"Hsst. Gil."
Gil woke up and lay very still and kept his eyes shut, though he couldn't keep them from tracking toward the heat and brightness of whatever lamp Tarvek was holding. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to admit he was awake but not sure either if he could fool Tarvek, after all the times they'd both pretended to sleep so they could sneak out.
Tarvek didn't seem to have noticed, though, because he kept trying. "Gil. Wake up. I think my father's taken Agatha."
Gil did open his eyes at that and sat right up. Tarvek jerked back just in time to keep him from bumping the glowing red light he held. Gil only then realised that the anxiety in Tarvek's voice made no sense. "She's already in his palace," he whispered back crossly. "Where else would he take her?"
Tarvek looked unhappy and somehow pale even in the red lamplight. "I don't know. But my cousin thinks the Geisterdamen want to sacrifice her."
"You're freaking out because your cousin thinks Agatha's about to be sacrificed by ghosts?" Gil scoffed.
"They're not ghosts!" Tarvek's voice rose for a moment and then he went quiet, breath shaky and a little fast. "They're from somewhere else, they - my father invited them here."
Gil rubbed his eyes and looked at Tarvek again. "And you think he wants to sacrifice Agatha?" Tarvek seemed really seriously worried, but he was talking about ghost-women who weren't ghosts and Prince Aaronev going along with their plans for human sacrifice and okay, his father and Barry Heterodyne didn't really trust Prince Aaronev very much but that was about wanting to rule Europe, not... whatever this was. "Are you sure you didn't just have a really weird dream?"
"I'm serious!" Tarvek snapped. "Agatha's gone! Come see if she's in her room if you don't believe me!"
Gil remembered all at once that Tarvek had been mad at him, and suddenly the story not making sense... seemed to make sense. "Oh, sure." His hands curled into fists. "I'm going to come and get caught breaking into a girl's room in your house. And I bet you'll still be right beside me when I get caught."
Tarvek's eyes flashed. "Like you stayed with me?"
Gil went hot all over. He'd walked into that one. And he couldn't defend himself about not meaning to leave Tarvek to get caught alone because running off crying wasn't exactly better, and he couldn't tell the real reason he'd tried to get rid of Tarvek afterward or all the hiding it would be for nothing. "I got caught too," he muttered. "But I think you're just trying to get back at me." But what if Tarvek wasn't?
"I'm not," Tarvek said through clenched teeth. "Gil-" Gil had time to notice the lamp was shaking, and that meant so was Tarvek's hand, and then Tarvek said, "Please."
"Fine." Gil pushed back the covers and stood up, still feeling grumpy and a bit wary and ready for Tarvek to pull something. Even though he was starting to believe Tarvek was as scared as he seemed (and, okay, Tarvek had nightmares sometimes, but he didn't keep believing them after he woke up).
Tarvek took him out through a secret passage, then the corridors and a crack that might not be a secret passage or at least was never meant for adults, fast and dead silent, even more careful than when they'd been sneaking around Castle Wulfenbach. Then he took out... real lockpicks, better than the ones on Gradok's dragon, and insisted Gil keep watch while he broke into Agatha's room. Gil did, but he kept looking back at Tarvek part of the time and the rest wondering why, with all the guards they'd glimpsed earlier, there wasn't anybody closer to what ought to be Agatha's room.
The door swung open, a little, and Tarvek grabbed the doorknob and held it still before the hinges could make more than the tiniest squeak. They eased it open and slipped in.
Agatha wasn't there.
Her bag was, so Tarvek hadn't taken him to the wrong room. Her dress was folded on a chair. Princess Stompy Boots was on the bed. But no Agatha.
"She could have gone back to the lab," said Gil, trying hard to keep his voice steady. "She really wanted to carry on working." But she would have come to get them, wouldn't she?
"We can look there," Tarvek said unhappily. "I don't know what else to do."
"...I have a beacon," said Gil. "It's in my room." In his trouser pocket, still. "If you're really sure she's in danger..." Gil still wasn't, but she wasn't here. "We should bring it with us to the labs, and if she isn't there..."
Tarvek stared at him. "You... a what? To call - you want to call the Baron?"
"Who else are we going to call if Agatha's really in danger?" Gil demanded. "It calls her uncle too."
