False Moves – 12.a | Pale

Eight years, five months ago

The kitchen was noisy, with the sound of the radio, the baby crying, and the clatter of dishes as the sink hissed.

“Hey hon,” Clint’s mom greeted his stepdad, as he approached, squeezing her shoulders and giving her a kiss on the cheek.  “Aren’t you late?”

“Byrnes is opening.  Leaving late, staying late.”

“Do you still want me to make you dinner?”

“Sure, but tinfoil it, maybe.”

The baby’s screech reached a fevered pitch, that nerve-jangling kind of noise that made Clint squirm in his seat a bit.  He startled a little bit as his stepfather approached, putting the back of his hand to Clint’s forehead.

“Feeling okay?”

“He’s been feeling off all week,” his mother said.

“I’m okay.”

“You’ve barely had any cereal.  I thought you liked that kind.”

The colorful shapes had dissolved into mushy blobs of color in the milk.  Forcing himself, Clint raised the bowl to his mouth and chugged it.  It was gross and overly sweet and he coughed-gagged a bit as he put the bowl down.

“Easy there,” his stepdad said, clapping a hand on Clint’s back.

“Yeah,” Clint replied.  “I’m gonna go get ready.”

“You look ready.”

“Gotta fix my hair,” Clint said.

“Do you want a ride?”

“Teresa’s coming by in… twenty or thirty minutes, we’re going to walk,” Clint replied, before heading upstairs.

He could hear his mother say, “He’s at that age where he’s starting to care about his appearance.  Do you want to finish up these dishes or see what has Brody screaming?”

He didn’t hear his stepdad’s response.

The gross cereal felt weird in his stomach.  He tried to focus on other things, like his hair, getting the spikes up at the front right.  Like Teresa.

A couple days ago, Teresa had said she liked him and it was up to him if he wanted to stay friends or be something else.  He’d asked for time to think because he had a lot going on.  She’d said that was fine, but he was pretty sure she was running out of patience.

He texted Teresa to ask her to come by, so the excuse he’d given wouldn’t be a lie.

He wondered if he should tell her-

“You’ve gotten so handsome,” his mother said, from the doorway.  “Already ten, hmm?”

He gave her a bit of a forced smile.

Her hand reached out to adjust a bit of his hair that he’d just gotten right.  In the mirror’s reflection, though, the hand wasn’t human.  Hand, fingers, and wrist were overlong, encased in white glass with broken edges where things needed to bend.  Raw red meat, shredded and barely intact, was wrapped around broken bones that rubbed up against one another to serve as joints.

He did his best not to let her know he was as terrified as he was.

He looked into the doorway, and saw his mother’s face smiling fondly at him, as she held a fussing Brody against her shoulder.

“I gotta whiz,” he said.

“Okay, baby,” she replied, smiling as he shut the door.

He shut the door, then whizzed.  His hands shook enough that aiming was hard.  He finished, went to the sink to wash up, and then remained at the door for a long time.

He had to get out, he had to act normal, get his bag, get his things, he couldn’t show he was scared, and then he could leave with Teresa.  He could have the entire day at school, he could go to someone’s house, maybe hers, and then he wouldn’t have to come back until dinner.  If they asked, which they usually did, then he could stay there for dinner too.

Then early bed, fitful sleep waking up at every small sound, and another morning like this.

He could run, but what would he even do?  If he ran and got caught, then he’d get brought back here and they’d know.  They’d know he knew.

He could tell Teresa, but who would that help?

Clint had felt so scared for so long now that it felt like he was being hollowed out inside, and every physical sensation, from stomach cramps to trembles to racing heart made him feel like he was becoming one of them.  Like he’d look in the mirror and he’d look like that.

He swallowed hard and opened the door.

The thing that was pretending to be his mother was there, a few feet away, bouncing a complaining Brody against her shoulder.  “Done?”

Clint shrugged and gave a little nod by way of response, his voice refusing to come out.

She navigated past him into the bathroom, and he caught a glimpse of her, taller in the mirror than she was in reality, a white glass doll’s face with mis-aligned eyes broken, barely clinging to the mess of raw meat that was her head, more glass like a collar around the neck, a torn and bloody dress draped over her body.  A torso with white glass breasts, meaty jagged shoulders, white glass upper arms, meaty elbows with jagged bone sticking out, white glass forearms… and so on.

The arms held the white glass and meat version of Brody, who cried in reality but was unmoving and watching.  One misaligned eye staring in Clint’s direction, the other eye socket empty except for the red of a slick blood clot.

It had been like this for a week.  When he saw them in the mirror, the metal of the kettle on the stove, the screen of the television set when it was off, he saw them like this.

He ducked away.

“Clint!” she raised her voice.

He stopped, pausing.

He had to force himself to retreat.

“You went number one and you didn’t flush,” she told him.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I was in a hurry.”

“Haste makes waste,” she told him.  She pointed at the flusher.  “You only end up losing more time if you rush things.”

He was very aware of what she looked like in the mirror as she stepped out of his way, expression and body language stern as he crossed the bathroom, crossed within a foot of her, and pressed the metal tab down.  The toilet roared as the yellow water rushed away.

Her hand reached for his face, and he flinched, stepping back quickly, nearly tripping on the mat before he caught the counter.

They were very still, him leaning backward against the counter, looking over at her.  He couldn’t see her in the big mirror over the counter, but there was a little mirror at the edge of the counter near the toilet, and he wasn’t sure what part of her was being reflected there, but he could see the parts of her that weren’t at all like his mother.  Just vague raw meat and semi-transparent white.

His heart hammered, and he didn’t move as she adjusted his hair.

He tried to leave in a casual enough way that it would counteract the slip-up just now.  Straightening, fixing his shirt, offering her a tight smile, because a tight smile was the best he could do, and then he headed to his room, leaving them in the bathroom.

The thing that was pretending to be Brody whined, and the thing that was pretending to be Clint’s mother shushed it.

He closed his door and pulled on a jacket, not because he needed one, but because he wanted to buy time.  He tried to get his breathing under control, his mind racing in circles as he tried to consider options.  Where could he go?  Who could he talk to?  Did they know he knew?  Did that matter?  Whatever they were, maybe they’d be happy to pretend, even if he was scared.  But in case it did matter, he’d have to run.  Where could he go?  Who could he ask for help?  What would they do?  Would they do anything?

Could he go out the window?  Where would he run to?  Who could he go to for help?  Would they come after him?

His fingers shook too much to slide the pieces of his jacket’s zipper together, so he left it unzipped.  He put his hands in his pockets, felt unnatural and defenseless, pulled his bag on, and gripped the straps tight with both hands.

Deep breath.

Had to get outside, had to get to Teresa, then he could go to school.

He stepped out into the hallway.  Every door he passed felt like it would have something standing on the other side, ready to lash out.

The bathroom especially, when it had been where he’d last seen them.

He eased down onto the stair, praying for it to not creak.

There was conversation happening in the kitchen.  He’d be out of sight while crossing the front hall, he just had to do it without making a noise.

Down another stair.

He could hear some of the words.

“…int knows.”

“How long has he known?”

“He’s been acting strange and subdued for a week.”

Holding his breath, Clint eased down the next few stairs toward the door.  He turned, peeking a little bit, and the bag he was wearing scraped against a picture frame by the stairwell.  He hurried to stop it from swinging and scraping the wall.

The conversation had stopped.

He wasn’t holding his breath anymore, but he was trying to keep his breaths quiet, as they came fast and hurried.  He moved down the stairs in the quickest way he could while minimizing noise, halfway down, two thirds of the way down-

“Clint.”

His stepfather.

He stopped.  “I’m ready.  I’m going to go wait…”

His stepfather stared at him.  His mother stood in the doorway behind his stepfather, bouncing Brody against her shoulder, giving him a sympathetic look.

More because of that than the unreadable stare from his stepdad, Clint was pretty sure that if he hadn’t just taken a whiz, he’d be wetting himself.  His hand gripped the railing.

He couldn’t get to the door before his stepdad did.  He wouldn’t get outside.

He turned, and he scrambled up the stairs, pulling on the railing as much as feet pushed him.  His bag’s straps were too wide for his skinny shoulders and he let the bag fall- hoping maybe a little that it would help or trip his stepdad up.  He nearly lost his balance, letting go of the railing, letting the bag’s strap slip down his arm.  He grabbed onto the railing, and he felt it break.

His stepdad was at the top of the stairs, and as he’d gotten there, he’d grabbed the railing.  The little posts had shattered and the railing had been pulled away, and Clint had to let go or he’d be pulled over and away from stairs, down into the front hall.

He screamed.  It was a cry for help, a cry out to neighbors, a wail that let out every bit of pent emotion that had built up for a week.  Wailing, he ran down the hall, past bathroom, past his parents’ room.

His stepfather’s footsteps came so fast up the stairs that it sounded like he had more than two feet.  There were crashes, wood breaking, glass breaking.

Clint ran for his room.  He heard another crash, and looked behind him, and his stepdad was at the top of the stairs.  The remnants of the bathroom door and doorframe had fallen on top of and around the man, who stared at Clint.  He’d come up the stairs so hard and so fast that he’d carried on forward and he’d smashed the door and wall.

Clint slammed the door of his room, and looked around for furniture to move into the way.

The door broke, his stepdad pushing through with such force that it came free of one hinge.  The door itself was hollow and came apart with an ease that made Clint feel stupid for ever thinking it could protect him.

“Please,” Clint whispered.

His stepdad stood there with hands by his side, but Clint felt a hand around his neck.

He was lifted, legs kicking, hands reaching for and finding that invisible hand, holding onto it to alleviate the pressure on his neck.

Lifted higher, higher.

