John Wickerbasket paused by the door, fixed his jacket so that his shoulders looked appropriately wide, and moved the belt of his sword so that it sat just a bit forward of his hip. Because making sure the girls saw his sword as soon as he walked in always made spending the night showing them his other equipment a whole lot easier.

With a shove, he rammed the front door aside and took two quick steps into the room.

Two dozen eyes turned his way and more than one gun was pulled from a holster. “Hello, boys!” he said, teeth all on display as he took in the crowd. He ran his tongue across his lips. “Guess who’s back?”

A few calls of ‘hey’ and ‘Johnny!’ greeted him, warming his heart while guns were lowered and swords returned to their sheaths.

He loved his squires and this was why, they might not have much, but they were the nicest bastards in the shitty end of Vale. Grinning from ear to ear, he ran his hand through his fresh bowl cut and swaggered over to the bar at the far end.

Their little bar had been a factory once, but they had built a wall through the middle of it, brought in some tables from here and there, added a counter to the far end and someone found a van full of brand new couches just rolling down the street one day and donated it to the gang. It was a proper stomping ground for any knight, but especially the Caws.

“What’s the shit?” he asked as he sidled up to the busiest section of the bar, sidestepped a couple of boys and hopped onto the bar, sitting with both feet dangling off the side.

“Hey, Wicker,” Twitch said. He lifted a little baggy filled to the brim with some yellow power. It smelled like fart. “Got some Buzz.”

“Twitch,” John said. “Who’d you buy that from?”

“He got it from Blue,” one of the girls said.

“Oh, Twitch, that’s not proper Buzz. Everyone knows he laces that stuff with, like, sulfur or something instead of lightning dust. It’s gonna have you shitting out your liver.”

Twitch looked sheepish, but he shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, but it’ll make your world go wonky, you know?”

John shook his head. If he was going to get a hit he’d wait for some of the better stuff. “Did we get the stuff for the Dagers?” he asked.

Twitch’s head moved up and down like a bobble head that had just been flicked. “Oh yeah, yeah, it’s all in the back. Like, two whole crates of Fire dust grenades. Hunter grade. Good shit.”

“All right,” he said with a nod. “Wait, they didn’t pick it up yet?”

“Supposed to, but they’re late. Probably too fucked to drive straight, you know?” Twitch said.

John shrugged one shoulder. It didn’t matter in the end, they’d get the gear to their brother gang and they’d get some raw materials in return, then those would be turned into more shit that they could sell to buy more gear that they would trade again. It was like a circle, with every pass making the Knights just a bit stronger.

He was reaching backwards over the bar for a bottle when the lights clunked shut.

The room filled with shouts and screams of distress, but plenty of light was pouring in from the street lights outside, enough that they could see, and a couple of the less buzzed members pulled out their scrolls and flicked on their torch function.

Beams of light scoured across the room, flashing past wide-eyed faces and some of the smarter guys who were pulling out guns and knives, getting ready for a fight.

“Y’all calm down!” John shouted. “Just the lights. Twitch, get in the back, check on the breakers. You,” he said while pointing to one guy that had two handguns out. “Go with him.” The man nodded and jogged after Twitch who was stumbling towards the backroom. “The rest of you idiots calm down. Ain’t gonna get anything from freaking out.”

“He’s right,” said a voice, a buzzing, barely coherent things that carried a sibilant hiss that made shivers run down his spine. “Now, if you would be so kind as to drop your weapons and line up, I’m certain we can work this out painlessly.”

“Fuck that.”

Then the ceiling, which had turned into a living, crawling tapestry of chitin and squirming insects, dropped.

***

Akelarre sighed and shook her head. Her Grimmsects were having far too much fun swarming the gangsters inside the factory, their simplistic minds overjoyed at all the screaming and panicked flailing. But they were doing a good job all on their own, so she turned her focus elsewhere.

Neo was sitting in the driver’s seat of their little car, bootless feet on the dash where her brown and pink socks wiggled like a caught worm. She was reading a magazine, the very image of bored relaxation. “What are you reading?” she asked.

