Previously : Reagan's a hunter, Karma is a werewolf and Amy's dead. Except she's not, and she's somehow appeared at Silas University with no memory and rescued by a very confused Carmilla.
LaFontaine calls it 'the lightning round', which is about the dumbest thing Carmilla has ever heard, but she has to admit - it works. At least sometimes and, when it comes to anything they can do to fight her demon mother, the Dean, she'll take all the sometimes she can get.
Sometimes, she knows, 'sometimes' is as good as you're gonna get.
LaF got the idea from one of their psych classes, most likely 'abnormal' because, let's be real, there's no other kind of psych at Silas. According to LaF (or her teacher or some theorist somewhere who Carmilla's never heard of), it's supposed to help with reconnecting or reordering or re-some-fucking-thing-or-another synapses in the brain. Carmilla's not sure how word association - because that's really all it is - is supposed to help.
"It lures your subconscious - and whatever boogie men or women you've got hiding in there - out into the open," LaF explained to her once. She was trying to convince Carmilla to try it.
Carm's quite happy with her boogie men, women, and monsters staying right where they are.
It's pretty simple - and Carmilla does appreciate simplicity - and seems fairly harmless. The questioner - always Danny or Laura (the nice ones) - says a word and whichever one of the cast-offs they're talking to says the first thing that pops into her mind. Over time, they've developed a list of standard questions, the words most likely to get a response that might help them figure out what the Dean, Lilita, is up to.
Carmilla's repeated suggestions that maybe they'd be better off not knowing and beating a very hasty retreat to wherever isn't ground zero for her mother's demonic undertakings have been , as a matter of course, ignored.
Which is fine, really. She talks a good game but they all - or at least Laura - know she doesn't mean it. Carmilla was here first, before any of them, hiding in the bowels of Styria, lurking in the shadows, waiting for her mother to make a move. Maybe Carmilla didn't ever expect that move to be becoming University Dean or kidnapping seemingly random girls, but that doesn't change anything.
She's stopped her mother before. Maybe she can't kill her - maybe she doesn't even know how - but she can fuck with her. Mess up her plans. Chain her in a box and bury her at the bottom of the ocean.
It's all temporary. Stop gap measures. But sometimes, Carmilla has realized in her over three hundred years, stop gap is all you've got.
Hence, the lightning round.
So far, it hasn't given them much to go on. Two of the girls in the first batch remembered their full names. A second batcher remembered that she had a sister who had also gone missing
(but not returned)
and two of the girls in this most recent batch have remembered some as well. Betty remembered that her father is a general, though whether that's military or practitioner she couldn't say. And Sarah Jane remembered that she has a very… intense… crush on Kirsch.
Carmilla almost wishes they could help her forget that again.
Now, it's Amy's turn in the hotseat. Normally, Carmilla leaves this - and most of the touchy, feely, kumbaya hocus pocus shit - to Danny and Laura, even as Laura tries - every damn time - to get her to stay.
"It's important," she says. "These girls are frightened. They've been through something so horrible they can't even remember it. They need to see that someone powerful is on their side."
There's logic to that, Carmilla knows, but she also knows it's so very very flawed.
She's not on their side, not really, not unless you go by the old 'enemy of my enemy is my friend adage - which is total bullshit, anyway - and they don't know that the cast-offs went through anything horrible, and none of them, not a one, knows how powerful she is.
For that, they'd have to know what she is. And that, they all agree, is anything but a good idea.
So, if this were a normal situation, Carmilla would be back in her room, reading a book, taking a nap, drinking some blood. She'd be doing anything but leaning up against the door to the dorm's common room, the usual spot for the lightning round, nice and open and where all the girls can watch.
"It makes them feel less alone that way," Danny said once and even Carmilla could see the sense in that.
But this is not a normal situation, not even remotely. Laura and LaF are still not back - closing in on two hours late now - so they're shorthanded to begin with. Carmilla's taken up LaF's usual second chair spot, assigned to watch and listen and see if she can spot anything - a change in body language, a facial reaction, even the tiniest twitch - something that might signal their questioning is getting somewhere.
She's doing a shitty job of it so far.
She barely paid attention through the first three girls, her eyes and ears and mind all focused entirely on Amy - Amy who can't be here, Amy who shouldn't be here, Amy who's going to bring the wrath of hell down on all of them just for being here…
Amy, hasn't done a single thing but sit and watch and, occasionally, smile at one of the other cast-offs.
