Thuck, thuck, thuck, that awful sound filled her head, haunting her dreams while she fought to push it away. Shuck, shuck, shuck, another sound came to her, more terrible than the last, and a warm and wet feeling hit the back of her hand. "Goodbye, Weiss."
Weiss sat bolt upright, her eyes dripping and a dead weight filling her stomach. "I'm here," she reminded herself for the third time that night, "I'm okay." A flash of lightning outside made her shriek and she pulled the rough blanket up over her face. It was raining again.
With a deep breath, she pushed the blanket away and got to her feet, tiptoeing around the silver and scarlet rapier leaning against her mattress. The small room was fine for tonight, she thought, but she knew she couldn't stay. Now that Rosmyrta was finished she had to keep moving lest she be caught and, if she imagined correctly, beaten to death.
Weiss made it to the bathroom and compulsively washed her hands, ridding herself of the warm feeling she'd just suffered through for another few minutes. She reached up and scrubbed the mirror clean before staring into her own silver eyes. She shrieked again and tumbled backwards into the door, calling on her semblance to shield her. But the longer she looked through the snowflake shield that crackled in the air before her, the more she realized it was just part of that same nightmare. She stood again, this time with more nerve, and stared into her own blue eyes. "You're alright," she said to herself, pulling down her eyelids and examining the red lines in her eyes. "You're okay." She splashed water into her face and let it drip down, washing away some of the tears that still threatened to stain her.
In a slow, practiced movement, she glided back over to her bed and sat down, pulling out her scroll one last time before trying to sleep. 4 am, only a few more hours here and she was gone. The screen blinked at her a few times and she saw the indicators telling her what she'd missed in the last hour of sleep: Two missed calls from BFF Ruby Rose, three from BFS Yang Xiao Long, and a message, "Where are you?" from BFSP Blake Belladonna. The phone blinked again and read, "Location deactivated. Would you like to activate location?"
"Nope," she said with a sigh, tucking herself back in. Just a few more hours.
...
Weiss blinked and held a hand up to the sky, shielding her scroll from the sunlight. "Are you sure we're going the right way?" she said above the sound of whipping wind. Her partner, a taller, but also slightly more unkempt woman, sat in the driver's seat, taping a paper map to the dashboard as she sped across the relatively empty highway.
"We're fine," she said, pulling her black hair behind her ears, "I've been here before."
"Because you've gotten us lost before," Weiss finished.
"Pssh, you wanna drive, princess? I seem to remember you getting us lost a few times as well."
Weiss shot the woman a somewhat cold look and opened her hand, summoning a small fragment of silver in her palm to check her reflection. She was practically perfect today, as she was most days, and had her pristine white hair pulled back and tied short, the way she preferred it for most of her hunts. "I've never gotten lost on anything important," she said.
"What, Cinder wasn't important?"
"I wasn't driving then," she said.
"Only navigating."
"I'm only saying," Weiss said, eager to change the subject, "we've been driving for hours and my scroll's losing signal. If we take too long, we'll have to face this thing in the dark and I-"
"Found it," shouted her partner, veering the car haphazardly to one side. She pulled onto a small dirt road that cut through a dense forest, the selfsame variety that covered most of Vale, and smiled brightly at Weiss, who was now glaring back at her.
"I hope you know where you're going, Ruby," Weiss said helplessly, again pondering her reflection, "because we just lost signal."
"Yang knows where we are; besides we'll be fine. We'll get this done quick and I'll treat us to some burgers back in the city."
Weiss unsummoned her mirror and looked over at Ruby. "Don't be too casual," she said. "You remember the report. We don't even know what this thing is."
"Some kind of Geist, right?" Ruby asked, her voice becoming darker. "We've killed Geists before."
"Not for sixty-thousand lien, Ruby," Weiss said, locking eyes with her. "Not for half that. I've never heard of a kill mission that expensive."
"So it's a big Geist," Ruby said. "Maybe a really big one. Worst case scenario, Yang and Blake show up tomorrow and we split the reward with them." Weiss gave her a nervous look, one she noticed. "Look," she said with a frown, holding out her hand, "it's going to be okay; we're going to be okay. In ten years, we have literally never failed a mission."
Weiss sighed and took her outstretched hand, squeezing it gently. "I know," she said, "I'm just worried, is all. The report says it didn't even kill people, they killed themselves."
"I know what it says." Ruby pulled the car off the trail, slowing to a halt in a small grove marked with the usual sign warning people of Grimm. "This is our stop."
Weiss cross-checked the map on her scroll with the one taped to the dashboard and nodded. "Just stick together and we'll be fine," Weiss said. "And keep your eyes open."