within the blaze, the blood pooled around his feet and the twirling orange flames licking and dancing all around him, catching on his feathery coat and burning it as well. One of Dio’s hands clutched his left side, toward which he seemed to be limping. With his other arm and leg, however, he was sliding himself along the walls. Smothering the fire with his own body, even as it caught on his clothing. Amazingly, it seemed to be working; the flames were gone from the part of the wall he’d already worked along, and as his body moved further the orange lights grew fewer and dimmer.

His back was to Jonathan. This was his chance.

Jonathan steeled himself, and rushed forward into the burning room. A moment after he did, he realized his mistake. The smoke bit into his eyes, making them water and blink. His ripple-to-waves collapsed, and he let out a choking cough when his gasp of pain took in the hot smoke and acrid fumes. There was still an electric tingle left in his body, though, and even lumbering forward half-blind into the heat he could still raise his arm and bring it downward, middle two fingers shooting outward. He couldn’t see Dio through the smoke and tears, and he could only barely feel his fingers strike home over the burning heat searing every inch of Jonathan’s body, but he heard the second screaming whistle of pain, and then another explosion of shattering timbers and bricks.

He was blind, and blisteringly hot. But those discomforts didn’t compare to the agony he felt as his right sleeve caught fire, and his skin and sinew burned.

Gasping in pain, Jonathan had no option but to throw himself backward out the way he had come, his body striking the blood-slick floorboards and rolling. His skin still felt like it had been cooked, and his arm was screaming in a kind of pain that not even his chest had been before Speedwagon’s return, but his next lungful of air was cool and free of smoke. When he pried his singed eyelashes apart and blinked out the blood and tears, he saw the demolished wall in front of him, the bits of broken wood and wallpaper scattered on the bloody floor just before his face. The fire was still roaring, smoke pouring out of the breach, and Dio was nowhere to be seen.

As Jonathan pushed himself off the floor, grimacing as his burned skin chafed against his own clothing, a shower of burning wood and plaster fell from the ceiling in Dio’s room, scattering across the orange-lit and ichor-covered floor. With room to grow, the flames loomed brighter, and their dance grew more energetic.

The ceiling, Jonathan realized, an instant before he heard the scrabbling sounds from overhead. The ceiling was already half burned through, and he broke through it to escape.

From above, he heard Dio roar his nickname, followed by something else he couldn’t distinguish over the crackling flames and the roar of his own bloodstream. Back on his feet, and checking his arm to make sure he wasn’t still on fire, Jonathan backed away from the smoking, glaring breach. The sleeve covering of his upper right arm was black and flaking, and beneath it he knew the skin was likely the same way. Ripple-healing took longer with burns than it did with other injuries, he knew. The recovery would not be easy, or quick. Or painless. He tore his attention away from the new injury and toward the ceiling overhead when he heard more sounds. Rushing water, from one tap and then another. The upstairs bathroom! Dio must have been filling every vessel and container he could carry to douse the growing flames!

And if it was just Dio himself doing so, then Jonathan really had exhausted his supply of prisoners. Whoever had been screaming for help before, she was no longer in any condition to receive it.

That reality brought a new sting to Jonathan’s eyes. Another life destroyed, while I was just a few rooms away.

Putting the smoke and noxious vapors behind him, Jonathan went back up the hall and started climbing the stairs to the top floor. Halfway up he stopped, forcing three more ripple breaths through his system and clinging to the comforting tingle in his arm and across the skin of his face and hands. It wouldn’t last long, but any relief from the burning sting, however momentary, would help him forward. When he reached the top and braced himself against the doorframe, the smell of smoke returned to his nostrils. Weaker than it had been in the hall outside of Dio’s room, but present, and growing. Judging from the sounds he heard, the taps were still running.

Jonathan started moving toward the smoke cloud billowing out from the door to the attic storeroom, going back into a labored ripple-to-waves for what he hoped would be the final exchange of blows. He stopped when the door opposite it flew open and a ragged, charred figure that he nearly didn’t recognize as Dio flew out. His coat was gone, burned down to a few blackened threads that hung, smoking, around Dio’s bare shoulders and chest. His hair had changed from golden blonde to soot gray, and blazing green eyes and ivory fangs flashed out from his ash-covered face. In each hand, he was carrying a bucket overflowing with water.

