Ivy House. Dawn.
The morning began with the rustle of vellum. Charlie entered the dining room while the sun was still just clawing at the treetops. His eyes glittered feverishly—not from exhaustion, but from the creative ecstasy that visits an artist when form and content finally merge into a perfect nightmare.
He brought blueprints. These weren't sketches on napkins. They were engineering schemes, executed with the precision of a man who knows how every lever works.
"The cellar," Charlie jabbed a finger at the lower part of the diagram. His voice rang like a taut string. "The geometry here works against the intruder. We will turn their path into a series of forced perspectives. And the piano."
Booker, who was cleaning his revolver at that moment, slowly shifted his gaze to the drawing, then to the small man in the vest. "Seriously? You want to drop a Steinway on the heads of the League of Assassins?"
"I’ll buy Anna a new one," Charlie didn't even blink. "It’s a classic of the genre, Booker! A falling heavy object is the finale of any good comedy. It’s only a matter of balance and a fulcrum. Archimedes would be delighted."
"It weighs nearly two thousand pounds," Nicolo spoke up, studying the lever system's calculations. "To trip it, you need a mechanism that won't jam from the humidity."
"Precisely why," Charlie nodded at the mounting scheme, "we are using a counterweight of sandbags in the coal delivery shaft. One click—and gravity will do the rest for us. The League is used to steel blades, but they aren't ready for a musical instrument to collapse upon them."
Joe leaned over the table, his massive shoulders blocking the light from the window. He traced a finger along the corridor line where Charlie had marked the installation of "blind spots" using mirrors. Joe nodded—slowly, with that deep respect one master shows another. He saw not just traps, but the rhythm of the coming fight.
Nicolo took a pencil. His hand, accustomed to the hilt of a sword and the pen of a philosopher, began adding his own notes directly over Charlie’s blueprints. Silently. Quickly. With his calligraphic script, he marked firing sectors and points where the immortals would "receive" those who survived the encounter with the piano.
I stood aside, leaning against the doorframe, watching this surreal scene. Four immortal warriors who had survived the fall of empires and one genius of silent film were building a lethal farce.
There was a higher meaning in this. The House of the Returned would expect resistance by the rules of war—barricades, gunfire, organized retreat. But they weren't ready for a comedy of errors where every step the enemy takes turns into a deadly stunt.
I checked my watch. Less than 48 hours remained.
"We need Victor Dandre to enter the house first," I added. "We must have the ampule before the 'movie' begins."
Andy placed a hand on my shoulder. "Your bet on Charlie paid off a hundred percent. A cinematic genius thinks in seconds, laws of physics, and trajectories. And that’s not the only reason he’s here." Andy smiled.
I smiled back, watching Anna as she passed by, discreetly touching Charlie's hand. Already in work clothes, she was bustling along with our "guests." Our eyes met. "Forgive the mess, sister. We’re just changing the finale of your ballet."
The Garden of Ivy House
I settled on the grass by the very edge of the pond. The sun glinted off the water's surface, but for me, only the steel existed. I laid out my blades on the burlap—one by one, methodically, like a surgeon before an operation. I checked every fastening, every screw. A scratch on the left blade.
I took up the whetstone. Whish-whish. No rushing. In this rhythm, there was salvation from thoughts of Wong and his portals.
Anna stepped out of the house soundlessly and sat on a nearby bench. She simply watched me work. "Rehearsals canceled?" I asked without looking up, concentrating on the sharpening angle. "Today, this scene is more important," she answered simply. Her voice lacked even a shadow of the hysteria that would have gripped any other woman in her place.
We were silent. The swans were no longer in the pond—the gardener had taken them away. Without them, it felt empty. "Do you think Jack forgave me?" I nodded toward the direction where the animal wagon had rolled away. Anna laughed softly. In that sound, there was more life than in all her performances at Covent Garden. "He is vindictive. Like all swans. They remember grudges longer than humans remember love." "Vindictive. Or perhaps just cautious?" I asked. Anna smiled enigmatically, a spark flickering in her gaze. "I hadn't thought of that."
I hadn't thought of it either. That I might one day stop thinking of the worst-case scenario.
Charlie came out next. He looked disheveled, wearing a vest smudged with chalk. Seeing us, he approached and sat beside Anna—very close, shoulder to shoulder. The movement was so natural, as if they had never been parted for those long, agonizing years. Anna didn't pull away. On the contrary, she leaned her head almost imperceptibly toward him.
