Building A looked like it'd been ripped out of the Eastern Bloc, as if its design had been the last act of a communist-sympathizing architect. This, however, turned out to be a boon— the brutality facade made for easy scaling. The Huntress took one easy step after the other; such was her peace that she ambled with hands in pockets.

Part of it was probably the wallwalking talisman. Most of it was the intense sense of right in her bones.

This was what she was made to do. Her, and the ghost she was trying to be. Like a working hound, like the ones her father had used for tracking, Hunting, or hunting, their lives wouldn't be fulfilled without their purpose.

Qroe Branwen, however, didn't look half as confident as she did. He strode behind her, his own charcoal-grey Parley coat trailing perpendicular to his path. He had a haunted look about him. She couldn't tell if this was how she'd always seen him.

"Mister Branwen?" said the Huntress. "Are you alright?"

He made a gruff noise. "Mnh. Yeah. I'm just not used to being this sober."

She scoffed. "That's a good one."

When he didn't laugh, she looked back at him. He matched her gaze. "I'm serious."

The Huntress' features pinched, her disbelieving smirk still convinced the man was joking around. "You were absolutely lush earlier; you smashed my father—"

"With a car door, yeah," he agreed, a hint of fond reminiscence on his tongue as he shrugged. "What, you've never wished to do that?"

The Huntress now scowled fully. "You're The Drunk, trying to tell me you're not. I saw you nursing that flask— what, are you gonna—" she shook her head, correcting her tone to be more like hers. "Are you saying there's water in that thing?"

The Drunk rolled his eyes, but extracted the flat metal vessel from his coat and tossed it to her. She caught it with a ghost's ease, twisting off the cap as the man's voice said, "Pedialyte."

Her mouth, again forgetting who she was, blurted, "Are you pregnant?"

Qrow barked out a laugh. "Yeah, snowflake, I'm pregnant."

Her soul curdled at the nickname.

"Uh, sorry, Weiss. I, um… you look a lot like…"

She snapped her eyes to him, dropping the flask. He caught it too easily for the earlier drunken facade.

"N-not like— like that—"

She made a sound of disgust. "I never thought it was 'like that'."

"Wh— hey! I'm a competent and attractive adult! Two consenting adults can—"

"Yuck," the Huntress enunciated, turning on her heel to continue walking up the side of Building A. "Never talk about that again."

A long sigh escaped the man behind her. "S-sorry."

Surprising herself, the Huntress didn't leave the rest of their vertical walk silent. "So, what, you just pretend to be a drunk idiot?"

"It's a valid strategy."

"Is it, now?"

"You've seen Columbo."

She turned to him, head cocked. "What? No I haven't."

Objection, then realization, then regret crossed his features in rapid sequence. "R-right." He scratched the back of his neck, chuckling without humor. "Kids these days— Imma firin mah' lazer, right?"

She should've checked the flask for psychedelic intoxicants. "Are you speaking in tongues?"

He sighed. "God. Maybe I am out of touch…"

"No sh—" the Huntress forcefully whipped around on a heel again, schooling her words. "Obviously."

Her stony tone brooked no further conv—

"Hey, I, um… I'm sorry," Qrow said suddenly. "I know we haven't really… since that mission, but… I'm sorry. And I am your coworker, but I hope you know you can talk to me or my fam—"

"Shut it," she hissed, holding up her hand to cut off whatever static was coming out of his mouth. "We're almost at the top."

"I— I just know someone who's… worried about—"

The Huntress snapped her head around. "Is now seriously the time to try giving me therapy? You can't talk to me two years after—" she cleared her throat, stretched her shoulder blades back, breathed deep to reclaim her calm confidence. She stuffed her hands in her deep coat pockets, running her fingers on the crosses inside as they neared the corner. "For the last time, Drunk, just be quiet. I'll take point."

She could feel the words he didn't say, the useless 'But—'s and 'Wait—'s that she ignored as she crouched on the lip of the rooftop, keeping one foot grounded on the vertical side as she crossed her other foot around the corner, setting it flat on the opposite face of the lip. Her center of gravity immediately shifted until her middle pulled itself between both feet, then onto the pioneering foot as she lifted the other off the vertical side. The second sudden alignment of her center of gravity made her a little sick, drawing up vomit that she quickly swallowed down. Shifting her feet securely on the flat rooftop, some thirty or more storeys above the ground, she untied the wallwalking talisman from around her neck. She felt the contract fizzle between herself and the Building, and in its wake the emptiness in her head made one thing visible— something with a shape she'd forgotten, observable now by the space around it like a black hole.

The string of her Binding.