Neo looked up at her, then scooted to the side a little so that Akelarre could see the colourful pages filled with images of women in pretty dresses.

“Oh, that one’s cute,” she said, pointing to a nice summer dress while in the back of her mind she coordinated a flight of Lancers to pin down one particularly twitchy young man.

Neo nodded, then pointed to the dress and at Akelarre.

“Hmm, no, I find dresses cute but they just really don’t suit me,” she said.

Neo shrugged and turned the page. Her eyes lit up and she pointed at a black dress covered in fine lace. It looked like something very old, but cut in a more modern style. She jabbed a thumb at herself.

“Oh yeah, that would look nice on you,” Akelarre agreed. “But black isn’t your colour.”

Inside the factory one of the gangsters had snuck into the back and returned with an armful of what looked an awful lot like grenades. He started flinging them towards the ceiling with reckless abandon. She shook her head and hoped that they weren’t fragmentation grenades or else then man had just effectively killed a lot of his friends.

The grenades burst into great balls of spreading, sticky fire. She lost quite a few Grimmsects.

“Maybe the same thing in white? Though it would get dirty really fast. Oh, how about like a swirly brown and pink? Like your hair?”

Neo tilted her head to one side as if imagining what that would look like then nodded. The image on the magazine shifted and changed colours as Akelarre had described them. It didn’t look that good.

“Hrm, maybe not then.” She tapped her lips with an index. “My mom made me try on so many dresses. You wouldn’t believe it. I don’t think she has ever thrown away a single piece of clothing.”

Neo looked at her, one eyebrow perked as if to say ‘so what.’

“She’s like, six thousand years old. That’s a lot of dresses.”

Neo blinked.

Inside the factory, the screaming was dying down, though the ceiling was still on fire.

The last gangster tossed her gun down and fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face as she was shoved down by one leg of a mantis Grimm that had to weigh twice as much as she did.

“Oh, my pretties are done now,” she said as she unbuckled herself and opened the door. “Did you want to come?”

Neo folded her magazine and placed it between the two seats, then she showed off her flexibility by putting on her boots while still stuck behind the wheel.

Akelarre didn’t mind waiting a minute for Neo to get ready. She had all night. Or at least until the fire grew too big and the roof collapsed.

“So I was thinking,” she began once Neo joined her. Inside the factory, her bigger Grimmsects--or those that were big, but not so big that they couldn’t sneak into the room--were herding all the bad guys into a line near the bar. “I can do this two ways. I can go in there and be all Cinder-y. Like, intimidate them and scare them until they know better than to betray me. Or, I can try and be nice to them. I don’t know why, exactly, but when you have the big stick and are nice to people it makes them act really weird.”

Neo gave this some thought, then lifted two fingers.

“Okay. Nice Princess it is.”

One of her Grimm opened the door for her, and she stepped in with Neo right on her heels. A dozen eyes rose up to stare at her, most filled with suppressed terror, though a few were glazed and confused, the sort of look that she would associate with someone that wasn’t entirely there.

“Hello everyone!” she said as she came to stand before the Knights. “My name is Akelarre, and I have something of a proposition for you.” she gave them her most winsome smile.

One of the people in the ground, a young man wearing a fur coat over a tanktop and jeans fought against the silken wrappings keeping his arms bound together. “Y-you bitch! You think we’re gonna do anything for you? Huh? We’re the Knights, we don’t answer--” A large insectile claw scythed down right in front of his face, stabbing several inches into the concrete floor with a note of finality. Suddenly feeling very self preservation-ey, he looked up into the many-faceted eyes of a Praying Mantis Grimm the size of a car and did not finish his sentence.

“That was very rude,” Akelarre said with the exact same tone she used to greet them. She had one of her larger Grimmsects pull a seat over from one end of the room towards her, the chair legs scraping against the ground loud enough that it drowned out all other noise in the factory. Patting the beatle Grimm on the head, she turned around and sat before the gangsters, then had a pretty moth that was more white fluff than anything flutter down to land on her lap while the beatle stood by her side.