I continued to hone the blade. "John," Charlie leaned forward, watching my hands. "Will you teach me something useful? In case the piano misses." I stopped and looked at his slender fingers—the fingers of a pianist and a magician. "You’ve already built a trap that could crush an elephant, Charlie. Isn't that enough?" "That’s technique," he twirled an imaginary cane in the air. "I mean hand-to-hand combat. Like in your parts. So that—bam—and the opponent is knocked out." "Better not," I returned to the sharpening. "Disappointing," Charlie puffed out his cheeks theatrically, but sparks danced in his eyes. "It would be the same as if I asked Anna to teach me the role of Basilio in Don Quixote in a single day."
She nodded understandingly. "Your weapons are chaos, timers. And revolvers. If you get into a brawl with a professional from the League, you'll live three seconds. If you make him trip over a bucket of paint—you win. A ridiculous enemy isn't frightening. And only you can make them ridiculous." "You're right. And how long did you train?"
I was sharpening the second blade. "A few years in my youth for pleasure, some time in the war for survival. But not long enough to be the best."
Anna watched the two of us. Something warm settled on her face—not just a smile, but a deep, hard-won tranquility. She saw two protectors: a grim soldier from nowhere with steel blades, and a genius with a heart full of love. And who knows, perhaps she finally saw that very thing called a family. Even if this day were to be our last.
Gun-fu and Steel
The rehearsal hall of Ivy House had transformed into a theater of martial arts, where there was no room for stage fencing. Today, the very concept of my survival was being dissected.
I occupied the center of the room. Andy, Booker, Nicolo, and Joe surrounded me, studying me like wolves. Anna and Charlie sat on a bench by the mirrored wall.
I drew the heavy M1911. It looked like a piece of field artillery. The dry-fire clicks merged into a rhythmic burst, interspersed with strikes from the grip and short thrusts of the barrel into imaginary pressure points. But with a weapon of this weight, it was more of a parody of the grimy, economical style designed for the distance of an outstretched arm—a style meant for much faster tools.
"The center of gravity is too far forward," Booker remarked after I finished, having 'spent' the magazine. "Reloading will take you an eternity. If you don't drop everyone in ten seconds—you’re a corpse."
He was right. Relying on gun-fu before the invention of the TTI JW4 Pit Viper was a fool's errand.
"No weapons!" Andy commanded, nodding to Booker.
He tossed his jacket onto the bench and stepped into the center of the hall. He was simply two steps away—and then he was already attacking.
I took the first blow, moving off the line, but not enough. Booker wasn't hitting with full force; he was evaluating. A short jab, a sidestep, body pressure. He had fought in trenches, on ships, in back alleys—he worked without a 'school,' but with an absolute understanding of where an opponent's reaction ends.
I kept my distance. Shifted. Didn't block—evaded.
"Moving correctly," Booker muttered, without stopping. "But you’re thinking half a step ahead. The Demon’s Head elite think three."
He caught me on the same strike a second time. Just changed the angle slightly. I dropped to a knee, then stood back up. "Again."
The third pass was different. I began to feel the rhythm. Booker paused before his right hand. A barely perceptible hitch. I caught it on the fourth exchange, slipped inside, and secured a clinch.
Booker stopped. He nodded—no praise, just recording a fact. "You take a hit well. But not enough practice." He picked up his jacket and sat back down.
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"Show the staff!" Andy demanded.
I reached for my hanging cloak. A few clicks, and a double-bladed weapon was in my hands.
Andy stepped forward; her labrys seemed weightless. Nicolo and Joe unsheathed their swords in perfect sync. The testing began. My double blade whirled with a howl, creating a sphere of steel around me, but the immortals found openings with terrifying ease. They didn't just attack—they "read" me, leaving light nicks where they touched, each of which could have been fatal had they wished it.
Andy stopped her blade a centimeter from my throat. Her breathing was steady, her eyes cold. "Who taught you?" "A sister," I replied, lowering the weapon.
Anna arched an eyebrow. "Your family is larger than I thought." "A sister in spirit."
The silence was brief. Andy looked at me with the expression of someone recalculating a sum in her head and getting an unexpected result. She scanned the room. Booker, stone-faced. Nicolo, with a faint smirk. Joe, imperturbable.
"Strange family," Andy said. "Even for me." In that phrase was two thousand years of experience and not a grain of irony.
Anna smiled slightly—that same smile I’d first seen by the fireplace. "A good family," she said softly, "gathers out of necessity. And stays—by choice."
