Concordia discors

Warr1or had been pestering me via every means at his disposal: IM, comments at all my mirror journals, even grass-stained notes slipped under the door of my study in Malfois Manor. He wasn’t being threatening, exactly. He was more the friendly kind of stalker, and evidently very concerned for my moral welfare, if not for my mental health. But nothing I did or said seemed adequate to convince him that I wasn’t under imminent threat from Josh Amos. I even stepped across the employer-gardener social divide long enough to assure him Josh was still barred from the Manor, and I’m not normally prone to bending over backwards to reassure the outside help.

It was his burgeoning friendship with PrinceC that really set my nerve ends jangling. Not just the perplexingness of it, though that was pronounced, but the dire possibility that PrinceC might casually let slip my whereabouts. I didn’t think PrinceC was prone to fannish faux pas, but he had been strangely quick to forgive Warr1or’s friendslock breach, so there was really no telling how deep the roots of their comradeship had penetrated.

And I couldn’t, right this moment, afford to be indifferent. I’d tried my hand at a spot of next-generation wizardfic, and the thing was up at a couple of archives before I’d fully considered what effect my foray nearish the borders of slash might have on my hettish acquaintance. It was having its expected effect on my readership in general, who were torn between wanting me flogged and wanting me canonized, but they were several degrees to the sane of poor Warr1or. He was fully capable of showing up in person to berate a near-slasher.

I idly flipped open the wind-up pocketwatch that had arrived in PrinceC’s most recent, and oddly mechanical, package. Nearly midnight. I headed in-game, feeling pensive, and strolled along the front edge of my property, gazing out through the elaborate wrought-iron fence at Dread Lane.

I hadn’t been out in wild gamespace at night--my allegiance to Lord Henri Antoine Silvestre de Gravina notwithstanding, I have no wish to be set upon by flocks of undisciplined vampire NPCs--and I didn’t really know much about Sanguinity after hours beyond the obvious. I mean, everybody knew that the gothic bartending school ran its classes at night, and naturally that elitist American Association of Horror Film Lovers held nightly screenings of the latest Japanese movies, but what else went on?

And then I noticed Rabbit, pacing back and forth on a patch of sidewalk at the lower end of the hill. She was showily removing and replacing her long scarf, and coyly rearranging it around her neck every few seconds. I rolled my eyes. Honestly, some people.

She must have heard me pushing my way through the night-blooming jasmine (and incidentally disturbing a white peacock, a recent addition to the grounds, and a small flock of ornamental bats), because when I disentangled myself she’d come over to stand beside the fence. ‘Hey, Mina,’ she said, with entirely unwarranted familiarity. ‘Staying safely shut in, are you?’

‘You know, Stasia’s extremely jealous and upset,’ I said frostily.

‘Because of the dance we shared?’ Rabbit asked, and then laughed loudly at my outraged expression. ‘Oh, Mina, your face,’ she gasped when she‘d finally recovered from her own joke. She wiped her eyes and reached out to support herself against the iron thorns and roses of my fence, but only for the splittest of seconds, snatching her fingers away satisfyingly quickly from their icy bite.

‘Because of your relationship with Razz Martini,’ I said frigidly. ‘Reports are that it was rather heated.’

‘Your own relationship with Razz was rather heated, back in the day,’ Rabbit said. I opened my mouth to argue, but she raised one white-gloved hand. ‘I remember the nasty emails you used to send each other.’

‘She showed you my emails?’ I asked, wrinkling my nose with distaste.

Rabbit shrugged. ‘Sometimes, yeah,’ she said.

‘Were you...?’ I began, but bit off the question. Really, why was I even curious? It was beneath my dignity as a BNF.

‘Lovers?’ she finished.

‘That isn’t what I was going to ask,’ I said, as chillingly as poss., though it fell a bit flat when I couldn’t immediately think of a convincing lie as to what I had been going to ask. ‘Where is old Razz, anyway?’ I asked, by way of changing the subject. ‘Still struggling to operate a dictionary?’

