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The game starts with the sound of a buzzer. One moment, Jude is there giving Cardan a Cheshire cat’s grin, the next she's grabbing darkness by the collar and wearing it like a cape.
Cardan has no choice but to step into the maze alone.
The staff at Laser Crusade had quickly become fed up with the odd couple. It had taken four rounds for it to become clear to them, that no matter what combination of players, no matter the objective, if the Greenbriars were together, they would dominate the game.
Rather slow, Cardan had thought, for veteran game-makers. Really, they should’ve taken one look at Jude and known.
By the end of the fourth game, both husband and wife were glad for the change in pace. They’d become bored of always winning.
Instead of putting the pair on separate teams, the staff had announced a Battle Royale round. Which apparently meant, Cardan had learned when Jude’s smile grew horrifically feral, that every man was for himself.
But Cardan makes allies swiftly, having gained notoriety amongst the patrons these past few rounds for being remarkably sneaky and damn near impossible to catch.
Soon after the buzzer sounds, two large men who look to be around Cardan’s age, approach him—along with two middle-aged women and their teenage son.
They take a moment to convene on strategy. And with roles assigned, he and his five teammates step into the fray.
Shootouts commence between their team and a few other hastily thrown together alliances.
Oddly though, Cardan doesn’t see Jude in any of them.
When they are through the thick of it, he's left with only two of his companions. The man called Jeff and his friend, Darrel. They agree to flank him while he scouts the maze ahead for stragglers.
Cardan spots a kid with his back turned peeking around the corner in front of him. He takes aim and shoots.
The kid releases a cry of disappointment when his sensors buzz, announcing his untimely game-death, and stomps out of the maze.
Cardan looks behind him to check on his allies.
Only Darrel remains, walking backwards and fighting off another player behind them. Cardan faces forward again, moving slower so Darrel can keep up.
Soon after, Darrel, too, disappears.
Cardan supposes it really is every man for himself. He’s just glad for the honest men who did not shoot him in the back.
He slips through the labyrinth, silent as a shadow.
Cardan never thought his training with the Ghost would come in useful for something as non-threatening as a mortal game—but here he is, grateful to be learned in the art of slyfooting.
He peers around a corner, trying to catch any stragglers unawares. There’s a girl with green hair camping out a few feet ahead of him.
He’s taking aim to shoot when something yanks him by the back of his vest.
Cardan’s heart flies into his throat. There is not much he can do to defend himself as he’s pulled backwards into a dark corner and slammed with great and terrible force against a wall.
That’s when he catches a glimpse of his assailant.
Jude.
His wife holds her gun at her side, finger resting casually on the trigger as she splays the golden fingers of her free hand on his vest.
The gun is not what frightens Cardan, however. What frightens him is Jude’s eyes, honey-glazed and sharp as shards of glass. They spin a lark across his face.
“Hello, wife,” Cardan manages to breathe.
This could go one of two ways, he realises—they could fight to the death here and now, or join forces and rule all. The mere idea that they hold each other's game lives in the palms of their clammy, gun-toting hands is a dangerous one.
Jude steps ever closer, until they are almost nose to nose, but not quite.
"I picked off your lackeys," she says, eyes roving over his lips. "They seemed like trouble." She knocks the barrel of her gun lightly against his.
A wicked smile curves the corners of his mouth. "Ceaseless as you are in your chivalry, Your Majesty, I doubt you are very much better than they where trouble is concerned."
Her answering grin is serrated and tells him enough.
"Though perhaps I should not complain," he says, catching a loose tendril of her dark hair between his fingers and tucking it behind her ear, "If you were simply watching my back."
This dance is dizzying as any faerie wine.
"Hmm," Jude purrs, tracing the long nail of her index finger along his jaw. “Was I watching your back or my own?"
In their corner of darkness, her face limned in thin cobwebs of blue and red neon light, Jude looks vicious; like something plucked straight from a ravening unreality.
Cardan shudders involuntarily. Then raises both hands in surrender.
