65 Ash 121
Michaelis Estate, West End, Zaichaer
Vanessa had seen the man skulking just outside the estate for a few hours now. She had to give him some credit, he knew what he was doing. He walked with confidence, but the way he often looked over his shoulders at the guards at the front door gave him away. He was burglar, and had set his sights on one of the most impressive estates in the city. The damned fool did not even appear to have a crew to support him. Even Charlie was not so brazen, and that was saying something.
She had half a mind to tell the guards, but she knew what they would have done. They would have ignored her warnings, but loudly enough to spook the thief off for just this evening. Then he would be back, and Vanessa may not be present to stop him. No, it fell to Vanessa to snip this problem at the root and protect Karl and Amelia whom she could still hear playing in their rooms as she passed through the main hall and up the stairs.
Stepping into one of the many guest rooms, Vanessa made her way to the second story window and opened it. She stood flush to the wall on one side of the window, and peered out only occasionally to track the movements of the thief.
He was over the wall now, and the guards had not noticed. Just as she had suspected. No wonder Franz had outsourced the protection of Anton to her.
The thief made his way down towards the rear of the house, and stopped precisely where she had expected him to. He had been transfixed by the open window, such an alluring point of ingress. Why, it would hardly feel like trespassing if they were so inviting to him! Thieves were nothing if not predictable, and Vanessa had spent enough of her life around men like him to learn their patterns. Find a way in, grab anything within reach that wasn't nailed down, and get out. In a house this large, it might have been days or weeks before the missing items were noticed, and by then the thief would have been well away.
She saw him more clearly now in the last lights of evening. He was young, which she had suspected. Short and slim of build, he looked every bit the urchin he was, what with his shaggy black hair and his sallowing skin.
He was pathetic. Little more than a desperate man taking desperate measures in a city that cared little for him one way or the other. But that desperation could not stay Vanessa's hand, at least not entirely. Her loyalty was sworn to House Michaelis, and there were relics and writings within this estate that would have marked the family as heretics. She doubted the thief would have found them, or even known if he had, but even just the threat of it was enough.
The rustling of hands in a backpack spurred her into action, and Vanessa placed her hands on the windowsill and swung herself out the window. She floated noiselessly in the air above the thief, her magical cloak keeping her aloft. Like a creeping chill, Vanessa floated behind the thief, and then lowered herself to the ground. He was searching for something in his pack and had not noticed her. A grappling hook was Vanessa's best guess, but perhaps he too had some magical trinket to make infiltration easier.
The grass crunched under her boots, and the thief's head lurched up in surprise. He felt her presence then, her body near enough to his that her breath bristled down his neck. She could see the realization dawning across him as his body language changed. His shoulders sloped forward, his head turned just slightly to the left so he could see her silhouette In his periphery.
Then his whole body begun to shake, shivering like a scared rabbit. She knew that look, and had seen it before in members of her crew. All at once, his adrenaline jolted into his system, and his mind screamed incongruous orders at him. For a moment he was frozen, mind locked with indecision, and then his body flung itself into motion on instinct.
He broke away from Vanessa, bolting in a dead sprint off to her left.. and running in the exact opposite direction of freedom. If he had dashed to the right, he might have gotten to the street and lost her there, but the thief had instead done her work for her by blitzing deeper into the beautiful walled in lands of the estate.
Vanessa was after him in a heartbeat, and was closing the distance his head start had given him. Her boots thumped against the hard earth, and behind her she could hear the shuffling of guards making their way towards the commotion. Predictable as always.
She chased the thief into the gardens, and was finally upon him when he tried to feint her pursuit, juking one way around a large statue of the Michaelis family founder before committing to the opposite direction. It was a commendable effort, but Vanessa had not been fooled, and crashed into his back before he could put the stone man between them.
Her hands grabbed his hard-spun tunic, twisting hard, and her shoulder smashed into his back. The man fell with a scream, but he was quickly muffled with a mouthful of dirt and grass as Vanessa came down atop him.
“You're going to have to try a little harder than that.” She hissed down to him. She moved her hands from his back to his hair, and wrenched his head up away from the ground. “Go on, boy. Give me your best excuse.” she snarled down at him, digging her knee into his back until he cried out weakly.
“No, you don't understand, I can explain!” The thief begged, bringing his hands up to try and claw at her own. Her grip was iron though, and she did not release him even as he drew ribbons of red down the back of her hands.
Vanessa did not let him explain, and pulled his head back further. Then she slammed him forward, bashing his face against the pedestal of the statue. The thief's nose met the lip of the stone platform, and a sickening crunch rang out when Vanessa deviated his septum. She pulled back again, and this time brought his mouth down against the rough stone.
Teeth broke, and blood splattered against the statue's base, getting crimson spray on the stone man's chiseled boots. Vanessa pulled back again, and used one hand to wrench the man's arm painfully behind his back to keep him from mounting a resistance against her.
He was missing a front tooth, one half of it embedded in the pedestal below. One of his molars was gone as well, and he had spit it out on the grass. Blood poured from his nose like a faucet, and each of his ragged breaths sent more blood, spittle and snot misting into the air.
He was crying now, his tears mixing with blood. Through his tears, he blubbered a single phrase over and over as his last shield. “P-please, don't k-kill me.” his whole body still shook, but more violently than before. Terrified eyes beheld Vanessa, pupils so large that they made the irises disappear entirely.
She heaved his head once more down across the platform, this time catching his brow and fracturing his skull at the eye socket. He screamed, god how he screamed. Like a banshee's wail, but without any potency. He shrieked impotently, clasping at his face when Vanessa finally let him go and let his body fall limply into the grass.
