Covens and Proxies

31

Masky's POV

I hate everything about this. We're driving just under the speed limit, a witch right next to me and Toby staring intently at the floor in the back. The witch has half of her body out the window, which concerns me for attention reasons, although she swears there's a strong veil over the entire vehicle so no one notices.

I don't trust her. I don't trust the other one too. This could easily be an elaborate trap the two set up after Toby's girlfriend dug through my fucking head! Damn it. Why couldn't he just kill her that night? None of this would've happened if he'd kept himself together.

And now, we're either diving head-first into a highly guarded facility or a trap that will kill us. Both ways we're gonna get hurt. My guess is we'll only recover another corpse that will send Toby on such a tangent he kills the whole region and then himself.

I hate this.

The witch slams the hood of the car, yelling at me to take a sharp turn off the highway. Gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles are white, I turn.

We've been driving all night. It's almost dawn.

The witch directs us to an airport. Both her and Toby start getting really mad, cussing and swearing. Toby kicks another car to hell while the witch pours blood on the ground and starts muttering furiously, drawing some sort of diagram. I start to question this being a trap. She seems genuinely furious.

Toby's kicking stirs up dust that's taken up by the wind, swirled around outlines of three men carrying two limp bodies. "Who's the second body?" I ask them, not recalling the car stopping anywhere else.

Toby circles the outlines, sticking his head into the cloud, right under the bag, and steps back, coughing furiously. When he's done with his fit, he manages a few words. "It's Zem-ra."

"They took her roommate?" I wonder aloud.

The witch looks like she wants to explode. "Come on. We need to find a plane." She heads for the fence topped with spiralled barbed wire.

I almost laugh, about to tell her she won't be able to climb that, before the wind picks up, spiralling at her feet and lifts her over. Toby hacks a solid line through it for him and I to slip through. By the time we're on the other side, the witch is circling a tan plane with red, tribal-looking designs spanning the length of it.

"This will do." She tells us, taking a switch blade and carves yet another symbol into the side.

Toby jumps in without hesitation, holding a hand out to help me up. The witch takes the pilot seat, but doesn't touch much of anything. A snap of her fingers turns the plane one, fastens our seatbelts comfortably and shoves headphones with mics over our ears. It starts down the runway, taking off after the swirling cloud of the past ahead of us.

"From what I can tell, it's going to be a pretty long flight. Across the continent. We'll have to stop to refuel a few times," she catches the edginess in mine and Toby's glares, "Don't worry! No one will recognize any of us." She stares at the ground quickly disappearing bellow.

"Why would anyone recognize you?" I ask from the back. I understand Toby and I, since we're mass murderers and have been on the news for years, but her? I don't remember anything about her.

She laughs. "I doubt you've heard about me, and if you had you couldn't remember unless I let you." She pauses, glancing at us each. "I caused some trouble a while back. I won't get into the specifics, but everyone across the country was looking for me for a while. Until I faked my death, that is."

Apparently, she let me remember because the memory of an old news story comes to mind. Her entire town caught a horrible plague. She was believed to be the cause, since it was a man-made disease. The witch was the only survivor. Two years later they found her body, mottled and rotting like the rest, and the case was shut.

"We looked for you." Toby remembered.

It's true. Slenderman had liked her methods and wanted to see if she'd be part of our ranks. We'd been looking for months until she was reported dead.

"I didn't want anyone to find me. Especially groups like you."

The rest of the plane ride lasts until noon, the sun high, when we're forced to land for fuel and food. Both Toby and I are hungry, but we're trained not to show it. Still, she knows and sends us to get sustenance while she handles the plane.

When we get back, she's paying some welder to take a look at the engine. "What's wrong?" I demand.

"I'm just making sure she's ready for the next leg of the trip." She informs us as the mechanic comes over.

"She looks perfectly fine." He smiles, wiping grease off his hands--though it doesn't seem to do much as they're still stained.

Everyone piles back on; I hand out the food and it's silent except for the roar of the engine, which is anything but silent. We stop three more times of the span of thirty hours since we got on, letting the witch sleep at a hotel during one said break so Toby and I can go relieve stress. He and I trade between sleeping in the back and sitting up front. The witch chugs coffee and ignores her own exhaustion.

"If I fall asleep, the plane will go down." Was her only comment on the subject.

It's uncomfortable and quiet until we're giving wide berth to our target. We get parachutes on, the witch mutters something in really old Egyptian, and we jump into the forest below. Everyone leaves their chutes in the branches above, slinking towards the compound.

The witch kills the men on patrol outside silently, convincing me completely that this is a real rescue mission. There are a few men at the front doors, so we kill them and move around the perimeter to check for back openings.

There are none, unfortunately, so we get ready for a full frontal assault. I'd feel better if Rouge and Hoodie were here, but they aren't. So I sharpen my knives, reload my gun, prep more bullets and tighten my mask. Toby is obviously ready to slaughter everyone inside, and the witch looks like she'd rather level the entire property to get (Y/n).

Blasting open the door, I fire off at the five closest men before letting Toby and the witch take the charge. I really don't do much, maybe killing ten men in total, but the other two are incredible.

The witch has a visible aura of murder that both attracts and terrifies the enemies in the room. When they get too close, they fall over, choking and clawing at their necks. I watch them claw through their skin in an attempt to release the pressure, only to dig right into their jugulars and bleed to death. I'm starting to like this one.

Toby, on the other hand, is hacking at anything that gets too close. A head-first charge? The helmet rolls with a dislodged head still inside. Got a knife or brass knuckles, about to strike? The arm is sent flying and the man is screaming on his knees, trying to stop the bleeding. A kick? He hacks through the thigh, the bone and more muscle until it's hanging on by a few fragile senews.

While they plow through the main force of the men, I check side rooms, killing anyone still inside, until we get to one that obviously leads to the bulk of the warehouse-like building. The witch conjures a bomb and sets it on the knob, pulling us both back.

Toby looks like he just took a five-second shower in blood, panting and red to his skin. The witch has a different kind of blood-curdling rage. Hers is silent, boiling deep in her veins, ready to explode at the slightest motion. It's very obvious to me that if she'd wanted to kill either of us, she would have done it in that ally back in town.

The door blows in, letting the two rush in.