Gotta get this up now, before I forget.
Knuckles belongs to Sega Corporation - and all this is making me impatient, so just read.
(Imira's POV)
The most upsetting thing? It all made perfect sense.
Nep had a temperament even worse than the avadarks and cysnakes put together. He was creepy, sleazy, cruel, and heartless overall. He never left his balcony, almost as if he was bound to it. Not like the Gatekeeper, but as if he couldn't join the festivities below. Or just didn't want to. And the way he'd ordered that cyclops around made me suspect it was part of the staff he'd hired to replace the ones he'd murdered. The book guards had called him "the master of masters," some special title. If he commanded the monsters together…
But I couldn't just jump to conclusions about it. True, Nep was a jerk, but not all jerks were monsters. He could've just been anxious to seize the mansion for himself. Or just an overall psychopath. (It wouldn't be the first time we'd dealt with that.) And I couldn't very well prove he was a monster, either. Some monsters are better at bending the veil than others. If I started blabbing on about what I thought he was, the other guests would think I was crazy.
Besides, I thought Maude had first dibs on Wyvern, given what had happened with her dad. It wouldn't surprise me if she'd been plotting her revenge all the two years she'd been in hiding. If anyone had a right to seek justice, it was her. But true sight or no, I wasn't sure her attacking a hydrodraco was a good idea – if this even was a hydrodraco we were dealing with.
And then there was Knuckles' odd behavior. He'd acted concerned, sure, but his hands hadn't smoked up even once since I'd jumped out of the graveyard. He was standing apart from us, too – which rang my alarm bells. He'd be trying to sniff out Nep immediately, and getting involved with our conversation. This aloofness, the standoffishness I'd scolded Chase about, was extremely out of character for him.
"Are you sure?" DJ asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.
"Positive," Chase replied. "There was metal plating all over the balcony. And if I'm reading the elders' legends right–"
"The balcony!" Vinny Lee snapped her fingers. "That's where el tercio was! Right under the balcony!"
"What now?" I asked.
Chase explained about what she'd found in the lead-up to the pyrobear attack. "There were whole plates of sheet steel covering the balcony and the hallway leading off from it. According to the lore, the hydrodraco could walk on metal, but not earth or rock. It would have pulled him down. And there was water damage leading to Wyvern's chambers."
Amos glanced warily up at the balcony and frowned, his brow furrowing. "Well, Nep's not there now," he said.
Ice formed in my stomach. "What do you mean he's not–" I glanced where he was looking and realized that Nep was, indeed, gone. Not even a trace of his finely pressed wave coat. My panic worsened.
"He must've slunk out in the middle of the fighting," Amos guessed. "I don't really know for sure."
Chase stared at him. "You don't know."
DJ cleared her throat. "I don't think he was in any state to notice it, Chase. I've seen this with his temper flares. He gets tunnel vision. Hyper-focuses on the threat in front of him. But it is worrisome that Nep isn't here now. I really don't like enemies I can't keep track of."
It did bother me. Maybe Nep was just resting up in his chambers or checking on his prison or something, but I didn't like that he was gone from the ballroom. DJ was right, it had been easier when he'd just been popping out of the room occasionally to creep us out. At least, we could tell where he was. But did he know we were on to him?
On top of that, if he was the hydrodraco…
I heard a sharp bang coming from the balcony side of the room. I wasn't sure what it was, but given how much we'd blown stuff up, it probably wasn't even anything important. And yet I couldn't assume…
"Well, hydrodraco or not, I still call dibs on Nep," Maude spoke up.
"Thought you might," I muttered.
"Whoa, girl," Amos said, talking to Maude. "Why–?"
I explained the whole Norgate-Wyvern soap opera to Amos – Nep murdering Maude's father, Matthew Norgate, along with the servants, and forcing Maude into hiding. I also discussed what I'd been doing while they were looking for me. By the time Chase had cleaned the cyclops blood off her arrow (which took her a while, since it had crusted on the point), I'd brought Amos up to speed.