‘She’s dead,’ Rabbit said. I thought for a moment I’d misheard her. She went on angrily, ‘Josh Amos got religion or something and killed her. And now he thinks he can just walk away from me--.’ She stopped abruptly, glaring at me as though it were my fault she’d said too much.

I stepped away from the fence, wondering if she were mad, while back in the dorm room every hair on my body stood on end. Wait, what if she weren’t mad? I glanced involuntarily over my shoulder, even though I knew perfectly well that my roommate was out. Was this the real reason no one could talk about Josh’s whereabouts?

‘Are you sure?’ I asked Rabbit idiotically.

‘If you had a twin sister you’d been incredibly close to all your life, how would you feel about the person who did away with her?’ Rabbit demanded, and then chose to share her own bizarre feelings by adding, ‘And he’s so damnably attractive, too,’ and stamping her foot. My eyes bugged out a bit at the sheer callous self-absorption required to be attracted to your own sibling’s murderer. Rabbit was nearly as scary as Jen, with one crucial exception: she didn’t have a key to my room. Horrible suspicions were crowding in upon me. Rabbit had lost a twin, and Josh--I mean, Jen--had that photo of twin girls. Life had taken a sudden turn for the gothic.

Whoever it was first came up with that ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ line, you can tell her for me she has a pretty thorough insight into human frailty, because even though my own spirit fully intended never to sleep again, I dozed off at some point that night. I don’t even remember stepping away from the computer, but I must have done, because sometime in the pre-dawn hours I woke up, cramped and chilled and fully dressed, lying on top of my covers. I thought immediately of warm pajamas, but when I sat up to undress there was a slight problem.

It was my Norman Bates of a roommate. Jen was sitting on her own bed, smoking--in defiance of several rules, but I guess fire codes look pretty petty once you’ve done murder--and watching me.

I’d felt chilly on awakening, but my blood positively iced over at this point. And then it got, against all odds, worse.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ my roommate said politely.

‘Not at all, no,’ I babbled, wondering if I should scream shrilly or just bolt for the door.

‘It’s just that I noticed you had something of mine,’ she went on, gesturing vaguely towards the head of my bed. My pillow, I saw, had fallen to the floor. I looked slowly from it back to Jen, who held up one hand to show me the framed photograph Xena had removed from her desk. Okay, forget the door: maybe I should just make a leap for the window. We were only on the third floor, after all.

‘I can’t imagine why you’d want it,’ she went on. ‘It’s a lousy picture. But I’m deeply flattered, Mina.’

‘Oh, good,’ I said, barely listening. Why on earth hadn’t I had the foresight to keep a rope next to the bed? If I survived this, I was seriously going to make an effort to be better prepared in the future.

‘I can’t let you keep it,’ Jen said.

‘No, no, I quite see that,’ I babbled. Aside from the whole evidence factor, she was probably attached to it. CSI had led me to believe killers often kept that sort of minor trophy.

‘But I promise I’ll bring you back something even better,’ she said, and even in my alarmed state I noticed she was gazing at me with unprecedented fondness.

‘Oh, well, thanks,’ I said. ‘Jolly kind of you to--wait, what? Bring me back something?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said.

‘So you’re going somewhere?’ Hope was, as it so often does, springing.

‘Sorry, but yes,’ she said, and consulted her watch. ‘Right away,’ she said more urgently, standing up and heading for the door. I’d glanced at my own watch out of a sort of automatic empathy, and couldn’t help but wonder what sort of appointment one could have at four in the morning. Still, who cared what it was, as long as she left.

‘Don’t let me keep you,’ I said, with a more perfect sincerity than even saints generally manage.

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she said, sort of goopily. She was giving me a queerly sentimental look. I naturally assumed she was imagining how best to dismantle me and bury me under the floorboards, but it was much more awful than that.

‘You know,’ Jen said, before vanishing into the night, ‘I wanted to be close to you even back when I was writing as Razzberry Martini. I never guessed you felt the same way. I’ll steal you something gorgeous, I promise.’


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