Another hand at his hip and the hand at his neck pressed him against the ceiling.  There was a sense of vertigo like he’d never had before, even on rollercoasters.

His mother stepped into the doorway, and Brody was silent, watching without even pretending to be an irritable baby.

There were tears in Clint’s eyes now, blurring his vision.  And as they blurred and marred the image he saw, he saw them for what they really were.  His stepdad with three arms of meat and white glass on one side and two more on the other, his face like three pieces of a doll’s head split in three and barely fit together over something misshapen.

He couldn’t speak, with the hand at his neck.  He could barely breathe.  Struggling, fighting for any leverage or anything he might be able to do, he kicked the ceiling, driving heel into ceiling, once, twice, three times- moving over to the side, he kicked the light, jarring the housing, kicked it again, trying to find some way.

He blinked hard, squeezing tears out of his eyes, and he cleared away the image of the monsters.

Just him against the ceiling, and his stepdad looking up at him, as if vaguely confused, his mother smiling sympathetically.

The hit came without warning.  A singular blow to his ribs, sharp and hard enough that something broke explosively, and Clint’s vision wobbled before going dark at the edges, the vertigo getting worse.  He coughed, sputtering, fighting to breathe more than ever, and every breath produced pain that made his thoughts go all over the place, like he’d panicked beyond panic and now he was going insane.  He felt himself start to pass out, but he couldn’t quite- couldn’t get there, even though he kind of wanted to at this point.  The buzz and thrill of fear kept him from getting- getting past the moment he was in.

The fingers of an invisible hand dug into his chest, with purpose, and with the realization of what that purpose was, he succumbed to unconsciousness.

Clint woke up on his bed.  A thousand unpleasant smells filled his nostrils, and his thoughts swayed like he hadn’t slept at all.  Confusion, alarm, that vertigo feeling.

His hand went to his chest, examining, and then he pulled his shirt up, looking and not understanding the bloody mess that was there in the upper center of his chest.  He wasn’t feeling nearly enough pain for… for this amount of damage.  Not nearly enough.  He’d been cleaned up too, except for his clothes.

The carpet had been cleaned, he realized, with a spot drying in the middle.  The door had been put back together and repainted.  One of the hinges was brand new.

He wobbled a bit as he ventured across his room.  At the top of his dresser was a thing of facial tissues, and he pulled out fistful after fistful, before pressing them into his chest, where the damage had been done.  He pulled his bloody shirt down, pressing a hand down over the wound to help keep the tissues in place, and looked back at the bed, with a huge bloodstain on it, that had been shaped by the position he’d been lying in.

It felt wrong, like everything else was clean and fixed and then there was that shocking, making-his-stomach-feel-weak amount of his own blood there.

He opened the door and felt disoriented by how it opened even more easily after having been fixed up.  He could smell the cleaning chemical on the carpet and fresh paint.

He looked up at the ceiling where he’d been- where he’d- he’d been held.  He could see the shine where it had been fixed and painted as well.

There was a faint trace of shoeprint on the light fixture, like the skids left behind by bad sneakers on a gym floor.

The hallway rug had been fixed, the pictures put back up.

The bathroom door was fixed, the frame mended, both glossy with that smell of paint.

The railing fixed too.  The pictures were put back there too, glass cleaner than before.

He ventured downstairs, dazed.

Into the living room.

Through the front window, he saw his mother talking to Teresa.

Had it only been twenty or thirty minutes?

It was so disorienting.  Like the worst of bad dreams.

He wasn’t sure why he kept thinking of her as his mother, when she wasn’t.  When she was something much, much worse.  Maybe because she looked like his mother, because the mannerisms were there, because he couldn’t break ten years of thinking the same way about her.  Because… a part of him wanted this to be a nightmare.

Teresa saw him in the window and raised a hand in a wave.  Black hair done up nice, wearing nicer clothes than she usually did, like she was trying really hard to make a good impression.

His mother saw, and looked at him, before flashing a smile, and giving a little wave as well.

Teresa made a heart shape with thumbs and middle fingers.

Could she not see the blood?  It had to be hard to see him standing in a dark living room.

Clint knew he could have called out for help, or said something, or signaled something, but shame and fear won out.  If he did say something with his mom right there, she might hurt Teresa like they’d hurt him.

Teresa left, pink and black bag at her back, marching on with purpose.  Off to school.

Clint remained where he was, kneeling on the couch and looking out the window.

His mother came back in.

“I told her you’re taking a sick day,” his mother said.

Clint tried to decide how to respond for so long that continued silence became the only sensible response.  It felt a little bit like a silence so deep and so awful that he might never say a word again.

“Have a lie down, put the television on,” she said.

He didn’t move, didn’t respond, but as she took a step closer, he found himself retreating.  It was easier to continue to play along, to listen.  He lay down, head against the armrest, and grabbed one of the puffy decorative couch cushions and he hugged it tight against his chest.

“I’ll check in on you when it gets closer to lunch.  Let me know if you need anything,” she told him.  “I’m going to change your bedsheets, I’ll bring a shirt for you to change into.

Then she was gone, going about her business.  His nostrils were filled with the smell of his own blood, the fresh paint, and the cleaners used upstairs.

They didn’t keep tabs on him.  His stepdad came and went from kitchen to the workshop upstairs.  His mother changed the sheets, brought a change of shirt and waited while he pulled his shirt off, wincing as it stuck to his chest with the blood, then went to do laundry.  She looked after Brody, fed Brody, put Brody in the bouncy swing, then went upstairs to take a belated shower.

Clint could have left.  There was nobody stopping him from going out the front door, was there?

Except… what was the point, now?

The television didn’t matter.  He couldn’t pay attention to the shows.  He watched news and crappy non-primetime cartoons with equal disinterest and mild confusion, the scenes not feeling like they were stringing together.  He watched people argue on some stupid talk show about cheating in relationships and he kind of wished he could have gone out with Teresa before it had all went wrong.  It wasn’t that he, like… liked her liked her, but she was cool and now he felt like he was ruined for anything like that.

His mom made and brought him lunch, and he ate with the same disinterest he’d watched television.

He lay there, avoiding touching his chest, and he watched.  There was a glimmer of annoyance as a neighbor started mowing their lawn and he couldn’t hear the show, because that left him more alone with his thoughts, but he could turn up the volume and after the mowing stopped he left it loud.

Another roaring, similar to the mowing, made itself clear, and he sat up to look.

A van, parked out front.  The people who emerged did so on the far side, so he couldn’t see them with the van in the way.

They came as a group of five, one remaining in the van, a phone pressed to his ear.  Five people, with two adults flanking a teenage girl who was holding a chainsaw, like they wanted to keep people from seeing it.  The ones on the side were watching the neighbors, looking around, wary but not slow wary.  They moved with a forward stride that kept them all going at about the same speed.

They were carrying guns.  It was spring and they were wearing heavy jackets and two of the guys were carrying long guns and the one woman Clint’s mom’s age was carrying a pistol or something.

She saw him looking and pointed the gun at the window, at him, before glancing both ways.

He froze, staring, tears in his eyes as he looked down the barrel.

The others mostly disappeared from view.  He could see a hint of the corner of one’s jacket as they stopped at the front door.

The door clicked, and they came in as a group of four.  Clint moved slowly, turning to look, as one of the men pointed a rifle at him.  It was only when he was securely in the sights of that rifle that the woman with the pistol came inside, closing the front door.

None of them made much sound.  The footsteps were quiet even with boots on indoors.

The teenager with the chainsaw walked around the couch and hauled the curtains closed.  It made the living room dim.

The man with the rifle and the chainsaw girl were studying him.  The others were standing at the end of the living room, watching the rest of the house, weapons out more clearly now.

Moving slowly, so he wouldn’t be shot -did he care if he was shot, now?- he raised one hand.

Two fingers extended.

The man with the rifle turned, and pointed at the various entryways.

Clint paused, then pointed once upstairs.  For the backyard, he pointed back toward the kitchen, then leaned forward a bit, for a second, longer point.

Tears rolled down his cheeks.

With a series of hand signals, they split themselves up.  Two for upstairs, two for the back.

Leaving the girl with the chainsaw standing by him.  The weapon looked like the panel at the side had been scuffed and sanded down enough times that it was misshapen from what it had used to be, the label unreadable except for the hint of an ‘A’.

The girl wore a hoodie, and her blonde hair was long and dense enough that it filled the space between the neck and the sides of the hood, and burst out near the forehead, pushed into a bit of a part with strands sticking out.  She wore cargo pants and there was a knife handle sticking out of one pocket of the pants, and the pockets were all full.

She held one finger to her lips.

He nodded.

There was just so much silence.

The gunshots came, one upstairs, two in the backyard, incredibly loud, and Clint nearly jumped out of his skin.  His breath came out in wheezes.

“Cleared!” the group upstairs called down.

“Heard!” the teenager called up.

“Cleared!” the backyard group called out; the guy who’d had the rifle approached the back door and raised a hand in a wave.  The teenage girl waved back.

“Heard!  Upstairs, back shed is cleared!”

“Heard!”

“You okay?” the teenager asked.

Clint had no idea how to answer that question.

She didn’t press him, and most of her attention was on the other parts of the house.

Nervous, unsure, Clint paused, then began to roll up his shirt, pulling it up.  It was easier because she wasn’t looking at him.

She looked and he stopped where he was, shirt up to his lower ribs.

It took effort to bring himself to keep going.  Effort to lift it up to the armpits, and show her the damage that had been done.

With fingers, he pulled bloody tissues out of the wound.  Fistfuls and fistfuls that had gotten soggy and pressed in together.

There was a hole in his chest where his heart was supposed to be.  A hole big enough to fit his fist into, ribs broken, his skin torn and folded away, flaps pressing into the sides of the wound.

