Henry didn't want to believe it. Couldn't bring himself to believe it. They'd had him! Guillaume had been backed in to a corner, stripped of everything he could have used to protect himself! And yet… and yet…

"You know, Henry, there are many things we have always been at odds over, but there are some things that I must thank you for." Layla's hijacked voice dripped with contempt, the barest hint of the perpetrator's accent slipping into her speech. "Letting your guard down is one of them. To think, the paranoid little rat that's been burrowing holes in the walls of my little chateau and holding my resources at gunpoint, having his entire scheme fall apart by celebrating too early! Why, I'd laugh, if I still had the heart to."

"Bastard…" Henry growled through gritted teeth. "What have you done?!"

"What have I done?" The gathered puppets guffawed in eerie unison, all six offering up different voices with the same exact laugh. "What haven't I done, now? It would seem that you no longer have a monopoly on cheating death, Henry!"

Quicker than he could blink, Layla's fist slammed into his already bruised eye. The blow sent him reeling back into the two former guards who held him upright by the shoulders. No Domain power behind it, otherwise he likely would have been dead on the spot. Apparently, Guillaume wanted to enjoy this.

"Perhaps I should take that crown for myself? Knock out the competition while I have the chance? Bah, but I am getting ahead of things. You've made quite a mess for me to clean up, first."

The three remaining guards, limping and staggering in tattered armor laden with burnt-out enchantments, circled the motionless frame of Evelyn. She hadn't moved a centimeter from where Layla had been forced to kick her, and it didn't look like she'd be able to move anytime soon regardless.

Each one of them withdrew a melee weapon of choice, from chipped blades to vicious-looking mauls. One of the guards happened to have a spare, handing it over to Layla's piloted body to equip her to satisfaction. As one, they rained down blows on the unmoving body from above.

With each swing they spoke in unison, saying words of one mind through the medium of multiple people.

"Starting…"

"With…"

"This…"

"Insubordinate…"

"WRETCH!!"

She lifted a studded iron club high into the air, swinging down in a dreadful arc towards Evelyn's bloodied head. There was nothing to stop it from connecting. Not the first time. Not the second time. And certainly not the time it finally split the reinforced skull open, spilling grey matter onto the oily tarmac beneath their feet.

Henry could only watch on in horror. His fists clenched tight enough to draw blood from where his fingernails pierced his palm, his teeth grinding like millstones. Tears welled up in his eyes, as the two men holding onto him made sure that the only thing he could do was watch.

Watch, and scream bloody murder.

"YOU SICK FUCK!! I'LL KILL YOU FOR THAT! MARK MY WORDS, YOU FUCKIN' MONGREL-"

He shouted at the top of his lungs as the executioner's club withdrew, slick with the blood of the friend he'd made who the world had treated no better than any other monster.

Another punch to the stomach cut his tirade short. The air in his lungs forcibly vacated, turning his furious string of curses into a ragged wheeze with the threatening taste of bile in the back of his throat. Then a third. And a fourth. Now he could taste blood, too.

"You will get no such chance," Guillaume declared with finality. "And, even if you did… how do you plan on killing us all in time, especially as you are now?"

"What?!" Henry's words burbled through the blood clot forming in his mouth, staining his teeth red and leaving a metallic tang on his tongue. He spat the globule out in front of him, still trying to process exactly what Guillaume was getting at.

"Ah, forgive me. I forget you are a false Devil, sometimes, with all the trouble you've managed to cause me. But, since you are about to die, anyway, and the look on your face will be worth the countless preparations of mine you've ruined…"

The three guards fanned out to completely encircle him, while Layla's puppeted body forcefully grabbed him by the chin, pulling his eyes to meet hers.

God, even her eyes weren't completely her own, now. They looked perfectly identical on the surface, but the way they drilled directly into him was entirely foreign. As the horror sank in even further, she spoke.

"I will indulge your ignorance, just this once."

Disdainfully, she pushed his head to the side and began pacing as she monologued on Guillaume's behalf. In the background, the three other guards retrieved the corpse that he formerly inhabited, the black angular crystal roughly the size of an eraser embedded into his forehead.

"You see, Henry, as you might have already guessed, you are a bit of an outlier compared to the other Devils. You grasp at powers that are not your own, barely understanding the Exotic Domain you so heavily rely on. No other Devil contends with such issues. Why? Because unlike you, we were given the keys to unlock our own fates."

