Hello everyone! I hope your New Years are all off to a positive start. I know these updates are maybe coming out quite thick and fast but I seem to be on a roll with my writing just now so I'll take the positives and keep going before I get another writing drought!
Kk, once again you give me far too much credit m'dear but I do agree that as much as we all love Bo, sometimes she was not always the most easily sympathetic of characters.
Dragonfly00, I hope I've not upset you too much! As ever with my stories, things will get much darker before they get better but remember, I always give you a positive ending so worry not my friend.
As always, huge thanks to my lovely reviewers, FrenChi, Joannrbb et al, glad you're staying with me and welcome to Aussie and all those hitting the Follow/Favourite buttons. I reckon I have the best readers on FF.
Ready?
Chapter Eight
Dagny shoved hard against the front door, something heavy was jamming it shut from the inside. With one final almighty push, she gave herself just enough of an opening to squeeze through provided she breathed in. She glanced around the entrance hall in utter befuddlement, clambering over what she now realised had been the hefty mahogany sideboard pressed up against the entranceway where it had obviously been tipped over with some force. Rubbish lay strewn across the hardwood flooring and soil from Lauren's beloved plants lay scattered in muddy clumps.
"Hello?" she called cautiously. "Bo? Lauren? Saoirse?" and still she received no reply. "Anyone?" she tried finally but no answering sound came. Gingerly, she picked her way through the mess, edging further and further through the hall, ears pricked and vision primed for the slightest sign of movement, friendly or otherwise.
She paused when she made it as far as the opening to the Living Room, doing her best impersonation of stealth, she peered around the doorframe only to be confronted with a very Dyson-shaped lump lying in a heap on the floor in amongst yet more household mess. Without a thought, the Valkyrie dived across the room and dropped to her knees, inspecting her scruffy-faced friend for any obvious injuries. Airways clear, no blood…she rapidly ran through her list of checks; no bones or weapons sticking out anywhere...
"Dyson!" she cried, smacking lightly at the Wolf's cheeks and trying to shake him into wakefulness. "Dyson, c'mon, I know you can hear me, even through that thick skull!"
Eventually there came a grumble of protest as Dyson raised a hand to his temple and lifting himself onto his elbows as the mist began to clear.
"Dag, where's Bo? Kenzi!" he said, struggling to sit upright, glancing round furiously before spotting a familiar pair of stripy-socked legs sticking out from behind the kitchen island like the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy's house landed on her.
"Easy!" The young doctor pressed down on Dyson's shoulders as he attempted to regain his feet. "Stay there, I'll go check on her."
Dagny dodged her way over to Kenzi's side, wondering just what the hell had been going on while she had been at work but then realised she would no doubt get all the details soon enough. In the meantime, she had injured and she was first and foremost a medic.
By the time she reached her, the plucky little human had already started coming to, slurring her best friend's name incoherently;
"Bo….n-n-no…don't, don't do tha-"
"Kenzi!" said Dagny, gripping the other woman's shoulders, trying to bring her out of whatever terrible haze she seemed to be trapped in. Kenzi's eyes began rolling about in her head, her eyelids flickering just enough to show signs of a growing alertness. "I'm here Kenz, talk to me."
"Bo…Bo…" she rambled restlessly, head lolling from side to side on Dagny's arm while the Valkyrie checked her over. Like Dyson, there were no obvious wounds but the woman was definitely in shock.
"What about Bo? Kenzi? Can you tell me what happened?" She asked again gently.
"Bo got loose." Came Dyson's voice from over the Valkyrie's shoulder before he moved to kneel at Kenzi's other side, smoothing a hand over the woman's brow. "Lauren never made it to the Dàl this morning, Bo wanted to come check everything was okay. We found Lauren and the kids gone and that," he said, pointing to the large, newly cracked mirror above the mantelpiece, "waiting for us."
Dagny lifted her eyes to find the message written in Bo's 'slut red' lipstick scrawled across the polished surface. In her haste to treat her friends she hadn't even noticed it before now.
"So now Bo's gone nuclear I'm guessing?" she surmised. The Wolf nodded;
"Kenzi and I got knocked out by the blast when she hurricane-d it out of here."
"I suppose it would be stupid to ask if you know where she went then." Dagny raised a sardonic eyebrow to which Dyson's only reply was a small quirk of the lip and the private musing that the woman was becoming more and more like her mother with each passing year.