An empty space with nothing to fill it.

She stared down at it.

“Yep,” she said, quiet.

He wasn’t sure what response he’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it.

She turned.  “Upstairs!  Can you keep an eye out for a heart?  Maybe in a box or a jar?”

“Heard!  On it!”

“They’re looking for stuff?” Clint asked, quiet.

“Yeah.  Figuring out what’s up.  Hints that might lead us to more other groups like them, or help us figure out weaknesses.”

“There’s a baby,” Clint whispered.  “It looks like my brother Brody.”

“Shit.  Upstairs!  There’s a third!  Look for-”

“Crib.  End of the hall.”

“There’s a crib!”

Clint could hear the running footsteps.

There were three gunshots, one after another.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t fibbing, I thought since it’s a baby-” he sputtered the words, before remembering that oppressive silence, before remembering he’d nearly been unwilling to ever speak again.

“It’s in the walls!” someone upstairs shouted.

“Heard!” the teenager shouted, waving in the other two as they came down the hall.

“It’s fine,” the teenager said.  “You’ve been through a lot.  Just do me a favor?”

Clint nodded, tense.

“Maybe pull your shirt down and if your neighbors poke their heads outside asking about the noise, say it’s construction.”

Clint hesitated, then obeyed.  It felt wrong, having his shirt down, nothing filling that gaping hole in his chest.

As he headed out to the front door, the teenager revved the chainsaw.  “Stop stomping around, upstairs!”

He left the front door open, wandering out to the front walkway, and everything felt too real for how strange the moment was.  The lots and houses were big and the neighbors were a little distance away but with everything so horrible happening-

The teenager moved the chainsaw, like she was tracking something she couldn’t see.  Then she plunged it into the wall.  Blood sprayed out of the hole there.

-the outside was so sunny and normal.

“Cleared!”

“Thank you!” the other woman said.  “My daughter, lovely daughter.”

The teenager made a face as the woman came down the stairs, used sleeve to wipe away blood, and then planted a kiss on her forehead.

“Still looking for your heart, baby,” the woman told Clint.

Clint nodded.

“These ones usually keep them around.”

“There’s- other ones?”

“Oh, honey, um-”

“Mom?” the teenager asked.  “Can I?  I’ll give him the rundown?”

The mom nodded.

The teenager approached, passing the chainsaw to her mother, and partially closed the door.

“Buddy, you got a name?”

“Clint.”

“Clint, hi.  I’m Elise.  Listen, I’m so sorry, but your family died in a house fire-”

Clint looked at the house, unburnt.

“There’ll be a fire.  You’ll- this is all a bad dream, okay?  You made up monsters because that was easier, it’s easier to pretend there are evil things that can be killed than it is to pretend that sometimes really awful, random things happen.”

Clint shook his head a little.

There was a knock on the door, from the inside.

Elise opened the door a bit, and the man who’d had the rifle passed her a wooden box.

She popped it open, pulled out a bloody heart, and then lifted up his shirt a bit.  He lifted it up the rest of the way.

“Just… stick it in there.  Yeah.  Looks about right.  We can call the fire department, they’ll find you, you can say you got hurt in the chest, they’ll look and go oh no, that’s horrible, how are you alive, but they’ll put you together again.  And maybe any time you see a doctor you can explain you’ve got a tricky ticker and ask them not to poke around too much.  I think if you’re a little bit phobic of doctors that’ll be okay, it’ll work out and the universe will keep you out of the way of anything too health-related, as thanks for playing along.”

“I don’t understand.”

She reached into a pocket and pulled out bandages, and she wrapped bandage around his chest.  The heart was pulsing in there, wriggling, and as it did, more blood was welling out of the wound.

She kept wrapping as she told him, “Lie, Clint.  Lie to the doctors, lie to neighbors, lie to friends.  Just lie, lie, lie to yourself.  Do whatever you gotta do, convince yourself, as deep down as you can, this was all a bad dream.  Even this conversation.  Can you lie?”

Her voice was almost hypnotic, almost something that could pull him in, if he let it, the repeated words, the pattern.

He shook his head a little.

“Does any of this feel right?  Does this feel real?”

“You- you guys feel real.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “But if you lie hard enough, you can tell yourself I was a subconscious voice, or a face in a dream, okay?  And that’s better.”

“Better than?”

“Than continuing to live in a world with monsters.  Live in the lie, Clint.  Because the truth gets…”

She looked back at the house.  She looked down at her hands, and there was a little speckling of blood on her arms and hands.  She wiped the beads on her right arm away with the edge of her left thumb and thumbnail, one by one.

“How’s that heart doing?” she asked.

“Beating.”

“Wound looks fresh.  That from today?”

He nodded.  “But I’ve known a week or so.”

“Ah, Clint, buddy,” she said.  “That makes it harder to buy into the lie, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about.

There was another knock on the door.  It felt weird to be outside and talking and having people on the inside knock.  Elise opened the door.

“Kid,” the tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged guy who’d had the rifle said.  “You know of any hiding spots?  Any other weirdness?”

He shook his head.  “They fixed everything up after it broke, but…”

“What’d they fix?”

He pointed at the front door, then slipped inside, and pointed at the wall by the stairs, the railing.

“That it?”

He shook his head.

“Just burn it down, Haris,” Elise said.

“Was that what you were thinking?  Is that the story Clint’s going with?”

“Trying to get him there.”

Haris nodded.  “Anything you want to keep, kid?”

“Clint?” Elise asked.

“Uh,” he couldn’t imagine- he still felt a little stunned by proceedings.  He still felt scared even though it was supposedly over.  His heart felt weird as it throbbed in his chest.

“It can’t be a big deal, can’t be weird that you grabbed it, on your way outside after first seeing the fire.  Couple pictures, maybe?”

“You can take more if you can sell yourself on the lie, about how you got it,” Elise said.  “Maybe keep it secret?”

He didn’t want to go back in that house.  He could see through the open door to the living room, where the chainsaw had cut a hole in the wall, and the hole in the wall was bleeding.  Brody or something pretending to be Brody was inside.

He went inside.

“Power bar in the kitchen, we’re thinking a trace of white phosphor and metal filings,” Elise’s mom called out.

“Don’t burn yourself,” ‘Haris’ said.

Clint went to a photo album, and he picked it up, hugging it to his chest, feeling his heart throb in a strange way as something pressed against the opening.  He glanced at the people, and saw the skepticism on their faces.

Walking over to the couch, he dropped it there, opened it, and picked some photos.  One of the family all together.  One of him and his friends, Teresa in the background.

He got a bunch of things, and he didn’t care if they thought it was too much.  He went upstairs, and averted his eyes from the washroom, from the shower curtain that had been pulled down, draping over the thing that had pretended to be his mother, half in and half out of the tub.  The gunshot had painted a wall red.  He passed his little brother’s nursery and he could see the holes in the wall there.  In his own room, he stepped in the cleaning chemical and got his sock wet, and so he changed his socks before also pulling on his favorite shirt, he grabbed the tag that hung from his lamp, a bit of metal with his cat’s name on it, from the box that her ashes had been put in after she’d been cremated last year.  He got his school bag.

They looked like they wanted to tell him it was too much, as he came downstairs.  He set his jaw.

“All good?” the mom asked.

“Yeah, think so,” Elise replied.

There was a sound like a match being set, but it wasn’t a match.  It was a dusting of something cast into the unused openings in a power bar with a bunch of appliances, radio, and toaster all plugged into it.  The dusting sparked, then erupted into fire.

As a group, they departed.

“Let’s go before people start poking their heads outside,” the mom said.  “How’d it go, talking to the kid about options?”

“Not… great,” Elise said.  “Eh Clint?”

“Options?  You only told me one.”

“I sorta mentioned the other, but… you’ll be happier with the one I told you about.”

He stood a few feet away from the front door as they all walked out, moving with that same stride.  The grizzled old guy with the long coat, Haris, was carrying most of the guns, holding them inside the coat, a large hand holding them as a bundle, barrels pointed at the ground.

“Go with the lie, Clint, say nothing at first, then leak small details over time, okay?  Ones you’re sure about, ones you know don’t contradict anything you’ve established.  Believe it as you say it.”

He was silent, his heart hammering in his chest even though he felt calmer than he had all week.

He watched as they all got into the van.  He glanced back at the house and saw the fire spreading through the kitchen.

“You’re going to be okay, Clint,” Elise said.  She settled into the back of the van, speaking through the open door.  “You’ll be groggy after the surgery when they fix your chest up, that’ll help fuzz everything up.”

“What if they don’t burn up all the way?” Clint asked, worried, worried not just because of the questions but because he wanted that lie.  He wanted his chest fixed.  He wanted to not be scared.

“They’ll burn.  The universe cleans up pretty nice after us.  Just like the universe is keeping the neighbors from getting up in our hair about the gunshots.  We get that little perk.”

“It’s not the universe, Elise,” Haris said.  “It’s God.  Don’t disrespect Him.”

“Do you want me to shove my god down your throat, Haris?  Because we’ve been down this road.”

“Save it, Elise.  Quiet, Haris,” the mom said.  She leaned out the passenger side window.  “Okay, Clint?  Look after yourself.”

He looked back at the growing fire.

He started moving.

He walked, strode at first, and he thought of how they’d come down the walkway, in the opposite direction, all at first.

Look after yourself.

It felt like they were asking him to do just that, and the idea terrified him as much as anything, and he’d become very acquainted with terror lately.

And they were saying the universe looked after them?  Or God did?  Or something did?

He switched from stride to jog, and then he ran the last few steps.  As if he’d miss his chance or the door would slam.

But Elise was there, by the door, and she wasn’t closing it.  She didn’t look surprised.