Tarvek flinched. "Does she have one? Maybe she already used it? But - why would they give you-?" He went suddenly still, looking at Gil harder.
"Maybe because they realised you wouldn't want to use one even when you think people are about to sacrifice Agatha?" Gil snapped, trying not to blush or squirm.
"I didn't think they'd give me one when I was going to my own house," Tarvek snapped back. "But - fine. We'll go back and get it." Tarvek seemed even more tense on the way back to Gil's room, and once they were inside, he hissed, "Why didn't you bring it with you?"
"Because I was half asleep and not sure whether you'd had a nightmare," said Gil, frankly, pulling it out and holding it tightly, although careful not to press the button.
Tarvek sighed. "If you'd just believed me we'd be at the lab by now."
"We're not going to get there any faster for you standing around arguing with me," Gil said, still a bit too annoyed to apologise.
Tarvek opened his mouth, then shut it and bit his lip. "Fine. Come on then."
The lab was also unguarded. Well, why shouldn't it be, nobody was supposed to be in there and it was just a kids' lab. Nothing all that dangerous.
And it was dark and quiet, no Agatha.
Gil shut his eyes and, before Tarvek could say anything else, moved his thumb over and pushed the button, then pulled the antenna out.
Tarvek turned to him. "We should - oh, you've done it." He swallowed and leaned over to peer at the beacon. "Is there any way to send more of a message?"
"I don't think so, it doesn't shut off." Gil blinked, lifting it and peering more closely, he'd been told not to take it apart but the signal was sent, even if they broke it now his father would come. "If we make it shut off and turn on again we could use military code."
"That shouldn't be too hard. If it turns on with a button it's probably a contact mechanism, right?" Tarvek handed him the red lamp and went to fetch tools. He let Gil have them when he reached out, and as Gil was prying the cover off, Tarvek whispered, "Gil. Who was the Queen of Skifander's consort?"
Gil jumped, tool nearly slipping. "Does it matter?" he whispered back, sharply.
"He did tell you," Tarvek breathed. Then, "Maybe. I guess not right now."
It would matter later, then, and Gil had known Tarvek would work it out if he let him get close. But not right now. "I've got the contact mechanism," Gil said, prying the spring back with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. "What do we send?" Something short, something to the point, something informative when everything Tarvek had said so far was vague and worrying.
"'Geisterdamen took Agatha'," Tarvek suggested.
"Will they know what Geisterdamen are?" Gil asked. "They're going to think we've gone mad if we say ghosts did it." But he couldn't think of anything better. Maybe they would know.
"Uh..." Tarvek hesitated, then caught his breath. "They might. The Lord Heterodyne might. If she's the Holy Child they talk about, then I - I think he took her away from them."
Gil stared for a moment, and then started pinching and releasing the spring to send the message, concentrating on the code. He didn't understand anything, but if Barry Heterodyne had had to take Agatha from the Geisterdamen once then he could believe Agatha needed protecting from them. He ran through the message twice and then let the spring go, sending an uninterrupted signal again. "I've sent it," he said. "If she's...if they're really going to kill her we should go and find her. In case they don't get here in time." He wasn't sure what he thought he and Tarvek could do, but the answer couldn't be nothing. He pulled open Tarvek's cupboard and shoved the beacon to the back, where any guards looking in wouldn't see it. A number of tiny watchcase clanks turned and looked up at him.
Tarvek let out a breath, then shouldered in and started pulling things out and stuffing them in his pockets. Why or how his nightclothes had that many pockets Gil couldn't begin to imagine. Gil stayed crouched there, looking at the clanks.
"You're kind of in the way," Tarvek pointed out.
Gil shifted back a little and said, "Hey. We think Agatha's in trouble. You understand me? Come help Agatha."
"What are you-" Tarvek looked down just as three of the little clanks jumped down onto the floor. "...Okay. Let's go."
"Where do we look?" It was Tarvek's house.
Tarvek swallowed. "If they've taken her down where they live I'm not sure we can catch up. I don't know all the tunnels in the deep-down. But I think they were building something in the chapel."
Klaus was halfway through a meeting with Boris - which meant being cajoled into signing things - when his pocket started humming a high, piercing and completely unignorable note. Gil. He shoved the latest sheaf of paperwork aside with enough force it was still fluttering down when the note began to flicker on and off. "...He took it apart," Klaus muttered, even as most of his attention was on the message. Geisterdamen took Agatha.
