[4-A] Barking, Baying, Biting

It was a dark and stormy night.

Blake had read that line dozens of times by now, and she always rolled her eyes. Bad things didn't happen when there was lightning flashing, they happened when the weather was fine enough for protests, sit-ins, and raids. They happened when you weren't expecting them, reared up out of nowhere right when you felt safest.

So she didn't associate dark and stormy nights with ill fortune, but that didn't mean she liked them. Not when it was raining as if the clouds were being wrung out like wet rags, and she was wearing tights. Cold, clammy, waterlogged tights.

Ruby, who lived for dark and stormy nights, was bouncing around with the kind of unrestrained enthusiasm that was always either endearing or annoying. Since Blake suspected the thick, soft, warm-looking cloak draped over her shoulders was why she was so peppy, she was leaning towards annoying.

"That's it," Blake snarled, as a rivulet of frigid rain trickled between her shoulder blades. "Forget the mission. We need to find somewhere to wait out the storm."

"Forget the mission?!" Ruby was incredulous. "We can't do that!"

"If we keep going, I am going to freeze out here and you are going to have to deal with that nest on your own."

Her leader shot an agonized glance toward the woods. "Ruby. It's population control. There aren't even any towns nearby. This is as far from time-sensitive as we can get."

"...Fine." She folded her arms. "But you owe me some Beowolves."

Blake had hoped they would find a cave, or maybe huddle under the roots of a fallen tree. She hadn't expected anything as luxurious as an abandoned cabin, and she definitely hadn't thought they would find an actual, honest-to-gods mansion.

"Whoa," Ruby breathed, reverently. Blake craned her neck upward to admire the sweeping roof, tiled in a soothing forest green and looking no less graceful for the ivy that hung from it. Then she glanced down to where a set of wooden double-doors, both a rich mahogany, stood invitingly between rows of topiaries. They were so overgrown it was hard to tell what they were meant to be, but she could make out vague, four-legged shapes.

It was an impressive building that had obviously been abandoned for a while. Not that long, since none of the walls were crumbling and the roof looked sound, but Blake suspected that no one had lived there for at least a few years. Cautiously—because no people didn't always mean no Grimm—she approached the door and examined a pair of finely-wrought bronze knockers. They were shaped like wolf's heads, each with a pair of brilliant emerald eyes.

Blake grasped one and knocked twice. She'd meant to do it three times, but had let go when the heavy ring grew strangely warm. She wasn't surprised when no one answered. On a whim she pulled on one of the doors, expecting it to be locked. It didn't make so much as a whisper as it slid open, and she was so startled she nearly fell over.

"Should we go in?"

"You're the leader," Blake pointed out

Ruby tugged the doors the rest of the way open. Light flooded inside, revealing an elegant black-and-white tiled floor and fluted columns that swept upwards toward the ceiling. Above them was a skylight, but it was so overgrown with ivy and the storm outside blotted out so much of the sun that it may as well have been boarded up.

Blake loosened Gambol Shroud in its sheath. Beside her, Ruby transformed her scythe into a more compact form in case they had to walk down narrow hallways. Neither spoke as they entered the room, both too busy gaping at the tapestries hanging from the walls. They were moldy and moth-eaten, but strangely captivating. Blake thought she could make out a wolf like the knockers on the door, though most of its outline was lost to decay.

"I wonder who built this," Ruby murmured. She turned slowly in place, eyes roving over the walls as she took it all in.

"It doesn't make sense." Blake frowned at a marble bust tucked into an alcove. Its face had been worn into a smooth, unbroken canvas. "Why put this in the middle of Grimm infested woods? Anyone who lived here would have a few weeks at most before they were overrun."

"Maybe there used to be more? Like a wall and a town, or something?"

"Why would the Grimm destroy that, and not this place?"

Ruby gave her a half-defeated, half-exasperated look, as if to say, 'I don't know, why are you asking me?'