When Jonathan leaped forward, fingers outstretched, Dio swung his own right arm and hurled the heavy, overfull bucket in the exact opposite direction. The wood smashed into Jonathan’s face, cracking and splintering along with the cartilage of his nose and ripping apart his skin, water splashing all over and around him. A cry came to Jonathan’s lips, but it escaped as a wet gurgle as his head snapped back and his body slammed to the floorboards above the staircase. Had it not been for the ripple already thrumming through his body when the bucket connected, Jonathan knew that he would be unconscious, and that Dio’s fangs would have been upon him a moment later...if the impact didn’t kill him on its own. His eyes were swelling shut, though the ripple fizzing and warming around them slowed the process. There was a sharply cold pain across his face, as winter air and frigid water touched the flesh that was normally covered by skin.

“I TOLD YOU,” Dio’s roar echoed above the running water and crackling flames, “FIGHTING IS USELESS! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO PROVE, JOJO? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH?”

He heard water sloshing, as if the other bucket were being raised for a throw with vampiric strength behind it. Blinded by his own blood and head spinning too fast for him to stand up, Jonathan knew that he would not survive this one if it landed. Erina, Speedwagon, and his father’s faces flashed before his watery eyes. Wamuu’s tiny, distant silhouette, dueling desperately against the demon of crimson hair and leathery sinew to allow their escape.

He blew out his last ripple breath, making his torn upper lip flap with the escaping air, and brought his arms down on either side, stopping his fingertips just as they wetted themselves against the water covering the floor. All around him, the puddle rippled and vibrated as the flow of power spread through the liquid. A short, sharp whistle of pain came from Dio’s direction, and then two loud thuds and more water splashing against Jonathan’s legs as vampire and bucket fell to the floor side by side.

“What…”

Jonathan managed to croak out the word as he sat back up. His face was burning with pain and ripple, mixed too deeply for the sensations to even be separable. His vision was still blurry, and the pain in his neck nearly brought him back down when he raised his head, but he kept his eyes forward. Dio was back on his knees, smoke curling upward from the soles of his soaked-through shoes. His entire mouthful of fangs on display as he grimaced.

“...what are you...trying to prove?”

Jonathan gritted his teeth as he put his least injured arm to the floor, pushing himself up and then staggering back down to his knees. Blood trickled down his front, gushing from his nose and mouth. He stopped to perform a ripple breath that burned his torn lips as if they were on fire themselves, and nearly ruined his following exhalation.

“You don’t...need this...house. Not...anymore. Why?”

Dio’s left flank above his hip was caved in, the missing chunk of flesh cauterized and blackened around where its edges would have been. On his opposite shoulder and upper arm there were deep, blacked pits, burned outward from where Jonathan had blindly planted his fingertips.

“Easy for you to say, JoJo,” Dio sneered through grimacing fangs, “but I take pride in my accomplishments!”

If he’d been in less pain, Jonathan might have managed a very humorless chuckle. “Yours?” He paused again to sear another ripple breath in and out his ruined mouth and failing chest. “You don’t even...own yourself...anymore. He does.”

A larger roll of smoke glided across the ceiling from above the attic door. The taste of ash and poison was growing stronger again in what remained of Jonathan’s nose and tongue, mixing with that of his own hot, flowing blood. Dio was still, crouched on his knees, fangs extended so long that they deformed his mouth from within.

“What,” Dio asked, his voice quiet and measured, but with a quiver of tension beneath it, “are you gibbering about?”

“Your new mask.” Jonathan stopped for longer for this ripple breath than he had for the previous ones. It was getting harder and harder. “Tall man? Red hair?”

The flames crackled. Behind the door, something fell off of the wall and clattered to the floor in Dio’s bedroom a storey below. Dio was unmoving. Still in a way that a living human could never be, as neither eyes nor chest moved even a hundredth of an inch from their place. It was as if he’d been petrified, or frozen in invisible ice. Were it not for the smoke moving overhead, Jonathan would have feared he’d lost his own perception of time.

“Are you trying to save me, JoJo?” Dio finally asked. “Convince me to throw it all away and follow you?”

Jonathan chuckled, each note hurting him more than the one before it as they tore up through his lungs and lips. “It can’t be helped. Wicked as you are, Dio, I’ll always hold a hand out to my brother.”

It was Dio’s turn to laugh. Louder, higher, and even more madly. “Why are you still calling me your brother? HOW STUBBORN CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE?”

Jonathan breathed in, choking again on blood. “Not…” he managed to gurgle “...as stubborn...as you.”

