Chapter 17

Seraph didn't budge from her spot by the door. "How do you know my name?" she demanded.

The smile slipped from the woman's face and she cocked her head to the side, as if examining something troublesome. "I make it my business to be aware of... shifts... in the status quo. It is only prudent that I know about you."

"Oh? What else do you know?"

"Many things," the woman waved her hand dismissively.

"Do you know about what's happening to me?"

"Of course."

This confirmation was all Seraph needed. She leaned her upper body forward, just enough to give her good leverage, before taking a step back and slamming her head backward into the face of the guard. The impact hurt, but it came with the satisfying crunch of cartilage and she whipped around to face him. He held both hands to his face, covering his broken nose, which left him nicely open. With her good hand she ripped the gun from its holster before he could react. He was recovering, but not fast enough. Seraph lashed out with her foot, catching him in the solar plexus. It wasn't a hard blow, certainly not enough to injure him, but it was just enough to send him back a step. That was all she needed. As the guard tried to regain his balance he brought his foot down on the empty air above the first step. He managed to catch the rusty guard rail, but the corroded metal was in no condition to support his weight and broke off in his hand. Down he went, tumbling ass over teakettle straight to the ground.

Seraph slammed the door shut and locked it. To be safe she grabbed a tall end table, knocking down the vase that sat on it, and wedged it under the door handle, effectively barricading the door should the guard prove tougher than he looked. It was all over in less than a minute.

Gun at the ready, Seraph turned towards the woman once more. She had not moved, but she was smiling again. Seraph took several steps into the room so that the door was not immediately at her back and trained the gun straight at the woman's head.

"Now," Seraph said. "You're going to tell me what's going on."

The woman threw back her head and laughed. The sound tickled down Seraph’s spine and made her shiver. The laugh was intimate, as if they had shared something special that Seraph had managed to miss– deeply sensuous and vastly inappropriate. Seraph had a hard time remembering the last time she had found something so wholly unsettling.

"Marvelous," she said. "This will do wonderfully."

Before Seraph could respond something crashed into the door. Seraph's makeshift blockade held... at first. The second blow broke the table's legs and it was crushed behind the door as the guard slammed through it. Once in the room he homed in on Seraph. At some point during his fall he had lost his sunglasses and Seraph saw why he had been wearing them.

His eyes were inhumanly blood red. But it wasn't just the color of his eyes, no, the irises were huge, leaving barely any white around the edges and the pupils were slitted like a snake's. He opened his mouth to hiss at her, showing off long thin fangs and a forked tongue.

Of course the guard wasn't human– that would have been too easy. Seraph swung the gun around to point at him as he bunched his muscles to lunge at her.

"Stop that at once."

Seraph obeyed without understanding why. Perhaps it was the way the guard froze in place at the woman's command, perhaps it was something that Seraph didn't want to think about too hard. The guard's freakish unblinking eyes were focused over Seraph's shoulder, making her spine itch with the need to glance behind her even though she already knew what was there.

"Go back to your post, I'll deal with you later."

The forked tongue slipped out from between the guard's fangs while the rest of him remained unmoving. For a moment Seraph wondered if he was going to disobey and she wondered if the gun would do anything to stop him if he did. But slowly the guard began to back out of the room. Once out of the doorway, he turned his back on Seraph and was soon was out of sight. Seraph didn't lower the gun until she heard the last of his footsteps on the stairs.

Seraph turned back to the woman, who was still smiling. The smile was not a pleasant one– it remind Seraph of a cat playing with a mouse. All curiosity and malice.

"Please have a seat. We need to talk," she said, gesturing to the low table with its pillows. "And do put the gun down, it's incredibly rude." Seraph looked back and forth between the table and the woman, simply staring.

"Lady, I'm not sitting down or putting the gun away until I get some goddamn answers."

The woman's eyes narrowed and she made a sharp gesture with her hand. Pain exploded in Seraph's head.

When she blinked her eyes open again she was lying on the floor. Her head felt like she had just come off a three week long bender. Again. Carefully she sat up. The gun was gone, but it was becoming painfully apparent that it wouldn't have helped her much anyway.

The pillows were at least as soft as they looked. Seraph had an idea there was a way she was supposed to sit at the table, but she couldn’t be bothered to figure it out, she just sat in a way that hurt the least.

"Would you like some tea?"

Seraph eyed the woman, unable to figure out if her desire for pleasantries steamed from sadism or insanity.

"Who are you?" she asked finally.

One elegant eyebrow rose at the question. "I suppose we did skip the introductions didn't we? I apologize. You may call me Celeste."

Seraph shifted in her seat. Celeste was clearly a mage. And one with dubious morals, to say the very least. While that didn't make her an impossible opponent, it did make her one Seraph was unprepared for. She would have to play along for now if she wanted to get out of this. It was a strategy that Seraph was sickeningly familiar with.

"What did you want to talk about?" Seraph asked carefully.

