"So, on the fateful night of—"

("Ooooh, she's doing her story voice.")

("Could you not?")

("Come on, Robyn, we love story time.")

("She hasn't even gotten one sentence in— we don't need your running commentary.")

"Could you both shut up, please?"

("Yes, ma'am; sorry, ma'am.")

("Don't be a pest—")

"Robyn."

("Sorry.")

"Anyway, Weiss and I were fresh off the heels of this blood cult, tracking the patrons they'd beseeched— your Coven, obviously, whether that was just by proximity or if they had connections we never found out. Weiss was already remarkable at tracing rituals. We found you within the day.

"So the next day— the day— er, night— we went in with our usual four-man, only this time we brought Weiss instead of babysitting one of the Americans. A blooding ritual, basically; your dad takes you hunting to see if you can kill a deer, you get to keep the skull, he respects you forever— only the skull in this metaphor is, uh… Parley favor. And also the actual skull. If it doesn't ash.

"I gotta give you guys kudos— whoever tipped your Coven off did it quick."

("We used to have a girl with foresight.")

"Seriously?"

("Used to.")

"Us? Or him?"

("Dunno.")

("Doesn't matter.")

"Oh. Sorry. Either way, there wasn't anyone there, barely any energy traces. Figured you made it out, so we started on metaforensics.

"Stupid. And I insisted on it— wanted to move past there not being any Vampires before Jacques could get his Depends in a knot. Weiss and I split off to find something traceable while he and the Drunk examined the physical. I watched the back, that way you could focus on what was ahead— keeping an eye out, rather than getting in your own head.

"He must've been watching us— must've had some way of masking his energy, must've done… something. He let us wander for a long time— lemme just say, I hate how much you Vampires tunnel. Does the Viet Cong handle your Turning orientation?"

("It's actually an instinctual thing. I don't know—")

("Rötschreck! That's what it's called.")

"Thanks, Ruby.

"So, we were going down your godforsaken tunnels when he jumps us, and it's just him. He's battered, but only on the outside— healed-over after fighting you two— and he's strong."

("Fed on me after our fight. The headrush must've made him short-sighted; he left me alive to chase after you. Sienna wouldn't have had anything to drag away, otherwise.")

"Like I said: strong. We can barely get a hit on him, and the silver doesn't even slow him down. It takes me less than a minute to assess that we're definitely not going to win, but… I wanted to try—"

("Don't lie.")

"Weiss, it's not—"

("I wanted to fight.")

"We wanted to fight. I gave my best— you did, too, God we deserved that fight—"

("No one deserves anything.")

("Hush.")

"Then he… he moved so damn fast— got his hands around my sword— his hands should've fucking melted—"

("Babe—")

("Win—")

"No. I'm fine. He got his hands around my sword and opened me from rib to rib— across. I told Weiss— I told you to run, but… you weren't going to abandon me. Not until he gouged half your face out."

("My… what?")

"That's when you ran— he gave chase, but he must've thought I'd be down or dead, because I blew his goddamn knees off; shrug off silver all you want, but nobody gets to snub John Browning. I had to keep shooting his legs while they regenerated, but I couldn't reload once I'd gone through the mag, so I let the last one get him in the balls— more symbolically than anything else. Alas, he regenerated, and soon enough he was back on his feet. He kicked me and laughed, he said something like, 'You're still alive, but I'll make you regret that. Was that your sister? Do you think it'd be worse if I killed her in front of you, or vice versa?'

"I spat on him. Then he laughed, and… started chasing…

"Please tell me you got away."

("I'm here, aren't I?")

"Was it close?"

("Yes.")

"Thank Christ. Now— I had all my guts on the floor, so this part's a little… fuzzy. Sienna? Would you mind?"

"Not at all! This is the best part."

("Thank you.")

"So— me 'n Robbie— well, me carrying Robbie— were following the fighting. Robyn needed blood, bad, and I figured Adam would leave at least one of you behind— and hey! I was right! Cuz I round the corner and there she is. Guts on the floor, gun in hand; I think you're dead.

"So I lower Robbie to get her teeth on you, and you snap out and grab my leg— I nearly piss myself— and you look at me like a goddamn ghoul and you say, 'Do not let him get my sister.'

"Now, I was still gonna feed you to my girlfriend, but said girlfriend— she's got a little more intact moral fiber and she's a sucker for the romantic, so of course she manages to tell me to be empathetic, or something, which doesn't stop me from giving her a mouthful of Winter— wahey— but it does get me to hoist the pretty princess up on my other shoulder— I'm huge in my other form, so it's easy, and I lug these two granny-haired idiots all the way to a hospital. I mean, we have cars, so I dump you two into one and then I drive to the hospital. Robyn, obviously, is fine after a sec—"

("I did what I could to get her insides back on the inside. I've got a couple nifty tricks— helps a ton that it was her own blood I'd drank.")

