Chapter X
Vice and Virtue
Filthy private school, Megan Moore thought with a snarl as her old Ford Pinto pulled up to the curb of a magnificent building, situated at the edge of town. It had the look of a historical university to it, complete with bell tower and ivy snaking up the outside walls. Saint Erica's Academy was the exact stereotype of a fancy girl's school, and while Mina had belonged there (with her grades, there was no question), Alice McGee certainly did not.
"Wow, ain't that fancy as hell."
Megan jerked her keys out of the ignition and turned a steely eye to her so-called partner in crime. Bob Catherine, for all his homeless and nicotine-addicted faults, certainly did clean up nice with a shower, a shave and a new pair of clothes (well, not new, since they had once belonged to Megan's ex-husband and not yet been cleaned out of the apartment). He turned and grinned at her, "Ya'll used to go to this place?"
"I never had the grades to get in," Megan snapped, almost kicking open the door as she clambered out, "Mina did." Bob followed, still stooping over where he stood, following Megan like a shadow as she walked up the winding drive of Saint Erica's.
The atrium was a symbol of decadence, thought Megan. Marble – probably not faux, she thought – walls and fine oak floors all lit with the finest and most perfect electrical system in the country. The woman at the registration desk was bored, smacking bubblegum and flipping over her braided hair.
"Excuse me," Megan told the girl at the counter, who looked up, annoyed, from her magazine. "Megan Moore and Robert Catherine. We had a meeting with the student council president?"
"Oh, yeah," the girl said, checking a roster by her side, "She's in the art room, clearin' out stuff for the Festival . . ." She handed Megan two passes and returned to her magazine, which was probably the first thing she'd read all month.
"I ain't Robert," Bob told her, grinning proudly as he clipped the visitor ID to the lapel of his jacket, "It sounds stupid."
"No, Bob sounds stupid. Robert at least doesn't sound like a moron's name."
"So ya do care!"
Megan looked around the halls of Saint Erica's in utmost distaste, her eyes scanning the pieces of student artwork that hung upon the corridor leading down to the main art room. How many times Megan had heard about this school at home, heard her parents debating how they would pay for Mina's education, and remembered how upset her mother was when Megan couldn't get into this damn place as a kid . . .
"Dat the art room, Miz. Moore?" Bob asked her, snapping Megan back to reality. She turned around to face a set of double doors covered in various notes and miscellaneous papers, along with the title Art Storage and Painting Room. "Who has a painting room all to itself?"
Megan shoved open the door, walking inside and nearly choking on the smell of paint and plaster that oozed from every inch of that ridiculously large room. It was almost sickening. A lone female figure was in the room, lifting canvases from their places upon the easels. She jumped at the sound of their voices.
"Oh," she said, blushing scarlet, smoothing her navy skirt and fixing her hair, "Are you Mina's sister?"
Fine greeting, Megan thought nastily but shook the girl's hand and nodded. The student was short and raven-haired, not pretty but not exactly ugly. More bookish, Megan supposed.
"I'm Anna Lutze," she said with a polite – almost rehearsed – bow, eyes looking at Bob, who gave a yellow-toothed grin and stooped bow in return. Anna looked sick and spoke to Megan, "What did you wish to discuss?"
Best not to beat around the bush, Megan thought, and spoke aloud the name of the one woman Megan wouldn't mind being responsible for the death of, "Alice McGee."
Anna's face paled and she gulped nervously, hurrying quickly back to the canvases she had been sorting. Megan scowled. "I really need to talk to you; you were her best friend, weren't you?"
"What do you want?" she demanded quickly, almost painfully. She sounded almost near tears. "The police said I wasn't in any trouble, what the hell do you want? I didn't do anything!"
Bob, speaking quicker before Megan could (and probably for the best) asked, "Did yer friend ever mention Eirika or Ephraim, or Siegmund or Sieglinde?"
Anna knelt down by the rows of canvases and said nothing, nimble fingers moving across the canvas frames. She was shaking, crying certainly, and Megan felt irritation swelling inside her. Damnit, all she wanted were some answers, just a bit of a clue even to the identities of these people that had helped kill Mina and Sean and all those other poor people . . .
