Renting a carriage to Colm’s estate that morning proved shockingly easy. Our driver was even able to drop us off right underneath the man’s rather substantial front awning, without me even having to suggest such a thing.

  Every building in New Charsburgh had a rather substantial front awning, now that I thought about it. Vampiric architecture at its finest.

  I only needed to rap on the front door twice before it was thrown open by a modest maid. She fixed her hair, first looking up at Ana, who stood by my side, then down at me. “Yes?”

  I gave her a short bow. “Pardon, madam, but I’m here regarding your lord and master’s… disappearance?”

  Her face blanched slightly. “How do you know about that?”

  “I have my sources,” I said, turning to Ana with a smile. “May we let ourselves in?”

  We did just that, not giving the maid time to reply as we stepped through the threshold. Alfonse trailed along between myself and Ana, who shut the door behind her as she entered.

  The maid was clearly displeased by this. “How do you know about Master Colm? And where is he?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid he’s… indisposed, at the moment. But he left his estate in the care of his dear cousin.”

  “His cousin? You don’t mean…” The maid turned to Ana, who offered her a slight smirk, one that could melt glaciers.

  “Assemble the household. All of it. The field workers especially.”

  I did my level best to get comfortable in Colm’s sitting room, crowded in as I was among a dozen house servants and five times as many farm hands. Colm’s manor was certainly smaller than Grayson’s, but it was decorated to taste, with bits of Ostlander flare. It was also pleasingly and comfortably symmetrical, bereft of spurious additions and extensions.

  Once everyone was inside, Ana regarded her countrymen, most of them unwashed and covered in the caked dirt of the fields. Introductions weren’t necessary; everyone there knew her by reputation alone.

  “I know many of you weren’t expecting this. Most of you weren’t expecting it soon. But I know, in your heart of hearts, you’ve all yearned for it.”

  A younger Ostlander, a teenager by my reckoning, put her hand up. “What is ‘it?’”

  “Freedom. And with it, the chance to fight back.”

  There was some murmuring as she continued. “Colm left me his estate, so as of today your debts to him are cancelled. I intend to use his coin to buy the freedom of the rest of the Ostlanders in New Charsburgh.”

  “The Firmans will never accept that!” Shouted an older gentleman, a cook by his outfit. “They’d sooner ruin themselves than let us go free.”

  Ana nodded in agreement. “Which is why you must break your chains by force.”

  There was yet more murmuring, and a couple Ostlanders even stood up to leave, only to be pulled down by their fellows. Nonetheless, Ana continued.

  “The colonizers have handed us more than our share of defeats. But there are still enough of us to preserve what we still have, and to win back that which was stolen from us. I know the oldest of you know all too well the murder of the Firmans, while the youngest may as well have been born in your shackles. But those shackles are the only things you have to lose.”

  It was then that that same young Ostlander spoke up again, rising to her feet. It was only then that I noticed she too had a collar around her neck.

  “What is it like?”

  Ana immediately understood her meaning, and proceeded to disrobe. This did not scandalize her audience nearly as much as her sudden transformation into her towering, glorious wolf form. I was very thankful for the curtains already being closed; if anyone saw us in here, the plan was up in flames.

  “It’s like this. And it is glorious.”

  There was a pause as Ana and this girl acknowledged one another, before she awkwardly skipped and stepped through the assembled crowd, much to the protest of her parents. When she arrived before Ana, she craned her neck up, pointing toward the hideous iron ring about her neck.

  Ana reached down and snapped it off, and in an instant that Ostlander girl was transformed into a broad-shouldered, hog-headed beast.

  She was shorter than Ana, but taller than anyone else. Her eyes were bloodshot, dilated with the repressed rage of an adolescent, finally bubbling to the surface after so long. I felt Alfonse flinch into my arms as she ducked her head and attempted to charge Ana, only for the more experienced and level-headed werebeast to catch her by the tusks.

  They tussled like that for a few brief moments, the whole assembly on a knife’s edge as the teenager snorted and brayed… before Ana leaned in to lap at the top of her head, like a puppy.

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  This gesture seemed to snap her out of her rage somewhat, giving Ana time to whisper in her ear. After a short while, the boar-girl embraced her, a gesture Ana returned in kind, the two of them at last returning to their human forms.

  When they parted, Ana turned her to face the crowd, and held her arm up above her head. “This is what I offer you. Freedom. Joy. Vengeance, for your ancestors, and the right to live on their land, and yours. Will you take it?”

  There was a brief but terrible pause, as Colm’s household considered this offer. Then an old woman rose to her feet.

  “What would you have us do, Tuath?”

  Ana nodded her head. “Tend the fields today, as you normally would. We cannot have the Firmans suspecting anything out of the ordinary. My agent Mister Gelb will stay here for the day, and turn away any unwanted visitors. Meanwhile, I shall rendezvous with my warriors from the Wolf clan to prepare for tonight.

  “We will make the announcement to the rest of the settlement this evening, at Grayson’s abominable auction. Before I go, I’ll pick out a few of you to insert yourselves among his farm-hands, to provoke the crowd’s sympathies. Any questions?”