("Drunk.")

("Winter, honey, shut up.")

"Honestly, I would've been fine leaving well enough alone after that—"

("Pfft, as if.")

"I would have, really. I was always better at resisting stupid temptations— of all things, a Huntress… idiot woman. And they say we're the beasts."

("At least I'm not susceptible to fleas.")

"Casual racism aside, dear Robbie was keen on getting herself right back into something stupid no less than a day after we dropped Winter off. She kept mewling, 'Sienna! We need to check on her! She had a family— a sister! I have a sister!' I pointed out that you do not have a sister, but you whined anyways, 'But what if I did!'

"And, unfortunately, I am not infinitely resistant to the whims of my darling girls."

("Oh, please. You weren't hard to convince.")

"In front of the guests and everything?"

("Keep talking.")

"I took us back to visit her the next day, but she was still asleep. The day after, too. I think she was asleep for… eighteen days? At least."

("Why didn't anyone call my father?")

"Oh, we threw away her wallet before we checked her in. Didn't want anyone to get notified of that kind of thing. Another reason for us to come back— to make sure she didn't go back to being a Huntress. With no contacts, someone had to pick her up when she came to, otherwise she'd go crawling back to daddy.

"Robyn was able to charm her enough that she got her own bandaged ass in the trunk. She was banging on the inside the whole way back. Had Stockholm the shit out of her."

("Winter!")

("What? Two hot women Stockholming me is a lot better than dad. Don't mind if I do.")

("Win. Ter. I am going to vomit.")

"In all seriousness, it was definitely kidnapping vibes. But she couldn't really escape, she was hurt pretty fucking bad; even if Hunters heal fast, they don't always heal perfectly. Robbie?"

"There was some light atrophy. We're lucky she wasn't asleep longer; it could've been much worse. Luckier still that Sienna's not a Vampire— she avoided me like the plague, but you Schnees are overtuned to us, it blindsides you to other abhumans. At least enough that you'll begrudgingly do at-home physical therapy with them.

"The atrophy was easy, though. Everything else was hard.

"Maybe it was some reaction to, I dunno, having your lower intestines tying themselves into a rat king on the floor for a nonzero amount of time, but she was… unsettled. Lots of trouble eating. Trouble sleeping. Trouble sitting still. Trouble… cutting.

"That was the 'Oh shit' moment for me: seeing Winter half-crooked over the bathtub. She looked delirious. I could smell how much blood she'd lost. And she was praying."

("Down the street or across the road?")

("Blake, you can't say that.")

("Sincerest apologies.")

"I don't know. I wanted to help— tried to help— but it was a lot of blood. Enough that I had to get Sienna in, and she made her wear all her old bracelets to cover up her wrists. Maybe the blood loss helped, made her too sluggish to police her thoughts normally, because after that she stopped avoiding me. I mean, I wasn't giving her regular deep-tissue massages like Sienna, but she wasn't taking her dinner plate to the bathroom whenever I was present.

"This is about when she started talking— a couple months in, at least. Tiny things. Yes, no, I don't know, et cetera. Anything that necessitated more than a single sentence, she clammed up and started threatening to kill herself— Parley thing, I guess.

"I thought she was being stubborn at first, till one day I caught her yawning. She cringed and hunched over, after that I started noticing how tight her eyes get when speaking at all. Figured I'd ask.

"And she looks at me— her whole face is tight, bright red like I'd caught her jerking off; I honestly think she's gonna slap me, or something.

"Then she looks away and puts a hand over her stomach, gets hateful in the face like she's gonna kill me and then herself, and says, so quiet that a human would miss it, 'Hurts.'

"Fellas, right then and there I realized I'm gay.

"Again, I mean."

("Heurk—")

("Don't be a baby. You should be glad your horribly debilitated sister was able to get quality care from people who probably should've spent their time more productively.")

("I reiterate: heurk.")

"Like I said before, I have some nifty tricks with healing— I was a doctor in the 1850s, before I got Turned, in the good ol' days when it was half medicine, half magic, and half cocaine."

("You gave my sister—")

"No! Nonono, haha. No. You think I'd ever buy coke for you psychos? You think you've got mental problems now, that'll give you mental solutions.

"And by solutions, I mean turbo-psychosis. Probably. I don't know. Either way, none of you are getting coke."

("Aw…")

("Augh— Ruby!")

("What? I'm gonna live forever… might as well try some— ow! Hey!")

("Weiss, don't hit my sister. Ruby, you're not getting cocaine. Jesus Christ.")

"So, I don't give Winter cocaine. Instead, I offer to do some blood stuff to make it better. She, of course, adamantly refuses. I tell her I've already done it once, when she was initially wounded, and she slaps me and yells at me for that, which… fair enough, I guess.