There were no open seats, but she grabbed his hand as he reached, to help him inside, and then she pulled him into her lap.  She helped pull off his bag and then she hugged him tight from behind.

The guy in the backseat leaned forward to push the door closed.

The van started up.

The flat of Elise’s hand was over Clint’s heart, where it pumped unevenly where it sat, at the bottom of a horizontal hole.

“Yeah,” she whispered in his ear, squeezing him.  “I couldn’t either.”

Four years and three months ago

The apartment building had the vibe of a building that had served some other purpose once, like an office building with wires in corrugated metal tubes threading in and out of walls, all painted over in white.  The paint was probably lead.

Elise led the way, holding a bat with nails poking through the end.  Her chainsaw was hanging behind her back from a strap that also connected to her belt and holster, where she had a gun at her hip.

She was followed by four more.  Her mother was in the car, a heavy gun rigged to the passenger seat, pointed at the door.

“How are you doing, Raph?” she asked.

“Nervous.”

“This should be…” she wanted to say easy.  It wouldn’t be easy.  She’d already seen the hints.  “…doable.  Just follow Clint’s lead, okay?  Don’t shoot until he’s shooting.”

“Yeah,” Raph replied.

He and Clint were… not as far apart in age as some of the pairings she’d seen, a fifteen year old and a twenty year old.  They had similar likes, fought over the same girls who fell between their ages, but Raph was bright and Clint was dark in demeanor, Raph was careful and methodical and Clint crashed in the door.

Clint had grown.  He was taller than Elise was now, muscular, hair short, eyes dark.  He was only barely fifteen and he was showing signs he’d be one of the biggest in their group by the time he was fully grown.  His workout regimen only played into that.

Raph was narrower, could pass more easily on the street, without that look in his eyes that let everyone know he’d seen some messed up stuff.  Which he had.

She reached the top floor and saw the chalk on the floor.  She eyed it, she wasn’t an expert, but she knew what to look out for, and she knew what wasn’t an issue.  There were markings that could explode or turn the metal of the stairwell into a bear trap, and there were markings that kept things out.

This was meant to slow things down, keep them out.  Her shoes scuffed the chalk, marring it.  She reached the sliding metal door that served as the entryway, and hauled it open with one hand.

“Daddy!” a little girl shrieked.

It was a loft apartment, high ceiling going to a peak above the hallway she still stood in, high windows, tons of light.  The walls were painted that same lead paint white, the floors were white as well, if a little more scuffed, and it made the place very bright.  Furniture was hypermodern, with egg-shaped chairs all hanging from fine chains, around a massive and hyper high-def television set that was just screen, no apparent border.

“Pardon the intrusion,” Elise said, as she stepped inside.  She saw a woman in the kitchen, and Elise’s eyes went to the knives in the marble knife block.  The woman backed away, not even thinking to arm herself.

Her squad followed her in.  Clint, big and cold, carrying an assault shotgun.  Raph, new, longer-haired, skinny, a little shaky, but still with that sense that he was dangerous, carrying a crossbow.  There was Nelson, who Elise hated being around in times of peace, but was more than happy to have along in a crisis, and who hated Elise back, in peace and war both.  He was round-faced, round-bodied, with stubble and a glimmer of mean-ness in his eyes.  And there was Rocky, who was newer than Raph but had the aura of being an old pro, which was a combination that made Elise more nervous than shaky Raph with a crossbow did.

The mom was pretty, pale with blonde hair, an hourglass figure, in her late thirties or early forties, but wearing it really damn well.  Her girls were maybe twelve, ten, eight, and six, pretty enough to be models, in clothes nice enough to deserve models to show them off.  Like the kind of fashion that was showcased in the big store windows in the fanciest stores in downtown Toronto.  Hair styled, everything nice.

“Who are you trying to impress?” Elise asked the mom, jabbing at the occasional art piece, tipping over flower vases with plants in them.  “Looked at your Go Foto Yourself galleries.  Perfect family, perfect everything?”

“If you want money, um, just let me put the kids in their room, we can lock the door-”

“You always lock your kids up?” Clint asked.

“No.  No, never, but-”

“We don’t want money,” Elise said.  “We want to talk to your husband.  We know he’s in.  Where is he?”

“He’s in his office, we don’t disturb him, especially when he’s doing precise work.”

“Yeah,” Elise said.  “I think, in a scenario like this we should disturb him.”

“We never disturb him,” the mom said, with emphasis, and she looked a bit scared now.

“Mom,” the oldest girl whispered.

“Shh.”

“In there?” Elise asked, as she crossed the apartment.

“Don’t!” the mom raised her voice, and stark fear crossed her features.  “We can’t-!”

Elise kicked the sliding metal door that led to the office, hard.  It rattled in its housing and it banged like a really shitty gong.

The door opened.  The guy inside was… sorta attractive, but in that ‘best looking guy on the block’ way, not model-esque like the others.  Tanned, with wavy black hair with a high forehead, bushy eyebrows, chiseled jaw, bit of a dimple, loose cotton shirt, sweatpants.  He was fit, and the way his skin was darker outside of the creases in his forehead suggested he’d spent time in the sun.

He took in the scene, tense.  Machinery hummed behind him.

“Mr. Asher?”

“That’s my first name, yes.  Asher Hodgston.  And you are?”

“Witch hunters, Witch,” Elise told him.  She held the bat at the middle and at the end.  She glanced from him to the bat and back again.

He swallowed, hard.

“Witch?” the wife asked.

“Does she know?” Elise asked.

He shook his head.  “She doesn’t need to.  They don’t need to.”

“Your eldest daughter thinks differently.  She tipped us off.”

A look of pain crossed his face.

She held the nail-studded bat out toward his face, forcing him to back up, as she ventured into the workspace.

A desk, four monitors, and a glass case with lasers flashing within.

In another case, a lump of white-gray material.

She found the catch and she opened it.

“Don’t touch it, don’t taint it-”

She dug fingers into soft material, and it was warm to the touch.  It was soft enough to stretch but firm enough that she could dig fingers in and lift the entire block.

“Don’t get it dirty!” he raised his voice.  One of the others might have motioned with a weapon, because he reacted to them, backing off just as quickly as he’d gotten angry.

She walked through the office door and she threw the material into the center of the floor.  It rolled a bit, picking up grit from the floor.

Mr. Hodgston dropped to his knees, looking at it.

“Clay from which life can be forged,” she said.  “Fancy stuff your husband works with, Mrs. Hodgston.”

“I stay out of his work.”

“Uh huh,” Elise said.  “I think he made you that way.”

“What?”

“I made her her own person,” he said.  “There’s no point if there’s no free will, I’m not a monster.”

“You’re a monster of a rare breed and all of this is on your head,” Elise told him, her voice getting heated.

“Made?” Mrs. Hodgston asked.

“Forged out of clay, with life breathed into you, you came to life,” Clint told her.

“With his tendencies, you were, are… perfect, aren’t you?” Elise asked.  “Not a speck of impurity or grit in you.”

“This is nonsense.”

“Can you tell me a childhood memory?  A real, verifiable one?”

“I have childhood memories,” Mrs. Hodgston said.  “Vacations by the beach.  Parents would argue sometimes, but they’d make up later.”

“You made her well,” Elise told the guy who was still on his knees, despondent.

“What will it take for you to drop this charade!?” the wife raised her voice.  “You’re scaring our children!”

“Didn’t you wonder why your kid ran away?” Nelson asked.

“Every minute, sometimes.  It breaks my heart,” Mrs. Hodgston said.  “She never leaves my thoughts.”

“She realized there was something wrong.  She snooped.  She went into the office,” Elise said.

“We’re not-”  The wife sounded intense.  She shook her head, looking away.  “-allowed to go into the office.”

She said it like she’d realized what she was saying before she was even done with the sentence, voice dropping.  Realizing how it sounded.

“Yep,” Elise replied, voice low.  She shot the woman a sympathetic look.

The woman looked away.

She glanced at the others, and Raph tapped the side of his neck.

Elise looked.  The wife was wearing a necklace of what looked like white gold plates connected to one another, the biggest one in the center an inch by an inch across.

“You think so, Raph?” she asked.

“Saw a glimpse, between the segments.”

“Those crazy eyes of yours, Raph,” Elise said.

“Yeah.”

Fuck.  How were they supposed to resolve this, without… without just opening fire indiscriminately?  Without the chance, however slim, of undeserving casualties?

She spoke slowly and carefully.  “Mrs. Hodgston, if you’re willing, I’ll make you a deal.  Your daughter’s downstairs in the truck-”

Teary-eyed, the wife made a small exclamation, hands to her chest.  “Please.”

“And we’ll give her back to you.  We’ll leave, without violence, with apologies…”

“Please-”

“If you take off that necklace.”

And there it was.  The brick wall, the immediate, kneejerk no.  Like she’d asked the impossible.  Damn.

“It’s more a symbol of our bond than our wedding ring.  I-”

“More important than your daughter?” Elise asked, testing, seeing the limits of the wall.

“No, but-”

“But?” Elise asked.

Seeing the emotions on this woman’s face, her heart sank.

Yeah.  This wouldn’t be easy.

“You’re not allowed like you’re not allowed to go in the office, huh?” Nelson asked.

There was a meanness to the tone that went beyond what Elise was comfortable with.

“It’s not like that.”

“That’s the deal, Mrs. Hodgston,” Elise said.  “Mr. Hodgston?”

The man, eyes downcast, kneeling, shook his head.

“Mr. Hodgston?”

“I do good for the community.  We give to charity, I build medical equipment and donate it to hospitals, my wife does low cost photoshoots, professional quality, for a hobby, she takes pictures of the homeless for a humanitarian project.  My children get good grades, they say their prayers every night.  They have friends, happy, who love them.  They have fans on social media.”