No one answered. But no one objected either. So, I continued. "In my sister's hands, the 'Armored Fist' is a masterpiece, capable of tearing the head off... an iron man," I gave a wry smile, finding a suitable substitute for the word cyborg. "Compared to her, I’m just an extra."
"If he doesn't win in twenty seconds," Booker chimed in, "the opponent will see the limitations of the technique. Your skills are more than enough to survive a tavern brawl, John. But the Demon's elite will eat you for breakfast."
"I don't intend to be the best," I wiped the sweat from my brow. "My role has always been support and distraction."
Andy narrowed her eyes. "But what drives you then, if not the desire to be the best?" "There is always someone stronger. You are eternal athletes. And me—I’m over fifty. I was afraid for too long. At my age, it’s too late to start a sports career. But staying effective—that is still possible."
Anna looked at me as if at a man walking into a bonfire. "And who told me that 'too late' is when you're dead? I am not young either—" Her voice wavered, and Charlie’s hand immediately covered hers in support. "How can you break—but continue to live?"
"It’s easier to bargain with the mind than with the body, Anna. Am I broken or not? How do you check? Does someone have a 'break-o-meter' in their pocket?" The immortals smiled. "I gave up my own desires. Now I only have a task. It allows me to think only of what is possible."
Anna exhaled with relief, as if she had received an answer to an important but unasked question. Charlie looked at my scars, at the heavy pistol, at the ancient steel of the immortals. His lips quirked in a sad smile.
"His style is the desperation of a man who knows the price of every second of life. In cinema, we cut the film to make the hero seem faster. But here—he is the jump cut itself."
Andy nodded, sheathing her labrys. "You won't be fighting the Demon’s Head. You'll be getting under the feet of his vanguard while we carve them up. Agreed?" "I’m not the prima here. I’m the corps de ballet."
Anna and Charlie smiled simultaneously. "We could have used your sister, Vei Lin," Andy added.
But I remained silent. Because I couldn't get Wong's phrase out of my head, though I desperately didn't want to believe it: "...And those who have already become dust."
Ivy House. Sunset.
Inside, there was a hum of creative destruction. Booker and Nicolo worked in the corridors—two soldiers who had seen sieges of fortresses now erased from human memory. They moved methodically, without haste, prying up floorboards and stretching the thinnest strands of piano wire.
Charlie—with a smudged blueprint in hand—resembled a mad conductor. Booker occasionally stopped, shaking his head skeptically at the comedian's latest "circus" proposal. "This won't work, Charlie. A League professional will simply step over it." "He'll step over it if he’s expecting a blow," Charlie insisted, jabbing a finger at the diagram. "But he won't expect the floor to vanish from beneath his feet. Trust me, Booker. I know how to make a man lose his face."
In the end, they did it the Chaplin way. Death in this house now bore the signature of a silent film.
On the first floor, Anna and Joe were reinforcing the shutters. The scene was almost biblical in its simplicity: a fragile woman handing forged nails to a massive warrior with hands accustomed to a heavy sword. Joe was sparse with words, but there was a rhythm in their coordinated labor. A ballerina and a crusader fortifying the last redoubt.
I checked the outer perimeter. Hampstead Heath was already drowning in lilac twilight. It was quiet. Too quiet for a place that would soon become the epicenter of a collision between eras.
Mrs. O’Reilly displayed true British fortitude. She accepted the "unusual filming day" version as the only possible way to maintain her sanity. She refused to leave the house, feeding us in three shifts, ladling soup with the air of a high priestess. Not once did she ask why the piano was suspended on a clever system of blocks and levers. To her, it was simply very complex prop-work.
By evening, Charlie stepped out onto the porch. He looked gaunt, the shadows under his eyes deeper, but his back remained straight. He stood beside me, looking at the slumbering garden.
"Are you afraid, John?" he asked finally, without turning. I looked at my hands. "Being afraid is normal when you're dealing with the House."
He gave a bleak smirk. "I've filmed battle scenes. Mud, explosions, extras covered in blood… Do you know what the hardest part is?" "What?" "Making it so the audience is frightened and amused at the same time. Because real war is exactly like that. It’s a bloody slapstick. Chaos where someone falls, slipping on a shell casing, and it looks ridiculous a second before their head is taken off. Scary and funny. Simultaneously."
I shifted my gaze to the darkening park. "Tomorrow you'll see it in reality, Charlie. No retakes, no jump cuts." "I know." He fell silent, adjusting his collar. "But I don't regret coming here. Even if this film becomes my last." "Tomorrow we’ll just wrap the shoot and go home," I said quietly.