Which only makes Carmilla worry more.
Danny explains the rules to Amy, just as she did for the first three girls. Carmilla can't help noticing the way Amy's fighting to keep from rolling her eyes at the simple way Danny's talking to her, like she's a fourth grader.
"She was abducted, Xena, not lobotomized," Carmilla snaps. "I think she knows what to do."
Danny glares at her but settles back in her chair and gets the show, as it were, on the road, starting slow as she always does, letting Amy get into the rhythm of the back and forth. LaF says that loosens up the mind so that things flow, all instinct and no thought.
Danny works through the usual suspects and Amy's answers seem fine, if not a little boring.
Food. Doughnuts.
Home. Heart.
Family. Love.
Danny ups the ante a little - not a moment too soon for Carmilla - as Amy seems to be settling into a groove. She moves from general stuff - calibrating the mechanism, LaF calls it - to things that might trigger some responses about who took her or what they did.
Kidnapping. Ransom.
Monsters. Real.
Carmilla perks up. It's the first sign any of the cast-offs have ever given that they believe in the big bad things under their beds.
Dean. Winchester.
Danny tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to bite back a laugh. Carmilla doesn't get it.
Vampires. Dracula.
Carmilla sighs. Every fucking time, it's the same thing. Dracula.
Overrated hack.
Danny moves into the real lightning portion of things, one rapidfire word after another, repeating Amy's answers back at her, using her own words to get deeper into her mind.
You. Amy.
Amy. Karma.
Danny looks at Amy funny, like it makes no sense, but Carmilla knows it makes all the sense in the world.
Karma. Love.
Love.
Love.
Danny tries one last time.
Love.
Reagan.
Danny pauses again, just for a beat. This is - possibly - the first time they've ever gotten a truly personal response. She glances, hopefully, at Carmilla, but the vampire's eyes are locked on Amy and she looks, at least to Danny, almost as terrified as some of the cast-offs when they've found them.
Danny soldiers on.
Reagan.
Amy turns in the chair, her entire body shifting - aiming - at Carmilla. There's something in her eyes, a flicker in her gaze, just for a moment, the slightest tilt of her head as she speaks.
Santa.
The accent is all wrong - like Amy's never spoken Spanish in her life - and Danny seems confused, like the blonde is talking about Father fucking Christmas, but Carmilla doesn't need an accent. She doesn't need sudden fluency or perfect enunciation.
It's all right there, if she can see it. It's in the way Amy's eyes are traveling down her body, making tiny little stops along the way, a pattern Carmila should know, she should recognize.
The throat, right where the pulse point should be.
Just below her chest. Up and under the ribs.
Her stomach. Gut shot.
If Carmilla hadn't been caught so off guard, hadn't been so thrown by the word, she would have seen it. She would have spotted the pattern in time, would have recognized it for what it was.
The killing blows.
She hears Danny repeat the word back to Amy, but it's like Danny's underwater and it's nothing but burbles and gurgles and air rushing out, escaping and never coming back.
Santa.
Muerte.
Carmilla's just a second too late, her reaction just a half a beat off as Amy lunges for her, one hand grabbing the collar of Carmilla's shirt to hold in her place as the other hand snatches the pencil from Danny, swinging it wildly, her aim inexpert and hesitant - her eyes anything but - and Carmilla thinks, for just a moment, that she's really fucked up this time.
Amy's slight hesitation is what gives Danny a chance to kick the table, slamming it into the blonde before she can actually connect with the pencil, knocking her back into the wall. Amy's up, almost inhumanely fast, but Danny strides forward, one quick right to the jaw sending the older girl tumbling back down, out cold for the moment.
Danny stands over Amy's unconscious form, the other girls huddling at the end of the room, a couple of them crying.
"What the hell was that?" she asks Carmilla, not even bothering to clarify if she means Amy's answers or the attack.
Carmilla looks down the length of the room at the terrified cast-offs, Betty standing at the front, holding out a plastic spork like a weapon.
"Get them out of here," she says to Danny. "All of them. Tie Amy up or duct tape her or something. Just get them out of here and somewhere safe."
Safe.
Carmilla's pretty sure they're just about out of places like that.
Danny nods. "But what about -"
Carmilla holds a hand up and, remarkably, Danny grows silent. "Send Kirsch and Mel and whoever else you can scrounge up our to find Laura and the bio major. Find them and bring them back. Kill anything that gets in the way."
