Servant of the Queen

“No, it wasn’t this early,” Sunny pointed at the computer screen. It was showing footage from four different cameras of the cafe and its patrons from morning on the day that Sunny Flare and Silver Rose had gone to visit it.

“Okay. I’ll skip ahead some.”

The camera quality was somewhat poor and washed out in color, but it displayed people clearly enough, and there was a camera facing the bathrooms, which was just what they needed. But first, they had to find the time when Sunny Flare and her friend had come.

“Wait, there!” Sugarcoat pointed. There, on the screen, were Silver Rose and Sunny Flare, walking into the cafe, hand in hand. They were chatting amicably, which looked normal enough.

They made their way to the counter and ordered their food and drinks, after which they sat down at a table on the edge of the camera’s field of view.

“Could you have picked a more inconvenient place to sit?” Sour Sweet grumbled.

“Well, at least there’s proof that they went out.” Lemon shrugged. “So Sunny wasn’t hallucinating that.”

“But we can barely see them.”

“That’s not what we’re looking for, anyway,” Lemon pointed out. “Sunny said she found herself in the bathroom and Silver was nowhere to be found. I’m going to fast forward a little more, see if we can get to the point where you went to the bathroom.”

The camera showed Sunny and Silver talking in fast motion, and Sunny flushed as she recalled what she had said to Silver that day. She hadn’t been able to help it; it was as though someone had drugged her into telling the truth.

“Woah, look at you go, Sunny!” Indigo roared with laughter.

While they couldn’t see Sunny and Silver all that clearly, Sunny’s hand moving under her skirt was easy enough to notice.

“In a public place like that?” Sugarcoat was unamused. “Really? That’s worse than in the van.”

“I told you, I can’t help it!” Sunny’s face went red with embarrassment and anger. “Stop bringing it up! I haven’t touched myself since then, okay?”

Lemon continued to watch the video, speeding it up a little to jump past the boring bits.

“Okay, here!” Lemon waved for everyone to be quiet. “Here’s where you got up to go to the bathroom.”

Indeed, on the screen Sunny and Silver rose from their seats, abandoning their food and drinks to head towards the bathroom. They walked out of one camera’s view into another’s before pushing open the restroom door and disappearing inside.

“Look,” Sugarcoat pointed at the screen. Someone had just entered the cafe, a woman in a frilly pink dress and holding an equally pink handbag. She made her way over to the bathroom door but did not enter. “Who’s that?”

“I dunno,” Indigo scratched her head in puzzlement. “Maybe she needs to take a leak?”

The camera was angled in such a way that they could not see the woman in pink’s face clearly. They did see her glance up and down the hallway that the restroom was located in.

Sour Sweet gazed at the screen, enraptured. “She’s… just standing there.”

Sunny chewed her tongue inside her mouth. At this moment, she had been trying to get Silver to go for another steamy session in the bathroom, but instead she had ended up blurting out all the details of the Shadowbolts’ investigation. She elected to not mention this, hoping that her friends would forget such an embarrassing detail.

On the screen, the woman in pink reached into her handbag and drew out something black and vaguely L shaped. Not a second later, the bathroom door was pulled open, uncovering a hysterical looking Sunny Flare.

Then, to the Shadowbolts’ astonishment, the woman in the pink dress raised the device in her hand and pointed it at Sunny, who staggered back before falling forward into the woman’s arms. She carried Sunny into the bathroom and disappeared from view.

“What… what just happened?” Lemon stared blankly at the screen.

“Dude, that woman just shot you!” Indigo cried out, her jaw dropping in disbelief.

“I got… shot?!” Sunny stood up in shock. She ran a hand along her neck, finding no bullet wounds or anything. “Play that again!”

Lemon rewinded the footage back a few seconds.

“Zoom in on that,” Sugarcoat ordered.

“Sugarcoat, this isn’t PSI, I can’t just zoom in on things to get a better view, at least not with this software!” Lemon whined.

“Okay, fine. I’ll just move closer to the screen. Slow it down; you can do that, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lemon clicked a few times and the footage slowed to a crawl.

The video played on slowly, with the woman in pink removing the gun from somewhere in front of herself, then pointed it at the door. In a second or two, the door opened and Sunny stepped out towards her.

Sunny didn’t know if it was the slow footage or not, but there seemed to be quite some time of them standing there before the woman shot her. In the shoulder. And then she fell forward, unmoving.

“But… Sunny isn’t dead…” Indigo flicked her arm. “She’s here.”

“Ow, hey!” Sunny took a step away and rubbed her arm. “I’m not dead! I’m here! I’ve been here! I couldn’t have been shot!”

“The footage says otherwise,” Sugarcoat said.

The video kept rolling and the woman in the pink frilly dress carried Sunny back into the bathroom. Lemon kicked it back to normal speed and they waited. A few minutes later, Silver Rose and the woman in pink exited the bathroom and left the cafe entirely.

Lemon stopped the camera footage and turned to her friends, looking most disturbed.

“So. What the hay did we just see?”

The rest of the Shadowbolts looked equally unsettled, even the usually unflappable Sugarcoat.

“Looks like those two know each other…” Indigo said, unusually somber and stoic. “Is that even legal? Carrying a gun around like that?”

“Obviously it isn’t,” Sugarcoat snapped. “Something went down here and I want to know what. We need to confront Silver Rose about this. As soon as we can.”

“But we can’t do it so openly. Then they’ll know we know,” Sour Sweet said.

“This is a predicament,” Indigo admitted to herself, sitting down on Lemon’s bed.

Sugarcoat sighed and removed her glasses to rub her nose. “I want to find out what’s going on as much as the next person, but I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to go further unless we want to reveal to Silver that we know what happened. I think the best thing to do here is to lay low. Continue to watch her, but also to go on with our daily lives.”