Amos stared at me. "Dang, Imira. You had to fight an aerodraco? On your own?"
"I'm just lucky the other girls showed up in time."
He gave me a look of grudging respect. "And all those cages…" He clenched his fists. I imagined I'd just upset every chivalrous part of him with that particular detail. "Good thing you waited until I was sane to tell me about that part. Imprisoning all those women to feed to the aerodraco? Murdering Maude's father? Now I really want to kill Nep."
Chase frowned. "Well," she said, "it's going to be tougher with the hydrodraco–"
"Hey," I replied, "we handled the first two dracos easy-peasy. Like you said, Amos knows his explosives."
"That's not what I'm concerned about, Imira," Chase said, and related how Nep had telepathically sent the Gatekeeper at the others when they'd gone looking for me. Just a minor little detail she hadn't bothered to mention.
"So he's a telepath?" I said. "Lovely."
"I think it's only among the monsters he commands," she replied.
"That's not helpful. That just means he doesn't need words to sic a threat on us." Another thing needled me about Nep and the hydrodraco, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I was liking this mission less and less. "He could just call 'em forward if he needed them with a thought. It's bad enough when it's just Tails."
"That's what Knuckles said."
"Tails is decent enough. But others? Any over one's a little too much for me."
Another bang came from the balcony. It definitely sounded like someone was trapped up there. I'd have to go up and investigate.
"DJ?" I asked.
"I heard it," she replied. "By all means, go investigate–"
Knuckles moved, all of a sudden. He cut straight in front of me. "Probably just someone tripping."
That started up another ringing of alarm bells in my mind. Knuckles never tried to keep us from investigating anything. He expected us to get in trouble. It was par for the course with VLADJI, after all. Especially if it was related to the mission at hand…
Besides, when someone tells you it's nothing interesting, that usually means it's worth looking into.
"Or it could be something blowing up," I retorted, pushing past.
Knuckles grabbed my wrist and I registered something else. His hand felt incredibly moist, like it was dripping with water–
Wait a flipping minute!
Dripping with water? Now that was definitely out of character for Knuckles. He never made contact with a lot of water if he could help it. That sort of thing dampened his fire powers. Suddenly a lot of things made sense that I didn't want to.
My response to that? I grabbed his arm and judo-flipped him onto his back.
"Augh!" The grunt didn't sound remotely like Knuckles'. More like our old dear friend Nep Wyvern. And that wouldn't have normally hurt Knuckles – heck, a lot of things didn't hurt Knuckles. (Invulnerable avatars and all that.) Which meant…
"Imira!" Amos yelled. "Why'd you do that? That was our–"
"It wasn't," I responded, a sick feeling coming over me as I remembered, too late, something Chase had said about the hydrodraco. "It wasn't Knuckles."
"¿Qué?" Vinny Lee asked.
"Don't tell me you guys forgot that little detail!" I shouted.
"About what?" DJ demanded. "I think I remember that the hydrodraco can… change… its… form." DJ's voice faltered as she remembered Chase's warning, all too late.
"Knuckles'" form rippled and grew, till he was as large as the keuranodraco we'd already fought. His neck elongated and turned blue – actually, the rest of him turned blue. Tux and all. A scale pattern materialized into place. The short muzzle of Knuckles elongated into a proper draco snout. His eyes went from gray to black. His hands, covered in white gloves, developed into wicked claws. His tail straightened itself into a long, whip-like thing.
In the space of a minute, he'd transformed into our biggest, worst problem in the whole mansion – right up there with the one in the ballroom and the one in the catacombs – the ones we'd already squelched.
"Shoot," Amos muttered. "Talk about becoming your worst nightmare."
Yeah, for sure. Hate to leave on a cliffhanger, but little time!
Verse for the update: Galatians 4:4-5.
Please review! No flames! Stay tuned!