How? he thought, as the message started to repeat. How had they found her, how did Gil know what they were? How long would it take them to decide to overwrite her mind with Lucrezia's?
Boris was looking a little wide eyed, he understood military code too even if he didn't know what Geisterdamen were. "Have my drop armour prepared," Klaus snapped at him, already striding out of the office. Boris hurried after him and then away to the dock. Klaus almost ran to the school and threw open the door to Otilia's room where she was reading a book. She looked up, eyes flaring green. The Muses had never been accused of being slow on the uptake.
"Who?" she asked.
"The Geisterdamen have Agatha. Gil sent the message," said Klaus. "I'm going down."
She stood, lifting her scabbard from its place by the wall. She didn't wear it while teaching, but it fitted against her back as if it was part of her, huge sword gleaming. "So am I."
He assembled other troops, barking orders, throwing the whole thing onto Boris's shoulders as soon as the drop armour was ready. Otilia was nowhere to be seen by then, but he didn't have time to wonder about it as he shut himself in, checked the views, signaled them to let him fall.
He did see her then, as he looked down. She'd simply jumped, trusting to her altered wings to carry her. They were folded now, in a sharp dive. Klaus turned his engines to maximum, plunging downward until the air fought him harder than they could accelerate.
He caught up to her. He held even with her for a few seconds, a twinge of anxiety touching him when he realised her wings had never been tested like this and she was... irreplaceable.
But then everyone was.
He passed her when she spread her wings and as he glanced up and back he had a view of her slowing to a safe speed to land, looking like an avenging angel bearing down on Sturmhalten.
Then his drop armour bulled into the ground.
Something was shrieking. Barry started to hum louder to block out the irritation and then stopped and snatched up the beacon receiver from the other workbench. "Castle, something's gone wrong. I'm going to Sturmhalten."
"Not by yourself," said the Castle firmly.
"First. I can break anything Aaronev put on his side of the portal." Barry grabbed the pack and belt he kept in this lab - adventuring tools, you could call them. The beacon paused then, and he looked at it sharply, worried someone had broken it. It started spurting again, quick beeps in the military code Klaus had developed, and how the kids had picked that up...
Five letters in, and Barry felt time slow around him, his heart seize and red haze his thoughts and vision. "Alert the Jägers," he said. "All of them. The Geisterdamen have Agatha."
The Doom Bell rang, fast and sharp, almost more an alarm bell clatter than its normal solemn peals, emptinesses overlapping at the edge of Barry's mind. Afterwards the sky lit suddenly actinic blue, lightning arcing across the darkness. "Jägers to the Lord Heterodyne! Lady Agatha is in peril!" The Castle's voice boomed out across the town.
"The Cathedral," Barry snapped, already running now. "There's a portal. They'll know."
They did. Fast as he was moving there were already Jägers waiting for him at the portal when he arrived, more pouring into the room. No smiles here, no eagerness for the fun of battle, just bared teeth and anxious rage to match his. Barry slammed a hand against the controls and plunged into green light and not-space.
Aaronev's traps weren't very interesting at all.
The Geisterdamen took Agatha to the Sturmhalten palace's chapel, which was full of statues instead of skulls. Agatha was pretty sure this was more normal and it was definitely prettier and easier to walk in. More Geisterdamen filled the room, some she didn't know staying busy and others turning with brilliant smiles and tears in their eyes, and she had to hug them all. They sat with her and told her how much they'd missed her, how glad they were to find her again, and Agatha tried to tell them all about her friends and her work.
She was trying to describe her little clanks with gestures and looking around for something to build more of them when one said to another, "It's true, she has the divine touch. She has returned to us, and soon her lady mother will too."
"Tsst!" The second woman shushed her, and Agatha looked up and frowned. Her mother had not been very trustworthy if she'd become the Other. The Geisterdamen wanted her back?
"So deep in thought, Holy Child." Klazma Vrin came up, and the other Geisterdamen stepped aside for her. She picked up Agatha in her arms. "It's time to fulfill your destiny."