“What if we catch her doing more weird stuff?” Lemon asked. “Not like there’s not enough weird stuff connected to Silver already, but she’s with this gun toting lady? Shouldn’t we go to the cops with evidence like this?”

Sugarcoat sat there in silence for a few seconds. “You know what I think? I think Silver Rose is new to all this. If her mother and sister or anyone else in the family have been around for so long without arousing any kind of suspicion like she has, they have to be pros.”

“I can’t believe Ebony Wings is a witch! Or worse, a vampire!” Indigo grabbed Sour Sweet’s face and squished her cheeks. “I can’t see her the same way anymore!”

“Get off!” Sour Sweet shoved her back on the bed. “She can’t be a vampire, Indigo. She goes out during the daytime, remember?”

“Well, so does Silver.”

“That’s a good point.” Sugarcoat put her glasses back on and groaned. “Whatever they are, I think it’s best we do not play all our cards just yet. How do you think people like that keep secrets for so long? Either they’re that good, or… They know how to clean up.”

The Shadowbolts considered these words for a moment. Finally Indigo groaned.

“So what did we actually get from the heist? Ugh. I need a freaking drink.”

Lemon Zest opened a cabinet on her computer desk and pulled out a bottle of cider, tossing to Indigo. “We got a video. We know Sunny didn’t dream up her whole Silver Rose date. So that vampire story might not be totally fake. I mean, besides that daywalking bit. Shows us how little the staff check their camera feeds too.”

“Totally fake?” Sunny repeated. “I was shot! We’re seriously not going to do anything about that?!”

“Well, you’re okay. Right?”

Sunny grumbled and sat down on Lemon’s bed next to Indigo. “Care to pass the bottle, Indy?”

Sour Sweet looked at the two of her friends drinking with a look of unamusement on her face. “If there’s even the smallest sign that Silver Rose is really a vampire, I’m going to start carrying garlic on me. I’m not going to let anyone bite me.”

“Well, Sunny, she didn’t bite you, did she?” Lemon shifted over and pushed Sunny’s head to the side to get a better look at her neck. “Hmm, no teeth marks. Just a little sting or something. Did a bee get you, Sunny?”

“Hey, stop!” Sunny tried to remove her friend from her face. “No, I didn’t get stung! Go away.”

Indigo passed the bottle to Sunny and sighed, her eyes shut. “It’s like the more we see the less we know. It’s so frustrating! We need a solid lead on all this weirdness.”

“That’s why I recommended we lay low,” Sugarcoat restated. “Let’s just go back to our everyday tasks and just keep an eye on Silver. Make sure she suspects nothing.”

“See if she bites anyone else,” Lemon laughed.

“Or see if she eats anyone else…” Indigo sneered and looked at Sunny.

“Like I’m going to let her near my pus- ahem, lady parts now that I know she’s a vampire!” Sunny protested.

Sugarcoat sighed and glanced back to the computer screen. “Aren’t vampires typically known for being sexy and charming? This is like the reverse.”

“What? Silver must be sexy and charming if she charmed Sunny like that. I mean, until we found out her vampiriness.”

“So it wasn’t magic? It was actually vampire charms.”

“We don’t know everything for certain. Like I said…” Sugarcoat sighed. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Sunny took a gulp of the cider and stared at her feet. If Silver was a vampire, had she been using her as an eventual source of blood? Why hadn’t she had her blood sucked sooner if Silver was indeed a vampire as they seemed to think? It wasn’t as though she was averse to drinking other fluids from Sunny’s body.

“I still don’t know about vampirism,” Indigo mused stubbornly. “Vampires drink blood, everyone knows that. Silver’s done nothing but mash Sunny’s buttons all this time. And she can go out in the sun. Vampire, probably not. I’m thinking succubus.”

“Is this more nonsense from your O&O books again, Indigo?” Sugarcoat peered at her friend.

“Hey, if magical flying girls and giant plants can exist, why can’t a succubus?” She shrugged.

“Ha, succubus…” Lemon snickered. “I wonder what she’s been… sucking from you, Sunny.”

“This is all magic stuff,” Sour Sweet grumbled as she shook her daily pills into her palm and dry-swallowed them. “We need to stop blundering around in the dark and actually find someone who know about magic. Like Twilight Sparkle!”

“Hey, that’s an idea!” Lemon perked up considerably. “The CHS girls deal with weird stuff all the time. We can ask them about what to do!”

Sugarcoat looked less sure. “Maybe. But I think that for now, the best option for us is to keep our heads down.”

“You’ve said that like, fifty times.”

“That’s because you girls keep making me repeat yourself. So that’s final. Okay? Now we wait.”

“Bah. You’re no fun, Sugarcoat.”

“Well, excuse me for trying to keep us alive,” Sugarcoat shot back. “Whoever else is in on this clearly has no problem shooting kids like us. We need to watch our step, or any of us could end up lined in chalk.”

“I am not a kid,” Sour Sweet muttered grumpily, crossing her arms defensively.

“Yeah, neither is Sunny.” Indigo gave her a playful punch on the shoulder. “Kids don’t have sex like rabbits.”

“Hey, I said stop making fun of me!” Sunny’s face turned red with embarrassment and anger as she stood up. “And I’m still alive. Maybe she just shot me with a dud.”

“That’s not how guns work, Sunny,” Sugarcoat deadpanned.

“Yeah, Sunny,” Lemon Zest added. “Haven’t you ever played Call of Camping?”

“You know I hate video games.”

“Yeah, I know. All you like to do is have your pus-”

Sunny smacked her across the face.