Reaching back, Vanessa retrieved her knife from her boot, and brought it to the man's neck, pressing the point right up against his jugular.
She should have killed him. She should have jammed that knife right under his chin until he stopped twitching. Had she been the pirate she once was, she would have done it without question. He had come to darken the eye of House Michaelis, to dishonor them by having them be a victim of a robbery. And in so doing he might have unwound a very carefully constructed tapestry of lies.
Only, none of that had come to pass. He was a trespasser and attempted thief, but nothing more. He had earned the beating she had given him, did that mean that he needed to die for it? For others, the answer was simple, but not for her.
It was not mercy that stayed her hand, but the approaching of the guards. Their shouting broke Vanessa out of her blood haze, and she looked over her shoulder to see two house guards approaching, weapons drawn.
Her hand dropped to her cutlass, an instinct she still needed to unlearn. The guards did not stop, and instead flanked her on either side while she remained on her knees atop the thief.
“Miss Quill, are you alright?” One of the guards asked, taking Vanessa entirely off guard. It was only then that she realized how much of the man's blood had gotten on her face and hands. But that was not what had surprised her. What surprised her was that the guard seemed concerned for her. The way their eyes scanned her for injuries, and the way her brutality had not made them falter.
“I'm fine.” Vanessa said, slowly standing up. She kept a boot on the thief's back, pinning him to the earth. “Just caught this pisspot trying to break in. Thought I'd handle it.”
The guards looked down to see the thief's badly beaten face, but their expressions hardened rather than showing him any sympathy. “Thank you, Miss Quill. We can take it from here.” One of the guards said, and they each stooped down to grab the man and heave him up to his feet once Vanessa moved her boot from his back.
It was best if they did handle the arrest and punishment, they were members of the ZADC and loyal to Franz. Any punishment they leveled on the thief would have had the duke's approval. The same could not be said of Vanessa. That was not to say that Franz would have disapproved of her actions, only that he could not put his authority behind vigilante justice so easily.
The guards dragged the thief off, and now more houseguards poured from the estate to patrol the walls and search for any accomplices. In seeing them, Vanessa realized the thief never stood a chance. If it had not been her, it would have been any of the other guards or servants still posted within the estate.
She was glad it had been her, though. It felt good to have solved a problem in this household for once, rather than being related to it at the very least by proxy. Word of it would get back to Anton and Franz in due time, and perhaps it would not be such a wonder why they kept her around.
Stepping through the front door after having washed her face and hands, Vanessa was confronted by yet another curious sight. Amelia, Anton's younger sister staring up at her in awe.
“You can fly!” Amelia exclaimed, pointing a finger at the bodyguard. “I saw you!”
“Aye.” the bodyguard said flatly in reply, though a smirk did tug at the left corner of her lips. She was remarkably calm for having just mangled a man's face, but Vanessa had years of practice to grow used to violence.
“Antin never told me you could fly.” Amelia said, sounding a bit dejected that her older brother would have kept such a fun fact to himself.
“Don't have to do it often.” Vanessa explained. Then she shrugged her dark blue coat off of her shoulders and stooped down onto her haunches. “You want to try?”
Amelia nodded so intensely that Vanessa thought the girl's head might snap off her shoulders.
“Before I do, you gotta promise me something, can you do that?” Vanessa was stern, but not unkind.
Amelia nodded again, her eagerness not diminished in the slightest.
“Not a word of this to your parents, alright?” The last thing Vanessa needed was her good deed spoiled by her parents learning she was introducing Amelia to magical items. Vanessa's coat was registered and permitted within the city, but still she knew that Anton's family would not have wanted their darling child to get it in her head that magic was something to be enjoyed.
“Easy!” Amelia replied. Vanessa then draped the coat over Amelia's shoulders, and the girl practically disappeared underneath the fabric because it was so large on her.
“Now all you need to do is imagine yourself flying, and the coat does the rest.” Vanessa instructed.
Amelia closed her eyes and scrunched up her face in thought. It took some time, but soon Amelia's feet left the ground. Immediately her arms pinwheeled and Vanessa reached out to keep the young girl from flipping herself upside down.
Vanessa let the girl hover, though always held onto the sleeves of the coat to make sure she didn't slip too far away. Amelia was giggling madly, feet kicking in the air like she were trying to swim through it. The joy present on Amelia's face was enough to warm even Vanessa's stony heart, and soon the bodyguard found herself sharing in the girl's mirth as she twirled herself in the air.
After a few minutes, Vanessa brought Amelia back down to solid ground and removed the coat from her shoulders. “You're a natural. You must've been a skyskimmer in another life.”
Amelia beamed at that, hands on her hips. “You need to teach me how to fight, too!” she said, and pantomimed the way Vanessa had grabbed the thief's head and smashed it down.
It was an odd thing for Vanessa to see her actions through the eyes of another, and even moreso when it was through the eyes of a child that knew not what they had truly seen. Amelia could not have understood the brutality or the necessity of what Vanessa had done, only that it had been entertaining to see.
“Saw that, did you?” Vanessa said, slipping her coat back on but remaining low to the ground so the fabric pooled around her legs. “When your mother allows it, I'll teach you to fight. Your brother needs all the help he can get, eh?”
Amelia laughed at that, a measured little giggling trill that went on for precisely long enough to be polite without overstaying its welcome. So young, and already so used to performing. “I want to be an adventurer like you were! Antin says you have stories, lots of them.” She looked at Vanessa expectantly, this always being the part where Anton would have relented and read her a story.
So too did Vanessa fold. “I've got plenty of stories. I suppose I can spare one or two...”
