Elsewhere 5: Act I Epilogue

“Dr. Fornal, I don’t need to breathe.”

“Yes, and I don’t NEED to wear clothes when the Kine can’t see me, Benjamin,” the psychiatrist seated behind her desk responds. “But some things we do for ourselves, even if they aren’t required. I can help, but that only goes so far. You have to take care of you. No one else is going to do it.”

“Fuuuuuuuck, you’re right!” the tweed-clad professor wearing pince-nez glasses groans, stretching out in the armchair. “Okay. Breathing. Like we went over.”

“And not just breathing, Benjamin. Remember the phrases we talked about, remember what calms you down. If you jam a pencil into some student’s neck one night, I don’t think another appointment is going to be possible,” the improbably young-looking blonde tells him with a subdued smile. “Prevention, Mr. Calliver.”

“If you can’t be cured, prevention is your medicine,” he says, repeating the mantra the doctor taught him. “Thank you, Dr. Fornal.”

“You’re welcome, Benjamin. Unfortunately, that is our time for tonight. The usual appointment?” she asks, producing a pad and pencil. He nods, which she quickly jots down, then passes him the carbon. “Thank you for coming in, as always.”

“I’ll stop coming when it stops working,” he responds with a friendly grin and tip of the hat he pulls off the coatrack and flips on to his head. Doctor Helen Fornal neatly organizes her patient’s file, unlocks her heavy-duty filing cabinet, and stores it. She briefly moves over to the window, looking out over the city. The view still makes her stop dead, even after all these decades. Motes of light dot the city, more than their used to be. Her lip twitches disdainfully as she considers the erasure of Northwoods’ identity, the face of rampant greed opening its bleak maw to consume everything that’s ever made it unique. Of course, fighting against it any harder than she is would see her people stuck in a spin, lost, dangerously alone … not productive thoughts. Control what you can. Overreaching is the prelude to defeat.

“Dr. Fornal?” a meek voice squeaks from the door. Helen’s mousy, redheaded assistant peeks her head in the door. “I have a package for you.”

“Thank you, Regina. You can leave it in my mailbox,” she says with a polite nod, then stops after a few steps, glancing back at the bespectacled woman still in her doorway. “… what is it?”

“The man who dropped it off, he was … insistent, said it was urgent?” Helen rolls her eyes, but smiles and waves Regina in. The package in her hand is immediately striking, envelope black with red lettering that reads “For the Mad Queen’s Eyes Only!” Part of Helen wants to fling it against the wall immediately, but her cooler head prevails as she thanks Regina for it, then tells her to head home before it gets any later.

“Spooky,” a man says, stepping out of apparently nothing beside her. “Not one of your fans.”

“I’d hazard not,” she notes bitterly, taking a letter opener and carefully teasing the edges. “Odds it’s a bomb?”

“Low. Pretty light for a bomb. Smell anything?”

“Ink, blood, no cordite or anything else that’d worry me. And yet.” Helen carefully cuts the twine holding it shut, then opens the letter, pulling the contents on to her desk. No detectable aura, just photos, news clippings, print-outs … of a girl.

“Want me to go tail the messenger?” Jackson asks as she pores over the documents. She nods distractedly, and the young man in the leather jacket vanishes from sight.

“What kind of play is this?” she mutters. The girl in the print-outs doesn’t appear in any of the photos. She’s pretty, maybe looks a year older than Helen’s countenance, long, dark hair and really quite infectious energy, even from Instagram screencaps and yearbook photos. It clicks suddenly when Helen takes a closer look at some of the more recent-looking pictures, people interacting with … someone … who isn’t there …

“Don’t let them leave!” she snaps quickly into the intercom in a frenzied rush out of her office. She darts up the stairs as fast as she can, figuring that if the messenger isn’t on the way down, he’s on the way up. She checks her purse, removing a small pistol with a markedly large barrel for its compact size, as she storms up the stairs, forcing vitae into her muscles to make her speed up the longer she’s been on her sprint to the roof.

Bursting open the door, she instantly realizes that the gun isn’t going to do her much good: the messenger is standing on the edge of the roof. He faces her, his eyes blank and hollow. Someone’s been … prepping him for a while. She makes eye contact with him desperately. The odds he’s serving of his own volition seems slim to none to the petite, blonde vampire, and even if he was, she doesn’t want him to die for it.

“Step down, please!” she yells to overcome the wind whipping violently around them this high up, her thin, white top rippling its loose fabric as she puts the gun back in her bag, sets it down, and starts forward slowly. “You don’t have to do this, you’re not in any danger!”

“Helen Fornal, Mad Queen of Northwoods.” The tattered man’s voice is almost robotic, devoid of any emotion. Her attempts to dominate him seems to slide off as easy as water, but a quick read of his aura tells her that he’s not even a ghoul. Just a human. Some poor homeless man someone’s weaponized against her. “My mistress sends you her regards and this information.”

“She doesn’t care about you, you’re about to kill yourself! Please, come down, we can just talk!” Useless again. Her shoulder-length hair whips into her eyes, but she forces them open and locked on his. “Or not, we can just get you some help, I’m a psychiatrist!”

“What you do with this is up to you, and you alone. She does not extend this gift and burden to any other.”

“PLEASE!”

“The ball is in your court.” With that, he falls limply backward. Helen dashes towards the edge, but arrives far too late to catch him. The helpless human seems to regain his mind long enough to scream just before he hits the ground, an unnecessary cruelty that sickens Helen to the core. She’d vomit if she still could.

“HELEN!” Jackson yells, running behind her. “He came up here, he might … still be … oh, no …” He joins her by the edge of the roof, the deep red of human blood visible even from this height in a sunburst around the dead human on the streets.

“Someone just killed a man so I wouldn’t be able to ask who sent that package,” Helen says slowly, standing back away from the roof’s ridge. “DuMorne would do it, but it isn’t her style. Too bold for Shire. Gaige and van Rossum, too much to lose if they’re caught. Sands would just have it appear while I was out. I don’t think this is a known factor we’re dealing with.”

“What the hell was in that envelope?” he asks, baffled as he follows Helen’s lead back inside. She snatches up her purse, flicks on her weapon’s safety, and heads back to her office.

“An unapproved siring. And not of a pillar Clan,” she tells him as they descend the stairs. “Nothing worth murdering a man over. We can’t let the Prince find out about this. The climate’s bad, I need to set up a play so this isn’t another **** on my hands.”

“It’s not on your hands, Helen,” he tries to offer quietly.

“And yet,” she says again.

“Whoever’s doing this, they probably want you off your game. Or to implicate you in covering for the orphan. This is a distraction, at best.”

“One I’m compelled to react to,” she sighs, sitting back down at her desk. “Put out feelers with your Anarch friends. I’ll tap into the network, see if anyone knows anything. Finding the girl shouldn’t be hard. But I need to mount a defense before someone uses her against me.” She glances up, pretty, blue eyes alight with a hatred her bodyguard rarely sees from her. “And then we’re going to make the bitch who did this to that poor man kiss the fucking dawn.”