The Huntress forced herself around, bending over the lip and extending her hand. Qrow grasped it and she hoisted him up with ease. She said nothing to his muttered thanks. There was a single roof access door that they stacked up on either side of. The Huntress unclipped the securing strap of her revolver holster, extracted the gun, and quickly sniff-checked the cylinder— a good force of habit. The blessings still smelled as fresh as the last time she'd checked. Looking up, she caught Qrow doing the same with the magazine of his sleek black rifle, and they briefly met eyes. Though neither actually did it, they felt the shared nod of approval.

Qrow stretched across to try the handle. It opened with ease, grinding loudly on its rusted hinges. She winced as the deep stairwell within carried the noise. The miraculously functional lights flickered as if in response.

"Shit," Qrow whispered. "Welp, no hiding now."

The Huntress grumbled, "I'll start including WD-40 in my gear."

Qrow snorted.

"What's so funny?"

Qrow opened his mouth, then shut it. Pulling a little black square out of his pocket, he opened it up to reveal two black earbuds that he slipped into his ears, watching her expectantly.

"What?"

He raised a brow. "You gonna put your earpieces in?"

"My… what?"

Qrow rolled his eyes. "Christ, you're just like your sister." Despite how that instantly made her stiffen, he reached into an interior pocket and extracted another little black square, chuckling as he offered it to her. "You guys're gonna get tinnitus if you don't use some kinda hearing protection, and it lets us keep in touch if we're separate."

She took it, looking at the earpieces inside. She couldn't identify the brand, but she never was one for tech stuff anyways.

"I had a hunch," Qrow stated ominously.

The Huntress glared at him. "I don't need this. I'll be—"

"Winter took them."

She slipped them into her ears immediately, placing the square in her coat.

"We're on the same channel," Qrow said directly into her ears. "They shouldn't muffle too much unless it gets loud, they're noise-canceling."

"So… if a Vampire had this…"

Qrow shook his head. "That's the funny thing with destructive interference: they make a sound to destroy a sound, but the frequencies we can't hear still mess with them."

"Huh."

Qrow giggled, which old men should be shot for doing. "Alright. You stay in the stairwell while I—"

"No," she immediately rejected. "I can clear. You stay in the stairwell."

"If I put you in danger, Jacques—"

"You think I can't handle myself?"

Qrow swallowed his words, then regurgitated some shit ones. "It's too risky."

The Huntress pushed into the stairwell anyways, ignoring him completely as she hugged the wall and swept the barrel of her shotgun-revolver opposite herself. Qrow followed behind, doing the same, still fussing, "Weiss, I can't just let you—"

She swung her gun around, leveling it with the older man. He froze. "If you think I'm going to let anything stand between me and them, you're wrong, Drunk."

He twitched, the end of his gun tipping ever-so-slightly, but his body seized up again when the Huntress clicked the hammer back with her thumb.

"Let. Me. Have. This."

The man— dressed in his dark longcoat with his dark rifle, his shortish hair pushed back and greying at the sides, his beard the same four-day-post-shave scruff it'd been last time she saw him— looked like the dictionary illustration for the word 'grizzle'. She'd seen him fistfight four crazed cultists at once and win. He'd shown her how to take down a werewolf, since Schnees always focused on Vampires. He'd taught her and Winter hand-to-hand.

His eyes, though, staring down the barrel of her gun, were wide with fear.

What was she doing?

"I. Will not. Be stopped," seethed past the Huntress' lips. "I don't care what happens. I will avenge her."

Qrow, now looking so much like another frail old man, gave her a timid nod. "O-okay. Okay. You can… do what you need to do. I'll stay in the stairwell and keep watch."

The triumph that roared up her guts made her want to smile. The instinctual wrongness of her hands pointing a gun at another human being made her want to vomit. Rushing to the first door, she schooled her face into showing neither. When they stacked up against it, this time, the Huntress opened the door and pushed in. Qrow kept watch from inside the doorway.

She cleared every room with perfect method, finding nothing but decrepit furnishings, detritus, and signs of a short-lived or decades-old drug den. No leeches. No monsters. The only sign of true wrongness was the distinct lack of rats.

Her and Qrow descended a level. She cleared it, finding nothing. Another level down— nothing. Another level, another lifeless collection of rooms, nothing, nothing, nothing.

By the time they reached the eleventh floor, the Huntress was on the verge of screaming. "If this turns out to be another dead-end—"

Qrow stacked up across from her, but snatched her wrist as she reached for the door handle. He locked eyes with her. "If it turns out to be a dead end," he said with a cast-iron tongue. "You will be glad. If it turns out there's nothing in this building, you will be happy, because it means you won't have to risk your life just for—"

She thrust her revolver into his face. "Stop acting like you know—"

A golden burn cinched around her waist.