Agatha looked up at her in confusion. She'd been very little when she last heard the Geisterdamen's language and was starting to realise she didn't know all the words. Vrin, to Agatha's surprise, frowned and repeated herself in Romanian. "I didn't know I had a destiny," Agatha said doubtfully. Except to be the Heterodyne, and she was in the wrong place for that, and anyway she wasn't sure it exactly counted.
Vrin set her in the big chair at the end of the chapel. "A child is never exactly the same as her mother," she said. "Less so with your people. But you will be close enough."
More Geisterdamen came up close around her, and their hands moved fast. Agatha squeaked in pain. "Don't pinch!" she said, and then looked down at her hands and found they'd fastened cuffs over her arms. Agatha jerked at them and felt her heart speed up. They'd chained her up. Why had they chained her up?
She pulled harder until the metal and leather dug into her skin. Prince Aaronev came up and patted her on the head, and Agatha tilted her head back and tried to bite him. He pulled his hand back, looking startled. "Everything will be just fine," he crooned. "Just a few minutes and we'll have your mother back!"
He stepped away to some controls and Agatha stared after him as Klazma Vrin pulled something like a big dish down onto her head. Things slowed down and everything divided into pieces in her vision again, separating until she could look at them clearly, and more thoughts flew in together.
They wanted her mother back.
Her mother was dead.
Her mother had moved Madame Otilia's mind around.
A child is never exactly the same as her mother but close enough...
This machine was for... was for... Agatha could only make sense of pieces of it at a time, but she didn't have to understand the mechanism, she knew.
Uncle Barry had always told her to be quiet when there was danger but that was when people or creatures were looking for them.
Agatha sucked in a lungful of air and screamed as loud as she could.
The door flew open and Tarvek ran a few steps in, before stopping, eyes wide at the device she was in. Agatha stopped screaming more out of surprise than anything, gulping for breath, relief at seeing a friend quickly being replaced by horror. He looked so small surrounded by Geisterdamen.
"What are you doing to Agatha?" he asked. Aaronev didn't answer and one of the Geisterdamen reached for him. He ducked, running another few steps into the room. "Father!"
"Tarvek!" said Aaronev, as if he'd only just noticed him. He waved the Geisterdamen back. "It is a glorious day, soon our mistress will return to us!"
"I don't understand," Tarvek said, and Agatha wondered whether he was telling the truth. He sounded bewildered, but Agatha didn't think he could have missed what she'd seen. "What...what's going on? Why is Agatha tied up? I thought she was our guest?"
Aaronev turned away from her. "She was always intended as a vessel, for our Mistress to return," he said, as if it made perfect sense to kill Agatha for that, as if it wasn't completely horrible. He was even bending down to talk to Tarvek, looking serious the way Uncle Barry did when explaining something really important he wasn't sure she could understand. "I swore an oath to her, all our order did, and today I shall fulfil it."
Agatha wondered whether to scream again, but the touch of metal against her wrist made her jump instead. She looked down to see one of her tiny clanks from earlier standing next to her bonds with a box knife and a determined expression.
"No!" Even if Tarvek was trying to be a distraction, the distress in his voice was very real. "Father, please, don't do this!"
She clenched her teeth and shut up her throat so she couldn't hum either. She didn't think they were going to hurt Tarvek, not with his father there, and they wouldn't be less likely to if some of them were paying attention to her. But the clank was working at the weakest point and if she could get away...
She turned her head to look at her other arm and as soon as the little clank had the first one free, she swept it down to work on her feet and undid the shackles on her other wrist by herself. She pushed away from the chair and landed on the floor in front of it with a thump, and Vrin shouted.
Then somebody snatched Agatha up off the floor and she yelped, but it wasn't one of them, it was Gil and she didn't know where he'd come from but he was running faster than she could.
There was a sound behind them, not really a bang so much as a whumph, and the air smelled like fireworks - bringing back memories of Mechanicsburg that somehow made Agatha's eyes sting as much as the smoke - and then Tarvek ran past them and swerved, beckoning. His nightclothes were torn over his shoulder, someone had grabbed at him.
Gil followed, Agatha holding onto him and trying to be as light as possible, and Tarvek stopped for a moment to work at the lock of a room and then pushed it open and pulled them through into an adult sized laboratory.