The shadows grew thicker the deeper into the room they went. Blake doubted Ruby could see a thing. Just as she was about to give up on exploring and wait out the rain nearer the entrance, she caught a glimmer of light. When she approached she realized there was a doorway hidden in a patch of gloom so oppressive even she hadn't noticed it at first.

"Blake? Where are you going?"

"There's light." As she turned a corner, Blake saw it was coming from a candle sitting on a wooden table, burning merrily and impossibly. Ruby yelped as she tried to follow and bumped into the wall.

Blake squinted at the candle—it had burned about halfway down, and wax was dripping onto the table. "This must have been lit within the past few hours. There's someone living here."

"We need to find them. This forest is full of Grimm, and if they're alone..." Ruby trailed off, but nothing more needed to be said. They'd die out here, and not a single other person would notice

Blake took the lead—more candles had been placed in strategic nooks, so it wasn't totally dark inside, but the spaces between them were heavily shadowed and Ruby kept tripping over chairs. She ducked through the first door in the hall and found a room that was just as disused and dusty as the rest of the house. A veil of cobwebs hung forlornly in the upper-left corner, and a moth-eaten rug lay in the middle of the room like a dead thing. On the opposite wall was another door.

"This place is huge," Ruby whispered.

"I wonder who built it." Blake frowned at the wallpaper—it was cracked and peeling, but the few moldy shadows she could make out were full of vivid geometric patterns that must have been beautiful once.

They took the door on the other side of the room and emerged between two massive bookshelves. Blake glanced over her shoulder, raising her eyebrow incredulously. Had they just come through a lobby? Someone had actually been pretentious enough to build a lobby for their personal library?

Despite her amusement, and the fact that the books smelled like mold and decay instead of paper and ink, she couldn't help feeling soothed by their surroundings. It was instinctive. Forgetting herself for a moment, she wandered over and ran a finger along one of their spines. A thick layer of dust flaked off and fell to the floor, and she frowned at the inscription. It wasn't in any language she recognized. The pages were rotted to the point of illegibility.

They backtracked into the hallway and walked through the second door. This had been a music room—a grand piano was moldering away in one corner, and when Blake examined a few torn sheets of paper that were scattered across the floor, she found they were covered in musical notation. She couldn't read any of it, but she did notice that some of the notes had been scratched out with such force that the paper had torn.

The third door in the hallway led to a dusty storeroom.

The fourth opened on a staircase. Ruby started trotting down without a second thought, and after a moment's hesitation Blake followed. Their footsteps echoed. They emerged into another hallway, though this one had the smell and thick silence of a crypt. An artfully sculpted bronze brazier sat at the opposite end of the corridor, burning without making a sound.

"Maybe whoever lit the candles lives here," Blake said—partly to make sure she hadn't gone deaf.

"Why'd they let it get so run-down, then?" Ruby prodded at a tapestry hung on the wall. It was so frayed that there was nothing left of its original design. Parts of it looked like they'd been burned.

"One person couldn't do the upkeep for a whole castle by themselves." Blake strode down the hallway and tried the first door on the right. It must have been a bedroom, though she wouldn't want to touch the mattress with a ten foot pole for fear of being eaten by bedbugs.

Ruby didn't follow—instead, she poked her head inside the room across the hall. "I guess so." As she shut the door behind her, Blake caught a glimpse of wooden crates and barrels. Another storeroom.

There was only one door left, at the far end of the hall near the brazier. Blake tugged on the knob. It didn't budge. She frowned, fishing around in the inner lining of her vest for a pair of lockpicks.

"Um, what are you doing?"

"Picking the lock." Blake's tongue poked out as she prodded at the tumblers—she blamed overexposure to Ruby and Yang. It cracked in under a minute, which wasn't much of a surprise since it was one of those old-fashioned ones that had keyholes big enough to peek through. Shoving open the door, she came face to face with another library and had to stifle a gasp.

