Summer Break – 13.6 | Pale

“Save your strength for five days from now, okay?” Avery asked.  “We might need some of that spiritual backup.”

A woman-shaped spirit lounged by her shrine, her skin patterned like an old fashioned china plate, blue florets on white, where age had led to some of that white taking on a faint gray cracked or scaled appearance beneath the smooth surface.  Her hair was coiffured into tight rolls, hard as anything else, her eyes orbs of blue-painted ceramic, but it was a watercolor-y blue.  More than anything, what made the spirits stand out was how the colors and light seemed to hit them differently.  Like they had been painted in after, or the saturation of the colors didn’t match up with the light, shadow, and lesser lights around them.  Dish was too bright, too blue, not dappled enough by shadow.

A collection of smoother stones arranged in a loose bowl shape that caught a lot of rainwater into a shallow depression.  Broken glass and bits of porcelain had been arranged in a pretty little pattern, filling up the gaps.  Moss and clover found purchase in between the stones at the base and ‘stem’ of the shrine, but didn’t actually encroach into the basin.

The spirit looked up at Avery, one arm hooked around the upper rim of the shrine, legs crossed.  Her ‘dress’ was hard to distinguish from the spirit’s skin, with no lines or seams to mark the distinction where one stopped and the next started.  The ruffled, decorated hem didn’t move in the wind any more than the stones that made up the shrine did.

Avery shuffled her weight nervously, then reached for her bag.  She dug inside, and grabbed the roll of paper towels she’d stuffed inside.  “May I?”

The spirit stared at her.

Avery approached the shrine itself, stared down by the blue eyes.

“I was a bit rushed the last time I stopped in, bit awkward,” Avery told the spirit, “or a lot awkward.  But I didn’t mean to be rude.  I guess with the fine china type stuff, you might put a lot of stock in being polite?”

“Oh hey, the glass and china we put in there changed,” Avery said, as she looked into the stone bowl shape, lined with a mosaic of bits of glass and plate.  “It’s a bit more filled in, pieces connecting.  That’s going to be really cool to see as time goes on.  Nice!”

The spirit looked at her, or looked through her.

Avery huffed out a breath, got water out of her bag, and then cleaned her hands, rinsing them in water to the elbow.  Then, tearing off a bit of paper towel, she wet the paper towel in the clean water, reached-

The spirit reached for her wrist, holding it.  It didn’t feel like a hand, so much as a trick sensation.  Like lying in bed as a kid, blanket tangling around her foot, and having to convince herself it was a blanket and not a monster’s hand reaching out from the side of the bed.  Or worse, one of her sisters.  Like the hairs on her arm moving and it feeling like a hand was just barely hovering above her skin… except taken to the next level with a firm grip.  It was warm like stones in the sun.

Avery froze.

The spirit put a hand on the back of Avery’s head, then gently pushed down.  Avery felt like she could fight back or resist, but doing so might break this fine dishware spirit.

So she let her head be forced down toward the water.  She bent down, head low, face nearly touching water, and then kinda had to roll her shoulder to accommodate the movement the spirit wanted her to make with her hand.

The first movement was apparently a failure, because the spirit moved closer to her, hand sliding down from wrist to hand, to manipulate Avery’s fingers.

This time Avery got it.  She cupped her hand, and brought water to her mouth.

The spirit let her go and moved away from her.

“That’s really good water,” Avery said.

The spirit turned to look at her.  Expression as unmoving as a statue, unsmiling, its hair and dress shifted, as if in a wind, a second or two of movement, the length of dress rotating around her, tightly coiffed hair ringlets stirring.

“I wouldn’t drink any still, standing water in most places in the forest here, I’d be worried about mosquito larvae and stuff, but I’d drink that again.”

The spirit dropped her chin, attention focused on-

Avery looked down at the water flask.  When she looked up, the spirit was looking at the basin, arm outstretched.

“I… thank you.”

Avery filled up the water flask.  She finished, drank more, then capped it.

The remaining water in the basin of the shrine flowed out, emptying through the cracks between materials and the bigger gaps between stones.

Avery took a few minutes to wipe things clean, to scrub traces of grime from bits of broken plate, and to use paper towel to pinch some little bits of mess and grit away.