Dio didn’t reply, at least in words. His body shot forward and downward, and lifted itself up on his fingertips and knees. His pitted arm was trembling, and his feet dragged uselessly behind him, but he was still as quick as ever as he crouched like a pouncing cat and threw himself at Jonathan with a wild scream and a vortex of flashing fangs. Jonathan raised his hands, catching and burning Dio’s bare shoulders even as the claws sliced through his own side. As blood waterfalled out and his entire body tensed up, Dio fell back a foot or so from his fresh burns. Jonathan pulled one leg up and managed to place it between himself and the screaming, whistling, smoking monster, and kicked. Dio skidded back across the floor, clawing and scratching wildly. The floorboards were slick with red. His own blood. His own warm, living blood.

Another ripple breath. He twitched his arms in Dio’s direction, and flexed his fingertips against the blood in his direction. Jonathan felt the ripple pulse through him, and around him. For an instant, he felt the expanding pool of blood as if it were still a part of his body, tingling and fizzing outward and forward. A flash of yellow fire erupted around Dio’s forearms as he scrabbled forward across the floor on them.

“WHY? WHY DESTROY EVERYTHING? WHY? WHY???” Dio’s screaming solidified into words, each seeming to break Jonathan’s eardrums over and over again.

Jonathan coughed. Blood caught in his throat, and he gagged on it. The room was fading. The heat growing and receding all at once. “…why…really?”

An explosion rocked the building, as the flames reached a gas or kerosene tank somewhere below. Another one answered it, throwing Jonathan against a hard wall, or floor. A roar of pain and rage from Dio, and the groan of collapsing floorboards, then the heat of flames and a rain of shards and rubble.

They’re safe, Jonathan thought, as a third explosion broke his hearing and touch completely, Erina. Father. Speedwagon…

The noises and burning pains drifted further away, and the feeling of their fingers laying against his cheek was the last thing he imagined before blackness took all.

...​

He smelled nothing but smoke. His body burned, where he’d been touched by ribbon, hand, and blood. Burned with a sharp, hot pain that nothing else since the mask had come near. The rest of him was dry, and tight, and numb. The thirst was everywhere. Not just the throat and mouth, like the feelings of a man craving water. His chest, shriveled and broken, was thirsty. The stump of his arm, torn off at the burned part and too dry to grow back, felt thirsty. Numb and dry and screaming for blood, but he could smell only smoke, and his fingertips and teeth tasted only ashes and dust.

His eyes were dry and thirsting, but they could still just barely see. He knew, intuitively, that his head would have saved the most liquid blood, insulating what it could from the heat of the flames even as the rest of him dried to cracked leather and powdered chalk. The entire western half of the manor was gone. Littered through the melted snow, bleeding its last black plumes of smoke from the light of drowning embers. Snow landed all around his body, and atop it. There was still a part of the roof overhead, but the building was open and cored like a gutted fish, and even the remaining facade and wings were dying. Orange light from the open rooms and falling walls danced like a mocking ghost across the snow and debris. The groan of wood and brick from behind him. The rest would soon fall as well. He would be underneath.

Underneath, again. Always underneath.

He pulled his remaining arm out from under the pile of brick and shingles. Skin flaked off and took what used to be flesh with it, leaving more bone exposed than even before. Why did he feel weaker every second? Where was blood? He needed blood.

Heavy, even footsteps crossed the broken bricks and crunched through the charcoaled timbers. Someone walking through the burning ruin of the palace he’d almost had. A tall, broad-shouldered figure loomed out of the smoke, looking down from atop a massive chest and a pair of enormous, sinewy arms.

How could it be? Alive? Standing up? Walking? He’s still okay? How?

“Jo…” he felt drier and thirstier as he let some precious, dwindling ichor leak back into his chest cavity. No air escaped his mouth, but he formed the name nonetheless “...Jo?”

Dio heard the other person clucking their tongue to an unknown tune. Then the figure came a step closer, and Dio saw the long, brilliant red hair rippling down over olive skin and steel muscles. Dio’s jaw shot open, but he had no words to form. He struggled to raise his arm, lifting his hand between himself and the arrival as the tongue-clicking stopped.

“Well, you turned out to be useless.”

Dio’s jaw twitched again, his fangs bared. The pain was everything now. Skin that no longer existed burned. Disintegrated lungs screamed his rage and despair into silence.

The man laughed at him.

“JoJo’s right here.” He stepped around Dio, to the snow-facing eastern side. His horned head angled downward, regarding something in the smoking rubble. Then, his tone of voice changed. “What? Still breathing?”

Hope rose up in Dio’s withered throat, his jaw started to close again. He used his arm to pull himself further out from under the bricks and splinters.