Where the first library had been ravaged by time and the elements, this one had been torn apart with malicious intent. Bookshelves were overturned, scattering dozens of volumes across the floor in sad little piles that Blake immediately wanted to rescue. Shredded paper was everywhere, and the whole room was splattered with thick black ink. Some of the books were soaked in it, oozing dark stains across their shelves as they bled.

"Who..." Blake choked on the word, overwhelmed by the sheer violence that had been inflicted on this place. She knelt down and ran a finger reverently along the spine of one of the stained books. Even its title had been blacked out. She tried to flip through it, but most of the pages were glued together by the ink.

"Over here," Ruby called out, from somewhere further in the stacks. Blake found her staring at another row of shelves. Here, ink was spattered across the walls and had pooled on the floor, but the books themselves were untouched. Ruby grabbed one at random. It fell open in her hand and she dropped it with a yelp.

"What's wrong?" Blake stepped over and stared down at the page. Even upside-down, the illustration made her ill—a mangled corpse covered in strange angular symbols that looked like they'd been branded on, reaching out in entreaty, with wide glassy eyes that seemed to follow her. She kicked the book shut—normally she wouldn't even think of doing something like that, books were sacred, but this one...

"Um... all in favor of moving on?"

"Aye," Blake said immediately. She'd never wanted to leave a library as much as she did right now. But they both decided to make one last circuit around the room before they left, to make sure there weren't any other rooms on the far side. There weren't—just another tapestry. This one had definitely been burned, and ink had been thrown across it as well. Great spatters trailed up and down either side, but there was still one spot where its original colors shone through.

Blake squinted at the fabric. It was a poisonous shade of green, bright and saturated and nauseating. It was also... off. She took a step back, eyeing the tapestry. It was almost centered, almost, but she noticed that it was hanging from a bronze rod and that the left-hand side was bunched up. As if it had been drawn hastily across, like a curtain.

"I think there's a door here," she murmured.

"So... do you want to move it?"

Blake really, really didn't. She was reluctant to even touch it, but she grit her teeth and grabbed a handful of cloth and heaved. Flakes of dried ink and ash came off on her fingers, staining the inside of her hand. Behind the tapestry was a blank wall.

"Ooh, I know this one!" Ruby knocked, moving her hand from side to side. Thunk. Thunk. Boom. "Bingo!"

They found a seam, then a keyhole. Blake tried to pick the lock and found that the tumblers kept slipping even when she applied as much torque as she could. Eventually she gave up and moved aside, and Ruby used her scythe to cut through the lock. The door swung inward when they pushed, revealing a room about the size of a walk-in closet.

If the library had been destroyed, this place had been ravaged. There was no ink, but great black scorch marks climbed all the way up to the ceiling. Chunks of plaster had been torn from the walls and scattered across the floor, and there were tools lying everywhere, or rather parts of tools—the deformed head of a sledgehammer, a metal wedge that was probably once part of a hatchet, melted scraps of plastic. Against the wall was a pile of charred splinters, maybe the remains of a desk, and a claw hammer made of stainless steel whose head had been dented. And there, in a pile of ashes, a glint of color.

Ruby bent down and shifted through the mess, then straightened up with a simple charm in her hand. It was a wolf's head carved from jade, slightly smudged by the ash but otherwise unharmed. There was a hole where a length of rope had looped through it, but that had been burned away.

She frowned at it, turning it over in her hand. "Okay. This is cool and all, but... it's not a person."

"There are still plenty of doors we haven't checked," Blake reminded her. "Let's just go back."

Ruby ran her thumb across the snarling face of the jade wolf, then slipped it into her pocket.

They backtracked through the hallways, still lit sporadically by dim candles. Blake stared at one of them, wondering how long they'd been in the library. The wax had hardly melted at all.