“Just a bit cleaner for every visit, right?  Bit of shrine TLC?” she asked.  She reached into her bag and got a little thing of old fashioned dissolve-in-your-mouth hard candies, with blue streaks.  “This okay?”

She went to put it down on the lip of the shrine, but a white ceramic hand with a painted pattern on it inserted itself between her hand and the shrine.  She placed the candy directly in the spirit’s palm.

The spirit wasn’t solid, but the rules got blurry, especially as the spirits got more powerful.  Dish was able to lift the candy, and tried to be overly decorous and subtle in how she put the candy in her mouth, as if even being seen with her mouth open would be gauche, but by trying so hard at that, she ended up being far more awkward and noticeable.

Avery beamed a smile at her, which only made the spirit look away.

Avery put three more around the rim, then sealed the bag and dropped it and the paper towels back inside.  She did her best attempt at a curtsy, because that was what she’d put down in her notes for Dish.  It wasn’t a very good attempt, and felt weird when she was wearing running shorts.  She kept her hands at her sides, wrists bent, ankles crossing as she bent her knees.  “Thank you for your service.”

The spirit stared at her.  Avery felt a flush creep over her.

Dish responded with a curtsy of her own.  The stiff, hard-material skirt moved as if it were fabric in Dish’s hands.

She got the salt shaker out of her bag, the contents a sea salt mixed with some basic cleansing herbs and run through a blender.  She walked to the next shrine, phone in one hand, thumbing her way slowly through pages, periodically dashing out a bit of salt.  “Wraiths begone.  Echoes out.  Ghosts go away.  If you want in, we expect you to cooperate.  Wraiths begone, shoo, ghosts…”

Given the size of the perimeter, there was actually a fair bit of ground between the sixteen shrines.  It was a good ten or fifteen minute walk, her attention divided between the phone, looking up how to curtsy properly for next time, looking out for possible trouble, and using the salt shaker.

Mannn… this next shrine.  She hadn’t enjoyed building it, and she didn’t enjoy the resident.

There was an outcropping of rocks and trees that had kind of formed a false hill, dead branches, fallen wood, and moss creating lopsided hill that had very soft ‘ground’ that wasn’t dirt.  It felt constantly like her foot would find an especially soft patch and go right through, and the difficulty of finding good footing made the uphill trudge a slog in a way she didn’t usually find hiking.  It wasn’t even a big hill, but she felt tired climbing it.

The complex echo standing behind the shrine wasn’t nearly as complex as Edith, and it wasn’t really vocal, either.  The heads of vague canine predators were stacked up atop one another in a vague approximation of a human figure, in a very squint and you can see it way.  None of the heads faced her directly, and mouths were open, not really muzzles so much as zig-zags of fangs and fur that couldn’t be easily told apart from one another.  Like the other spirits, the lighting sat wrong on him, making him high-contrast, murky light and deep dark that disappeared into the shadows of trees behind him.

His shrine was dead branches and sharp bits of rock, forming a kind of inverted triangle or cone shape, point touching the ground, scraggly and sharp bits pointed up.  They’d used a single loop of barbed wire that hadn’t been quite long enough to encircle the upended pyramid of jagged shapes, so they’d used cord to help secure it.

When she didn’t look directly at the complex echo, she could see the young guy it had used to be.  The lighter sections of the figure suggested wrinkled clothing, a slice of face visible in stark light, head slightly bowed, eyes peering out past shaggy hair, wary.  He wore a grey prison uniform with a decorated winter jacket over it.  A crown tattoo marked one hand.

Apparently, all the way over in Tripoli, there’d been a group of people who had bought a crap farm at rock bottom prices and then turned it into something of a drug production area, the house as a meth den, the barn as a pot grow op.  They hadn’t been very good at it, but for four or five friends, it gave them enough cash to scrape by.  One of the teenage guys had been a bit grandiose and paranoid, coming up with plans to make the operation efficient and to plan for how to fight back if cops came.  Dogs bred to be mean, gates with passwords, lock systems and hidden keys…

Eventually the others had gotten fed up, there’d been a fight, and this guy had hurt two of his friends really, really badly before another two people had managed to pull him away and restrain him.  They’d debated what to do, eventually called the cops on him, trusting he wouldn’t snitch, and he hadn’t.  He hadn’t lasted a night in jail.  The stories varied as to how and why.