Celeste clasped her hands together and sat back in her chair. "You. You are in quite an interesting position. I'm sure you would like to know all about it," Celeste smiled. "Unfortunately information like that isn't free, and you simply don't have a way to pay for it. I know you well enough to know you have nothing I want. But I do have something else you want."

"The rose," Seraph said.

"Yes, the Fairy Rose. Such a valuable item simply cannot be parted with for free and I am sorry to say that you couldn't possibly pay for this either."

She sure didn't look sorry. Mage or not, Seraph was tired of being played with. It didn't escape Seraph's attention that Celeste's name for the rose didn't match the name given in her vision. "If you're not going to sell or give it to me, why the hell do you want me here?"

"There is another option. I am willing to gamble for it."

"Gamble for it?"

"You may have noticed the particular set up of this warehouse. What did you make of it?"

"It looks likes a theater of some kind," Seraph said. "Maybe an arena."

"Very good. It is an arena. A pit-fighting arena, actually. The hole is simply covered for now."

A cup of tea appeared on the short table in front of Seraph, placed there by a green hand. The hand was attached to the most bizarre looking creature Seraph had ever seen. It looked like a mutant cross between a duck and a turtle. About as tall standing as Seraph was sitting, the creature stood upright on stumpy little legs and held the tea tray with webbed hands that came out from the shell that encased its body. A stumpy, slightly curved bill took up most of its face. Dead fish eyes blinked wetly at her just above the mouth and below... the rest of the head. Where the dome of the skull would have covered the brain of a person, this creature had a concave bowl. Filled with water. It licked what would have been its lips with a sharp black tongue.

"What is that?" asked Seraph, completely taken off guard by the strange monster appearing from thin air.

"That is a kappa. Foolish creatures, easy to ensorce. Competent enough if you don’t need anything too complicated.”

Seraph stared at Celeste, suddenly losing interest in the kappa. "You're a witch."

Seraph blamed her head injury on how long it took her to figure it out. Celeste didn’t reply to Seraph’s obvious non-question, she just smiled her scary cat smile and took her tea from her creature before waving it away. It vanished with no more apparent effort than it had appeared. Either Celeste had teleported it away with a gesture and a thought, which made her powerful. Or it had teleported on its own at her bidding. Being a servant, it would be much weaker than her, which made her very powerful.

People with magic were very rare, but not so much that Seraph had never met one before. In fact, there had been a minor mage in her platoon that Seraph knew well enough to go out and drink with. A minor mage could give people a boost of energy like a caffeine high, light up a dark area with magelight, or start fires with a snap of their fingers. Small things. Useful things. A witch was not a minor mage. A witch was much more than that.

Closer to a greater mage in power, witches did not, as a rule, use their magic to help those around them or even as means to gainful employment. They used their power to gain more power, both magical and otherwise. Laws and morality were mere suggestions, easily ignored. Being a witch was illegal enough, there really wasn't any good reason to obey prohibitions against stealing if existing was enough to warrant execution. So, they used their magic in whatever way benefited them most– usually to the extreme detriment of someone else.

Such as raping the mind of a kappa and forcing it into slavery, for example.

People with magic talent were born with a certain level of innate ability– a certain level of power. Years of training might teach a mage to better focus their power, to use what little they had to larger effect, but they could never increase their power.

At least, not naturally.

However, if someone was an amoral psychopath, there were lots of ways to increase your base power level. You could sacrifice an innocent to an illegal god, you could steal the power from another magic user by torturing it out of them, you could do a number of other horrible things that Seraph didn't know the specifics of. If someone did that, they could become much more powerful– and a witch.

Seraph knew, academically, that whoever was doing this to her was likely a witch, what with lawmakers tending to frown upon using compulsion on another person, but that was an altogether different reality than finding oneself drinking tea with a witch in her lair. A witch who knew the answers to all of Seraph’s questions, if she was telling the truth. A witch who may even be the one behind all of this, for her own inscrutable reasons.

Seraph took a sip of tea to cover her fear and calm her nerves. Alright. This wasn't the worst situation Seraph had been in. Sure, Celeste may be the most powerful enemy Seraph had ever faced alone, but... uh... shit.

Her best chance, her only chance, was to play this as smart as she could. She set down the tea and faced Celeste again.

"You run a pit-fighting club?"

"Sometimes. It's more of a hobby. My real enterprise is much more varied and global."

"Why here? Wouldn't it make more sense to have it some place more... metropolitan, with a large criminal underground? New York or Los Angeles?"

"Normally. But this is a special event."

That... didn't sound particularly reassuring. "Why would you gamble for the rose?" Seraph asked.

"Because whether you or I have the rose benefits me. So I will give you a chance to complete your... quest."

"Alright," Seraph said, considering her options. They were depressingly few. "So, you want me to what... bet on one of the fighters?"

"Oh no. You will be one of the fighters, facing off against one of my oni, my ogres if you will." Celeste finished her tea and set the cup aside. "To the death."

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