“You know, I do remember selling a toy like that a very long time ago.” Carredura’s top half, lying in the road, melted and paled like a candle, merging with her lower half as she looked up at me and laughed. Her torso, in the sheets, began to change into seemingly every imaginable shape. A knife, an outfit, a glass, a pen, a book—a collection of weather-beaten objects with no discernible similarities came raining down. Wrapped up in the all-destroying sheets, they couldn’t even maintain their proper forms, already coming apart as they rolled along the ground.
“Ahh, a shame. A part of me is gone.” The melting Carredura chuckled and stretched upward, changing her form. “But it’s futile. Did you think that would be enough to catch me?”
An arm sprouted from the morass, then a leg. Shifting, changing, regenerating her lost body, she got to her feet and looked at me as calmly as if nothing had happened. It was like seeing a person formed out of clay before my eyes, but her movements were unmistakably not human. To put it in the simplest possible terms:
“Oh man! That is so gross!”
It was all I could say. I sucked in a breath and took a step back.
“I have to agree,” Elaina sighed. She picked that moment to rush in from out of view, moving almost too fast for the eye to see. By the time Carredura turned, Elaina was already on her. She was holding the handcuffs.
Click! She snapped one of the cuffs over Carredura’s right wrist, then jumped back again.
The Cuffs of Love. A sancta that eternally bound together those connected by it. The chain between the cuffs led to Elaina’s own wrist. “No more running away for you,” she said. Even though their previous owner had perished, the cuffs still did their work; she would never be able to take them off. “While we’re at it, maybe we should keep your feet in one place, too.”
Elaina backed up to where Riviere was standing, then drew the bowstring and loosed two arrows, quick as the wind. They went straight into Carredura’s feet and stuck fast into the ground.
“Hmm? Ahh, I see. You’re trying to pin me in place.” She smiled as if she were playing a game with a child. Did she not even feel pain? Could arrows through the feet really not stop her? “You do love pointless displays,” she said.
Then, slowly, she raised one foot. She took a step toward Riviere, leaving the arrow stuck in the ground behind her.
“You know there’s no way you can stop me.”
Her right hand dropped away, handcuff and all. Then she took another step. There wasn’t so much as a scratch in her foot—or for that matter, at the end of her arm. Her missing hand was already regenerating. No matter what we did to her, no matter how we tried to hold her back, she came through unscathed.
Even, for example, when I tried again to get her with the whip. I was right in her blind spot.
“Yaaaah!” I cried.
“Not very imaginative,” she snapped. She sounded like she was in complete control of the situation. She only looked mildly annoyed as she glanced back at me, then simply melted her way out of the whip that had wrapped around her. Her body was phantasmagorical; no attack could do anything to it!
Elaina tried the bow several more times—no luck. I cracked the whip—nothing doing.
“Futile! Simply futile,” Carredura said with a merry laugh, melting and breaking and dodging everything we threw at her. “However, I can’t say I enjoy the view with the lot of you hanging around.” Her hands turned into something like mud, producing two ropes. “If you’re so keen to tie someone up, how about a sancta like these?”
She took me in with a glance, and a rope flew from her hand. The moment it hit the ground, it twisted like a snake, slithering toward me and Elaina.
“Oh, gross!” I said again. In spite of my distinct queasiness, I managed to crack the whip—but to no avail.
“I imbued that rope with a wish that it would allow nothing to catch it until it binds the chosen target.”
Just as Carredura said, the rope jumped up and crawled along my whip, following it straight to me and wrapping me up tight. I mean very tight. I couldn’t move enough to even use the whip again.
“Well, this is no good,” said Elaina, who was bound so fast that she couldn’t wield her bow and arrow.
The two of us had tried to bring down Carredura, and now we couldn’t have resisted a kitten.
“What exactly were you hoping to accomplish?” Carredura looked at us, a faint smile still on her face. She was clearly feeling confident. Certain that nothing and no one could capture her. Haughty and proud.
She never suspected that everything, all of this, was going exactly according to plan.
“What we wanted was a piece of your body.”
The answer came from Riviere, brandishing Carredura’s right hand. The one she had dropped earlier.
It hadn’t melted. It still had the pale, lovely fingers. It hadn’t been touched by the fatal power of my sheets; Carredura had simply cast it aside of her own free will, and it retained the shape of a human hand.
“It was all for this,” Riviere said, and she clasped the hand close.
Maybe that was when Carredura started to get a bad feeling about things. Or maybe she was just grossed out by seeing someone hug a part of her like that. Whichever it was, for the first time, her face began to drain of color and her smile disappeared. She’d spent all her time so far strutting around me and Elaina, but now for the first time she rushed toward Riviere.
There was a knife in her newly grown right hand—when had that gotten there? What kind of effect did it have?
She was planning to stab Riviere. To kill her. As she charged my shopkeeper, it was unmistakable: There was murder on her mind.
All Elaina and I could do was watch as Carredura tried to kill Riviere.
But Riviere simply said, “Too bad,” and did one simple thing. She didn’t dodge. She didn’t defend. In fact, she completely ignored the onrushing Carredura.
Instead, she kissed the severed hand.
“Huh?” Carredura gasped. Whatever she had been expecting Riviere to do, it wasn’t that. Her bemused exclamation seemed to carry all through the night-darkened town.
The knife never made it to Riviere. A sword came flying out of nowhere and cut Carredura’s arm off at the elbow.
But it was the kiss, the gentle press of Riviere’s lips to that disembodied part of her, that Carredura really couldn’t seem to understand.
She was grinning. “Are you sure you want to give me your first time?” She pointed at Riviere and laughed, the contempt welling up from the bottom of her heart.
Riviere smiled right back. “Oh, you’re not my first.”
Then she held up the sealing wax that bestowed volition. And the Controlling Lipstick. Both sancta that Carredura had created—and both of which Riviere had been using right up to that moment.
“What are those?” Carredura demanded. Maybe she had forgotten why she created these sancta. Maybe she didn’t remember what they did. She certainly sounded perplexed.
The question was hardly out of her mouth when a spear stabbed her through the chest. She didn’t react with pain—since she didn’t seem to feel that—but she did look down curiously. By her feet, she saw a pair of scissors. And a knife. And a book. And a glass. Objects Carredura had created, but no longer remembered, surrounded her.
They were all sancta she had made in an effort to mock people. Then she had thrown them aside, and Riviere Antiques had taken them in. Riviere had made them her own with the lipstick, then given them volition with the wax. Now they beat Carredura, stabbed her, crushed her, maimed her, tore her apart, bit at her.