The polar wind stirred the fabric of the scientist’s polar jacket.
Stan’s chest felt strange upon seeing this...
He had, in his life, seen violent death before. He had caused violent death in the past twenty-four hours. He had watched a Royal Blood torture a werewolf pack leader with something close to enjoyment less than an hour earlier.
This was different.
The scientist had not been armed. He had been holding binoculars. His voice, over the loudspeaker, had ordered his soldiers to detain, not to fire. The soldiers had fired only after Camilla had begun killing them. They had been doing their jobs. They had been ordinary human beings employed by a government that had sent them into the field to investigate an anomaly.
They were not the Red Serpents. They were not the werewolves. They had not consented to this.
The Void Sovereign’s words from a few hours earlier surfaced in Stan’s mind with unwelcome clarity. ’I want your word that you will draw the line under the worst of what would otherwise happen.’
He had drawn no line.
He had said ’Camilla, don’t’ and she had ignored him and he had done nothing else.
His hands felt cold inside his gloves.
Camilla lifted her hand.
She examined the tip of her index finger. A single small droplet of blood clung to it, a trace from some part of the past few seconds that had reached her skin.
She brought the finger to her mouth.
She licked it, slowly, the way a woman who had been on a long fast might taste the first thing offered to her. Her eyes half-closed. The polar wind caught the edge of her hair.
Then she opened her eyes and smiled.
She turned toward Stan who was giving her a shocked, dumbfounded gaze...
"What?" Her voice was warm. Almost teasing.
Stan didn’t answer. He looked at her for a long moment. His face did not carry the expression she had, apparently, expected to find there. There was no fascination on it. There was no shocked awe. There was no flicker of the complicated attraction that a Royal Blood was, evidently, accustomed to producing in beings of every species she encountered.
There was only a slow, hard cold. His voice, when it came, was flat; "Camilla."
She tilted her head. Her smile faded by a small, careful fraction.
"You killed the scientist."
"Yes."
"He wasn’t a threat."
"He was a witness."
"His men were following his orders. He ordered them to detain us. Not to fire."
"They fired anyway."
"After you started killing them."
Camilla was quiet, then she said, "They’re nothing more than annoying insects. It’s what they deserve for daring to speak to me like that..."
The polar wind moved between them. Her expression, which had been comfortably indulgent a moment earlier, began to shift into something more attentive. She was, for the first time in their acquaintance, actually studying his face rather than treating it as a source of amusement.
She was, evidently, reading something in his expression that she had not expected to find.
Stan kept speaking. His voice remained level. He did not raise it.
"I said don’t."
"You did?"
"Yes I did, but you did it anyway."
"Oh."
"Why?"
Camilla considered.
She could have deflected. She could have offered the practical justification, that the scientist was the single most dangerous witness in the modern world, that his continued existence would have triggered exactly the institutional cascade Stan had feared, that killing him now was cleaner than killing him later. All of that was true. All of it was, on some level, defensible.
She chose to be honest instead. "I have lived a very long time, human. In my world, people like these are not to be spared. They are to be removed. Their removal is not personal. It is procedural. Things like this always comes back to bite one later on if not handled correctly."
She paused. "I did not think you would object as strongly as you are objecting."
Stan let out a slow, controlled breath. "You didn’t think about it at all."
"That’s true."
"Camilla."
"Yes."
"When I say don’t, you don’t."
She held his eye.
Her expression, for the first time since he had met her, was neither amused, indulgent, nor teasing. It was quiet. Measured.
The specific quiet of a Royal Blood who was, apparently, processing a piece of feedback from a person she had recently accepted as her comrade and who had just realized that comrade was, in some way she had not fully appreciated, holding her to a standard she had not consciously agreed to.
"Understood." She said it plainly. "I will not do it again."
Stan did not thank her. He walked past her without another word and moved toward the nearest vehicle. He needed to see the scientist’s body properly. He needed to look at what had just been done in his presence, on his behalf, by a woman who was, thanks to a binding he had personally applied to her, bound to his interests.
The scientist was slumped against the platform railing.
Stan stood over him for a long moment.
The man had been in his late fifties. His polar jacket was still zipped correctly. His binoculars were still hanging by their strap from one gloved hand. His expression, in death, carried the small, faintly puzzled look of a person who had not, in the last second of his life, been given enough time to fully understand what was happening to him.
Stan crouched beside him. He closed the scientist’s eyes with two gentle fingers.
He stayed there for a moment. Then he stood up. He turned back toward Camilla.
"We have work to do."
His voice was still level. Whatever he was feeling had been pushed down beneath the practical necessity of what the next several hours were going to require.
"You probably don’t know what those are but They’re are almost certainly satellites monitoring this convoy. There is almost certainly a control center receiving the transports’ telemetry in real time. There are almost certainly drones somewhere overhead. Their sensors are going to have registered every second of what just happened. If those recordings reach the outside world, every government on Earth will know that supernatural beings are real, within twenty-four hours."
He looked at her. "I need you to help me clean this up. Every camera. Every radio. Every hard drive on every vehicle. Every drone in the air, if there are any. All of it. And I need you to help me make sure no signal made it out."
"Like just destroy any thing you think is a ’new age toy’..."
Camilla nodded once. "Understood."
"And Camilla." She waited. "The next time I tell you not to do something, you don’t. Regardless of your reasoning. Regardless of your instinct. Regardless of what your world would have done. You defer to me. That’s the terms of our comradeship from now on."
"...Yes, Stan." She had never, at any point in their acquaintance, called him by his given name.
He nodded once, tightly, and turned toward the transports. There was a great deal of work to do.
The Antarctic wind picked up around them, and the polar dusk began, at last, to deepen toward night.