Chapter 7: The Man in the Hat, Part 2

"So sorry to interrupt, everyone," Dr. Arden Lee Siren apologized. "But I'm afraid I can't abide a lynching in good conscience."

"Who are you?" a person near the front of the mob demanded.

"Who cares?" someone else said. "He's with them!"

"Another outsider!"

"He probably sent them!"

Arden held up a hand, which immediately quieted the people shouting and caused those nearest to him to take a half step back. He took on a placid tone as he spoke, and yet with a brief flicker of light from the pendant around his neck, his voice carried across the square without him ever having to shout.

"Please, everyone. I understand that this place has been met with great adversity in recent times, and that many of you are frightened and confused. For everything you have suffered, and everything you have lost, I am truly sorry."

Arden walked slowly down the aisle that had already parted in the crowd for him, making eye contact with as many people as he could as he did.

"But I have watched this mob justice unfold. I have listened to the accusations being made. And there has been a mistake."

He came to a stop at the base of the tree with Valerie and List, planting his cane firmly and gesturing to Valerie. "This girl is no monster. She does not consort with monsters. Though she is not from these lands and neither am I, neither of us mean you any harm. We came here to investigate stories we had heard of a terrible creature terrorizing this place, and to lend whatever aid we could."

The doctor frowned like a disappointed father, and an instinctive shame rippled through the people closest to him. 

"There has been enough death here," he chastised. "Please, do not let another innocent life be taken because of it."

Arden's interruption had taken the momentum out of the crowd's fury, and that along with his words had already quelled some people back into rational behavior. But he hadn't convinced everyone yet.

"Liar!" 

"They killed the sheriff!"

And then, just before Arden could press his advantage, a spanner was thrown into the works.

"She didn't kill shit!" List snapped. "I killed that monster, not her!"

Dr. Siren shot List a look, and the young hellborn girl met his glare with her own. Instantly, the dissenters in the crowd pounced.

"She admits it!"

"She's a murderer!"

List glowered, but before she could shout a retort, Dr. Siren stepped in front of her to regain control of the situation.

"You saw it happen then?" he challenged. "You have proof?"

"She was standing over the body!"

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"But was that body your sheriff? The man you all knew? Or was it something else?"

It wasn't quite a shot in the dark. He didn't know anything about the hellborn girl who'd been set to hang alongside Valerie. But there had been a monster attacking this town, and Valerie was almost certainly not a murderer. If she'd been involved with the hellborn and the sherif's death, which the town certainly believed, it stood to reason a dangerous shapeshifter of some kind had been involved. 

It was conjecture without hard evidence, but it was the best he had.

The dissenters grumbling half-silence was encouraging though. So there had been something wrong with the sherif's body. 

"Has anyone even asked these women for their side of the story? Their account of what the sheriff was? Why they did what they did?"

"You don’t get to tell us how to protect our home, outsider!" one man shouted, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. “For all we know, you're the ones who did that to the sherif!"

Arden kept his expression neutral to suppress a smirk. Up until now, he'd been battling the nebulous snake of a mob's fear. Now, with someone stepping forward, that snake had a head.

"I am a priest of Saint Hedwig, and this girl is my charge and apprentice. We do not turn people into monsters," Arden said.

"Fucking murdering outsider fuck—" the man growled. His fists clenched, and his weight shifted. "Get out of our way. And get out of our town."

Arden's voice hardened. "If you wish to conduct a proper investigation into her hand in this incident, I will not stop you, because all you will find is her innocence. If you want to kill her, you will have to go through me. And I would advise against that."

Behind him, a few others began to step forward. Arden counted five dissenters in total who looked prepared to make this violent, and frowned. He warned them.

Arden flipped his cane in his hands and cracked the leader in the face with its head, immediately breaking his nose. He transitioned neatly into a thrust into a second man's windpipe and crack to his temple, leaving him choking on the floor. With a practiced twirl of the cane, he redirected a third man's clumsy attempt of a punch, placed a hand on the man's shoulder, and spoke a single world in the language of the gods.

Arden's pendant flashed at the word, and the man screamed in agony as a sizzle came from where the priest touched. Arden kicked his legs out from under him and jammed his cane into the back of his neck for good measure.

Two women lunged at Arden from either side, and he spoke another prayer. A golden ripple tore through the air around him, immediately flinging both of them back and into the surrounding crowd.

That was when the leader, bleeding profusely from his nose, drew a knife.

Arden pointed two fingers at him, spoke a prayer, and a white hote beam of light flared from his fingers, swallowing the man's hand and catching him on the side of the head. Anyone looking directly at the beam had a purple-green afterimage burned into their retinas, and the man's screams filled the square.

The man's knife, along with that hand that had been holding it, was gone, along with his left ear. Burns dominated the side of his face, and he continued to scream as he fell to the floor. Seemingly as an afterthought, Arden cracked the man he still had pinned with his cane in the back of his head, warning him to stay down.

Stunned silence took the crowd, and the only sounds were the ringleader's screams as he writhed in the arms of people who came to his aid. No one else attacked, but every face Arden could see bore a look of horror.

The entire exchange, from Arden's first interruption to healing the ringleader's injuries, had taken less than two minutes.

With one hand, he helped Valerie to her feet. List was already up.

Arden locked his gaze on the man he'd just maimed, and spoke a prayer of healing. A dull glow radiated from Arden's pendant, and the man's flesh slowly knit itself whole. The hand didn't come back, but the burns on his face and wrist stump mended themselves, turning from a charred black to a hearty pink.

"If it's all the same to you, I think we'll be leaving now," Arden said.

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