"I guess we start trying doors?" Ruby suggested, pulling one open. Blake peered inside and saw three shovels propped up beside the door. Rows upon rows of shelves lined the walls, all packed with a wide mix of junk and treasure. Jewelry shared space with rotten old tunics and rusted belt buckles, and precious gemstones sat atop yellowed scraps of paper that were completely blank. Blake even spotted a coil of rope that looked like it was made out of hair—human hair?

She backed up, giving the room a wary look. "This wasn't here before."

"We must've skipped it. Or... did we take a wrong turn?"

They doubled back on their backtracking. Somehow they'd missed a hallway that forked off the one they were in now. Ruby skidded to a stop, turning her head to look from one side to the other.

"Uh..." She looked over at Blake, grinning sheepishly. "Sorry, my sense of direction is, uh... don't laugh, okay! I just... don't know which way."

"I don't either."

The awkward smile vanished. "Oh. Okay, that's... not great."

Blake went stock still, then slowly reached up and undid her bow. The sound she'd been hearing, so faint that it had just barely tickled at her senses, sharpened. It was barking.

"We need to go," she decided.

"Well, yeah, but first we gotta figure out where."

"No, I mean... we need to go back. Stop exploring. Something isn't right."

Ruby stared at her, baffled. "Are you feeling okay? You look kinda pale."

"There's something barking."

"Maybe that's them!" Ruby looked around. "Which way is it coming from?"

"It's not a person." Blake couldn't explain how she knew, she just did. Whatever was making that sound wasn't someone's pet. It was too savage to be anything except a wild animal. Or worse.

Straining her ears, she decided that the sound was stronger coming from the passage to the left, and pulled Ruby right. "Come on. We just need to—" The corridor ended abruptly in a set of stairs, leading down.

"We have to go," Blake repeated, turning on her heel. "We have to—"

"Wait a sec! Those might be the stairs we went down before. If they are, we won't be lost anymore. And if they're not, it means we definitely have to go the other way to get out."

Blake tried to map the place in her head. Was she misremembering what she'd seen when they walked in? She could have sworn there wasn't any split in the corridor except right in the beginning. But Ruby was right, they needed to know where they were before they got to where they wanted to go, so they charged down the steps. There were two ways to go, right and left, and already Blake had the feeling that this wasn't familiar. Except...

There, on the wall, she was sure she'd seen that burned tapestry before. "This way," she said, beckoning Ruby to the right. They walked down the hall, then turned a corner, and found more stairs—still leading down. Wrong way.

The barking was louder, now. Blake flinched when it broke off for a second and was replaced with a long, chilling howl. Ruby heard that, too. She led the way back, until they turned the corner and passed the tapestry and...

"What?!" Blake looked first one way, then the other. It was a straight hallway, leading back the way they came and forward until it ended at a wooden door.

"Ooh." Ruby bit her lip. "Um... I think this is one of those 'the maze is changing' moments."

Blake rushed up to the door and heaved it open, letting it crash against the wall. Inside was a dining room. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, with a single candle set on one of its arms. There were no other doors, only a long table set with chipped plates and tarnished silverware. She wrinkled her nose, knowing without having to look that food had been left to rot.

"Down the stairs, then," Ruby said. The distant baying was loud enough now that she must hear it too. Blake followed her, shivering. Part of her fear was irrational—she'd hated dogs since she was a child, which had amused her mother and frustrated her father. Part was beacuse she knew there were Grimm that imitated the sounds that local animals made, so they could move stealthily without the wildlife going silent and revealing their presence. Neither of those felt like the real reason, though. There was just something wrong with that noise. Those weren't normal dogs.

Her feet hit the bottom of the stairs before she was expecting it, and she stumbled. Then she looked back and saw that yes, there were six steps after that torch sconce, she hadn't counted it wrong the first time. "This doesn't feel right."

"Nope." Ruby pointed. "It really, really doesn't."

Blake followed her gesture and gaped, horrorstruck. There was a window set into one wall of the corridor. It was massive, floor-to-ceiling and more than ten feet wide. All she could see in it was her own reflection, and vague shapes just on the other side of the glass. They were definitely supposed to be underground right now.