"She's stable, just a little winded, I think." She continued, turning her attention back to Kenzi who had gone quiet again since Dyson had moved to join them. "She needs rest. There may be a minor concussion but nothing serious."
"I'll take her upstairs to the spare bedroom," he said, lifting his human girlfriend easily into his arms, "in the meantime, we need to find Bo."
"Correction," she replied, "we need to find wherever Lauren and the twins are being held. That's where Bo will head. We just need to find them before she does. Where the hell is Saoirse anyway? She was supposed to be on watch."
"I don't know," said Dyson, "maybe they took her too."
Groggily, Lauren's senses began to return to her. Keeping her eyes firmly shut she slowly felt her way up through her body, trying to get a sense of her condition. Nothing really hurt too much, just a pounding headache where she guessed she must have been clubbed. Her hands were tied behind her and her hip was sore where she lay twisted on her side but overall, she didn't appear to be in too bad a shape she decided woozily.
Just where the hell was she? And god, she really needed to give this outfit a miss in future! There she was, in the same belted camel blazer, white shirt and jeans combo that she had been wearing when she had been kidnapped by Massimo years earlier; now to be referred to as the 'captured by maniac psychos' outfit, she huffed.
She dared crack an eyelid, cursing herself as the sudden change in light instantly made her groan aloud. She blinked rapidly as a black-garbed figure moved blurrily closer into her field of vision.
"Well Doctor Lewisss, how nice of you to finally join ussss!" he clapped theatrically, "Isn't it Kostas?" he called to someone whom Lauren guessed was lurking in a darkened corner of…whatever this place was with its dingy walls and hard concrete flooring.
That voice…she thought…so familiar but…wait…oh no…
Lauren scrabbled frantically to lift herself off the floor and into a more upright posture, a poleaxe slamming into her skull at the sheer effort.
"Shh now, Doctor, this just won't do" that same sickening, hissing voice mocking her again as he knelt in front of her on the floor. Unable to make out the individual characteristics of the man's face, she cringed as he came close enough for her to feel his warm breath on her cheek, the heat of his suit-clad body saturated in expensive cologne and that savage grip on her arms that still burned her in memory as he raised her roughly into a sitting position. "Trust me when I tell you that I have no interest in harming you today. Any of you."
She glanced around in horror as his words sunk in. On her left, Charlotte and Ethan sat strapped back-to-back in a chair each nearby, both wide-eyed but fear-frozen into silence. To her right, she could just make out the form of her proud Griffin daughter, prone and chained to the ground, seemingly trapped her zoomorphic form, struggling against her bonds like a wild animal caged for the amusement of passing tourists. Christophe followed Lauren's gaze and smirked;
"Legend has it that the only thing that could ever capture a Unicorn was a golden chain…apparently, it works just as well on their other Celestial cousins. I can't have you and that mangy beast concocting up any fancy ideas between you now, can I?"
"What the fuck do you want?" the blonde growled to which, infuriatingly, her captor only chuckled. Not since turning Fae had she felt so powerless, so weak and she hated it.
"Isn't it obvious?" He said, rising once more to his feet, turning his back to them all and lifting his hands in the air as though he were about to conduct a symphony. "Don't tell me the great Doctor Lewis has failed to solve my little puzzle! Oh, but it's so simple!" he spun gracefully on his toes to face her again and clasped his hands in front of him. "The unaligned Succubus is going to kill you all, not I!" he informed her gleefully.
"Bo would never do that!" Said Lauren confidently. "My wife would never hurt her own family! She'd die first."
"Oh, she will, don't worry," he said mildly, "but she will destroy everything she holds most dear first." He strolled casually back towards her, allowing the words to settle in the air before squatting down directly in front her, showing off a well-rounded athleticism; "you still haven't worked out what I can do yet, have you? Have I really managed to foil that…legendary brain of yours?" He said with an almost reverent leer, running a finger down the side of Lauren's face from which she instantly recoiled in disgust.
"You're a Cogitatio with a side order of Hissing Sid!" She retorted, trying to bring them back on topic and hitting back with a little bravado of her own. If Christophe was stupid enough to suddenly start spilling all his secrets then more fool him.
"Very good. Yes, my mother was descended from King Hydra as you know but my father possessed an exceedingly rare, recessive gene of the Cogitatio species. The ability to reflect a person's fears inwards until the victim eventually drive themselves insane. What you don't know Lauren, may I call you Lauren? Is that Hydra had the ability to regenerate his own eight serpent heads as long as not all of them had been severed. Now…here's the conundrum; What would those life-giving abilities do if coupled with one's ability to seek out a person's deepest darkest fears?"