Danny nods, again, afraid to do much else. "What are you going to do?"
Carmilla bends down and brushes Amy's hair back out of her face. There's blood on her lip and a bruise already forming on her jaw.
She doubts it's the first time Amy's been bloodied. Probably not the worst either. The girl was married to Reagan - to Santa Muerte herself.
Getting your ass kicked comes with the territory.
"Carmilla?" Danny asks, confused at how tender Carmilla is being, especially with someone who just tried to kill her.
The vampire heads for the door, tapping out a text message on her phone. "I'm going to see a man about a saint."
They meet, in of all places, a church.
It was Will's idea. It's the last place she'd look, the last place she'd think to find two of her wayward children conspiring against her.
Carmilla isn't sure what they're doing is, technically, conspiring. Will's too on the fence for that, never outright helping her, not in ways that would actually make Mother mad. He may not be as deliberately or intentionally evil as Lilita, but he's not quite at the 'conspiring' level.
And she thinks he's out of his mind - even moreso than usual - if he thinks their mother doesn't know every single time they talk. She knows Will hasn't got Lilita fooled at all, not even a tiny bit, and if he was half as dangerous to her as he claims to be?
Mommy dearest would have him drawn, quartered, and then stitched back together so she could do it again.
Will knows only what Lilita lets him know, reveals only what she wants him to. And Carmilla knows that one day her brother is going to outlive his usefulness to their mother - or to her - and he'll have no choice but to pick a side for real.
And when he does, one of the women he loves so dearly is going to kill him.
Right now, Carmilla's thinking that's going to be her because not telling her about this? Not telling her about Amy, not warning her that their mother was making this big a move and dragging their fucking past into the light of a Silas day?
That's picking a side. And it isn't hers.
She waits for him in the church, her anger barely contained. If she was sure - really, absolutely sure - that he'd been holding out on her, Carmilla knows it wouldn't have been a text message and a 'meet me. usual spot'.
If she was sure, she'd have walked into his dorm room, hugged him, told him she loves him - somehow, someway, she really does - and cut off his fucking head.
But a part of her - the part her mother would laugh at, would call the last little bit of humanity rotting her away from the inside - still has hope. She still thinks, maybe, that Will doesn't know, that he'll be as surprised as she was, that maybe - just maybe - this will be the tipping point.
Carmilla knows Will always loved Reagan. More than he ever loved her or their mother. So, maybe this will finally get him to jump off the fucking fence and pick a side.
He comes in through the back door as he always does, refusing to just appear in a puff of smoke and a flash of light. Will's always prefered the grand entrance, announcing his presence like he's Napoleon back from conquering some barbarians.
(Carmilla knew Napoleon. Will could so take him.)
She's counting on it, actually - his stubborn consistency, his refusal to change it up. She doesn't really need the advantage of surprise, but it'll make it easier.
Will's a good liar , a very good liar. Except when he's scared. If Carmilla wants the truth, she knows the quickest way to it is to put the fear of death into him.
Meeting him just inside the doorway, her hand wrapping around his throat as she slams him into the wall seems to do the trick.
"What the fuck, Kitty?"
She hates the nickname, has hated it every day for two hundred years, and it only makes her grip tighter. He struggles against her, but she's stronger - she always has been - and he can't break free. She's not squeezing hard enough to break anything - not yet - but a little more pressure and Will stops squirming, his eyes darting back and forth around the room.
He's getting it.
He's in fucking trouble.
Carmilla leans her shoulder against the wall next to him, her face pressed against his. "You didn't warn me," she says, not even bothering to snarl or flash her fangs. Her soft, calm, and totally fucking lethal tone is far more effective.
"Warn you about what?" Will digs his fingers into her hand, trying to pry her grip loose but getting nowhere. It's the story of Will's life. His death gave him so much he never had when he was alive. Purpose. A family of sorts. Strength. Power.
But not a single damn clue how to use it.
"We rescued more girls," Carmilla says, leaning closer, tilting her head in and out of his vision, and every time she's out of sight, she can feel him tense under her fingers. "Four of them. Nothing special, really. Though there was this one interesting one. An American."
Her tone's light. Carefree. Like they're chatting about the weather.
It's the scariest thing Will's ever heard.