She started petting the moth between its wiggly little antenna while looking down at all the gang members. Above, the roof cackled as the fire grew. “Now, I would like to think that I’m a very fair woman. I believe in second chances and in people redeeming themselves.” She carefully lifted the moth to show it off to all the gangsters. “Like my pretty Grimmsects. They might be able to eat people alive, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all evil. They can be nice and playful and friendly while still being effective manhunters.”

A few members of her audience whimpered.

“So, I decided that instead of just getting rid of the Knights I would offer all of you the opportunity to work for me.”

One of the gangsters, a thin young woman with eyes that twitched from Akelarre to Neo to the Grimm and back, twisted her arm around, freed herself from the webbing holding her in place, and brought her arm out towards Akelarre. She was holding a revolver.

It was a rusty little thing, held together more by tape and happy thoughts then by any sort of maintenance and care. Still, Akelarre felt her eyes widening as the girl squeezed the trigger.

The beatle Grimm jumped forwards, wings deploying from out of its carapace just in time to give it the boost it needed to move in between Akelarre and the gun.

The retort echoed through the room a half second before a clump of insects the size of a minivan fell onto the girl.

Akelarre waited a few moments, her attention split between all the Grimmsects who wanted to bite, eat, and kill the girl and the gangsters who were backing away from their suicidal companion.

She sighed and with a languid gesture of her wrist the swarm moved away from the girl, revealing a trussed up, web covered form writhing on the cement floor. Next to her, the Grimm beatle wheezed, falling to one side as thin plumes of black dust slipped out from between its carapace.

Placing her moth Grimm on one shoulder to free her hands, Akelarre raised an open palm and allowed a Lancer to land on it, the revolver held tight in its six little limbs.

“Thank you,” she said before dismissing the wasp. She inspected the gun with a critical eye, aware that she had the room’s attention. “Dust, the great equalizer,” she said. “It can turn even the weakest person into someone strong, at least for a moment. But there are other paths to being great, aren’t there? Or maybe you guys don’t know. My problem is that I kind of want to get rid of all the criminals in Vale. That means all of you.”

One of them started crying.

She stood. “But like I said, I believe in second chances, and I know that getting rid of crime is easier said than done. So if I can’t get rid of it, then I might as well control it, yeah?” She flashed them all a smile. “That’s why I want all of you to work for me. Well, me and Neo and Junior, I suppose. I have all sorts of things to take care of, after all.”

Neo waved at them, her own smile less pleasant and more hungry.

“See, you guys are still useful, even if you’re not as strong as my babies.” She placed a hand atop the head of the beetle that had moved to save her. It was weakening, she could feel it. For all that her Grimmsects were strong, they were also much smaller than normal Grimm, and when they took injuries it showed. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

Lowering the revolver, she placed it behind the beetle's head and fired.

Everyone but her flinched as the Grimm fell forwards and started to dissolve into motes of dust. “I love my Grimm, but they are expendable in the end. I think you would all rather I didn’t think of you the same way.” She flicked open the revolver and let the empty casings and bullets clater to the floor before flinging the gun off to the far corner of the room. “I’m going to leave now,” she said. “Some time next week there’s going to be a meeting of all the local gang leaders. If you still want to live this sort of life then you’ll do it under my rule. If you don’t... well, you won’t last very long.”

She made sure that her last smile was big and bright and really cheerful so that they would all have a good impression of her. Then she had her swarm buzz around her, thick enough that their sight would be entirely obscured by the moving masses.

With a nod of her head, she motioned for Neo to follow her back out of the building while some of her smaller Grimm took apart and weakened the bindings on her captives.

As they climbed back into the car, Akelarre made a mental tally of all the Grimmsects and normal bugs she had left and came to a rather grim realisation. She had lost nearly one in twenty. Most to fire Dust grenades, a few more died while securing the gangsters and others were lost in the swarm.

“I’m going to need more bugs.”