"Then, Winter gives her own dumb ass a bad strain in her abdomen, trying to be a big tough girl and work through her pain— it's three or four months, when that happens, so she's past the physical therapy and on to her own workout regimen. With supervision, of course.

"She blows up at Sienna— projecting her own anger with herself, obviously— and it gets pretty bad. Sienna doesn't cry or anything, but she gets pretty shaken up. I go to talk to her next and I can tell she feels bad, but she's spiraling about being useless, abandoning her family, betraying her race, forsaking the Parley and God himself, but I can see what she really wants: to fight.

"So I tell her, 'You can't fight like this, but if you let me help you, you could. I swear on…' something important, I don't remember. She still doesn't trust me, so I offer to Bind myself to my word. That gets eyebrows on foreheads.

"So she lets me. I take some of her blood and cook up a healing thing— a topical salve she can put on herself. It heals the strain— doesn't heal whatever's causing the chronic discomfort, but it does kill the pain. She talks a lot more from then on— even apologizes to Sienna. Crazy stuff.

"Now that she can talk better we find out she's actually a massive fucking loser. She's into, like, Sailor Moon."

("Don't out me!")

"Look at what you're wearing."

("Shut up.")

"Huge loser. But at this point, I'm basically head-over-heels, so I get her the, uh… what was it called?"

("The box set?")

"Yeah. It had a name."

("The Naoko Takeuchi Collection.")

"That. Yeah…

"Damn, I'm good.

"From then on… you can imagine how it went up until now. Winter?"

"Got it."

"Qrow gave us the heads-up on your raid, so we moved as quick as we could. But, with father keeping watch outside, we didn't have any way to get close without tipping him off— not until he went inside, where the energy was dense enough that we'd be masked."

("He's just an old man.")

"In a profession where men die young. It wouldn't be an understatement to call Jacques Schnee the single greatest obstruction to abhuman autonomy. He had a building fall on top of him, and that's honestly the least deadly thing that's ever tried to kill him. If any one— or two— or any three of us got the drop on him, all at once, I sincerely doubt we'd be walking away alive."

("What about four? Or all of us?")

"Well, Yang, why exactly do you think you're here?"

("Because I followed Ruby here?")

"What?"

("Because I followed Ruby here.")

"Wait— wait— Robyn, you… talked to them, right? Assembled us all here?"

("No. I thought you did.")

"So—"

("Oh, um… Ruby Rose, by the way, not sure if I formally introduced myself to all of you.")

"Yes, Ruby?"

"You see, um… Weiss and I have this, um… thing. We're um…"

("Ruby, I swear to God—")

"Bonded."

("Jesusfucking— Bound, Ruby. Bound.")

"Bound."

("By blood. She's Bound to me.")

("You piece of—")

"Yang! I agreed to it."

("That doesn't make what she did—")

"No, it doesn't. But that's a discussion we'll be having later.

"So I've got this Binding in my head. I can kinda always vaguely feel it. It's usually just, like, there, but it suddenly started going crazy out of nowhere like a freakin' fire alarm in my head. And it was sort of… pinging me? Like I could kind of feel Weiss' general cardinal direction? So I called Yang and I guess Yang called Blake because I can't really fight good, then I just… started running."

("Surely you didn't run all the way—")

"No, I did. I'm really fast. Yang and Blake met me there."

("Wait— at the towers?")

"No. The town— the old one."

("You ran all the way to—")

"Ee-yup! Yang picked me up from there, then we started following you guys. I mean, we followed what my brain was telling me— the Binding. Ended up here. Honestly, I was kinda getting ready to kick some butt when Winter opened the door, and I was like, 'What the heck? Is that Weiss? No that's tall Weiss,' then I was like, 'Wait! Weiss has a sister!' because you mentioned her a super long time ago, and like, she literally couldn't be anybody else. So I said, 'Hey, uh… is Weiss here?' and Winter got suspicious until I said I'm your girlfriend, then I guess she was like 'Oh, her too,' because you've both got Vampire girlfriends hahahaha."

("But— mmf! Mm-mnn!")

"Any-ways!"

Ruby clapped, taking her hand briefly off Weiss' mouth to signify she wanted the conversation to pave right over her bullshit and move on to whatever else Winter wanted to belatedly indulge. "Anything else to add?" she asked the elder Schnee, a rigid smile plastered over her lips.

"Weiss," Winter said to her sister evenly. "Just to recap for you— I know this is a lot—"

"Don't patronize me," said the Huntress, still sitting placidly in Ruby's lap. "I'm an adult."

"I know, I just mean a full recap of your treatment."

Weiss pursed her lips, but raised her eyebrows in a way she hoped would beseech such information without seeming desperate for it. Which she was, unabashedly— desperate to know precisely what unholy machinations had been wrought upon her corpus, so she could know where best to mortify.