Agatha dropped out of Gil's arms and the boys started shoving furniture and storage cabinets over to the door. She climbed up and stood on one of the high stools to scan the workbenches.
Her eyes felt hot and her heart was beating too hard and it hurt. Her brain was full of angry white light and buzzing and she wanted Uncle Barry and the Jägers and the Doom Bell and she wanted to make things to show the Geisterdamen she wasn't the only one who'd made a mistake. She'd been happy to see them again and they wanted to kill her. She'd thought they loved her and they only wanted her to get her mother back.
She sniffed and wiped her wrist across her nose and kept on building things, but she was shaking all over.
Gil's hand closed around her arm. She hadn't heard him coming, but there he was on a stool next to her. "We sent a message, your Uncle and the Baron are coming," he said. "We just have to hold them off. What are we making?"
"A death ray," Agatha said. "But it isn't going together right. Maybe I should try a clockwork bomb instead."
Gil scrambled onto the table and looked at it, some of the same manic light coming into his eyes that she felt behind her own. "I think...if we try this here..."
Tarvek managed to balance one stool on another and climb both to reach a cupboard, and a moment later they were pelted with packets of cogs as he started throwing them anything they might be able to use.
Agatha's hands steadied a little, and Tarvek came down and scrambled up another stool to work shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Agatha started humming again, but it wasn't quite enough to shut out the banging from outside, or the scrape when the door started to move.
It slammed open, and a wheeled cabinet crashed into their stools. Agatha jumped for the workbench and Gil, already there, caught her arm while Tarvek started throwing things that whumphed into more smoke, filling up the lab and the hallway.
Agatha looked down at the death ray with watering eyes as Gil tugged at her. "Come on, we can hide in the smoke," he said.
It wasn't going together right. She'd got the power supply in and wound, but it was whining at a high pitch and she was pretty sure it was going to explode...
...Well, she'd been thinking about making a bomb. She grabbed it and jumped down with Gil, stumbling, and then slid it across the floor into the cloud of smoke.
There was a sound that was far too loud to be described as bang, and a blast of heat and light, screams behind them. They scrambled along on all fours, under one of the benches, eyes squeezed shut against the smoke. Footsteps came after them, fast and staccato. "They can't see through the smoke, but I don't think it's blinding them properly, their eyes are different, maybe..." Tarvek mumbled as if only half aware he was talking out loud, and then fell silent.
Hands, Tarvek's or Gil's but Agatha wasn't sure which, pushed her into a gap between edges - maybe cupboards or the wall and the back of a bench - and she kept crawling until she hit a wall and then opened her eyes, blinking hard, but the smoke was starting to clear. She was in a gap between two cupboards, Gil and Tarvek wedged in after her. White hands reached in after them and Tarvek smashed a vial of something against one, jerking his own hand back sharply. There was a hiss and a cry of rage and Agatha could see the skin blistering. But the Geister reached in for her again, even with blood trickling down her arm.
"Leave me alone!" Agatha yelled, and to her surprise the Geister pulled back.
"Klazma Vrin!" someone called, even as another set of arms reached in to try and pull her away. "The Holy Child's voice!"
"Yes," Vrin grated, "she is the child of the Lady. What did you expect?"
"Go away and leave me alone, all of you!" Agatha shouted in their own language.
"Go and get her, you idiots!" Vrin snarled.
Then a darker, thicker arm came at them, and Tarvek squeaked. Prince Aaronev's voice growled, "Get out of there, you little-" and Agatha heard a hand fall hard on his shoulder.
"Aaronev," Vrin said ominously, "you will not blaspheme the Holy Child."
"Do you want her out of there or not?" Aaronev demanded, and then apparently calmed down. "Fine. But I will get her out."
His hands reached down again and Gil threw himself backwards, almost squashing Agatha, to bite the side of one of them hard. Aaronev backhanded him into the wall and his mouth slid open as he fell against it half dazed for a moment, then Aaronev's hands closed around Agatha's ribs.
Agatha tried to kick but couldn't reach anything, and she clawed and bit until he shook her hard enough to hurt her neck, and then went still and tried to think. She came up with eight ways to break the machine on the way back into the chapel, but she couldn't reach any of them.
Aaronev held her down with both hands this time while Vrin grimly snapped the restraints back in place and Agatha screamed at her - demanding, threatening, begging, and finally ran out of words and only wailed at them all.
