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chapter one: if you can't hotwire a car with blood magic after being brought back unceremoniously from the dead and escaping from an abandoned house, when CAN you hotwire a car with blood magic

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Ruby opens her eyes.

Huh, she thinks.

Her hands are covered in blood, and she's in a completely unfamiliar room in a house that she doesn't recognize. The floorboards are scratched, and the curtains are gently smouldering, and the door has been barricaded with chairs and loaded-up-suitcases and everything smells like iron and discontent.

And most importantly – and this is a pretty significant sort of thing, all things considered – Ruby isn't dead.

"You have got to be kidding me," she says, and struggles to her feet, using the wall just to her left as support.

It's a clumsy rise to her feet, because she feels like she hasn't used her legs in maybe a decade, and her hair is a tangled ragged mess that's falling over her eyes, and she's not wearing her glasses, and also she's very confused and her arm really hurts, actually. She looks wildly around the room, squinting and cursing under her breath, and trying to get past the dizzying feeling of being suddenly alive in an unfamiliar location when literally five seconds ago someone had been shoving a sword through her chest.

There's someone pounding at the front door downstairs. Downstairs? After a moment of consideration, she judges the sound and concludes that she's probably on the second or third floor of some sort of residence – and when she goes over to the window and curtains to put out the slowly-rising flames, she sees that she's right. Second floor, and also this house is in the literal middle of nowhere. It's hard to see without her glasses, but it looks like there's a fence surrounding the house's perimeter and then a lot of flat open demolished desert-looking land.

No other houses or roads in sight, and somebody's slamming on the front door. They're yelling something indistinct and angry.

"This can't be good," she says to herself, and the sound of her voice startles her. Her head hurts. Her arm hurts. Her throat is scratchy, and she still doesn't know what's going on.

She goes to sit back down on the ground and tries to work out what to do next, really hoping that the door downstairs is sturdy enough to keep whoever-it-is outside for just a few more minutes.

Tracing her fingers along the scratches in the floorboard, she realizes that it's actually some kind of summoning circle. Maybe not summoning circle – a curse, or a ritual of some kind? The angles of the scratches are almost familiar, and she thinks if she had maybe a few more minutes spare she might be able to reverse-engineer it and work out what it's for – she's always been good at that sort of thing. But she doesn't have the time. Not if whoever's shaking the house's foundations with their door-slamming is as angry in-person as they sound from two storeys away.

"Rule fifteen," she mutters reflexively, and reaches outwards, sweeping her hands along the rough and ragged floorboards, trying to see if there's anything she's missed. Get all the facts before making a plan, if possible. Whoever dumped her in the middle of a ritual circle in a room in the middle of literal nowhere probably left some kind of clue behind as to what's actually going on here.

Ruby's not exactly blind without her glasses on, but there's a definite limit to the things she can and can't see. Which means that she probably can be forgiven for not noticing the carnival-style mask propped up on the floor, very close to where she is. Her fingers brush it, and she grabs it and tugs it over, squinting. The design is quietly fancy, a half-mask meant to cover the nose and eyes and not much else. Swirly intricate patterns with a few red prop-jewels embedded in it. She holds it, staring in confusion, and then feels something on its back and turns it over.

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