“They’re not real,” Nelson said.

“They’re real!” Mr. Hodgston roared.  “They’re living, they breathe, they love, they enjoy their shows, they get snarky, my youngest makes little clay figures of mythological creatures and does videos about them, she has thousands of followers!  Kati is student president, she plays violin beautifully!”

He got to his feet, his movements intensifying as his words did.  Crossbow and gun pointed in his general direction and he didn’t seem to care.

“I love them!”

Raphael aimed his crossbow at Asher Hodgston’s heart.

“Asher!” the wife shouted.  “They’ll kill you!”

He stopped in his tracks.  He turned his head, looking down at the blob of the clay of life, sitting on his floor.

“Take the necklace off,” he said.

“But-” was the response.

He didn’t say another word, didn’t look at her, and she didn’t finish her protest.

Elise watched as she undid the clasp, fought with it, because it had likely been a long, long time since she’d put it on.

The jewelry clattered as it touched the counter.

“There.  Done,” the wife said, like she was disgusted she’d had to do something so trivial.  Then, not seeing any change in their expressions, doubting that indignation, her hands went to her neck where the necklace had rested.

“Mom,” the oldest daughter whispered.

And there, on the side, fingers found the grooves that were less a scar or mark in flesh, and more like the etching a needle might make, digging into clay.  A four digit number: 2113.

“What is it?” she asked, as she turned, looking at herself in the reflective surface of the fridge.

“A doomsday clock, counted in people,” Elise said.  “We had to ask around.  See, having the lifegiving clay is only the first step.  The skill to make something out of it, yeah, that’s it’s own thing too.  But you also need power, and your husband… he’s from a fine family, one we don’t have any major issues with, but they’re not a powerful family.  So maybe, everything else being the same, we’d leave this be, warn him not to go overboard, check in once in a while.”

“Big maybe,” Nelson said.

She bit her tongue rather than reply to that.  It was important to be on the same page in the field.  “Husband doesn’t want to go the usual route, decides he wants a perfect wife and crafts her out of clay, and for the power, he makes a deal with something nasty.  I’m guessing those prayers your kids have been saying are to this thing.”

“Yes,” Mr. Hodgston said, quiet.

“And if enough people make that deal, ask for that big hit of power, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of seven thousand?”

“Seven thousand, nine hundred and nineteen,” he said.

“Millions die, you all included, and it all goes to hell,” Elise said.

With shaking hands, the mother knelt down, to where a bangle encircled her daughter’s ankle.  She had to work to undo the clasp, using a knife from the knife block, had to pull on the clasp.

The girl looked up at the group of them, tearing up, one hand on her younger sister’s shoulder, rubbing as if to reassure, when she looked like she needed all the reassurance in the world.

“Twenty-nine thirty,” Mrs. Hodgston said.  “On Kati’s ankle.”

“Oh god,” Kati whispered.  “I’m not real?”

“Fast climb.  How many years?”

“Four years.  It went down again, after,” he said.  “For the next child.”

“No thanks to you,” Elise said.

“No,” he agreed.  “They are so good, you have no idea, they’re such good children, they make the world brighter-”

“Do you want us to handle it, or will you?” Elise asked, with tears in her eyes.

“Handle?” he asked.  “Just like that?  You say that so easily?  Come on, no.  No, they- we could leave it.  We could wait until there are signs the number has gotten too high.”

“The number jumped by eight hundred in four years.  You could have had beautiful, lovely children by some beautiful, lovely wife you didn’t have to make out of clay,” Elise told him.

“Then they wouldn’t have been perfect,” he replied.

“You got greedy, and you having to make this decision in this moment is the price.  If just a few thousand more people made the decision to be this greedy, to take advantage of that kind of offer, or to reap the benefits of it and etch their own kids with the number, it would all be over,” Elise told him.

“You’re asking them to die for my greed.”

Elise didn’t respond.

“We could let them live.  At least until the number climbs.  You can decide a number, and at the first sign that it’s passed that number?  Six thousand?  Five thousand?”

Elise shook her head.

“Three thousand, even.  A bit more time?  A week together.”

“Pretty sure it’s over four thousand five hundred with the mark etched onto them by now,” she told him.  “We never know quite for sure what the number is getting up to.”

The man swallowed hard.

“You’re making another child in there, aren’t you?  The lasers, etching the clay?”

“A baby.  They’re to be twins.”

“Do you have the numbers for the twins yet?” Elise asked.

“No.  They answer a prayer from one of the numbered and that numbered individual or Other comes to pass a note under the door with the number on it.”

“And if someone’s gone and killed the person with number three, then you’d get the number three, potentially?”

“Listen, listen, please.  They might have started as clay, the marks may look like that, but they bleed red.  They cry.  They laugh- laugh beautifully.”

“Do you want to handle it, or should we?” she asked.

He drew in a deep breath, and he looked over at his family, huddled together in the kitchen, hugging one another, crying.  The youngest probably didn’t understand.

“Asher,” Elise spoke, the tone a warning.

“You,” he said, barely audible.

“You fucking coward,” she told him.  “Rocky?  The lab.  Total it.  Raph?  watch the door, pick off any runners.”

The family was sounding more agitated now.

“Nelson?” she let the word hang.

“The kitchen?”

The family was in the kitchen.

“Please.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Brooking zero sass, I am so not in the mood right at this moment.  Clint?  Help.  You and Raph pick this clay up off the floor, we can probably barter that crap.”

The others set into motion.  Clint and Nelson circled around either side of the kitchen counter, aiming, and one of the girls shrieked her fear.

She didn’t take her eyes off of Asher, didn’t break eye contact as he stared at her.  Until one girl scrambled over the counter, lifted up and forward by her mother.

Raph shot, and she went from forward momentum to backward momentum, bouncing back.

The girl shattered like baked clay.

Elise glanced from that to Asher Hodgston, who knelt on the floor.

She brought the bat down to his head, nails sinking in.

Leann drove, not speeding, not going slow.  She drove to drive and move them in a measured, unhurried way away from that scene back in the city.  The Hodgstons.

She reached across to the passenger seat, where Elise sat on a cushion because they’d modified the seat to hold the machine gun mount.  She tucked a bit of hair behind Elise’s ear.

Elise’s stare was a thousand-yard one, extending out the side window for the last hundred kilometers or so.  If Leann couldn’t see the reflection of Elise’s face, and if she didn’t know what had happened at the Hodgstons’ loft apartment, then she might have thought Elise was sleeping.

Each of them had their own techniques and talents.  If they had them before, from the bad moments that each of them realized there was a fight and that they needed to join the fight, they went to the Lighthouse to train in those things.  If they didn’t, then they trained harder, with some meaner people, and those things were forced into the open.  Sometimes it was little, like Elise and her proficiency with any weapon that was sufficiently impractical and grisly, and sometimes it was more profound, like Clint’s heart.

Leann was more middle of the road.  She kept them going.  A thump on the chest from her fist seemed like it could revive people a team of doctors and a defibrillator couldn’t.  She’d failed out of nursing school when it had all gone- well, before she’d gone to the Lighthouse, but the skills she’d picked up and retained went a long, long way to keeping the team patched up and able.

She liked to think that it extended to other fields.  Morale.  Support.  She cooked for them a lot of the time, and she might not have been the best at it, but nobody complained, and maybe her food was a medicine like a thump of her fist could be a defibrillator or a haphazard stitch job could help like field surgery from the next guy did.

But in moments like this, it wasn’t action that was needed, exactly.  It was presence, a kind silence.

Raph needed guidance, to find his way, he’d been through so much and he was so angry.  That was the kind of anger where, if they couldn’t train him to be collected and rational in the heat of it, he’d get angry and then get himself killed an instant later.

Clint took the bad moments hard, like any failure on any level was a mark against him as a person, and in those moments no explanation would stir him.  He needed firm feeling, care and love.  And it frankly terrified Leann that he was, right this moment, in the close company of Rocky.

She didn’t know Rocky, but she suspected Rocky, like, Nelson, needed to be kept away from people when things got bad for her.  The distinction was that Nelson got ugly in ways that put him at the top of a list of five people in Leann’s life that were ugly, and Rocky was adorable at fourteen and on the fast track to being gorgeous, the kid knew it on both fronts, and she’d use it to hurt people, now and worse in the future.

Depending, Rocky could bump Nelson from fourth to fifth place on the list, further down the line.

And there was Elise.  Leann was admittedly biased, because Elise was hers, from womb to world, but she was sure she had a firm grip on her daughter.  When things were quiet, Leann would go and she’d send a message to the boss, Samaniego, and she’d say her group needed a little rest so they could find their way back to center.  Elise would need the quiet.  It could easily be a day, maybe a week, before she’d say much, and-

“Turn,” Elise said.

“What?”

“Turn!” Elise said, sitting up.

Leann steered the truck over to the right hand lane.

To the off-ramp.

“And stop,” Elise said.

Leanne saw a rest stop, and decided that whatever else was going on, it was good to make use of it.

She pulled into the little lot.  There was a view from here to the town nearby.  Framed by two hills, with a ski lift in plain view.

“Why are we here?” Leann asked.

“I want to get Raph’s eyes on something,” Elise replied.  She was up, animated, unbuckling herself.

The van, trailing behind Elise’s truck and pulling into the lot, had the others inside.  Elise went straight to the back door, opening it.  Raph climbed out, squeezing past her, while Clint got out the other rear door, and circled around.  Rocky, who’d apparently been napping in the back, climbed out by Clint, combing fingers through hair that had gotten messed up as she’d napped.

Leann turned off the engine and climbed out, stretching.