"She's a blonde," Carmilla says. "Very pretty. Did I mention she's American? From Texas, actually." She digs her fingers in a little harder. "Austin, to be exact." Her fingers break his skin, leaving little gashes that heal almost as soon as she makes them, but every squeeze rips them open again.
It won't do any permanent damage. But it hurts like fucking hell.
"So?" Will asks - whines - as his feel kick, trying to find some purchase on the wall, some way to push off, some leverage so he can break her grip.
"She remembers her name," Carmilla says, her fingers tightening once again around his throat and he stills. "Amy," she says, "Her name is Amy."
At first, there's nothing. Nothing but fear and pain and confusion - none of which is unusual for Will - but then Carmilla sees it. She can watch it sink in, watch the words pinball around his head and he slowly gets it.
"No," he says, shaking his head as best he can. "You're wrong. There's no way…"
Carmilla's known Will for over two hundred years. She knows his cowardice, his failings, she knows he'll be loyal to whoever won't kill him. She knows when he's lying - which is most of the time - but she also knows when, every once in a while, he's telling the truth.
Like now.
Carmilla lets him go, his feet landing back on the floor with a thud as he clutches at his throat and the already healed over wounds. "Apparently," she says, "there is a way. Because right now, Amy Raudenfeld-Solis is tied up in my dorm room with no clue who - or what - she is."
Will slumps against the nearest pew, his mind racing. "You don't understand," he says. "It can't be. Not like 'I can't believe mother would do this', can't be. It fucking can't be." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone, tapping the screen frantically. "Here," he says, finally, handing her the phone.
Carmilla takes it and glances down at the screen, immediately drawn to the picture of Amy - smiling and happy and full of life - and then the headline.
Austin teacher dead at twenty-eight.
Dead.
Amy's dead.
Well… that's a wrinkle.
"Are you sure it's her?" Will asks.
Carmilla thinks about the girl back at her dorm. About her smile, the same one as in the picture. About the way she followed the pattern, the one Carmilla taught Reagan years ago
(neck) (under the ribs) (gut shot)
about how she said Karma's name and Reagan's.
About Santa Muerte.
"Yeah," she says, staring down at the picture. "I'm sure."
Will shakes his head, still incredulous. "How?" he asks. "She's been dead for like a year and a half."
Carmilla's eyes snap up. A year and a…
No.
No fucking…
She looks back down at the phone, at the date. She does the math in her head, even though she doesn't really have to.
578.
Amy died 578 days ago tonight.
Exactly the number of days Lilita spent at the bottom of the Pacific thanks to Carmilla and some enchanted chains.
"What the hell is she doing?" Carmilla mutters, mostly to herself.
"I don't know," Will says, a distinct ripple of fear running through his voice. "She doesn't tell me much anymore," he says. "She's got minions for everything. Some human and some… there's demons, Carm. Some of them I don't even know what they are. And I don't want to."
None of it makes sense. Freezing Will out. Kidnapping girls and letting them go. Using new 'hired help' instead of her old stand-bys.
Bringing Amy back from the dead.
"Why bring Amy into this at all?" she asks. "I was the one who chained her up. I dumped her at the bottom of the ocean. Why go through all the work to get Amy here…"
Carmilla trails off as she and Will make eye contact, the answer so fucking obvious to both of them.
Reagan.
"It's the only thing that makes sense," Will says. "I don't know why, but mother wants Reagan… she wants the family back together. And this is the perfect way to do it."
Carmilla nods. He's right. Amy's alive. Reagan's wife is alive. And sooner or later - probably sooner if Lilita has anything do with it - Reagan will find out.
And then it's only a matter of time before Santa Muerte, Carmilla's baby sister herself, comes hunting.
Austin
Reagan hopes she's wrong. She prays. And she doesn't pray often. In fact, she's pretty sure she hasn't prayed even once in the last 578 days. Mostly, she's been too drunk, too sad, too lost to even think about it.
But, when she has? She's pretty sure it would be pointless.
Why pray when no one is listening?
But tonight, as she takes cover behind the biggest tree - the closest one to Amy's grave and Karma's unconscious body - Reagan prays that she's wrong, that she's underestimating her father and brother. That maybe the alcohol and adrenaline and shock of seeing Karma again has messed her judgement up even more than usual.
Martin and Glenn agreed to come. They said they'd bring her truck and help her get Karma somewhere safe. It wasn't until after she hung up that the fog in her brain cleared enough and Reagan remembered.
