Whew, lotta tension. It's all crazy, with cousins over. Family, you know.

Knuckles belongs to Sega Corporation. (How many times do I have to say it?)

(Chase's POV)

Vinny Lee had gotten most of the women out of their cells – but it seemed he had been interrupted in the process.

A young woman – who looked about eighteen – in a purple dress stood beside an unlocked cage, pointing a jackknife at him as he was ushering another woman out. Her brown hair was plaited in a braided bun, which looked very Austenesque. Her silk gloves were black, not white as DJ's and Imira's were. Her dress was well decorated, with a pleated skirt, a silver sash, and short cap sleeves. I'm not going into more detail than that. I'm not Jane Austen.

For some other reason, she looked familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"Maude Dowager!" DJ snapped once she came to the site of the trouble. "Put that knife away! That's my friend!"

"Ah, should've known it wasn't Nep Wyvern," the woman, whose name must've been Maude Dowager, replied, folding up the knife and slipping it under her skirt. (Handy place to conceal weapons, isn't it?) "He's taller than that – and doesn't scream like a girl, besides."

DJ's lip curled. I imagined her biting back a retort that Vinny Lee actually was a girl – most of the time – but I didn't press the matter. I was in no mood to be yelled at any further.

"Why were you so anxious to pull a knife on Wyvern?" I asked Maude. "Besides the… hippopotamus in the room."

"Pretty sure the phrase is 'elephant in the room,' Chase," Imira corrected me quietly. "Although hippo might be more appropriate here."

Maude scowled, glancing around the place. "You." She pointed an emphatic finger at Vinny Lee. "Carry on. You don't need to know about it."

"Aw." Vinny Lee grabbed something out of his coat. Knowing him, he'd find a way to listen in while he was working on the other cages. He'd found a way to snoop in on me and report it to Imira and Amos. I still wasn't sure how he'd done it.

"What drama are we talking about here?" DJ said.

Vinny Lee cupped something in his hand and went back to uncaging the other women. Smart boy.

Maude frowned. "He took something from me that was valuable. My home."

"Excuse me?" Imira asked. "Don't you have a place somewhere in–"

"I meant here." Maude gestured above us. "I meant the mansion."

Then it hit me. She was referring to Norgate Mansion, which meant… "Maude Dowager's an alias," I realized. I hadn't heard of anyone with the name in Norgate – not even among the staff.

"Maude" nodded. "Right on it, savage girl," she said. "My real name is Emilia Norgate."

"Norgate…" Imira frowned. "Like the mansion."

"More like Matthew Norgate," I said, keeping the tension out of my voice. I didn't much like her savage girl comment. Nor was I entirely sure how she'd seen me for what I was. She couldn't have been around Knuckles for long in this house.

"What now?" DJ asked, and I realized I hadn't told her or Imira about my discovery about Matthew in the library. There just hadn't been a lot of time.

I gave them the full story – Matthew Norgate, the tragic professor who'd died in what we suspected was foul play, who'd been thrown into a Dumpster with his whole staff on account of a discovery he'd made on the mansion.

"Dang," Imira muttered. "That had to suck for him."

Really, there wasn't much you could say about that.

"Matthew?" Emilia leaned in.

The gesture got the attention of the VLADJI leader. "Are you related to him in some way?" DJ asked.

Emilia nodded, and suddenly the pieces fell in place. I realized why she'd looked so familiar – she'd shown up in the picture in the library, just beside Matthew.

"She's Matthew's daughter," I said quietly.

"His daughter?" DJ asked. "Hold on… if Matthew's dead–"

"That makes her the rightful heir to the mansion," I said, feeling sick even as I said it. She would've been in danger even if there weren't already disappearances occurring at the place. Nep Wyvern would not give up his stolen claim so easily. Emilia posed a threat to his power.

"I survived because I was still in boarding school when it happened," Emilia said. I didn't think they still had boarding schools, but I didn't ask questions. "My father frequently sent me letters from home. We exchanged them, in fact. He'd just told me of a secret he'd discovered – about the house – that troubled him. He said he'd look into it further. But he didn't."

"Because monsters attacked him," Imira guessed.

Emilia nodded.

"And how do you know that?" I asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

DJ glanced at me – giving me the look Amos had given Vinny Lee when he'd caught him about to say dead white male. "Chase, what did we just talk about?"

"I only meant to ask how she knew it was monsters that had attacked her! Two years ago – this would be well before the avatars came into Philadelphia. Surely–"

Imira turned to face Emilia. Her look betrayed grudging respect. "You can see through the veil, can't you?"

Emilia nodded. "Well, I do see more than what's good for me, if that's what you mean. Have since birth. I caught the monsters escaping fast with the corpses on my way back home, and I knew I couldn't stick around. I've kept a low profile. If Nep had sent these monsters to kill my father, how did I know he wouldn't do the same to me?"