The man looked back at Dio, and came toward him. Dio tried to cringe back, but the rubble had filled in behind him. Volcanic eyes sliced into what little was left of him, the gear mark under one gleaming an unearthly indigo in the night. He raised his hand, and Dio saw his mask. Blackened, chipped, and damp with melted snow. A long crack ran across its once-flawless face, bisecting one eye and ruining the fang below it.

“It’s worthless, thanks to you.”

He clenched his fist around the stone mask, and it broke into pieces like brittle clay between his fingers. That encroaching weakness that had been enveloping Dio swelled up from a growing weight to an inescapable, crushing hammer. Dio’s mouth fell open. His arm twitched.

“If you want your JoJo,” he emphasized the name, mocking, “I’ll let you finish him. Maybe one last meal will let you survive until the rest of the building comes down and crushes you.”

One of his arms reached back, and Dio heard the sharp snapping of bone. The limb bent above the elbow, and then below it with another crack, extending longer with each extra joint. Then it snapped forward again, and flung a charred, bleeding corpse in Dio’s direction. The hulking body rolled across the shattered bricks and splintered wood.

“Jo…”

The flesh and skin was warm. The smell, breaking through the stink of dry ashes as Jonathan’s angry red skin came within a few feet of Dio’s nostrils. Blood, so thick and wet and warm. The body, so smooth and hard, even through the burns. He heard a tiny, meagre breath coming from the body, and saw one of its blistered red fingers twitch.

...Jo…”

Dio managed to raise his arm one last time, and claw his fingers toward Jonathan’s neck. Just out of reach. If he could but pull himself an arm’s length closer and touch his thirsty finger-tips to the skin...

As the heavy footsteps retreated back across the rubble and then punched into unmelted snow, Dio strained what was left of himself, dragging what was left of his body toward JoJo’s. If he could...if he could only...if there was a way...to make that other, fading life his own...

Timbers groaned, and the rest of the manor came crumbling down.



TO BE CONTINUED ->
 

MagnificentLilyWitch

Active member
Pronouns
She/Her
Crosspost:

Jonathan and Robert finally kiss: JOJO YES!

Jonathan dies: JOJO NO!

So other then the great prose and Dio being the worst there are some interesting changes from Phantom Blood here. Jonathan and Erina never got married under english law and George is still alive (and doesn't know about Dio trying to kill him). Those could have some very big impacts going into Battle Tendancy. It also means that Jojo never got an apology from George for the gaslighting.

The way that Dio destroyed everything that made the Jostar mansion a home yet still got mad when Jojo took the final step of burning down the building was great. Jonathan cares about people while Dio only cares about property.

I am very happy for Speedwagon that he finally got his feeling openly reciprocated by Jojo. It only took multiple near death experiances in quick succession to break though his Victorian brainwashing.
 

Leila Hann

Member
Epilogue: And All the Fools Sailed Away​


“They only found bones. And... broken pieces of marble.”

Two more tears leaked down across Speedwagon’s face, and his head sank into his hands. His hair was cut short in front, and the fresh bandages around his forehead were already starting to darken. Erina’s body, just barely able to feel anything besides pain again, went cold and numb beneath her crisp hospital blankets.

“Were...were any of them his bones?” She asked, her voice so quiet she didn’t know if he could even hear her. Outside the white curtained windows, the sky was clear and empty. Like a hollow blue shell that had been scoured clean. Outside the door, she heard her father barking something at one of the other nurses. He’d been coming in every ten minutes since his shift began. The throbbing in her head was back, and her hands were shaking.

“Just…” Speedwagon broke down into a fit of heaving shoulders and gasping sobs. “...just…” He pried a damp hand off of his cheek and clutched at the side of his bandaged head. His eyes, red and bleary from when he’d entered the room, were swollen anew, and his mouth was barely able to form the words. “...skull.”

Her body went from numb, to frigid. A broken mask, and Jonathan’s skull. A battle with no victor.

“But. They couldn’t know.”

She stopped talking. Of course they could know. They couldn’t possibly mistake it for anyone else’s. She tried to believe that one could, but too many years looking at bodies living and dead would not allow her to deceive herself. The pain throughout her body intensified behind her eyes, and her breath started coming short.

She hid her face behind her arms as her own sobbing joined Speedwagon’s.

…​

George Joestar was sitting up in bed in front of the little table when Doctor Pendleton came in. The deck of playing cards he’d been brought the day before yesterday was spread out before him, and he was staring grumpily down at them over his moustache as he moved them from stack to stack.

“Good morning,” George said, looking up from his game to give the doctor a weary smile. “Merry Christmas eve, I suppose.”