“Hey mom,” Elise said.

“What’s going on?” Leann asked her daughter.

“I’ve swung by this direction a few times, and every time I do, I get a bit of a feeling like someone’s giving me a nudge.  Go on, Elise, hurry on your way.”

“Someone or something?” Nelson asked, as he got out of the van.  “Very different things.”

“Or both?” Leann asked.  “They can be the same thing.  A someone that’s also a something.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said.

“I figure maybe we can exercise a bit?  Stop from getting blood clots in our legs.”

“I’ve got to go water a bush,” Nelson said.  “I’ll watch the vehicles.”

“We’re going to hike, Mom.  Just look around, see what’s up.  Do you want to come?”

Disquieted, Leann just nodded.

She didn’t want to interfere, or to stop Elise from developing… whatever bonds she’d develop with these kids.  Samaniego was putting them together to train, putting Elise in charge, and when Leann said she wanted to go to make sure they were safe and healthy, he’d treated it more like… like a concession, than something he thought was desirable.

Twice in the last five years, there had been groups from the Lighthouse that had gone out to run ‘errands’ and they hadn’t come home.  Further down the road, Leann was pretty sure, Elise’s group would be asked to step up, after another squad didn’t come back from an errand.  They’d be young, fresh, talented, with blades honed and senses sharpened, their talents on full display.  Ready to step up.

Elise being able to work together with these younger people was so important, in that regard.  That teamwork could make or break the difference when it came to the big question: would Elise eventually be part of one of those groups that didn’t make it back?  To be replaced by an even younger group?  Would members of her group train others before then?

Where would Elise find herself, on this cycle?  Where would sweet, introspective Clint?  Where would this new boy, Raph?

The path from rest stop to town went through the woods and under the highway, and the woods were tranquil.  Leann checked that she had her weapon, just to be sure.

At Raph’s suggestion, though, they didn’t go to town.  Instead, as the path curved, they headed straight, deeper into the woods.

She trailed behind, watching them.

Watched as Elise stared off into the distance, still coming to terms with what had happened with the Hodgston family.

Elise did that a lot.  She was outgoing and vivacious, and on an ‘errand’ she was aggressive without being stupid, ready to jump into things or protect people.  But after a bad day, she fell into this kind of quiet.  Now that Leann knew what she was looking at and now that she had seen Elise come through these periods of quiet with so much strength, she was okay with it.

A long eight years ago, Elise’s father had stumbled onto a trinket.  A magic item, maybe a cursed one.  A clock with a spherical face that let the distorted face be seen from any direction, so blue that it evoked deepest sea or furthest sky.  The sphere had been inset on a golden base, surrounded and held in place by golden, cherubic infants bearing snakes, with more golden snakes for the minute and hour hands.

A rival at his work had disappeared.  Then a woman at his workplace, that she’d frankly suspected him of having an affair with.  Then his boss.  The company hadn’t survived the restructuring that had followed, and many more people had gone missing.  People had investigated, including private investigators that might have been practitioners, if she applied details that she knew now that she didn’t know then.

That attention had become fevered when the coworker her husband had had the affair with had returned twenty-four days after her departure, symbols etched into her skin and scarred over, naked, feral, and angry, choosing him to target and attack before being gunned down by a security guard at her husband’s work.  It had redoubled when she mentioned the strange animal her husband had killed and bagged before throwing it in their trash.  She’d found it and been so creeped out, but she’d taken his word for it when he’d described it as a chance mutation of something like a coyote.

Too many had gone missing but when people had investigated, her husband had claimed innocence.  The investigators hadn’t been able to find the clock, but Leann had seen it present before the interview, noticed it gone after, and she’d noticed its reappearance in her husband’s ‘man cave’ when the attention had died down.

She’d pried, and he’d attacked her, wrested it from her grip, and used it on her.

Opening a door to a primal, far-away, alien place where the golden sky screamed and impossible beasts lurked in dark wilds.

The cost of that device, she’d learned, was that it could send things back, on a schedule, and he’d often have to fight and kill things it sent out, to have the ability to get rid of anything in his way.  Like her.  Sometimes it sent beasts, sometimes men, sometimes men who could work magic.

She’d forged her way to the scheduled exit, only to find that a young Elise had been sent through, for asking too many questions, for refusing to take no for an answer.  She’d chosen to save Elise instead of leaving, and then she’d traveled and waited across another twenty-four days for the next exit.

She’d come through as someone who saved people.  Elise as someone very good at doing a grisly amount of damage to others.

Authorities had taken her husband, private investigators had taken the clock, and the Lighthouse had found them.  A Lighthouse-provided therapist had done her damndest to convince them that it was all a lie, that they were fabricated, delirious memories conjured in while they were in the secret captivity of her ex, Elise’s dad.

Because the Lighthouse didn’t need those who weren’t committed.

Leann had known she had to fight to protect others from the same fate, and she wished dearly that Elise didn’t feel the same way.

Her feelings about her ex were part of why she hadn’t gone up to the Hodgston’s loft.  She’d stayed behind with the older daughter, who had had a teenaged Romeo playfully take off her jewelry and found the number, then pried into her dad’s affairs.

If Leanne had gone, she’d have been too upset, given the similarities of the situations.  If she’d gone, she couldn’t be a support now, she’d reasoned.

Except as much as she knew her daughter, Elise was talking and strategizing, discussing things, and proving to be alert and eerily fine.

The thousand yard stares still happened, but they were fewer and further between.

Elise wasn’t struggling to function, like she might normally do.

Maybe that had been happening for a good long while, now.

Leann found herself wishing her daughter was struggling.  That the decisions made and the reality of having to deal with the children marked with numbers were weighing on her more.

She would have felt so much better than she did right now if Elise was sobbing and inconsolable over the decisions they’d had to make.

“There,” Raphael said.

The younger group crossed the woods, and Elise glanced back at her mom, flashing a smile.

Leann smiled back, but it was an expression put out there by sadness, not anything else.

“Wards,” Elise said.  “Practice, by a practitioner.”

“This is a lot,” Leann observed, as she got close enough to see.

Most wardings she’d seen were over a small area.  A glade or a clearing, maybe a patch of forest as large as this one.

It looked like a straight line.  That meant the curve, if there even was one, was very gentle, drawing out a circle over a very, very large area.

Was this warding over the town?

“Are they keeping things out?” Elise asked.  “Or are they keeping something in?”

“What the hell is big enough to deserve a cage this size?” Raph asked.

“Samaniego has talked about things,” Elise said, glancing at her mom.  “Beasts from a time before beasts had defined form.  Forms fed by the imagination of savage humans.”

“Could be other things,” Leann replied.

“But stuff like that, right?”

“Say yes.”

Leann paused.  “Yes.”

Elise nodded, bending down to examine the little organized arrangements of sticks and twine, and stone, and other things.  The others fanned out.

Leann turned.

A woman stood with her back to the same tree that Leann was standing by.  Black hair, her back to Leann, face not visible, hands in pockets.

“I have things I want to protect, same as you,” the woman by the tree said.

Leann reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone.  She held it to her ear, so talking to herself wouldn’t seem so strange.

“Are you practitioner or Other?” Leann whispered.

“Other.”

“Of what sort?”

“I’d rather not say.  Not Fae, not a sort where the label would stir much in the way of worries, if you knew all of the labels.”

“I see.”

“A colleague, admittedly a Fae, suggested that you have kind eyes, despite the blood on your hands.”

“I’d like to think I do, yeah,” Leann whispered.  “I worry sometimes about how much blood there must be, and how far the kindness gets me.  I’ve let Elise become this.”

“It’s why I’m approaching you.  In another circumstance, I’d disturb your cars, and the man there would call you all back, and you’d hopefully consider your options before going home.  Or I’d send an Other to distract, or an echo you could normally deal with… except for the fact your tempers are frayed, you’re tired, and two of you might come into sharp conflict as a result.”

“Are you that clever a creature, Other?” Leann asked.

“I’m a creature who thinks of little else other than… this.”

“The boundary?  This warding?”

“If you pressed, I think you’d find things you’d feel obligated to mention to others.  These things would reach the wrong ears, and life would become more complicated for your people and mine.  I swear to you, I’m trying my hardest to prevent any undue harm to human, to Other, to you…”

“Are we a distinct group from humans?”

“Distinct from humanity, I think.”

“Ahh,” Leann made a sound.  “Maybe.”

“I think you want the same for your daughter, at the very least.  Protection from undue harm.”

“And you want to?”

“I’d ask you to suggest to the other members of your group that this might be something contained with good reason.  It isn’t.  But if you can suggest it, it buys us some reprieve.”

“Who is ‘us’?  You, a Fae…?”

“I meant us, as in your group and mine.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t, I know.”

Leann stared at her daughter, and watched her talk to Raphael.  Giving him advice.

“There are members of… my contingent-”

“Of the Lighthouse.”

“Yes,” Leann murmured.  “They’d hear there was something scary here and they’d feel compelled to stick their noses in it.”

“If they’re that gung-ho, I can throw them bait to direct them elsewhere.”

“And practitioners who would want to know who made and claimed responsibility for this barrier.”

“I think I can deal with them too.  But your group… they have sharp eyes in their midst, they’re driven, they’re hungry, and yet they don’t have anything pulling them elsewhere.  I think they’re too tenacious.  I’d have to send a gunman into their midst to get them to stop, and that’d attract attention.  The Lighthouse would work it out.”

“And you’d be murdering a group where half of those present are minors.”

“Yes.  I could say some words about who it is that’s leading them into that kind of situation, where murder is possible, but… I don’t want to be enemies, Leann Norwood.”

“No,” Leann replied.

The woman on the other side of the tree went silent.

Leaving Leann with her thoughts.

