Exsanguination and Other Love Stories

VIII. The Blue Room

139B was the first room in Azure Tech I'd seen that had a real ceiling. Its long walls, however, opened onto the still depths of an enormous aquarium, with barren sand at the bottom, and no other decoration.

Down the hall ran a succession of square marble pedestals, each roughly a yard across. Omri froze at the sight of the one closest to us. It bore a real stuffed wolf, a white one, seated daintily: life-size. He let out a howl. There wasn't quite any other word for it.

At the same time, there also came a soft thump from my right. I glanced down: Dustin's navy trousers lay abandoned on the floor. An orange dog looked up at me with a scornful sigh, as if to say: "I told him so," pulled its ID tag out of the pants pocket with very sharp teeth, then turned and padded back out the door. I looked back at Omri's hunched figure and his arms around the stuffed wolf, with its yellow-glass eyes. Something clicked.

I decided this wasn't the time to start demanding explanations from a bereft and lovelorn were-wolf, particularly one who hadn't shown much liking for me up this point.

Instead, I stepped forward examined the inscription on each pedestal and its contents, to occupy myself while Omri regained his composure.

Neve Snow-Paws, pronounced my tablet, as I came within a few feet of her pedestal.

Who, Presented with Full Pack of Suitors, Proved Incapable of Making Up Her Mind.

I moved on. The next pedestal had a pink, glittery electric guitar mounted on it.

Anystysya Styles, spoke up the tablet. The text to speech feature stumbled over the pronunciation of both names.

Determined to Marry into Greatness, but When Push Came to Shove, She Could Not Face the Music.

When I examined the guitar more closely, I saw that the bridge was cracked and there were some very suspect crimson stains on its body. Almost as if it had been used to whack someone over the head...

Next was a very Gothic-looking white lace nightgown, mounted on a dressmaker's dummy, with a plunging bodice and more be-ribboned lacing at the back than I was quite sure anyone would ever be able to manage to tie on their own. Unlike the guitar, it was in immaculate condition.

Miss Sharon Anglofolly, explained my tablet matter-of-factly. Rendered Quite Breathless By Her Own Corset Strings.

I was beginning to feel rather perturbed. It seemed to me that these trophies were all monuments to deceased heroines of one form or another, my ill-fated predecessors at Azure Tech. Even more alarming, the means and method of each one's decease was quite easy to deduce from the display. I proceeded to view the rest with increasing haste and anxiety.

The second to last pedestal bore a broken bow and quiver of arrows.

Chariclea, Ex-Princess of Greece and Ethiopia, More Beautiful Than the Sun, Moon, Stars and Aphrodite Herself, declaimed my tablet flatly. Untimely ripped from ancient fiction, and returned to Erebus with haste. Her own arrows had to suffice. The monstrous progenitor of the whole lot?

And finally, on the last pedestal, something I recognized with a sharp intake of breath: a dented silver flask with my aunt's seal on it, lying on its side. I had never seen the flask before, but the symbol – that was Cordelia's, all over. Five-thorn-frame, petals, skull in the middle, a sort of gruesome personal blazon which she had been fond of knitting and/or embroidering on nearly everything she owned.

Whatever else one might say about my great aunt, she did have a morbid flair for personal branding.

Vane Witches, declaimed my tablet blankly. The source of all this trouble. One down, one to go.