Agatha trailed off into hiccuping sobs as she saw Tarvek and Gil at the edge of the room, held firmly by bruised Geisterdamen. That way she heard the whine of the machine as Aaronev activated it, grinning as eagerly as when he'd asked about her clanks. It almost sounded like it might blow up too. Agatha wished it would. It went higher and higher and made her teeth hurt and it was so stupid to worry about her teeth hurting when they were going to kill her and bring back her mother who hurt everybody.
People were yelling outside the door here too. Agatha started humming, as if she could make the machine not work by pushing the horrible noise it was making out of her head.
The door flew in and halfway across the room, and oven-heat washed over her as a blue-white spear of energy shot over her head and into the big oval piece of the engine. The Geisterdamen screamed. Agatha sat up as well as she could in the restraints. "Uncle Barry!"
He started forward. And a flood of more Geisterdamen crashed in through the doorway behind him.
Klaus charged into Sturmhalten, ignoring any attempts by guards or servants to stop him, only to find the corridors full of a battle already in progress. Jägers and Geisterdamen were everywhere; slightly ahead of him a Jäger swiped out a Geister's throat and then looked up at him, fangs bared and ears pinned back.
"Where is Barry?" Klaus snapped peremptorily.
"Dot vey," said the Jäger, twisting to kick a Geister in the stomach as he spoke, even as he nodded towards a corridor. Klaus punched one in the ribs before her sword could reach him. "Down."
Klaus ran, cutting a swathe of his own through the Geisterdamen, barking at Jägers to get out the way and tell him where Barry was, heading down. Until he reached an open doorway with the Geisters and Jägers tearing at each other a few metres back from it, inside he could see Barry's broad profile and the air smelled of smoke and ozone.
Inside was - surreal. In spite of the raging battle it was impossible not to notice that it was a chapel filled with images of Lucrezia. Lucrezia with a sword, Lucrezia exalted, Lucrezia as Madonna, improbably demure; all still radiating power even though half the statues were overturned, broken and splashed with blood. There was an alcove full of slag in the vague shape of a chair. Beside it, Barry and a handful of Jägers were backed up against one of the overturned statues, lying across its niche, and behind them where the statue had stood Klaus could just see the three children. All he could see of Agatha was a tuft of hair. Gil caught sight of him (Gil was alive, safe - well, not safe, but definitely alive and almost within reach) and looked glad enough to make Klaus's heart lift. He nudged his friends excitedly; Tarvek looked up, and there was no relief in his eyes.
Aaronev was across from them behind several of his guards and an electrified barricade, obviously hastily constructed, firing bolts of lightning at them that Barry was deflecting with an improvised rod. The Geisterdamen swarmed them, ignoring the lightning, clawing when disarmed, pulling their dead out of the way to keep attacking - because Barry was not holding back. He had the lightning rod in one hand and a death ray in the other and there were more scorched or dismembered white corpses in the room than live fighters.
Barry spotted Klaus and a wave of energy flung back the Geisterdamen in front of him, giving Klaus space to race across and join them. The death ray issued a disappointing hiss when Barry pulled the trigger again, and he dropped it and unshipped another. Klaus saw movement near the floor and looked down to see Agatha hanging over the statue to haul the spent death ray back into the niche. Tears streaked the smoke staining her face, and the wildness in her eyes and the set of her jaw matched Barry's.
Barry shoved the lightning rod into Klaus's hand. "Watch the kids," he said, and then drew a sword and charged.
Klaus didn't quite see what happened, because the next thing the children did was send a wind-up device on wheels careening out from behind their defenders' ankles and it turned out to be a bomb. But when the air cleared, Aaronev's guards were down and Barry had dragged him out from behind his barricade and was shouting at him. "The Geisterdamen came to you, Wilhelm! How long were you working with her? Is this why Sturmhalten was spared? Because the whole time we were fighting and searching and hoping to save her you were helping her destroy Europa?"
Aaronev reached for something in his coat and Barry hit his arm with the hilt of the sword. Klaus heard bone crack. Aaronev went pale but didn't cry out. He said hoarsely, "Not destroy-"
Barry shook him. "Have you looked at it? Did you miss the rocks falling out of the sky, the revenants, the wars?"