She gave it her due consideration, aware that the little decisions she was making here might be ones that pulled her away from the Lighthouse.

At the end of the day, she had no quarrel with Others.  She wasn’t bothered by the Fae if they didn’t bother her.  Which, yes, some had, and she’d pumped buckshot into their faces as payback.  But that wasn’t her battle.  It wasn’t what drove her to fight.

If this Other was asking politely to be left alone, if the town wasn’t suffering in any obvious way?  She wasn’t going to push.

Men like her ex-husband scared her more than any ghost or goblin.  Practitioners did.  Selfish people scared her.

She’d had to put a bullet in Skye Hodgston, the oldest daughter, and then she’d cleaned the dry clay out of the back seat before the others could come down.  And when that girl hadn’t been that far away from Elise in age… it sat heavy.

She was tired.

“Thinking on this situation in front of us, I think I’m a little uneasy with the idea of poking around wards and protections that might be keeping something dangerous in,” she told the group.

They looked back in her direction.

“And I’m pretty gosh-darn easy with the notion of getting back to the city with enough time to catch a movie in the hotel room.”

“You think there’s something here?” Raph asked.

She shrugged.  “They look like protective wards, to my uneducated eye.  I don’t see anything too tricky.  Seems to me that someone out there did the legwork for us.  I say we leave that alone.  We’ve done enough today.”

Elise looked around at the scene, then jerked a thumb back in the direction of the path.

When Leann stopped leaning against the tree, glancing around, she couldn’t see the woman she’d just been talking to.

The other members of the group headed back the way they’d come.  Leanne fell into step beside her daughter, picking her footing as she trudged through vegetation.

“I guess if the wards end up going down, we should check that something big didn’t get loose?” Raph asked.

“Maybe,” Leann said.  “When anything this big goes to pieces, it’s usually a sign of trouble on the horizon.”

“Let me get this abundantly clear,” Gerald Haris addressed the group of Witch Hunters.  “Because I haven’t come down this direction all that often…”

They looked at him.  Many young faces, some as young as fifteen, others as old as their mid-20s.  Meanwhile, Gerald Haris was six foot six, broad in the shoulder, and long in the tooth at fifty-six.

Not many Witch Hunters made it to fifty-six, he knew.  That kind of instinct was usually an instinct for self preservation, and it conferred a sort of seniority.  The ones who had an instinct for killing scary shit that got them all the way to fifty-six got conferred a whole lot of other things, seniority included.

“…Something’s been annoying you all into going away every time you come this way?  But skinny Raph made it in?”

“We think.”

“And whatever sorts of things it does to make you need to go somewhere else… it stopped?”

Elise replied, “We’d get calls for other errands as soon as we got close to here, felt like the uni- your God, he wanted us to not hang around.”

“Uh huh.”

“But whatever was doing that, delaying and distracting, it stopped a few months ago, but there was always a… mess, as you got close to the perimeter.  Subtle at first, when the perimeter was strong, but we got tipped off that it wasn’t strong anymore… Raph’s last messages back said there were a lot of ghosts and spirits hanging around the border.  Different kind of barrier.”

“Uh huh,” Gerald Haris replied, rolling those two syllables around in his mouth, giving them a lot of inflection.  “Right.  And now we’re here, we’re looking to go in, and there’s no ghosts?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “No ghosts.  And no-”

“No spirits either?”

“No obvious ones.”

“Uhhh huhhh,” he rolled those syllables around in his mouth again.  “No anything?”

“Not that we can see.”

“Gates are wide open, coast is clear, Raph went in and didn’t come out?”

“Yeah,” Elise said, sounding tired of this back and forth already.

“I know your mother, bless her soul and memory both, didn’t raise an idiot…”

“I know it looks a hell of a lot like a trap, Haris.  I know,” Elise told him.

He chewed on his tongue for a second, bobbing his head in a nod, looking around.

Elise, Clint, Rocky, Renfroe, Francis, and Haris himself from the Lighthouse.

Cleo Aleshire from Montreal.  A different breed.  Thirty or so, black, hair short and oiled close to the scalp, red lipstick, heavy eye shadow, and a level stare.

She hadn’t gone to the Lighthouse to get any particular talents sharpened or honed or pulled out of her.  No, she’d taken another route.

Cleo was hanging back, not engaging.

“Somethings and someones get hard to tell apart when you’re talking about Others, you know?” Elise said.

“Is this going to make my head hurt?”

“Mom thought it was something big, and it would’ve been something that’s also a someone.  But Raph investigated, like Raph has a tendency to do…”

“Yes.”

“…and he doesn’t think it’s a someone.  It’s something, for sure, because you don’t build a barrier for nothing, but it’s not a someone-something.  It’s a lot of someones.”

“Uh huh,” Haris replied.  “You really want to take this piece of bait, huh?”

“Yeah,” she replied.  Behind her, Clint, Rocky, and Renfroe nodded.

“You good with this, Cleo?  Want to go for a walk, into the warm loving embrace of a primed bear trap?”

“I’m good,” Cleo replied.  “Lead the way.”

“Speaking of leading ways, Elise!”

“Yessir?” Elise replied.

“If you want to do this-”

“I do.”

“Then you can lead.  If it’s a trap- I loved your ma.  She was sweet and her cooking was… filling.  But if you want to do something like this you can lead the way, I make no apologies to her.”

Elise nodded.  “Am I in charge?”

“You know these kids better than I do, I’ve trained them individually but I haven’t worked with them as a group.  You have.”

“So… yes?”

“Yes, but I can override if I see fit.  If you’re getting too stupid about this, I’m pulling us out.”

“Get in the cars,” Elise called out.  “And before you ask, no, you can’t drive, you’re not sixteen yet, Francis.”

The kid groaned.

“Yeah, fuck off,” Elise said.  “I don’t want to get pulled over before we even get there.  Clint, you drive.”

“I hate driving,” Clint said.

“But you’re good at it for that same reason.  Go on,” she said.

“Let’s see how wide open and clear these front doors of theirs are,” Haris said.  “You can ride with me, Francis.  Youngest with the oldest, how’s that?”

Francis looked over in Elise’s direction, and she pretended not to notice.  The kid did his best not to show his displeasure, which was not a very good job in Haris’ estimation.

Kid needed to work on his poker face, or some damned Other would use that against him.  It was a weakness.

Haris climbed into the back of a car, because it let him spread his legs more than the passenger seat or driver’s seat could, resting one against the metal tube that ran down the middle length of the car.  Francis sat beside him, glancing down at Haris’ knee encroaching over the middle line of the car and pressing the metal in his direction as if Haris had taken a heaping shit there, instead.

The car puttered to life, Clint shifting the gears with a bit more force than necessary.

Haris had been injured more as he’d gotten older, and it was Samaniego’s style to keep them useful, so he’d put the injured to work as trainers if they were experienced enough, and paper pushers if they weren’t.  Haris had taught a lot of these guys individually, and as time went on he found himself thinking more about what they’d need to learn and what kind of exercises would get that across.  He saw stubborn, quiet Clint pushing the car too hard, and he started thinking about things that would teach the guy gentleness.

Maybe time with one of the dogs.  If one of the bitches had a pup that needed care, he could give it to Clint to give milk to.  Or one of the barn cats, he supposed.  He wondered which Clint preferred.

And that poker face, the disgust on Francis’ face… that would need something too.

They were situated far enough away that any force from the town that tried to come after them would have to travel a ways, but that blade cut both ways.

Gerald Haris leaned back, groaning, rolled down a window, and smoked a cigarette, watching out the window as if there might be some sign in cloud, tree, or in one of the rock faces that had been cut through to make way for the highway, that would let him know what this damn trap was.

It wasn’t the kind of place he’d go for fun.

It wasn’t the kind of place he’d go for self-abuse either.

But as they got closer and he leaned his prematurely gray-haired head out the window, Haris could smell it.  A town that smelled more like blood than some bloodbaths he’d walked in and out of.

“Where in the hell are you taking us?” Haris asked.  “You smelling this?”

“Nah,” Clint replied, then he clapped a hand against his chest, producing a hollow metal sound, hand knocking on the lid he kept over his heart.  “But my heart’s acting funnier than it usually does when we pass through.”

“Something big here, huh?”

“That’s what we were thinking, yeah,” Clint replied.

“Huh,” Haris grunted his reply.

It might have been a nice drive in, but Cleo was on her motorcycle, and it roared as she pulled alongside the vehicle, glancing inside, then roared again as she pulled ahead, going to the truck up front, where Elise and her group were.

Violating traffic laws all the while.

Cleo relaxed her speed, and fell back until she was next to Haris’ window.  She flipped up her visor again.  “She wants to know where we’re going.”

“I’m thinking anything this big, we’re going to need to figure out where we’re staying.  Let’s stop at the best place available in town, see if our boy Raphael stopped in there, yeah?”

Cleo nodded, then sped up, evading an incoming car, and then passed the truck, shouting a single word to Elise before pulling ahead of them all, speeding.

Elise stuck her thumb out the window.

They reached the highway, and they reached the town.

“Perimeter is somewhere near here.  We’d never used to be able to get in.”

“Watch out for that motorcycle.  If they’re pulling something, she might take a spill,” Haris said.

“Right.  Seems like she’s okay.”

“Your eyes are better than mine, Clint,” Haris said, groaning the words, right arm stretched all the way across the top of the back seat, left arm bent at the elbow but still stretched some.  “Smell that.”

“Feeling it, yeah,” Clint replied.

Haris could almost hear it.  The drum of that heart that had been torn out of the boy’s chest and dropped back in.