Layla stooped over Guillaume's body. Or, rather, Guillaume stooped over his own body.

"We are pioneers, Henry. A new world is coming for us, and through fate we've been given the helms to the first ships there. A pity you were barred your own, really. You would have made a fine replacement for my, ahem, former associate Quatre."

"As if I'd-"

"Silence."

The command... almost worked. His retort choked off halfway, as two sets of conflicting thoughts clashed for a nanosecond before a flash from his chest purged the intrusive thought.

Both of them noticed it. Henry's eyes went wide with shock.

"Interesting..." Guillaume mused. "Have I been missing out on greater heights? Perhaps using the Harpy as a guinea pig set my expectations too low..."

Henry only halfway followed. Panic was starting to seep in, and he needed an out now.

"It would have saved me so much trouble," she continued. "Whatever little trick you used to keep me out of your friends' minds might never have worked to begin with. My reach within my own organization would no longer have been limited to ensuring loyalty through proxies. All this new potential at my fingertips… there wouldn't even be a need for a Gentleman's Club. There would only be… me."

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The way she spoke that last word sent a shiver down his spine, causing him to stop his squirming dead in his tracks.

"And now, we come to the very mechanism by which you cannot hope to stop me. Look at us. We are now many copies of the same mind, Henry. I'm sure it's something you are familiar with at this point, oui? But unlike you…"

A sharklike grin erupted on Layla's face. "I am not limited by how many duplicates I can fabricate. Only by how many bodies I can find to inhabit."

Henry tried to keep the look of horror from showing. He'd never been very good at hiding his own emotions, but if there was any time he desperately wanted to pull it off, it was now.

His wish went unfulfilled.

"Goodbye, Henry." Guillaume spoke icily, drinking in his sorrow as Layla stood to her full height. "May we never see each other again."

Mist began swirling at her feet against her will. Spiraling up from the floor and snaking in coiling tendrils into her skin. Grey light began to pulse underneath the surface, slowly at first, but faster and faster as more swelled inside. Muscle groups tensed, bundling into tighter and tighter bonds as the surface of her body rippled with power both magical and physical.

The fog at the highest point in Stratford was thin, very thin. But, it was still present, same as anywhere else. It was only a matter of time before the pressure she exuded mounted to truly dangerous levels. Henry could only renew his attempts to struggle fruitlessly, held in place as he was and still without his own copies to call upon.

Four sets of Guillaume's eyes watched him writhe about like he'd been caught in a mousetrap. Waiting patiently for him to finally accept his fate, for the drowning man to finally realize he was out of air and turn still.

As if he'd give them the satisfaction.

To the very end, he tried to break free. Time ticked away second by agonizingly slow second, and he used them to their fullest even as the count reached zero.

When at long last she could hold no more, her weight shifted. A violent plume of haze burst open behind her. A wild haymaker bore down at him from directly in front, his perception of time slowing to a crawl for one final time even as the fist began to accelerate.

In the last possible moment, the two men holding him in place literally tossed him away in unison so that they could escape the blast zone themselves. Had they not thrown him bodily upwards as they did so, he might have been able to use that moment to dodge. Unfortunately, caught slightly midair as he was, there was nothing he could push off of within reach that might allow him to evade the full power strike.

Everything pointed to the end. The only voice in disagreement was his own obstinate denial.

Subconscious clawed for some, any avenue of escape. Real or not, he could feel the not-so-gentle tug of the flashbacks that had been ailing him tearing him away to look inward in his final moments. Imploring him to remember the end of his past one last time.

Just before his mind swam beneath the depths of his psyche to escape, he could have sworn he saw a single tear in Layla's eye.

< -|- -|- >

- the vampire was going to kill them all.

It was a miracle that any of them had managed to regroup in the first place. Cecil was still out of the fight for certain, he'd fainted from blood loss only minutes before the creature decided to make its final move. Grace was still missing. Elias had lost a hand in the fighting, crazy bastard lopping it off himself to avoid being sucked dry. He'd live, but his best weapon, the longbow, would no longer be fired by his hands again.

He'd given it to Layla just to have someone who could make use of the wide broadheads that had been the only effective weapon against the monster so far, but she was far from the crack shot he'd been with it.