Jude clicks her tongue. "Always so quick to submit." She plucks his gun from his hands, flinging it blithely to the side. “Just in case,” she says with a flutter of her lashes.
Then, he feels it. The cool press of her gun to his temple.
Cardan knows it's fake. He knows she's holding it in the entirely wrong place to shoot his sensor. Even so, he can't help but go utterly still.
Jude is so close now her breath mingles with his—it smells like vanilla Coke and the strawberry chapstick she knows he likes. And damn him to mortal hell, Cardan wants nothing more than to forget about the game altogether and become lost in his own devouring.
Instead, he swallows, and says roughly, "This reminds me of a similar occasion when I was held at the mercy of your finger on a trigger."
Jude's eyes scintillate as if she too is remembering a room hewn from packed earth, a wooden chair, a crossbow from a lifetime ago.
She hums, then says, "You are always held at my mercy, my love." Her words are honeyed, her simper saccharine.
Cardan cannot deny her, so he says nothing.
Instead, his tail, glamoured invisible to the world save for his wife, comes to wrap gently around her ankle. Though she puts on quite the show, Cardan hears when Jude's heart stumbles, when it quickens in double time. Her breath snags in her throat.
"We should have called a truce," he says, holding her gaze under heavy lids. "We should have called a truce long before this."
"What kind of truce?" Jude asks, her voice a low, sultry thing that sends a skitter of shivers down his spine like pebbles thrown in water.
She leans impossibly closer, her petal-soft lips tracing his own in barely-there brushes; roaming across his cheekbones, to his ears, then down his jawline.
He doesn’t dare move. Not that he could if he wanted to. His knees threaten to buckle when Jude ghosts a slender finger down his chest, skimming lower, lower still.
It is sweet torment, what his wife is doing. Every almost-touch sends Cardan’s heart into a frenzy, his head into a fog.
Once upon a time, Cardan had frequently compared Jude to smoke. In his head, she was something he ardently believed he could not hold, and which he was half-convinced, if he looked away for even a moment, would disappear entirely.
Now, he wonders if he’d been right. If she is made of smoke and he, of glass. If she had merely been allowing him to hold her all this time.
It is this thought alone that has Cardan leaning down towards that ruinous mouth, a sailor to a siren.
“Cardan,” Jude whispers his name against his lips like it is her most sinful secret, and all he wants to do is taste.
To slide into the hungry, violent waves of her desire. Teeth like treacherous juts of sharp rock in water, hands that pull every fractured piece of him down so deep. Until he is drowned in the tempestuous storm of her.
Again and again and again.
Jude must see the ropes of Cardan’s mind fraying. For she smiles and continues her languid roving. But ever his darling nemesis, she does so with her tongue. Down his neck she trails, leaving a string of searing nips and kisses as she goes.
Heat, wild and untamed, lances through him.
Cardan can’t help himself. His head lolls back, hitting the wall with a thud. When he feels the thrum of Jude’s quiet laughter against his throat, a rough groan escapes him, unchecked.
It only spurs her on. That free hand tracing devious lines up and down his torso. The barrel of her gun still pressed against his temple. The cruelty of her mouth gliding lazily up the column of his neck.
Excited yelps and the metallic zing of laser bullets burst up from a few walls over as a skirmish between factions breaks out.
Jude’s teeth graze his ear. A sharp tug. And all Cardan can hear is the savage pounding of blood in his veins.
Awash with such potent desperation, Cardan is almost reduced to begging. Right there, in that very dark corner of Laser Crusade. Which would be humiliating, to say the least; though perhaps this was Jude’s intention all along.
Without warning, his wife leans back, ever so slightly, a mischievous glint in her eyes. Cardan is a bereft and battered thing on the unforgiving shores of her smile.
She cants her head up, sliding deft fingers into the curls at the nape of his neck.
“Why would I call a truce,” Jude murmurs, and he notices, a beat too late, where she’s moved her gun, “When I am so much better at war?”
And with that, the High Queen of Elfhame shoots him in the chest.