"We could smash it?"

"Better than trying to guess our way out," Blake agreed.

Ruby slammed the butt end of her scythe into the window. Blake half expected it to bounce off, but it didn't. The glass shattered. A torrent of rich, dark soil poured through the opening, bringing with it the fetid stench of something rotting. Ruby jerked back with a high-pitched yelp, then held her cape over her mouth and nose.

It was only after the dirt finally settled into a huge mound that Blake realized it was still moving. It was full of fat, grey, squirming things, like maggots or worms. Her stomach roiled, and she had to clap a hand over her mouth and back away, breathing shallowly through her nose and staring at the wall.

The barking was faster, now, almost feverish, like a pack of dogs were snapping and gibbering at each other, getting ready to tear something apart. Blake grabbed Ruby's sleeve and sprinted down the corridor. It went right, and then there was a long stretch with no doors, no paintings, only blank walls.

Another right turn. She slipped on a rug and swore. The corridor went right again. Ruby poked her head around the corner, then beckoned Blake.

It kept going. There was no sign of the place they'd just come from. A niggling ache began behind her left eye. The barking was close, now. She shivered, and kept glancing over her shoulder as they went right, right, left, right again, all without ever doubling back on themselves.

Finally the corridor split, and Ruby hung a right—Blake suspected that this was because otherwise it would have been their fourth left in a row, and going in the direction that seemed to at least vaguely correspond to the laws of physics seemed like a good idea. It didn't work. The next four turns were all rights as well, and they were coming in quicker and quicker succession until Blake was impossibly dizzy.

"It doesn't end," she muttered. "It doesn't end!"

"We'll figure something out."

There was a crash somewhere behind them, and Blake flinched. She could hear other things, now, too—not just barking but the scratching of claws against tile, and a strange whirring as if of thousands of tiny wings.

Then, just as the sound was so close that Blake was sure whatever it was would come around the corner, Ruby gave a victorious shout and pointed to a fork in the corridor, a passage branching off this one that turned left. They skidded around the bend. There was a painting nearby, and with a flash of horror Blake recognized it. It was just like the tapestry from the library, only it hadn't been burned. She could clearly see that the patch of toxic green that had turned her stomach was really an eye, wide and mad and bloodshot.

Her foot caught against the legs of a chair that had been knocked over on its side, and then she was sprawling, tumbling head over heels, cracking her head against the floor. Blake tried to get up, but only managed to turn herself over. She stared back the way they'd come, scrabbling desperately at the floor as a twisted shadow fell into the corridor.

It came around the bend heartbeats later—not a dog but something else. There were two dog's heads the size of horses, more that were smaller, and a forest of tiny, twisted, misshapen things that drooled and whimpered and twitched. The eyes, hundreds of eyes, were all bright green. Not the same shade in the tapestry—the artist hadn't captured it, they had tried and gotten closer than she could stand, but it wasn't the same.

Blake reeled, got to her feet for half a second before crashing into the wall. The creature was barking, snarling, snapping, with slaver running from between its jaws and its eyes rolling with rage. Cold was stealing into her, weighing her down. Her vision blurred, which was almost a blessing, and there was a strange ringing in her ears that followed the pitch of the barking.

Move, she told herself. She knew she'd be torn apart if she didn't run, she knew it, she kept imagining those jaws clamping down on her throat, but she just couldn't do it.

"I'm sorry!"

It's going to kill me. She tried again to push herself upright, but what was even the point? They were trapped here.

"I'm sorry," she said again, then again and again and again, shouting it at the top of her lungs as Ruby grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her bodily away. The barking turned to howling, and for a second the ringing in her ears and the blurring of her vision and the coldness in her bones all magnified until she felt she was drifting, floating in some dark and empty space. And for that instant she thought that it was a good thing she was here, she wanted those fangs to sink into the soft flesh under her chin. That would be justice.