They'd all been hoping they might stand a chance of making a final stand here, now that they'd chosen ground advantageous to them, for once. They had been wrong.

In the opening moments of the last ambush, William had been taken out of the picture almost immediately. Not bitten, as that would have left the vampire open to attack for the briefest moment, merely tossed across the room like a ragdoll. With one pale, bony arm, no less. Henry hadn't known it at the time, but the impact from that single, backhanded toss had paralyzed William from the neck down.

Then it had tried to quickly eliminate Layla, who it determined rightly was the largest threat to its life. Exhausted as Henry was from the constant harassment the monster had laid down over the course of a full 24 hours, he got in the way just in time to keep her from being hurt more than a nasty scratch. Not perfect, but the best he could hope for in the moment. He lasted a whole two seconds dancing with the vamp, before being tossed aside in much a similar fashion to William.

The main difference being, Henry got back up afterwards.

It wasn't pretty, or quick, but he was loath to let it have his way with him so easily. Battered, bruised and crippled, he willingly tossed himself back into the fray knowing this was not a fight he could win.

He wasn't planning on it, anyway. Just on not losing long enough to buy them all time.

"Go!", he'd shouted! "Get out of here!"

Despite Layla's protests, Elias understood and organized the retreat of everyone else.

After that, things became a bit of a blur. Focusing on keeping himself just out of reach of the long, spindly limbs of the vampire, but close enough that it wouldn't just run past him in search of juicier targets. Cecil's combat knife felt like it weighed a ton, though in reality it couldn't have been more than a few ounces in weight. Every muscle in his body felt like pointy-legged spiders were dancing on them, and yet he continued to lunge, slash and thrust with every scrap of energy he had left.

The vampire stopped going for bite attacks. Instead, it switched to sharpened, razorlike fingernails and matched his dueling stance.

A beast with a competitive streak? That was a new one.

But, new or not, it won just the same.

Henry lie bleeding out on the floor of the flat. Everything felt very cold to him, all of a sudden. No more pain, nothing left for him to fight through to keep going. Just a final, unyielding cold.

Guess this was the end for him, then.

He was ready. It was all he could be, in the moment. But if there was one thing his life was good at, it was keeping him guessing.

A second, smaller figure leapt into the room from seemingly nowhere, at a breakneck pace. In mere milliseconds, the vampire was on the ground, flailing madly as its attacker clamped down hard on its throat. In a fashion eerily similar to the state they found Guy's body in, what little blood flowed in its already pallid skin was drained entirely, turning it a pure, bleach white in death.

Hunching over the body of the beast that had terrorized them was… Grace. Undoubtedly, definitely her.

"Don't tell dad," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Black blood dribbled down her chin, from where she'd violently ruptured the beast's jugular. But, for the most part, she still looked… human?

"I can keep it under control this time, I promise. I won't end up like… this."

He couldn't speak. He was choking on his own blood. Something under his skin was probably ruptured, he guessed.

Sluggishly, he remembered the pills he'd gotten from Cecil. With uncontrollably shaking hands, he reached for his shirt pocket to pull the bottle out. Maintaining a hold on it was a herculean task, opening the container impossible.

Grace rushed to his side in a blink, and unclasped the lid for him. Messily, a few of the faintly magical capsules found their way into his mouth, with no time to check for dosage and many more falling to the floor in a heap.

The last things he remembered before fading away was looking down on his own body from above, as Grace carried his still form out in the direction of where the others were hiding. Through the walls of the destroyed flat, he saw a single tear running down Layla's cheek.

"You have proven tenacious," declared an unfamiliar voice. "Your time for now is over, but if fate is on your side, it may come again."

Everything went black.

< -|- -|- >

The crystal in Henry's chest flashed from green to blue, and above his head a clone materialized.

It was the last thing he ever saw. Less than a moment later, Layla's fist struck true. The white glow his reactive shield flared to life in an instant, only to be ruptured immediately as the incredible force behind the punch caught him square on the jaw, pulverizing most of his upper torso in the process.

His ruined corpse flew head over heels past the two guards, buffeting them with its passing and proving them smart to let him go. With a wet smack, the mangled head hit the side of the roof on the way over the edge, falling unceremoniously to the streets below.

Henry was dead. But, as had happened many times before, there remained one still standing to rebuild the chain anew.

Guillaume had believed the fight to be over. In truth, it was only just beginning.

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