Lauren followed Christophe's lead to rapidly reach a very uncomfortable conclusion at the end of that particular trail of thought.
"You can give life to someone's fears? Make it live and breathe inside of them? So, you have been controlling her!" She said, her eyes widening in a mixture of abject horror and scientific curiosity. She remembered once saying to Bo very early in their friendship that she found the Fae endlessly fascinating. How she wished she could retract that statement now. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat; "But Bo conquered her greatest fear a long time ago. She came to accept who and what she is with the help those who love her." She said defiantly.
"You're a clever girl Lauren," he said patronisingly, "but that whole 'ooh, I'm a monster routine' is so last season, darling! I think you'll find that the wonderful thing about fear is that no matter how many of them you conquer, another yet bigger and stronger will always rise up to take its place. Now you, sweet woman, do you have any idea what Bo's darkest fear has been since being with you?"
Lauren immediately hung her head, shame-faced. In truth, she wasn't entirely sure but she did have a vague idea what all this was leading up to. Their mutual fears were not something they had really discussed as a couple for a very long time. Lauren, more than confident in Bo's apparent invincibility, had naively chosen to believe that Bo would never scare of anything ever again after she had beaten the demons that had plagued her for most of her adult life. Clearly, she was wrong. Something had been nagging at her wife and she had had no idea, nor had she ever thought to ask. Suddenly, she felt like the ultimate marital failure.
"Your beloved is terrified that a day will come when she will not be able to protect you from some greater enemy, that one day her well of luck will run dry. Now," he crouched lower, bringing his face closer to Lauren's, "I have made you very easy to find. She will come here and the terror of being confronted with her very own worst nightmare will overload her neural pathways. In short, she will become that very creature which she fears the most. You see, I haven't been controlling her as such, merely her fear has simply been gradually consuming her, becoming its very own entity within her body. How do you think she will react when she wakes up and discovers that she, herself, has destroyed that which she holds most dear?" He finished lightly. "I did promise that I wouldn't hurt you." he grinned. "Now tell me Lauren, or should I call you Karen? Karen Beattie, right?" he continued, his lips now prickling along the shell of Lauren's ear as he whispered; "I'm curious. How does it feel to know that your love is the very thing that will kill not only your lover but your dear children too? How does it feel…to know that you have failed them all? To know that all of this was entirely preventable? Hmm? I guess humans really don't change, do they? When, oh when will you learn? Karen Beattie is destructive. She is the lit fuse to the ticking time bombs that are those she loves; the Succubus, her brother, her fellow human lover…all those innocent people!" He laughed maniacally as he pulled back, thrilling in the tears that now trickled freely down the blonde's stricken features.
Saoirse, with her finely tuned hearing had picked up every word and she began to growl loudly, yanking violently against her restraints.
"Oh look, I seem to have upset your pet." He said, coming over to stand above the writhing Griffin, pressing a boot into the scruff of her neck. "Shut this thing up or I will!" he spat. Lauren tilted her head and saw her daughter struggling futilely to break free in her anger. At first, she felt numb, utterly vacant, as if none of this was real, as though observing a specimen through a lens. "Shut it up!" he screamed again and this time it was enough to jolt her out of her stupor;
"Saoirse, honey, please stop, he's going to hurt you!" she tried but still the Griffin continued to bellow in fearsome protest. Lauren searched around desperately; "Stop it, please! You're scaring the children!" She screeched, noticing the way Charlotte and Ethan had grown agitated at the scene unfolding before them.
That worked. Reluctantly, Saoirse stopped struggling and flopped resignedly back to the deck in defeat.
"Ah!" Christophe smiled benignly, twirling his fingers in a 'presto' type gesture. "See how benevolent I can be when people do as they're told?" he said, lifting his foot from Saoirse's neck and making his way towards the door, wherever it led to.
"Wait!" Lauren called and Christophe stopped but did not deign to turn around. "I just want to know…why?"
The black figure shrugged.
"It's simple. She took everything from us. I'm going to take everything from her, make her live with the consequences."
Then he was gone.