The door was broken outwards off its hinges— the wrong way— and the force of it smashed through what Hunters' limbs were in its path. The Huntress' closest arm was snapped in half at the elbow, bones splintering out like a frag grenade. The Huntsman's hand became a pulp. The two scrambled back, but any burgeoning cries were torn from their throats by white-red blurs.

Azrael's invocation of mercy burned the skin of the Huntress' middle. Qrow locked eyes with her. "If it turns out to be a dead-end—"

Her revolver shot up, replacing the finger of a shushing gesture as she wriggled her arm out of Qrow's hand, her eyes darting to the door. The Huntsman let her go. When she started backing up, gun aimed at the doomed threshold, he mimicked her.

The door burst open a moment later. The Huntress fired twice. The Huntsman shot five times.

When the dust and debris of the doorframe's reckoning started to settle, two figures were left standing. Clad in ratty white and red clothing, they looked like unkempt scarecrows, silhouetted by rays of light filtering through the hanging dust. The one on the left had a golfball-sized hole where his nose should be, around which the rest of his face was torn outwards as if the flesh had stretched out to greet the Huntress' 410 slug. The second shot, buckshot, had gouged a tight crater in the center of his chest. The figure on the right was perforated with precise red spots around their sternum.

They did not fall, because they weren't yet dead.

The Huntress sprinted forward, trusting Qrow to do the same as she lunged, drawing her rapier and thrusting in a single fluid motion that had her silver-plated point piercing perfectly between the ribs, through the lungs, and into the right figure's heart. Their mouth hung open, but they regained control of their motor functions just in time to dart their eyes to hers, staring with wide scarlet shock into the cold, harrowing blue. Their orbitals became braziers, and their throat became a chimney from which cold blue flame purged away their sinful existence.

Beside her, the other one clutched feebly at Qrow's wrist as he jammed a stake into its heart. Unlike hers, which was purged by holy silver, Qrow's victim simply seized up before withering as if aged in a dehydrator. When he fell back, most of his ash-dry skin flaked right off his bones, leaving little more than a clothed skeleton. The Huntress ducked back behind the door frame as she sheathed her rapier, drawing her knife into her right hand to replace it.

"Stairwell," the Huntress commanded, advancing into the hall without so much as a look back at Qrow, who let her go without a word. She pushed in slowly, revolver outstretched, knife braced underneath. The seals on her arms warmed.

The first door on her right swung open, and she threw herself against the opposite wall as she jerked her revolver—

"Wait!"

She cocked the hammer back, holding its sight level with the forehead of a woman. Her seals went hot at her presence, but not with the squirming, branding disgust of a Vampire— rather, the vindictive rage of something else.

She was dressed far too well, and she was far too pristine for this building. Not even a speck of dust rested on her theatrical carmine dress, and her pale skin didn't have the same kind of gaunt quality that a Vampire would have. Most telling, however, was the curling ram's horns that came down from her temples, framing her face with solid black.

The Huntress averted her gaze, realizing what the woman was, but only so much that she could still see if she moved. "Succubus," she addressed.

"Miltia," the woman-shaped creature greeted, her voice dripping with lilted interest as she said "You're odd."

"What are you doing here?" the Huntress demanded, flicking her gaze down the hallway. "This is a Vampire coven."

Military scoffed. "And I'm fucking all the Vampires, obviously." She sniffed the air, then levelled a deathly smirk at the Huntress. "Oo-oo, and I'm not the only one."

The revolver jerked forwards, making the Succubus jump. "Shut up. Why are you doing things with this coven— you would've had to strike some deal."

"Yeah, thanks princess, I know what my own rules are," she mocked, fury edging into her voice. "And things were going great until somebody decided to come in and start murdering my clients!"

The Huntress scowled. "What was going great?"

Miltia rolled her eyes and scoffed again.

The Huntress surged forward, pushing the Succubus into the room and kicking the door shut behind her, revolver digging into the demon's chest. She backed the woman up until Miltia was stuck between a wall and a Huntress' gun, with the Huntress' knife promising a decidedly more clean end from the side of her neck.

"You can't kill me here, you don't have approval. And you're a Schnee," Miltia declared, reaching up to curl a lock of white hair around her index finger. She started to pout. "Why isn't it working on you?"

The Huntress yanked her head back and pressed the knife in until it drew black blood, making the demon hiss. "I don't care what you think I am or what you think I won't do," she hissed through her teeth. "If you don't tell me why you are servicing this coven, I will cut off your legs and make you deepthroat prayer-seals until you wish you were back where you belong, you Malevolent whore."

"Fuck," Miltia shivered. "Do that again."

