"The house is empty," Emma informed them as she descended the staircase from the second floor, holstering her gun. "There's no one here."
"Snow was here, though," Red said from where she stood in the foyer, inhaling deeply. "I can smell her. The scent is recent. Definitely from sometime earlier today."
"So Snow turns up at Regina's house and then both of them disappear," Charming breathed, leaning against the pristine wall beside a large, framed mirror. "That can't be a good sign."
"Well at least she's still alive?" Emma asked, glancing questioningly at her father. She had been confirming what felt like every five minutes that her mother's heart was in fact still beating. Charming nodded to indicate that he could still in fact sense his true love's presence in this world.
"But for how much longer?" Charming begged the question.
"If she hasn't killed her by now, she must want her alive for some reason," Emma reasoned. She and her father shared a meaningful glance.
"Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?" Red asked.
"Maybe," Emma pondered. She didn't want to see her own thought process through. The look on her father's face was already devastating enough. Still, if they were going to find Mary Margaret, they would all need to be on the same page. "Unless the reason she's keeping her alive is that she feels she can get her vengeance some other way."
"How do you mean?" Charming asked her.
"Torture," Emma admitted hesitantly, sad to see Charming's face fall further into despair. "Enslaving her. Any number of options."
"We have to find her," Charming seethed desperately.
"We will," Emma assured him.
"Where?" Snow asked. "Do you want me to try and track them? Because the scent is strong, but hazy. I don't know if I could find a trail."
"I don't think that's necessary," Emma said. "Aside from her house, there is only one other place in this town I think Regina could be." She made eye contact with her father as they said the words together.
"Her vault."
The trio rushed to the graveyard, but once they stood outside the tomb, they paused, hesitant to enter.
"If Regina's here, she's probably waiting for us," Emma muttered, surveying the tombstone. "It could be a trap."
"I don't give a damn, she can have me," Charming said.
"We can't help Mary Margaret if we're captured ourselves," Emma said, casting her father a sideways glance, partially amused and partially concerned that his wife's disappearance had him in such an emotional state that it compromised his judgment. She turned to Red. "Can you smell them, Ruby?"
"I think so?" she said, inhaling deeply. "I can smell them both, but the scent is muffled, as if it's buried deep. And…" she turned to Emma, "I'm feeling an extremely strong instinct to dig."
"That's probably them, then," Emma scowled, turning back to face the tomb. "Right. David, you come in with me. Ruby, you stand guard. If you hear anything, or – sense – anything, that seems like trouble, don't come looking for us. Run as fast as you can and get Gold. Better bring Mother Superior too if you can find her. We might need all the magical back up we can get."
Charming covered Emma, his firearm cocked and loaded as she heaved her shoulder against Regina's father's tomb and slid it open, uncovering the staircase to the vault below. The pair shared a determined glance before Emma began the descent, holding a flashlight level with her gun, both outstretched in front of her.
The first room was empty. Emma marveled at the vast wall of beating red hearts that stood in front of her as Charming climbed down behind her.
"Are these all hearts of people in Storybrooke?" she breathed, stepping forward, her eyes darting from one pulsating box to another.
"I'm not sure," Charming said. "Regina was feared in many different lands. From what I've heard, she collected hearts from all over."
Emma felt a chill blow up from beside her and turned to face it, aiming her gun into the shadows at the end of the corridor. She and Charming advanced slowly together until they found themselves at the end of the room with a long hallway stretching in either direction to their left and right. They looked up one side, then the other, then turned to look at each other.
"You take right, I'll take left?" Emma suggested.
"Should we really be splitting up?" Charming asked, hesitating.
"If Regina is down here and we come up against her and her magic, I don't think it's going to matter if we've got one gun trained on her or two," Emma pointed out.
Charming grimaced his agreement with her assessment of the situation. "Call out if you run into trouble," he said as the two turned from each other and began down the opposing hallways. "I'll come and find you."
"Same goes for you," Emma replied.
Slowly the echo of her father's steps faded as Emma crept further from him down the dark, narrow corridor. She squinted in the flickering candle light of the chandeliers that lit the way, igniting in front of her as she progressed and extinguishing once she had passed so she couldn't see the way behind her. It was a dizzying display, until she found she could not tell how long she had been walking, or in what direction.
She was just about to turn around and retrace her steps back to the crypt for fear of having stumbled too far along the maze when she felt the wall change as she traced it beside her with her fingers. She felt still closer, pressing her weight into the wall and found herself tracing something circular with the palm of her hand. A door, she thought. She grabbed hold of the circle and twisted it clockwise until she heard a loud click and felt the entire door jostle in front of her. She pushed it forward. It weighed heavily, and she had to push again, this time bracing herself and leaning all of her weight into it. It swung open stiffly until it hit a point where it just seemed to fall back, and Emma stumbled into the room behind it, catching herself from falling by leaning on it's knob.
"Emma?!" came a scared whisper from the corner of the room. Emma looked up and saw her mother's face, white as a sheet, barred into her cell at the other end of the room.
"Mary Margaret!" Emma whispered, expressing relief and concern in the same breath. Without turning to close the door behind her, she rushed forward, attempting to make her harried footsteps as light as possible on the cold stone floor.
"What are you doing here?" Snow asked, and Emma couldn't help but notice a hint of disappointment in her voice. "You can't be here."
"David felt something go wrong and knew you were in trouble," Emma explained as she continued forward. "You've got quite a hold on his heart. When we checked your room, we saw you'd gone out the window. What were you thinking?"
"I was trying to end this blood feud between us," Snow whispered, anxious tears sprouting in her eyes as Emma began surveying the bars of the cell, feeling them with her hands. "But I failed, Emma, I had no idea she would go this far. She took my heart…"
Emma did not seem phased as she continued to trace the bars with her fingers, searching for points of weakness or leverage.
"Well, we'll just have to get it back from her," she said distractedly. "But first, we need to get you out of here, and then we'll get it back before she…"
"No, Emma, you don't understand," Snow interrupted, desperate for her to listen. "It was never about me, it's about you. She wants to kill you."
"I'd like to see her try," Emma hissed, testing the door from a certain angle and blowing a piece of her blonde hair off her face.
"No, you have to get out of here now," Snow pleaded, wrapping Emma's hands in her own around the bars of the cell.
"I'm not going anywhere without you," Emma insisted, her tone almost harsh, but Snow persisted.
"She wants her vengeance, and I thought it just meant me, because I killed her mother, but it meant you because I killed her family and now she wants to kill my family. She orchestrated all this, it's a…"
"…a trap," a dark voice from the doorway finished her sentence for her. Emma whipped around at the additional voice as Regina swung the door closed with a clang.
For the record, I know some of this kind of makes Emma and Charming look like idiots. Why would you go down into an evil witch's cavern without so much as a semblance of a plan? Why would you then split up once in said cavern? But I wanted to keep the plot moving along, and honestly some times they do act a bit like idiots, even on the show. Like facing a showdown with two evil sorceresses and thinking that pointing three swords in their faces will do the trick.
Next up, we know what happened the first time someone tried to take Emma's heart. What will happen this time?