  No one spoke up. “Good. Let no one know our intent. All our lives hinge upon the uprising tonight.”

  As the crowd began to disperse, I strutted up to Ana and smiled. “Lovely bit of theater there, with the girl. You speak with her last night while you were out?”

  Ana shook her head. “I didn’t dare risk it. Damn good thing she stepped forward, though; I doubt I would have won them over otherwise.”

  I took her hand then. “Think I’ll be able to pull off something similar tonight?”

  She smirked. “I hope so. Inciting a riot should be much simpler than winning people over to a scheme like this. Plus, you have a couple aces up your sleeve.”

  She meant not only our agents inserted among Grayson’s workforce, but my vampiric voice and power of Suggestion. I was afraid of having to use it at this meeting here. I knew I almost certainly would need it at the auction. I thought back to the Duchess Azure making me bite into that maidservant’s neck, my first taste of blood.

  And I tried to tell myself that this would be completely different.

  The day passed without incident; I didn’t have to turn any callers away, as I suspect Colm’s status as an Ostlander still made him an outcast from the rest of the planter elite. Some of his house servants offered to prepare supper for me, but I politely declined, with the excuse that it would be rude to eat of Colm’s larder without his express permission.

  The servants in turn declined to ask what I did have to eat that day. The answer, of course, being a couple sips of Henrietta’s blood.

  As soon as the sun set, my carriage returned from town, and I bid Colm’s servants a kind farewell before Alfonse and I stepped inside. Ana had departed long ago to rendezvous with her tribe nearby, while her agents from among Colm’s field-hands were already making their way by foot to Grayson’s estate. As we rode towards the auction, I allowed myself a moment’s relaxation; all was going according to plan.

  Which of course meant it was the perfect time for everything to fuck up.

  We were not even a quarter of the way to New Charsburgh before our carriage came to an abrupt stop. Alfonse and I exchanged a worried look, before I stepped outside to interrogate our driver as to what was going on.

  Only to stop dead in my tracks as I saw what was waiting for us not twenty paces down the road.

  Henrietta, beaten and bloodied, was being held by the hair at the feet of a tall, moustachio’d vampire. It wasn’t Grayson or Bernard, so it must have been Griffenwald, Bloem’s other Scion and toadie. He was flanked by four toughs, two with blunderbusses and two with pikes. They stood before their own carriage, which was parked at an angle that easily blocked the whole road before us.

  “Ah, dear mister Gelb, we meet at last!” He cried out, smiling wickedly. “Though I have reason to suspect that is not your true name, and that you aren’t even strictly a ‘mister.’”

  I felt a brief rush of anxiety, wondering if these bastards had gotten to Ana, or any of those poor sods from Colm’s estate. I stuffed it down into my gut as Griffenwald continued to gloat.

  “For a master thief, Messer, your incaution knows no bounds. The moment you revealed yourself at Grayson’s little soiree as one of our distant kin, we of course began to suspect your whole party of foul play. Which of course led us to question your respective identities, and wonder if the description of that strange boisterous Aquamerean lady matched that of the mercenary who’s been giving our master so much grief.”

  Henrietta looked up at me apologetically, and for the first time since we’d been reunited I felt myself sympathetic to the old pirate. She struggled mightily against Griffenwald’s grip, but the agonies she’d endured in captivity had clearly sapped her strength, and Griffenwald was still a vampire.

  “So what? You’re going to butcher all of us?”

  He laughed out loud. “Oh no, I think I’d be happy to let you and Henrietta here go… provided, of course, that you let slip where that brute Ana the Wolf has run off to.”

  I sneered at the very notion of this bargain. “And if I refuse?”

  He laughed aloud. “Well, what I tasted of Henrietta’s blood here today was rather savory. I reckon I could drink my fill… after I tear her head from her body!”

  As he jerked Henrietta’s head up towards him, I felt a terrible bile in my chest. It was Castle Azure all over again, only this time there was no treacherous Hilda for me to deflect my own guilt onto. I could have ripped my own hair out, were I not frozen in place in sheer awful terror.

  I must admit, dear reader, that I came damn close to letting poor Henrietta lose her life in that moment, choosing Ana over her.

  But in the split second before I opened my mouth to spit at Griffenwald’s feet, young Alfonse was at my side, grabbing a pistol from off my own belt.

  Pistols, at this time, were single-shot and smooth-bore; horribly inaccurate at anything other than point blank.

  Which made it all the more a testament to Alfonse’s marksmanship and dumb luck that his shot embedded itself directly in Griffenwald’s eye socket.

  The man hit the ground instantly, all four of his thralls falling to their knees to aide him. Henrietta took that opportunity to immediately sprint towards our carriage, crossing twenty paces in five, throwing our driver bodily off his seat, and grabbing the reigns of the horses, turning around just in time for Griffenwald to shout.

  “Kill them!”

  I heard two blunderbusses go off in quick succession, ducking to avoid lead shot as it embedded itself in the back walls of our ride. Henrietta laughed like a madwoman.

  “Lovely day we’re having, Sig!”

  Alfonse returned my pistol to my hands, for me to begin frantically reloading it. “Yes, and I reckon tonight will be all the more eventful.”