He nodded, accepting this script as the only correct one. Though, after my conversation with Wong, I doubted it more and more. We were doing everything right, and with maximum efficiency. Any other move would have been weaker. But Wong had given us all the information so that we would do it exactly like this. And once again, we were faced with that "choice without a choice" that I had felt so many times before.
Ivy House. The Drawing Room.
In the evening, Anna called everyone into the drawing room. Her quiet request carried more weight than any command. We took our places: Nicolo by the wall, merging with the shadows; Joe on the floor, cross-legged, monumental and still. I leaned against the mantelpiece, feeling the heat of the dying embers against the back of my head.
Booker approached the piano—the one we had "spared." The foyer and drawing room had to look normal. His fingers, accustomed to the recoil of a rifle, touched the keys with unexpected tenderness. He didn't open any sheet music—why would someone need it if they had heard the music of medieval marketplaces and the marches of Napoleon’s Guard? He simply waited until the silence in the room became absolute.
Anna and Andy stepped into the center. Two poles of femininity and strength. They didn't bow; they didn't announce a program. They simply began to live in movement.
Booker found a theme—where the melancholy of the classics intertwined with the rhythm of the Scythian steppes. Two pulses, two eras found a common language in this melody.
Anna moved as she always did—flawlessly weightless. But today, there was no desire to please an audience. It was a pure manifesto of a living being: "I am here. I breathe. I am not a decoration."
Andy danced "from the earth"—low, wide, her gestures circular and heavy, like the swing of a labrys or the sowing of grain into dry soil. It was something so ancient it had no name—a dance of survival, the dance of Mother Earth, who buries her children only to give birth to new ones.
They didn't dance together in the traditional sense—they danced beside each other. Two languages, two truths in one room. And it was more powerful than any duet. It was a dialogue of civilizations.
No one uttered a word. Charlie watched Anna with an expression of such adoration and pain that I felt awkward—as if I were peering into someone else’s soul. He looked at her as a miracle he had already mourned in his thoughts, and which had suddenly returned to him, alive and warm.
I watched the fire in the grate. Listened as Booker drew out the final notes. My head was surprisingly empty—even my endless internal dialogue had fallen silent, no longer scrolling through worst-case defeat scenarios.
When the music faded, Booker slowly lifted his hands from the keys. Nicolo quietly said something in a melodic Italian dialect that hadn't been heard in Rome for the last five hundred years. Joe answered briefly in a bass rumble. Booker gave a barely perceptible smirk.
Mrs. O’Reilly appeared as if by magic. Eight glasses shimmered on a silver tray. She set it on the table, thinking this was the strangest filming day of her life, and the only way to survive it was to be the perfect housekeeper until the end.
"Leave the bottle," Andy said, answering Anna’s gaze. "It’s less than I need to get drunk."
I poured the cognac. The amber liquid caught the reflections of the fireplace. Everyone took a glass and looked at Andy. She swept her gaze over us—slowly, lingering on each of us.
"I have been at war for a long time," her voice chilled to the bone. "Longer than any of you can imagine. I’ve seen empires crumble and even more cruel ones rise from their ashes. I’ve seen people die for the truth—and seen that truth rewritten the very next morning after their funerals. I thought I had grown used to this meaninglessness."
She paused, looking at the glints in her glass. "I haven't." Andy looked at Anna. "I have seen people like you. Your inner light is so bright that the House cannot allow it to burn. Because freedom is the only virus that can kill them."
Then her gaze shifted to Charlie. "And people like you. Who make people laugh, reminding them that they are still alive. This is more dangerous than any blade. Laughter is something the House cannot calculate."
She looked at Booker, Nicolo, and Joe. "You came. Despite the bitterness I spat at you. I didn't deserve your loyalty this time—but you are here. Thank you."
Booker studied his boots, Nicolo looked out the window at the stars, Joe simply nodded to her. Finally, she looked at me. "And you. A man who shouldn't be here, yet came to protect those he never knew. And stood in the enemy's path with us."
She raised her glass. "Perhaps one of us will see our last sunrise tomorrow. Even immortals can lose their heads. But today—we are together. And that is already a victory."
We drank. In silence. Outside, London was drifting into sleep. The rain that had tormented us for so many days finally ceased. The sky over Hampstead cleared, and cold, indifferent stars glittered in the breaks of the clouds. For the first time in a long while, the horizon was clear. Tomorrow, the House would try to reclaim its property. But tonight, we were by the fireplace. Cognac. A dance before the battle. And the voice of an immortal who believed once again that it was not all in vain.
I watched the fire and built no more plans. I simply was.