"Eirika and Ephraim, you said?" Anna asked softly, voice cracking as she stood, fingers holding onto a canvas and shivering. Megan grunted in agreement and the student set the canvas down upon an easel, "Alice wrote stories about them, she used to let me and Caroline and Liz read them . . . but Alice was a better painter . . ."
Megan looked at the painting, the portrait done in a master's hand no less, of two people – male and female. Two people, dressed in rich gold and red of imperial glory, hair long for the two of them, eyes unfocused and faces smiling falsely . . .
But the painting . . . those people, the two near identical people painted . . .
"Sweet Jesus," Bob muttered, summing up Megan's thoughts exactly.
The man was deformed; near demonic, with leathery wings wrapping around his form and eyes a brilliant, gleaming crimson that looked like blood. Sharply clawed hands were gripping the woman's shoulders; and the woman who was painted . . . She barely looked human, not with those eyes, not with those claws!
And yet . . . and yet . . . Somehow Megan knew that these people weren't meant to be like this. Perhaps it was their eyes? She shook her head, dismissing the idea as ludicrous. No artist had ever been able to precisely capture emotion.
"Alice said these were the villains of her stories," Anna said softly, looking at her feet, "At least, when she painted this, she did . . ."
"What do you mean?" Megan asked, trying to ignore the painted still-life, although her eyes continually traveled up to the faces of the two people. Anna looked down at her feet.
"She never said they were the outright villains," murmured Anna, turning away, "But this picture says it all." She pointed at the portrait, voice still soft, but now almost cold and analytical.
"For one thing, they're drabbed in the cloth of imperial colors – absolute monarchies, totalitarian dictators. The man, painted as a dragon almost, represents draconian law – unfair, strict, cold – red eyes symbolizing bloodlust and warmongering. The dragon can also mean war and bloodshed. He's obviously a murderer."
She looked at the woman's face, a pensive look on her face, and spoke quicker. "Yellow eyes, decay and disease, gray skin, possibly ash on it, dying and burnt, an existence without a purpose . . . Blood on the nails," (Megan's eyes flickered to the woman's clawed hands, indeed finding some with a sick feeling), "Again, murderess. Her hair itself is done up like Jane Grey's, a failed queen and ruler, and the uncared for appearance suggests she's dead, again, no purpose, forgotten. She's fodder, little more, useless."
Bob blinked in surprise at Anna's rant. Megan spoke instead after the silence, "And . . . these are Eirika and Ephraim?"
Slowly, Anna nodded. "Alice called this Vice and Virtue."
Megan ignored the art freak and looked back at the portrait and shook her head. If those painted monstrosities of people were Eirika and Ephraim, then why had their names appeared at the sight of Sean Catherine's murder?
Something caught her eye at the arm of the throne the demonic man – Ephraim was it? – was painted on. Leaning closer to the portrait and narrowing her eyes to see the words We Guard the Gate carved onto the wood.
"EIRIKA! EIRIKA!"
Sensation brushed against her skin, tantalizing glimpses of touch that were agonizing to feel.
"EIRIKA! PLEASE, EIRIKA!"
Her eyelids fluttered open, the cerulean eyes behind them unfocused and dark from unconsciousness. Nausea swam within her chest as Eirika sat up, her body weak from the blood loss, her mind amazed she was even still alive.
"PRINCESS!"
She looked around her, her head aching as she tried to keep the vertigo and illness back. Eirika was freezing, no doubt owning to the loss of blood, and her mind was painfully sick and functioning poorly. Even still, she recognized the speaker's voice.
". . . Seth?" she whispered, voice hoarse as she forced her eyesight to flicker back to clarity.
Dark clay of a graveyard's ground; sky scattered clouds of smoke and brimstone, stars as red as blood . . . She looked down at herself. Blood was caked upon her hands and sides, and a poor tourniquet bound around her ribcage. Who had bandaged the wound?
She wasn't dead. Saint Latona, she was happy to hear those words, but Eirika's attention turned quickly to seeing what had become of the others who had been watcher – and participant – to Alice's game of chance.
Not a soul stirred, aside from her. There was no Bill acting as puppeteer to poor Tana, no bewitched Joshua to watch with cheeriness in his eyes, no Seth's body lying on the ground about to die . . .
"Seth?" Eirika called again, using a tombstone to hoist herself up to her feet and leaning against it. Her side felt like the ribs had been splintered, the skin weak and easily tearing to release more lifeblood.
