Prologue: A wedding, a reception and a death
“You may now kiss the bride,” the Luminositan priest instructed Ace, and with Layla’s enthusiastic assent, he complied.
Church weddings in the small town (and Gewehr hideaway) of Kugelheim were a relatively rare phenomenon. Most couples desiring a state of matrimony, holy or otherwise, simply appeared in front of the local justice of the peace, and that was that. (The fact that this official was a Gewehr functionary probably had something to do with this.) Layla and Ace were originally planning on this route, but Layla’s mother Faye, a high-level Gewehr personage herself, intervened. When the newlyweds-to-be questioned her about her insistence, she just smiled mysteriously and said, “Trust me.” Layla knew by now not to argue with her mother about such things, and Ace, who considered her nearly the ideal mother-in-law (and vice versa), wasn’t going to interfere.
So it was that with the nuptial kiss completed, she looked out on a surprisingly full sanctuary. The lighting was low and she couldn’t see the people at the rear of the room, but the front was certainly full of people she and Ace knew well, members of the Gewehr presence in the town that served as their quasi-legitimate base. Layla had, and knew she had, something of a “local girl makes good” image in town (
being considered to have “made good” because I got good at killing people is kinda weird, she thought, now that she didn’t normally do that anymore), which accounted for much of the crowd; and she and Ace definitely had some non-“professional” friends occupying seats in the hall.
Not everyone in those seats was friendly, however.
She would later remember almost nothing of the ceremony between that kiss and her rapid departure from the sanctuary to get changed for the reception. Before the reception itself, however, came a brief pause in a side room to check on her 9-month-old son Zachary. For her matron of honor, Layla had chosen her friend and magic tutor Galina Scherbatcheff, whose daughter was also in that side room. How nice, thought Layla, for Galina’s husband Kensuke (“Kenny”) Goto to have volunteered to babysit while the service was in progress – and to have applied several layers of security to the room, so that what had almost happened at
Layla’s vineyard and
Galina’s magic lab would not happen again.
All was well when Kenny opened the door to admit the two mothers; better than well, in fact, as Zachary and little Oxana were giggling happily at a preposterous-looking illusion that their babysitter had cast. As Layla and Galina tried to contain their mirth, Zachary crawled over to Oxana and planted a precocious kiss on her cheek. Layla couldn’t take it anymore; she burst out laughing and turned to her friend and said, “Ah, one’s first love.”
“Looks like we’ll be repeating this in twenty years or so for those two,” Galina chortled back, and after some mommy-love time, they changed into partying outfits for the reception.
And partying there was, in a way that would have horrified the Church of Our Lord Luminosita in Veracia if they’d known about it. (The priest had discreetly decamped moments after the ceremony, precisely so that he, and therefore the Church, would not know; he knew better than to get on a soapbox in Kugelheim.) Layla had made sure that there was a good supply of wine from Bad Ass Wines on hand. Of course, the current vintage, started before she and her mother took control of the vineyard, was rotgut, at least in her opinion. She knew, however, that that wouldn’t matter to the large majority of the revelers. For the few who would know, read, for the wedding party, they’d laid in a small supply of
considerably better wine from Kenny Goto’s winery in Volkanenborg.
It was one of the bottles from that better vintage that was instrumental in the incident.
Not all of the guests were altogether welcome. A large, blowsy blonde in the back of the fellowship hall was guzzling wine directly from a bottle, surrounded by laughing, scurrilous-looking men from the town. From the looks of it, she was on her third bottle already, never mind that the reception had only been going for less than half an hour. Worse, she was draining one of the higher-class bottles to go with the hooch she’d already had.
“Oh, Luminosita’s Nuts,” Layla muttered under her breath. “What is
she doing here?”
The comment wasn’t really intended for anyone’s ears, but Faye was standing close enough to answer her daughter. “
Barb, you mean?” A nod in reply, and Faye continued, “Remember, you opened the invitation list to everyone from – the company.” (Even in Kugelheim, it wouldn’t do to speak the word “Gewehr” out loud.) “You really can’t complain if some of them take you up on it.”
“I know, but I
hate that bitch,” Layla grumbled.
“So pretend she isn’t here. You have to circulate and talk to people, but you don’t have to talk to them all.”
“Whatever,” Layla shrugged, and set about working the room, making sure that her path intersected Ace’s as often as possible, and avoiding her nemesis making a fool of herself.
She hadn’t been mingling for as much as ten minutes when there was a loud, gurgling “URRRKKK!” from the back of the room.
This went largely unnoticed for a few seconds; more than one guest would later punch his or her cookies from overdoing the wine. Layla and Ace, of course, noticed, and they saw that Barb was rising from her table and entourage, clutching her throat, her face beet red. Faye also noticed … and since her specialty in the Gewehr had been poisons, she knew that what she was seeing wasn’t mere overindulgence. She rushed toward the back of the room …
… But before she could get there, the large woman gagged again, then pitched forward onto the table, spilling the half-drained bottle of high-class booze in the process, and dead before she sagged to the floor.