The last time they saw Karma, Martin and Glenn tried to kill her.
Granted, she was a werewolf at the time, but still...
But tonight, everything happened so fast, she hadn't had time to think, to reason, to make the best choice. She'd made the obvious choice and now… well… now she was realizing what she'd done.
She'd called a pair of hunters, two of the best, to help save a beaten and wounded werewolf, one who was her friend, her family even.
But that hadn't stopped Martin and Glenn before.
She hasn't been hunting with them since Amy died and - without her - her father and brother have lost what wiggle room there ever was in their judgment. They had seen Amy's body, they had seen what had happened to the woman they considered a sister, a daughter.
Reagan couldn't really blame them for being a little less judge and jury and more executioner.
But this is different. This is Karma. She knows it's different. She's just not sure they do.
So she hides, waiting behind the tree - lousy cover, but it's all she's got - and waits and rationalizes that she's just being careful, just being cautious.
Reagan watches through the branches as the two figures approach from the far end of the lot, stagger-spaced, spread wide to avoid bunching so if one of them gets taken, the other's still standing. Martin taught them that, before it was hunting, when it was survival, when he showed them and Carmilla and Will what they'd need to know in a fight.
He taught them a lot. All of them.
But then he'd taught Reagan and Glenn how to run and that was the end of that.
Reagan slows her breathing, evening herself out as she watches the closer figure - Glenn - reach Karma. Martin's hanging back, probably with gun drawn, waiting and watching in the dark, covering their escape. Glenn bends down, nudging Karma gently.
"She's out," he whispers. "No sign of Reagan."
Martin responds from a distance, his words lost to her, but she doesn't need to hear them to know what he said, not when Glenn pulls his knife - the silver one Martin gave him the night they escaped - flipping it around, hilt in his hand, ready to strike.
Glenn's younger and bigger - always has been - but he's slower and no matter how much he trains and practices, his reaction time is always off, he's always a second late. It's never enough to get him killed, but he's got more scars than he should and Reagan's perfectly fine with giving him another one.
Her knife catches him in the wrist, slicing through the skin before it clatters off the grave marker behind him. It doesn't do any real damage, not even enough of a wound to make him drop his own blade, but it startles him, and his head jerks up, distracted just enough for Reagan to cross the few short feet between them, her shoulder lowered and plunging into his abdomen, her speed and leverage giving her everything she needs to drive him back and take him to the ground.
She has his knife - and hers - in her grip before Glenn can rebound and she squares herself between him
(and Martin's gun, somewhere out in the dark)
and Karma.
"What the fuck, Rea?" Glenn tries to scramble to his feet but the ground is soft and he slips, catching himself on the tombstone behind him.
"I called you for help," she says. "Asked you to bring my truck, help me get her somewhere safe. I didn't ask you to come try and kill her."
Martin steps forward, the gun - a shotgun so clearly he's not taking any chances - raised, pointing down at an angle, at Karma's body. Reagan shifts her stance, just enough so he'll have to shoot through her leg if he wants to try it.
"Reagan, you know we have to do this," he says. "We're hunters. She's a wolf. That's how this works."
There was a time when it wasn't that cut and dried and even if it had been, they might have been on the other side. But that's not now. And now, all that matters is Karma.
"She was Amy's best friend," Reagan says. "And that makes her mine. Mine to protect, mine to help, mine to love."
The implication is clear. Mine. Not yours. Not yours to kill.
Glenn finally finds his feet again, but makes no move toward her. He's not stupid enough to challenge Reagan unarmed. "Yours?" he asks. "She's a werewolf, Reagan. She's a fucking monster."
Reagan hears the snap of a branch as Martin steps forward, trying to get a better angle, but she knows he'll shoot even if he doesn't get one, he won't think twice about wounding her if it kills Karma.
She steps back, a single pace closer to Karma and glares into the dark. Glenn sees it first, the glow, the light whipping back and forth in her eyes and then Martin spots it, the way she shimmers in the dark, every muscle - every one bigger than it should be - vibrating under her skin, her fingers lengthening, talons closing around the handles of the knives.
"She is a monster, Glenn," Reagan says, the words slipping off the sharp tips of fangs. "But just in case you forgot?"
The knives fly from her hand, pinpoint accurate, cutting down her father and her brother where they stand.
"So am I."