He saw the expression on the doctor’s face, and he raised his head higher.

“Thompson? What is it? What happened?”

Doctor Pendleton’s face, grim and stolid at the best of times, was ghostly. Every deep crease and early wrinkle seemed deeper and harsher than before. For nearly half a minute, he stood silently, as if trying to work up the nerve to speak. Something that George had never known him to lack in the slightest.

“George. Baron Joestar.” His lip twitched a touch, and he looked downward before continuing. “There was a fire at your home last night.”

George’s eyebrows shot upward, and his body stiffened, arms tensing up as he put down his playing cards.

“What?” He started to stand up, before stopping himself. “How bad is it?”

“It...burned to the ground. No one seems to have gotten out.”

The color that had been working its way back into George’s face over the weeks drained away again to leave ghastly gray. His blue eyes took on a wild, haunted quality.

“My boys. JoJo? Dio? They weren’t…?”

The doctor shook his balding head. “I’m sorry.”

George remained in place. Hands in front of him. Eyes wide. Body sitting upright.

“Sorry,” Thompson repeated.

George didn’t move. It was only after a quarter of an hour that George lowered his head to the table top and hunched over. He didn’t say another word that day, or the night of Christmas Eve, and neither would he touch any of the meals brought to him. All he would touch were the papers and pencils that he’d sometimes asked for, with which he drew their faces over and over again.

Three days later, Baron George Joestar had died.

…​

“It’s done, my masters. I told you I could do it with enough time.”

From across the void, a river of pride and admiration poured itself down the spokes of the mask and directly into his brain. His lips turned upward in a smile as the elation spread over his consciousness.

“Well then. I was wrong to doubt you, Santana.” The high, hoarse voice, issuing one of its rare apologies. “You succeeded where all of us failed.”

The other distant voice, warm and proud, spoke into him then. “Wamuu has cost us more since the time our mission began than any other being. You’ve proven yourself the equal of any in ending this persistent irritation. What of the daymen you spoke of?”

The smile faded a little from his lips beneath the stone that covered them. “The most problematic one is taken care of. Two others escaped. I’m planning to deal with that problem as soon as the moon returns.”

“No.”
The calm, soothing voice replied. “You’ve been awake for far too long already. Forget them. Travel to the Pillar of the Bowed Mountains, and return to us. I don’t want you active again for at least one hundred years. You’ve more than earned your rest, my son.”

Santana’s smile came back, as he raised his hands to remove the mask. “Thank you, father.”

...​

A weak fire flickered on the hearth, barely pushing back against the gloom of the overcast January afternoon. The teapot on the Pendleton sitting room table sat steaming, but the cups surrounding it were still empty. On one side of the table, Erina sat in a high-backed chair, a pillow supporting her neck. Across from her, a sharply dressed black-haired man of about forty held a briefcase in his lap.

“I appreciate the trouble you’re taking on,” Mister Wainwright, Esquire said as he opened the case, “I wasn’t expecting you to arrange this visit until at least February. Well. Before anything else, I’d like to repeat my condolences in person, Mrs. Joestar.”

Erina had to keep herself from screaming as he said the name. Thirty-six hours. That was the amount of time she had spent married, on the outside. No one had called her “Mrs. Joestar” in that time, aside from the Vicar after he’d performed the rites. It felt like a joke at Jonathan’s expense, and at hers. She managed to keep her jaw set and her eyes dry and even. “Thank you, Mister Wainwright.”

The executor bowed his head. “I regret to say that I had few opportunities to get to know your late husband. From the times I did meet him, he truly did seem a fine man.” He shook his head. “I knew his brother better, thanks to his choice of careers. Such an intelligent, charming young man-”

“Thank you.” The harsh, icy tone of Erina’s voice brought Wainwright’s head back upright. She was nearly shaking with the effort of choking back the acid that wanted to come out. “But I’d like to talk about the estate.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He resumed his businesslike tone and went back to producing the papers.

Erina wondered, through the blinding surge of hatred that Dio’s mention had ignited in her, what the executor thought of the ongoing police investigation. She had managed to cover Speedwagon’s trail from the police, as his lifestyle would not withstand the scrutiny that hers could. The detective had asked her and her father some questions that neither of them liked about the circumstances of George’s poisoning, but it had been readily proven that his condition began well before the Pendletons’ return from overseas, and the Chinese apothecary’s testimony that Dio had indeed been purchasing the exotic toxin since much earlier supported their own story. Likewise, the testimony of the neighbors regarding Speedwagon and Erina’s desperate states and consistent accounts even under that night’s stresses did much to appease the investigators. Nothing had yet come back from the department about the aspersions that Jonathan himself had cast against Dio, even with the Ogre Street apothecary's testimony as strong evidence. She wondered if the evidence would ever be sufficient for a statement to be released.