She pressed the knife in harder. More black boiled into nothing as soon as it flowed onto the silver blade, the pale flesh around it turning red with angry burns.

"Okay! Okay," Miltia relented, her eyes slowly trailing away. "I'm… trying to get information."

As a reward, the gun and knife pulled away ever so slightly. The Huntress slowly backed up, nodding deeper into the room where she'd have more time to react if someone came in. Miltia followed as she walked. "Qrow, got a Succubus— she's talking. First door on the right, cover me."

"What about the old man?"

"His job is to wait and watch. He does his, we'll do ours."

"I don't know if—"

"Just do what I say!" she growled. "Get in the door and keep an eye out. I'll interrogate."

Miltia purred, starting something salacious like, "Oh, I love the way you—" before she was gagged with the barrel of a revolver.

"Are you fucking the—"

Heat— worse than the seals sizzling on her upper arms— clawed up to her hairline. "No, I am not fucking the goddamn Succubus, you idiot! Get your old ass in here before I come out there and throw you down the fucking stairwell!"

There was silence in her earpiece for a moment, but the noise-canceling function was unfortunately insufficient to drown out the sound of Miltia's indulgent moan as she closed her lips around the gun. The Huntress jangled it around inside her mouth as a preventative measure, hoping that she'd chip a tooth and make her stop slutting out, or something, but that only modulated the sound.

"You know," returned Qrow's voice after a long silence. "You really are like her."

"Shut up."

"Nnnn," moaned Miltia, again, shoving the gun into her cheek with her tongue so she could say, "'ike 'oo?"

"No one."

Miltia reached to run her long nails down the back of the Huntress' neck, but the girl thrashed out and bit Miltia's wrist savagely, forcing the Succubus to pull back. She made a noise of disgust as the Huntress spat out black blood.

"Do not touch me."

Miltia scoffed, throwing her head aside and spitting out the gun. "Oh, you think because you've got some fancy blood bond that you can just—just— manhandle me—" her voice cracked, black hair curtaining her face. "Well I lost mine! Okay! My sister is in here with these— these fucking leeches!"

She looked up, and for once the Huntress met her eyes. Her seals demanded she turn away, but she didn't. She didn't turn. She looked the Succubus in the eye. She felt nothing.

Miltia tipped her head back up, furious tears reflecting wetly on the surface of her eyes. "If you're not going to give me anything, and you're not going to do anything, then send me back. I won't tell anyone. Just… let me get back to my search in peace. I— I'm not trying to fuck with whatever stupid human bullshit you've got—"

"Here," Qrow said, poking his head in. "Everything good?"

The Huntress glared at him until he shrank back around the corner. "You lost your sister," she said, turning back to Miltia, the words too cold for what they were. "I lost my sister, too— almost certainly to these people."

Miltia searched her face for any sign of a lie, but remained quiet.

"We can help each other."

"I'm not signing a contract with a Schnee," Miltia spat. "You people are fucking psychos. Even I know that much."

"No contracts," the Huntress offered. "We're clearing this building. Just tell me what you know, and it'll make our job easier. Our job being easier will clear out more Vampires, faster, cleaner. That makes your search easier. Your info, our labor, we both benefit."

The demon eyed the Huntress. Slowly, she nodded her head.

"What's this coven's name?"

Miltia nodded. "The White Fangs."

Vampires weren't known for their naming conventions. "Leader?"

Miltia squirmed. "That's… debatable."

"How?"

"I heard… different things. From the—"

"You don't have to—"

Hearing her attempt at interruption made Miltia smirk as she continued, unimpeded, "The Vampires I've been fucking, sucking, and cucking non-stop for the past three days."

The Huntress cringed. The Succubus giggled, but thankfully continued with markedly less horniness.

"Apparently it was this Sienna chick, but she got ousted by a guy named Adam— things've been going to shit ever since, allegedly. I haven't met either of those two, and like I said, I've only been here less than a week."

"You weren't worried they'd recognize you?" the Huntress found herself asking. "Assuming you look like your sister."

"Oh, darling," Miltia purred, leaning into her in a way that made her trigger finger itch. "I can fuck you so hard you won't be able to see anything— think anything— except you, me, and all the lovely little pieces of ourselves that we're sticking into each other."

The Huntress remained perfectly rigid, a concrete statue of a woman, as tangible waves of lust rolled off the Succubus. She blinked through every pulse, unbothered. Miltia made a whiny harrumph at her failure.

"Ugh, whatever," the Succubus deflected. "That Vamp pussy you're getting must be wacky."

The gun went back in Miltia's mouth.

"Nnngh, harder daddy."

(God-fucking-dammit.)