"Unfortunate statistical extreme," Aaronev gasped. "The revenants were never supposed to be mindless."
"Are you listening to yourself? You supported that?" Barry threw him to the floor in revulsion. None of the Geisterdamen were going near the two of them, but some of them were breaking off their attack to watch. "You supported that. And you want to destroy Agatha to get her back."
"I love her." Aaronev got to his knees, wild-eyed. "We all loved her. Klaus understands." Klaus might have protested that he did not but Aaronev went on, "Bill would have understood. He would have helped."
"Bill KILLED HER!" Barry bellowed. "Because he knew there were more important things than having her if it meant people dying and enslaved and destroyed! Do you not understand that?"
"There is nothing more important," Aaronev whispered. "Nothing." The mad light of adoration in his eyes flickered then and he added, "And you don't kill people."
There were perhaps two seconds of near silence in the room, heavy with incredulity, and then Barry hauled Aaronev up by the throat. "Look around this room, Wilhelm," he said, and he wasn't shouting but the stone underfoot seemed to pick up the harmonics in his voice and tremble. His voice rose, then, like a volcano building to eruption. "Before I send you to whatever Hell my ancestors rule for TOUCHING MY NIECE!"
There was a clatter by Klaus's feet and he looked down to see Tarvek's half built clank on the floor, Tarvek staring across the room with huge eyes. He looked paralysed, like a wild animal in a beam light. Klaus strode across the room to grab the back of Barry's jacket and haul him back from Aaronev. "Are you seriously going to kill him in front of his son?" he asked, quietly.
Barry swung around with murder still in his eyes, and for a heartbeat Klaus was bracing himself to be hit. Then Barry looked past him and focussed, seeing the children and - Klaus could only assume - specifically Tarvek. He looked back at Aaronev and his empty hand curled into a fist. "No," he grated. "No, I suppose I'm not. You take him."
Barry stalked back the few steps to the children; one of the Geisterdamen remembered herself and lunged at them, and Barry picked her up and threw her against the far wall.
Klaus reached for Aaronev and a blur of lightning-crackled metal snatched him away.
"You have threatened the Heterodyne Girl," Otilia said, not to Klaus but to Aaronev. She drew her sword, standing over him like Justice, dress ripped from fighting her way here, feathers splashed with blood. "You have threatened my Master's kingdom with destruction, risked destroying his subjects' will, come close to making it unfit for anyone to claim." Aaronev tried to stand and she simply placed a foot on his chest before continuing. "You have both used and harmed children for the sake of your petty devotion." She lifted her sword. "As Muse of Protection I condemn you."
"Uh, Otilia-" Barry sounded rather startled.
Klaus found himself thinking, in rapt fascination, that he'd had no idea the Muses were authorised to execute people and then realised that, first, Otilia was not necessarily carrying out an expected or official function and second, as the sword rose, that it was likely to be challenging to stop her.
He was working out whether to catch her arm or try to haul her back bodily when Tarvek's voice broke through, shrill with anguish, "Stop, I'm the Storm King!"
Otilia turned her head, the rest of her body motionless, sword arrested in its fall. "You claim me? By what right?"
Tarvek stood up, hands outstretched. "Descent," he said shakily, "through my mother," which was probably a good thing to specify as the alternative was that there was a better claim yet for the man she was about to kill. Klaus wasn't quite sure what effect that would have on her, but he was fairly sure he didn't want to see it. "I'm not recognised yet, but I am his rightful heir." Tarvek's eyes darted to Klaus, then away to Otilia again, still painfully wide. "I was supposed to - he said he wanted me to marry Agatha one day and bring peace to Europa. I didn't think he was going to try to hurt her." He swallowed hard. "But please don't kill him."
Otilia held still, eyes fixed on Tarvek as the green light slowly faded out of them. Then she turned away from Aaronev and went down on one knee, the tip of her sword resting on the ground, both hands folded on it, and wings folded against her back. "You are not yet my king, but until your claim is proven one way or the other I will accept it. Your father's life is spared."
Tarvek breathed out in a whoosh. Klaus stepped back toward Aaronev, before anything else could happen, and injected him with a strong sedative. "I have more troops coming," he said. "They can deal with the rest of the Geisterdamen. Let's get the children out of here."