"Robyn essentially sucked out all of your blood—"

"I spat it out," Robyn interjected with a raised finger. "I know you people tend to freak when we drink without consent."

That final word made Weiss twitch, but Winter continued, "Before you could fully Turn— benefits of a Brood as strong as outwardly strong as that guy: they have relatively long gestation periods— and since we're compatible, we piped my blood straight into you to so you wouldn't succumb to blood loss."

Robyn nodded, adding. "We got lucky. No matter the gestation time, Turning is hard to overturn so easily— most human immune systems can't develop a response before the cellular transmutation is past the point of no return, but yours was remarkably effective at slowing it down. Did you manage to use some kind of Parley magic when you got captured? I'm genuinely curious; you're too lucky."

Weiss had never been lucky, let alone too lucky. She felt herself tense. It couldn't be right. Weiss Schnee didn't get nice things. "I… I don't know," she said, tepid and cautious. "I think I got concussed at some point— I was delirious. And he had an Incubus; he knows more than he should about Parley procedure, I imagine that's how."

Weiss rubbed her neck, where he'd most likely bitten her— she wasn't actually sure of when that'd happened. Everything around it was a void of memory. "Although…" she continued. "I think… I don't think he wanted information out of me… I think he…"

The very idea made her stomach churn, the words having to fight through both bile and the anxious choke of her throat.

"He might have said… he wanted to sire me."

Yang snorted attractively. "Fork found in kitchen."

Weiss scowled at her, only to find that Yang was already scowling back— snarling, kept on the couch only by the woman (Blake? She'd called her Blake, right?) across her lap, who was unsubtly twirling one of Yang's springy golden locks around a long and slender index finger. Her chin was tilted up to Yang's ear, her mouth moving in a whisper that Weiss couldn't pick up.

Weiss shook herself, feeling horribly philistine to behold that unfamiliar woman. She amended, "Yes, obviously, but he… he was angry that one of his lackeys hurt me— could've killed me, me specifically, he said he wanted a Schnee."

Ruby hummed. Weiss felt her vibrate with the sound, settling her mind back to the bottom of her brain like sand shaken in a baking sheet. "It'd be prestigious," her Bound Vampire supposed, and Weiss glared at her because she couldn't think of any other way to react to that statement.

"No," Winter inserted. "He's just an idiot. Siring a Schnee would kill him— we have deals, Seraphic contracts, that kind of energy is antithesis to him."

"And yet," Blake said languidly, flopping her head back, her voice demanding attention even if her eyes were firmly on the ceiling. "He managed to drink Schnee. How do you suppose he did that, hmm?"

The room waited through three trimesters of a pregnant pause. The question was rhetorical, Weiss felt that she would answer on her own, felt that she should not interrupt, that it was not her place, and everyone else seemed to recognize that. The only one who didn't stare expectantly at Blake was Yang herself. She rested her head on the back of the couch, staring also at the ugly popcorn bumps on the ceiling.

When the atmosphere of the room was sufficiently unbalanced, Blake spoke up. "You couldn't feel any… Malevolent energies from him, when he ambushed the both of you; a Broodlord should never be able to sneak— should never have to, it's beneath him, but he should certainly not be able to move without his energistics screaming at anyone with a functioning pituitary gland. Let alone a team of trained infants. Huntsmen, I mean."

The room hung with silence again, through which they waited with reverent taciturinity.

"And… Rice?"

"Yes?" Weiss barked, feeling stiff in Ruby's lap.

"You said he was working with Sulphrous Edictors?"

Weiss blinked.

"Ah— apologies," Blake said, still without looking, though she smiled with her molars. "I am very human, as such I am prone to lapses in the tongue— Fallopian slips."

Yang flicked the back of her head. The woman's smile grew forward, showing her incisors as well.

"Freudian."

Ruby let out a sound— something that was two or three houses down from a laugh, more of a hiccup: loud, singular, and abrupt.

"I meant to say, Demons. Or a Demon. Which type did you say, Lout?"

Lout. Lice. Weiss. "Incubus."

Her smile moved to her canines, but they showed up two teeth too early, and they didn't stop. Not until it was only the front of her lips pinched together, barely enough to hide the finale of her lips' unveiling procession: first molar, second molar, premolar, incisor, canine, canine, canine. She opened her mouth. "So he is making deals with such Cambion— is is not a simple thing; there is Infernal Echelon involved. Somesuch Arterial." She blinked, giving Weiss a sly glance as if she purposefully misspoke. "Fourth or Fifth Wound, you would say. Methinks."

Another black silence.

Blake slumped against Yang and sighed with cataclysmic exasperation. "Ugh. Dullards, all. I am saying quite plainly that this Broodlord is making deals with the Devil."