Sometime later, Lauren remained crouched into the smallest ball she could squeeze her body into, gently rocking herself back and forth with her forehead pressed tight to her knees. She just couldn't stop crying. She was distantly aware of the soft wails of her children, the whining of her griffin daughter, the imminent danger of what awaited them but in that moment, she felt paralysed to do anything about any of it. Was it true? Was all this really her fault or was it all just Christophe's mind tricks?
'Don't you dare,' interrupted a voice in her head that was not her own.
"What?" she asked aloud, wild eyes darting about the ever-darkening room.
'Don't you dare let him get inside your head like that' came the same insistent voice.
Slowly, Lauren's gaze came to rest on her elder daughter who only blinked sadly. Lauren screwed her eyes shut and concentrated hard on clearing her mind.
'But Saoirse, what if it is my fault? He's right, I don't have the best track record. What if I did this?'
'Mom, don't you get it? He's playing on your insecurities. It's his nature. Don't let him get to you. You have to stay strong. If not for yourself then for Bo. For Charlotte and Ethan. They need you. I need you.'
At that moment, Lauren lifted her head and peered through the gloom, sniffling back the tears resolutely.
"Are you okay over there guys?" she called.
"We're scared mommy," said Ethan.
"I know baby but everything's going to be okay"
"Promise?" came Charlotte's timid voice. God, they really were like chalk and cheese, just like herself and Bo. Ethan had been blessed with Bo's brassy confidence and a fierce protectiveness over his sister as much as he liked to tease her whereas Charlotte definitely took after Lauren with her quiet bookishness and shy nature. Lauren only hoped that with the right encouragement, the little girl would eventually blossom into her own without all the painful adjustments that she, herself, had gone through. Still, Charlotte would be raised as Fae and as at least a half-Gryphon she was rare, then coupled with Bo's rather unique heritage…well, she deserved to grow up with that pride.
"I promise sweetie. I will not let anything happen to you, okay?"
"Where's Mom?" Ethan whined, "I want Momma Bo!"
"I don't know honey," Lauren gulped, "but wherever she is I know she'll be trying to find us. I know this is really scary but why don't you guys try to close your eyes and get some sleep, okay? We could be here a while." She said, her voice beginning to crack.
"Promise you'll wake us up when Momma Bo gets here?"
'Promise' was all Lauren could manage as she blinked back yet more moisture that pooled along the rims of what she suspected were now very red, puffy eyes.
Eventually, a calm descended in that grubby warehouse. Children's whimpers faded to even breaths while Lauren allowed her mind to drift.
'You said you wanted to talk about some things. Looks like we have plenty of time now.' Said Lauren, her thoughts filtering through to Saoirse's inner ear.
'Not here, not like this Mom.'
'Hmph, we might not get another chance!'
'Don't say that! We're getting out of here no matter what…
I want you to know, I'm so sorry.'
Lauren frowned;
'For what hon?'
'I was supposed to protect you. It was the whole reason I was sent here dammit and I couldn't even get that right!'
'Now who's insecure?' Lauren asked dryly, 'Sweetie, there's a lot of blame to go around here but none of it is yours. He had this all planned out to the letter. He deliberately pushed Bo to the point where he knew we'd have to separate ourselves. What I can't figure out is how he did it in the first place. Everything I've read about Cogitatio suggests there has to be some direct eye contact for their reflections to work; the eyes being the windows of the soul etc. When would Bo and Christophe have even met?'
'The night of the storm.' Said Saoirse suddenly after a mutually contemplative silence. 'You stayed to comfort the kids while Bo and I tried to get the windows shut. We both saw something reflective in the shadows but neither of us thought too much of it. Mom, all of this started after that night.'
Lauren thought for a moment.
'But then how come you weren't affected?'
'Fae powers don't work on Celestials. Even now, the chain he's holding me with was created of Celestial magic…although how the hell he got a hold of it, I don't know! One thing I can't get my head around though, he seems to have gone to an awful lot of effort just for a bit of revenge. Remember those words? He made a point of asking you how you thought Bo would react on learning what she had done. You don't think there's more to this?'
'I'm beginning to think you're right' She considered quietly until a loud bang sounded from somewhere outside; 'Saoirse, I think we could be about to find out.'
A large blast that knocked the solid industrial steel clean off its hinges ricocheted around the enclosed space while a dozen cries of pain could be heard echoing down a nearby corridor.
"Bo?"
Dun, dun, dun, dun, duuuuuunnnnnn! Looks like Mummy's home!