“Shit!” Clint swore.  He swerved, and Haris’ hand gripped the door, fingers outside the window.  Haris looked, and he saw- there was someone in the middle of the road.  Tall, muscular-

He lunged, hand reaching out, grabbing for the throat.

The stranger’s hand went out too- a deft slap, almost a parry, to push Haris’ hand away.

“The fuck?” Clint asked.  “What was that?”

Haris brought his hand to his nose, and he sniffed, hard.

It smelled like sunshine and blood, but everything here smelled like blood.  It smelled like blood without smelling like gunpowder and that offended him.

At least this one smelled a bit like steel, under the sunshine.  Smelled like honey and wine and fucking flowers.

He snorted, then horked a loogie out the window.  “Fucking Faerie.  Fucking fuck fuck I hate the fucking things, fuck.  That’s a bad fucking omen, fuck!”

“Easy,” Clint said.

Haris leaned into the window and he stuck his head out.  Then he hollered, “Elise!”

She stuck her head out as well, one hand over her ear, keeping hair out of her face.

“That was a Faerie!”

“We think so!” she said.

“And you still want to do this!?”

“For Raph!” she hollered back, hand cupped by her mouth.

“Fuck!” Haris swore.  “Fuck, I’m not leaving you to do this yourselves, but fuck me, if I have to deal with that fucking shit again…”

“He was trying to rile us up,” Clint said.

“I fucking know he was fucking trying to rile us up!” Haris raised his voice.  “God fucking damn it.”

“You going to be okay?” Francis asked.

“Don’t fucking condescend to me when you can’t even shave yet, boy.  Have you been trained in what to do with this shit, boy?”

“I started with this shit, sir,” Francis said.

“Yeah?  Shit.” Haris grunted.  He gave the boy a rough pat on the arm, and he pulled his knee back so it wasn’t encroaching on the boy’s space, even though it made his joints hurt some.

They didn’t have much farther to go.  Elise’s car turned and they pulled into a grungy motel, only to find there wasn’t enough parking for both them and the truck the others were in.

The motorcycle was already parked, but instead of taking a spot, Cleo had pulled it up to the walkway by the front office.

As Haris stuck his head out, looking to see if any cars might be making room, Cleo folded her arms, a single finger pointing.

At another pair of vehicles, a nice BEWC in gleaming black, and a sporty blue thing that he might’ve expected a woman to drive, that had a reddish-haired young man leaning against the door instead.

“What do you want to do?” Clint asked.

“Shhhhh,” Haris shushed him.  He listened.

“We’re getting increasingly surrounded,” the reddish-haired guy with the blue car said.

“I’m aware.  It’s fine.  Raquel?  Look into… any other option.  If the locals want us to go, we’re going to stay, but we’re not staying here.  Any house that’s being rented out, if it’s passable, maybe look into the cabins.”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Stay safe and stay close to innocents,” Reid said.  “It’s dangerous out here.”

The girl walked from the car to the sidewalk, glanced around to make sure the coast was clear, and then jogged across the road, deeper into downtown, phone pressed to her ear.

“Wye, Reid?  If you’d help me talk to this group…”

The man in charge looked around.  He had glasses perched on his nose, a glove on his hand in high summer, and clothes better fit for some bank party in Toronto than a town in west Ontario.  He looked like he exercised, but he didn’t look like he got exercise.  It was a fine distinction to Haris.

Haris popped his door open and climbed out.

He snorted, and the place smelled like drains, drugs, black mold, night sweats, and depressing sorts of intercourse.  At least some of that was Other.

“Are you the one in charge?  Abraham Musser,” the man with the glasses said.

“Gerald Haris, and no, I’m not the one in charge here.”

“Who is?”

Haris pointed at Elise, who’d climbed out the side of her truck.

“You look young enough to be my illegitimate child,” Abraham said.  “Oh, this is going to be a shitshow, isn’t it?”

“Could be,” Elise told him.

“Who are you with?”

“The Lighthouse.  Most of us.”

“We have arrangements with the Lighthouse.  Nonaggression pact.  We supply you with Aware.  The building in Winnipeg.”

“Surely you can name the person in charge of ‘the building in Winnipeg’,” Elise said.

“I can.  Bristow?  He was a colleague.”

“Was is the operative word,” Haris called out.

“A damn shame.  We’re hoping to get back to a position where we can keep supplying you.”

“They’re behind, aren’t they?” Haris asked Elise.

“Are they?”

“I think so.  They were supposed to get back to that position weeks ago.  We’re going wanting,” he called out.

“That’s troubling,” Elise said.

“Are you that eager for a fight?” Abraham Musser asked.

“A fight… or concessions.  A healthy bribe keeps us out of your way,” Elise said.

Gerald turned his head, sniffing.

His mouth turned up in a sneer, the sneer became a leer.

“Careful,” he growled the word, both as a warning to friends and a warning to this Abraham Musser.  “Is this that girl you sent off?”

“Is what that girl you sent off?”

Haris huffed out a laugh, which became another wheezing laugh.  He shook his head.  At least, being big, it took time for drugs to get to him, and this smelled like drug.  “Cover your-hh, mouth.”

Francis and Clint covered their mouths as best they could.

He turned to glare at Musser, who met the glare with a level stare of his own.

Yeahhhhhh.  Fuck this guy.  Fuck the Faerie, fuck anything getting this complicated.

Lower face pressed into elbow, motioned to Francis, making a gesture for a weapon.  He was aware that civilians all around them were starting to smile and laugh.

Francis handed him a one-handed crossbow.

This was what the kids were carrying these days?

The drug was starting to get to him.  He motioned, and when the kid didn’t move to hand him something better, he stooped down, looking.

The kid was smiling, laughing to himself, in a choked, uneasy sort of way.

“I will leave you to that,” Musser said.  “If you survive, reach out, I hope to re-establish old business again.”

This would have to do.

Haris aimed the crossbow.  He aimed at the back of Abraham Musser’s head.

He pulled the trigger, and the little arrow, solid metal from tip to feather, shot off.

The little thing had kick.  Good engineering.

And Musser caught it out of the air without turning around to look.

The drug was getting hold of him.  Bastard inconvenience.  Haris slumped against the car, thoughts dissolving as his brain became a stew of panic laughter and all the mental chemicals that were supposed to evoke it.  He dropped the dinky little crossbow into the open window.

“Maybe I’ll kill you,” Musser said.  “Want this back?”

He couldn’t bring himself to respond.  Every passing moment made it harder to process everything, and he’d- he’d been drugged and poisoned and cursed a whole lot over the years.  He liked to think it gave him resistances and immunities, but it was really fifty fifty as to whether he had picked up some resistance or some weakness from a given event.

He watched as Musser walked over to Elise, peering around, maybe to look for cameras or bystanders.

Clint pulled his own heart out, black and bulging with alchemy, and the smile on Clint’s face dropped away.

Yeah, Clint had his own perks.  The ability to hold something in his heart and put it away.

The guy grabbed top and bottom of window and hauled himself out.

“Musser!” the guy with reddish hair called out.  “Behind!”

Abraham Musser backed off from Elise, eyeing Clint and Clint’s torn shirt with the gaping hole in his chest.

Clint opened his car door, bent down, and pulled out one of the emergency kits, one eye on Musser.

“Let’s go,” Wye said.

“Is this your practice saying to go?”

“Common sense.  Let’s walk away, make an agreement, unspoken on their part, to just… not cross paths.  How’s that?”

Clint turned to Haris, and smeared something foul-smelling at the entrance of his nostril.  Haris’ face screwed up, his sharp sense of smell filling up with the smell of ass instead, and he turned away.

The smile fell off his face.

“There we go,” Clint said.

“There we go, and there they go,” Haris growled.  “Running?”

“Let’s call it a gentleman’s truce,” Musser said.

“You were willing to let us die and you were willing to hurt our Elise Norwood.”

“I’m sure you’d do the same if the tables were turned.  Wye’s right.  You came here for reasons, we came here for reasons, let’s not get distracted.”

“We came here to see what’s making this place stink,” Haris growled.  “And right now you’re not smelling like roses.”

“It’s not us.”

“I’m fifty-six years old, you know,” Haris said.

“I’m sure you’re proud,” Musser said.  “Either drive, Reid, or get out of the way so I can.”

“Fifty-six years old and I’ve learned to trust my instincts, something that goes double when I get a whiff of anything Fae.”

“You’re being manipulated.”

“I’m cutting past the manipulative shit and doing what feels right, and you crossed our Elise, you’re giving me all the bad vibes, hold up one moment.”

“I don’t think I will,” Abraham Musser said.  “Excuse us.”

Haris slapped the trunk of the car twice in quick succession.  Clint hurried to pop it.

Haris got one of his guns, hauling it out of the trunk.

The bar that had run down the car was a gun barrel.  It was technically called a punt gun, eight feet long, two inch barrel, ninety nine pounds loaded, with three-quarters of a pound of that being the gunpowder.  He had to take three steps back to get it clear of the back of the vehicle.

The gun slapped down on the hood of the vehicle, because he couldn’t hold it and shoot it at the same time.  The sound of that collision and the denting of the hood got the practitioner’s attention.

He saw the whites of Musser’s eyes as the man realized he might not be able to catch this with that tricky glove of his.

Musser, in the midst of pulling out of the spot they’d parked in, hauled open his door and ran clear.

The shot was concussive enough to lift up the front of the car Clint had driven in, and the massive amount of shot that hit the side of the practitioner’s fancy little black car lifted both left tires a good foot off the ground.  He could have aimed for the man, but taking a good chunk out of the car made his point just as well.

He watched them run for it, crossing the street where the cars had parked, the drivers leering.

“Wake up our guys and burn the car before people start coming to,” Haris said.  “Start with Elise, she’s technically in charge, and I’m too short on patience to lead right now.”

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