“As I said, the late Baron Joestar’s investments were nearly all in overseas businesses. Joestar and Bunton Spices and Dyes only has a small distribution center in London, but quite a large tract of land on the island of Jamaica, and another on Great Abaco Island. The main office is near Mister Bunton’s American residence in New York City.”

“He never said anything about America,” Erina said.

“As best I can tell, he hadn’t been overseas in person since the loss of the senior Mrs. Joestar. But, he did put quite a number of pounds back into the firm’s expansion in his final years, and his estate includes equal partnership.”

She slowly nodded her head. “I see.”

The rest of the barrister’s visit was curt and to the point, and arrangements were made for Erina to give her signature at the relevant offices as soon as her recovery was complete.

...​

When Erina told him about her plans the next day, he was in agreement.

“I’ve barely had a good night’s sleep since that night,” Speedwagon said, head buried in his hands as he sat on the Pendletons’ couch. Doctor Pendleton wasn’t home, of course, but his wife was, and she’d been giving him skeptical looks every time she found an excuse to come back into the room, which was every couple of minutes. His forehead no longer hurt, and some discolored skin had grown back over the pit in his skull, but no amount of ripple healing seemed able to restore the corroded bone. He knew, on the same intuitive level on which he knew to follow his nose’s pronouncements, that he would carry that dark purple indentation hidden behind his bangs for the rest of his life. “Every time I hear a noise, I scare myself half to death thinking that thing is back to finish the job it started.”

Erina’s head nodded, very slowly and silently. He didn’t have to explain the rest. The creature that killed Wamuu and left Dio as a trap for them had known where JoJo lived, and who his family was. It almost certainly knew where they lived, and who their families were.

“We take ourselves away, then. For a while, at least.” Erina’s words were deliberate and slow. “Inspecting my new property is an excuse that should satisfy everyone.”

“Ayup.” Speedwagon nodded his head in agreement. “Just need to set Clara and Kenny up, before I leave ‘em for such a while.”

“That’s easy enough for me to do now, I suppose.” She looked almost disbelieving as she said that. She was what Speedwagon himself would have called “wealthy” a few months ago to begin with, but he could tell she was still having trouble understanding her new status.

“The world’s no place for a young widow travelling alone,” Speedwagon said, resting a hand gently on her shoulder, “Clara will understand, but your generosity can certainly help.”

She looked like she was trying to smile. After a moment, she turned around and embraced him, her head dipping down as she began crying again. A sting returned to Speedwagon’s own eyes, and soon his head dropped down as well.

I don’t know what we are to each other without JoJo. I don’t know if we’re even husband and wife by nightmen ways without JoJo, he thought as they wept together, uncaring of Clementine’s watching from the doorway. But this was JoJo’s dying wish. We need to stay together, if not for ourselves then for him.

…​

The morning fog had lifted, leaving only the smoky, salty haze of New York harbor to filter the sunlight as it came in from over the rooftops and steamship smokestacks to the east. Beside the window, tucked against the entrance to the apartment’s little kitchen, the calendar hung open on June, 1890, the first seven boxes of which were checked off in ink. Steam rose from a teapot on the gas stove behind that entrance, the herbal fragrance doing the best it could to push back the smells of coal and brine.

A sharp knock at the front door called Erina Joestar out of the kitchen. As always, she peered through the peephole before raising her hand to the doorknob, and only after recognizing the faces on the other hand relaxed her lungs and resumed her normal breathing. The door was thin, well-moistened cedarwood, and the curtains over the windows were dark carmine. A relieved, but exhausted, smile - one of the very few she’d had in the past year and a half - crossed her face as she turned the latch and opened the door.

“Straizo!” she exclaimed, raising her arms and stepping into the man’s embrace, “I didn’t think it would be you!”

The tall man, fair skinned, raven haired, and slender aside from his broad shoulders and barrel chest, wrapped his arms around her in return. He wore a long, hooded blue robe, below the neckline of which she could see a hint of carmine; not the heavy saffron robes he wore at the monastery, but not too far off either. It was a sunny morning, and the temperature was rapidly rising, but Straizo showed no sign of noticing the heat. His face was ageless; just like the last time they’d met, Erina thought he could just as easily be twenty years old as fifty.