"You've seen this sort of thing before?" I asked the VLADJIs. I knew there were some humans who could see through the veil all their lives, but such people were rare. I didn't even know how VLADJI was aware these people existed.

DJ nodded. "We have a classmate like that."

I had too many more questions, like, oh, how do we handle the monsters now?

I was rudely interrupted by a sharp BOOOM! up above us. Coming from the ballroom we'd left behind.

I muttered a curse in narakai. "I forgot about the Gatekeeper."

"Gatekeeper?" Imira asked.

DJ gave her the thirty-second explanation – "Giant angel with a flaming sword. Like one that kept Adam and Eve out of the garden. Split us up."

"Yipe," Imira muttered. "But why would the thing split you guys–" She paused as if an incredibly unpleasant thought had occurred to her. "Don't tell me you left the boys to deal with it."

The boys? It was clear she was referring to Knuckles and Amos. But I realized Vinny Lee must've switched gender while she was working on the cages, and Imira had somehow picked up on it. I felt strangely pleased knowing Vinny Lee was back where she belonged. Oh, great, VLADJI was definitely rubbing off on me.

What bothered me more was Imira's anxious tone. Knuckles I knew could handle a Gatekeeper just fine – he'd fought bigger creatures – but Amos… it didn't sound like Imira lacked confidence in Amos's fighting skills, as I had with him against the pyrobear. More like she was worried he'd lose control of himself.

DJ glanced at me. "We have to get up there."

"Oh, surely they're all–" I glanced out toward the cavern and realized that something was amiss. I could see the whole place – the whole underbelly where the dracos had been buried. There were huge cracks spiderwebbing from where the keuranodraco had been – I could tell from the hole in the ceiling where it had emerged and crashed the dance.

That wasn't what really worried me, though. I could peer through the hole in the keuranodraco's grave's other side to see that the water draco's – the hydrodraco's – grave was totally empty. Not even a little reflection of water across the rocks. Which meant that the hydrodraco was already up in the mansion. That wasn't good.

"What's wrong?" DJ asked. Then she glanced in my direction. "Oh, that's a problem."

"The cavern looks ready to collapse," Imira observed. "Those strokes – the keuranodraco must've been getting really edgy."

"Weren't they sealed separately?" I recalled from the stories.

"Not separately enough, looks like. I reckon the bolts from ol' Lightning Face broke through the walls separating them at some point and that's what woke them up."

"That's not the real problem, though," I said. "The hydrodraco's is empty. Long empty. What if he was the first to escape?"

That cheerful thought settled in our guts like pyrobear blood.

"Is everything okay?" Vinny Lee asked, coming out with the women. I couldn't believe the numbers. I did a head count – not counting Imira and Maude Dowager aka Emilia Norgate, twenty in all. That was an awful lot of women to disappear unnoticed over two years, and I was willing to bet it wasn't all of them.

"It isn't good," DJ muttered. "The hydrodraco's already loose, and…" She turned to me. "You said the water draco could change his form?"

"Yes," I responded. "So if–"

I was interrupted by another boom coming from the keuranodraco's site. A piece of rock, glowing pink with some weird energy signature, flew out and would've hit Imira in the face if it weren't for that odd shielding veil of hers. The hijab flicked out and knocked it to the side, but DJ caught sight of it.

"Oh, no," she murmured, her face pale.

"What is it now?" I asked.

"I recognize that glow. That definitely isn't good. We have to get up there and help – even though I don't exactly want to."

Imira muttered another set of curses in Arabic – yes, I'd picked up on the language. "Did he–?"

Another BOOM shook the hall. Another moment of this and we were going to have a cave-in on our hands.

"Let's go," I said. "Vinny Lee, lead the captives out of here. We don't want any more trouble than we've got–"

"Oh, I'm coming with you," Emilia said.

"To help us with the Gatekeeper, or to give Nep what for?"

"What do you think?"

On that cheerful note, we – me, DJ and Imira – headed down the cavern, toward the keuranodraco's burial site. The place was warm and dank, and crackled with residual lightning. I didn't want to linger.

"Why were you so apprehensive?" I asked DJ. It didn't seem like her to be fearful of strange debris.

DJ glanced up at the battle scene through the hole in the cave ceiling. "You remember when I said it isn't pretty when Amos loses it?"

Another BOOM shook the cavern, sending a few loose boulders our way. We had to jump and dodge to avoid them. I jumped up to get a better look at the scene – leaping clear out of the hole. (Narakai strength. It's amazing.)

I quickly saw that things weren't going well at all. On the plus side, though, the Gatekeeper was backing away from the wall in fear – and for good reason. And for once, Knuckles' pyrotechnics weren't that reason.

Standing in front of the Gatekeeper was a glowing, larger, and royally torqued off Amos, who was getting ready to pound the creature into the ballroom floor.

"That's what I'm talking about," DJ said.

Uh-oh, how are they going to calm down Amos?

Verse for the update: John 1:1-5.

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