She knew she had heard him call for her, was very sure that it had been him. Who else could it have been, when Seth had indeed been in the graveyard when Eirika had been unconscious . . . ?
Yet Eirika had lost, so by all means she should be insane and Seth inhuman. Was she simply hearing things then? The thought send a shiver through her body and bile across her tongue.
"You lost, you lost, lost, lost, lost!" spoke a girlish giggle, high and annoying, ringing in her sore head. She recognized that voice as well, closer in memory, and called out although her voice was weak and throat was sore and painful.
"Show yourself!"
There was another giggle, a laugh between a shriek of joy and a howl of black humor. The sound was familiar, a sinister ringing in her mind that made Eirika clutch the tombstone she was using for support in an even tighter grip. She felt blood leaking out from the wound in her side and was sure a healer needed to tend to it but there was nobody here, nobody who could help her.
Eirika looked up, vision spinning from blood loss, but her sight was clear enough to make out a single figure, small and lithe and blonde, familiar . . .
"Miss, you've lost! Lost, lost, lost! You've failed all of them!"
Jabberwock, her mind told her instantly. It was Jabberwock, the small figure, and Eirika clutched her side as sharp pain raced through the injured muscle and skin. Hot blood covered her fingers, seeping through the thin material of the tourniquet someone had applied.
"Where are they?" she demanded of Jabberwock. "Where is everybody who was here before? Joshua, Seth, Tana? Where are they?" He merely laughed, as if to dismiss her questions, and tapped the brim of his hat.
"You lost!" he said with a nod and a grin, "But Miss. Bella wanted to be nice to you! You should be very, very happy!" He wagged a finger at her in a chastising manner, the smile never leaving his gray eyes.
"Where are they!" Eirika demanded, but her voice trailed off into a moan as she doubled over in pain.
"They're right here!" Jabberwock told her with a nod and a widening grin, "They've never left!"
Could she not see them? Eirika, beads of fearful sweat trickling down the nape of her neck, spun around the graveyard searching as hard as she could for any of the three, just anybody else . . .
"SETH!" she screamed out. "JOSHUA! TANA!"
"Princess . . ."
Eirika ran. She didn't know where she ran to, or exactly what she was running from, but found her feet skirting the barren ground, her eyes brimming with tears of pain owing to the wound in her side, and also tears of fear.
Was she hallucinating, hearing things? She did indeed lose the duel to the marionette that Tana had been forced to become and thus lost the game to Bill, but . . . Was she really insane? Did she really no longer have a grasp of reality; was she . . . like Riev, like Valter, like every other psychopath that Eirika and her brother had had to cleave down in the course of this war?
"SOMEBODY! PLEASE, SOMEBODY!" she yelled, choking, just wanting to see somebody from reality, see somebody – anybody, damn it – who would be able to convince her that she wasn't insane . . .
Eirika tripped and fell to the ground, her side exploding into pain and agony. She clutched her side and fought back more tears. What a queen she'd make someday, especially if she was indeed insane . . .
"Princess Eirika!"
She looked up, the side of her face stinging where she'd scraped it falling, her panicked eyes falling upon somebody she knew, somebody not Jabberwock and not Alice, but a tall man, red hair matching the blood from her wound . . .
"Seth!" she yelled, scrambling to her feet, staring in utmost relief at the Renaitian general. He looked much the same as he had when Joshua had helped win him from Jabberwock's clutches – still scarred, still bleeding profusely from wounds across his face and a twisted arm, but he was standing, albeit swaying, and his eyes were looking at her in fear.
"Princess," he gasped out, sounding as if speaking caused him a great deal of pain, "What happened, why are you hurt?"
She could not say anything, but a feeling of utmost relief spread through her. Here was proof, physical evidence that Eirika was not insane, that she still was . . .
"Seth? It's really you?" she asked, not wanting this to be a demented byproduct of the loss she'd suffered. He looked at her oddly, almost fearfully, holding his arm carefully so that his gloves were soon a deep black from the blood.
"Milady, what do you mean?" His eyes suddenly widened and he hurried forward to catch Eirika as she collapsed, her mind reeling back into the darkness, fatigue and stress and blood loss finally shutting her systems down.
At least she wasn't crazy.
I do not own Fire Emblem, Nintendo does. I own all original characters.