“Master Tonpetti would have come himself,” Straizo said, retaining Erina’s embrace, “but he was indisposed. I volunteered to bring William in his place.”

“Yes, he said in his letter he’d be sending someone, I just didn’t expect...well, I’m glad to see you again. I wasn’t sure if I ever would!” She stopped as she processed what he’d just said, and simultaneously noticed the other man standing behind him on the apartment building’s upper terrace. “Will! Why…I barely would have recognized you!”

She released Straizo and regarded the other visitor. A shorter, stockier, darker skinned man, dressed in a rather attention-getting light cream colored suit and an exceptionally tall top hat with a black-and-white checkerboard pattern that didn’t match it - or anything else - at all. A far cry from the mariner’s uniform and later robes she had seen him in before. Unlike Straizo, William Zeppeli looked like he’d aged a decade since she’d last lain eyes on him. His eyes remained bright, but they seemed sunken in place, and his moustache had grown out and spread down toward his chin.

“Mister Zeppeli no longer wears our civara.” Straizo’s voice was much colder than before.

William Zeppeli’s eyes fell momentarily downward, before he recovered and took Erina’s hand, bringing it up to his moustached face for a rather dramatic kiss. Unlike Straizo with his smooth English, Zeppeli spoke with a marked Italian accent. “I’d returned to Tuscany when they told me about what happened, and...well, there’s a chance this might concern me, indirectly.” He shrugged, and looked down at the wooden walkway. “But really, how many reasons do I need to visit the woman that saved my life?”

“Straizo was the one who actually saved it,” Erina reminded him. She remembered the sight of the sailor who’d been her patient, with the festering wounds that she feared she couldn’t treat. Then, a raven-haired monk of the secretive order he’d been traveling to an arranged meeting with arrived and laid his hands on him, and Erina’s life had been changed irrevocably.

“Stuff and nonsense! I’d have been past the point of ripple-healing by the time he reached us without you!” His expression grew somber again, and he adjusted his garish top hat. “Of course. I’m so sorry about your husband. I hoped I would get to meet the lucky bastard, but...not so lucky, after all.”

Erina’s own smile receded quickly as well, at this. Few of her smiles lasted long, these days. Straizo’s pale face followed suit.

“My own condolences as well,” Straizo said, “and those of Master Tonpetti. The Swami himself has performed our ritual of mourning for the great Wamuu. No living members had met him, but he was known to many of our predecessors.”

“Yes,” Erina nodded, “his letter said that as well.” She remembered how her head had spun when she’d read that passage. During her own time in India, she’d written everything about demons and immortal warriors off as superstition, keeping her silence when the monks spoke of them and trying not to betray her impatience. How stupid she’d felt, reading the letter and realizing just how much more than her they’d known all along. Realizing that even after learning to channel the ripple and having her view of the world turned upside down, she’d still been clinging to a fantasy, while the teachers she’d had the audacity to quietly scoff at lived in the true reality.

“Well. I have tea ready. Come in.”

She led them into the small, sparsely furnished living room. Speedwagon was standing near the entrance, waiting for the visitors. His hair was cut shorter in the back than he’d used to let it grow, though his messy, pale blonde bangs remained long. They were usually enough to hide the dark purple, fingertip-sized pit in his forehead, but not always. Despite that, he looked more presentable than he ever had in London dressed in his new black button-down and trousers. “Ello there,” he said, approaching the visitors and starting to offer his hand before remembering what Erina had told him and instead bowing, “Robert E.O. Speedwagon at your service.”

“Straizo. We have no family names among the order,” Straizo bowed in return, “and this is the Baron William Zeppeli. Formerly a brother of ours.”

There was still a tiny undercurrent of coldness as he said those last five words. Zeppeli looked out the nearest window, and made a point of finding a place to put his top hat. Erina wondered what exactly had happened; no one had borne her any ill will for leaving.

“You two have taken precautions,” Straizo observed, casting his eyes around at the apartment. There was a jug of water or vegetable oil perched on every piece of furniture, ready to be doused across the uncarpeted wooden floor at a moment’s notice. The windows were all hung in the same hue of dark red, as were the cushions that covered the only sofa. He looked back at Erina and Speedwagon. “I approve.”

Erina nodded silently. Speedwagon did the same, before excusing himself to the kitchen to retrieve the tea and biscuits. They sat around the coffee table on the sofa and chairs, quietly sipping tea and nibbling at biscuits for some time. More than once, Erina, Speedwagon, or Zeppeli would try to start a conversation, but it never outlived two or three sentences. Finally, Straizo leaned back in the armless chair he’d claimed and broke the tension.

“The main reason we came, now. Your child.”

Erina nodded her head, clutching her teacup close to her visibly swollen chest. “Yes. My and Jonathan’s child.” Erina started to continue speaking, to tell them that this was all she had left of who and what Jonathan was, save for those pencil sketches her father-in-law had produced in his final days at the hospital. How she had spent every day on the voyage across the Atlantic, and countless others since she’d learned she was with child, staring into the dark seawater and thinking of sinking barges and shoulders like squalls. How she’d come back time and time again to what Tonpetti had told her, about how sometimes the sun shone too brightly, and the ripples spread across the ocean too strongly, with too much power. Her husband had rippled like that, and something lurking deep below had noticed, and pulled him down. “She started doing it just a month after I took her home.”

“The child of two ripple users,” Straizo said calmly, “has been known to do this naturally, without needing their diaphragms pierced. But it is a very rare occurrence.”

“Yes,” Zeppeli said after finishing the contents of his own teacup, “once in a generation. At most.”

“Well, that’s good then,” Speedwagon volunteered, sounding hopeful, “isn’t it?”

“Probably.” Straizo replied. Before Speedwagon could ask him to elaborate, he turned back to Erina. “Show us your daughter, please.”

Erina put her own teacup back down, and stood up. “This way. Quietly, please. She only just fell asleep before you arrived.”

She led them to the larger of the apartment’s two bedrooms, whose carmine curtains were thicker than the others and drawn shut. She didn’t turn on the gaslamp, but the light from the hallway door was enough to reveal the wooden crib full of white linens pushed against the corner near Erina’s bed. Wrapped in the downy fabrics, a nine month old baby slept, her chubby arms clutched tight around her chest.

“How often does she do it?” Straizo asked, his voice a tiny whisper as he looked down across the room toward the crib.

“I can never tell when she will,” Erina whispered back, “though she does it after she’s finished nursing quite often. I suppose my...erm...nipples…” her face reddened a little, making her grateful for the darkness “...would be in much worse shape otherwise.”

“I see.”

He tiptoed forward, almost alarmingly silent. Erina had almost forgotten how Straizo could pad across the monastery courtyard and garden unheard by even the birds scavenging a few feet away from him in the grass. He reached the crib, and leaned over to inspect the sleeping baby more closely. Suddenly, his body went stiff, and Erina saw him startle.

“William,” he whispered, no louder than before but with an urgency that his voice had previously lacked, “come here.”

The shorter, darker-skinned man tiptoed forward, but he wasn't nearly as dexterous. His shoes bumped audibly off of the floor, and a moment later the baby began crying.

“Don’t feel bad,” Speedwagon said, shaking his head at Zeppeli and letting out a sigh that betrayed more relief than anything else, as if he’d been dreading the prospect of a prolonged conversation in whispers, “not a heavy sleeper, that one. I suppose my own nephew might’ve spoiled me when it comes to that, since he had to learn to sleep in an ‘ouse full of-”

“My god!” Zeppeli exclaimed as Erina pushed past him and Straizo to pick the infant up and rock her against her chest. Erina had been frightened as soon as she saw the change in Straizo’s reactions, and with Zeppeli’s exclamation she was now on the brink of terror.

“What?” She demanded, nearly shouting despite herself even as she tried to rock her daughter back into restfulness. “Is there something wrong with her?”

Straizo shook his head, his long black hair gleaming even in the near darkness. “What,” he asked, raising his right hand and extending a finger toward the crook of the baby’s left shoulder, “is that?”

Erina looked at where he was indicating. Of course. She’d been so worried and confused when her child had started ripple breathing all on her own, she hadn’t even thought to mention this in her letter to Swami Tonpetti. Straizo was pointing at the pale blue birthmark between the baby’s shoulder and the back of her neck, a perfect five-pointed star.

“Oh.” She said. “I’m so sorry, I should have told you before.” She continued rocking the infant in her arms and talking over the ongoing, high pitched wailing. “My husband...he had that mark as well. And his mother before him.”

Straizo looked back at Zeppeli. The latter set his jaw, bringing one hand to his chin and supporting his suddenly heavy head. “No escape,” Zeppeli said, quietly, “no escape for me after all.”

Speedwagon started to ask a question, but before he could Straizo addressed Erina again. “When you were at the monastery,” he asked her, “did Master Tonpetti ever happen to mention the prophecies?”



TO BE CONTINUED ->



 
Top