Lucy had talked to Booker about this complex echo, in very general terms, describing him, and Booker had known the story.  Lucy had followed it up.  Everything fit: guy got angry, flipped out on friends, the meth hadn’t helped, but going by the look of him, he’d probably always been intense.

Intense enough to leave a distinct echo behind, which had quickly become a wraith, a nasty, combative echo, and then it had become complex.  He surrounded himself with canine spirits and metal spirits, with traces of other echoes he cannibalized and took into himself.  He wasn’t strong; he’d taken a big hit from something when making his way over from Tripoli to bloody Kennet, leaving him wounded and starting from square one in some ways.

But he was spooky.

“Heya, Lott,” Avery said.

A crowded grouping of shadowy heads with long snouts and jagged teeth remained where it was.  Spirits weren’t generally very good at responding.  Echoes were better but they tended to stick to their patterns, so that was tricky in itself.

Inside that shadowy, vaguely-human silhouette, the young guy stood, slightly gaunt, rangy with bulky jacket and loose, wrinkled prison clothes filling him out, glaring, there was a crown-shaped gap in the silhouettes above his head.

Avery put her bag down, capped the salt shaker, and put it away.  Then she pulled out the wolf mask with the nails in it, put it to her face, and tied the ribbons behind her head.

She looked at Lott, and he looked away, all heads and the echo in the center of the mass turning to look off into the distance.

She walked carefully over the mound, branches creaking underfoot.  As she approached, she could see other spirits disappear into the gaps in the ground, where moss, fallen leaves, and other debris hadn’t quite carpeted over the gaps.

She remained still, watching, until the spirits relaxed enough to raise their heads up.  One looked like a rat, long dead, parts of its body rotted away to reveal skeleton, other parts still furred, with no back legs, but instead three tails that trailed beneath it, as it walked upright without rear limbs.  Another was only shadow with glowing red eyes.

“Okay,” Avery said.  “Hi guys.  I hope you’re playing along.”

The spirits disappeared into the gaps in the mound.  They wove their way through, stirring up small insects and motes of dust, and then emerged again at Lott’s feet.

“That’s going to be a thing we need to figure out,” Avery said.  “You’re focusing your attention on different things.  Longlegs is making a battery, Dish is prettying up her shrine, and you’re… gathering underlings?”

The wraith didn’t look at her.  Only the blurry edges of his silhouette really moved.

Pretty much by definition, this guy wasn’t a team player.  But they’d offered amnesty, he’d taken it, they’d made him a shrine.  It covered a base they struggled with by helping with the echoes, because he could see, handle, and remove some of the problematic ones.

He was guard dog, territory spirit, he was an echo of a guy who’d been king of his hill and all of those things were wrapped up together.  He’d be super dangerous if he was full strength but he’d been heavily salted or banished or something and he’d agreed to the shrine thing.  Now the trick was to keep it all balanced.

“Can you hold back on the recruitment of lesser spirits to your shrine for a bit, until we can figure out a way to balance this stuff out?” Avery asked.

Lott’s echo clenched his fists, still not looking at her.  As he clenched harder, the shrine itself began to creak, like the pieces that were propped up were straining against the segments that held them in place.  All throughout the mound, branches began to pop and make crackling sounds, the sound of wood being bent and twisted to the limits of nearly snapping outright.

He was a spirit, he was an echo.  To handle echoes…

“We don’t want to stand out, right?  It’s good practice to avoid getting the attention of those people who’d come kicking in the door, you know?  We’re kind of already dealing with them.”

Gradually, the clenching released.  The echo nodded, but didn’t look happy.  His attention remained fixed on the distance.

“Cigarettes for you, Lott,” she said, laying three cigarettes and a plastic lighter on the shrine.

She heard a sharp flick, and looked at him, at the far side of the mound.  He held the lighter and cigarette.  When she looked down, only one cigarette remained on the shrine.  The smoke from the cigarette traced more snarling, fanged faces into the air around him, smoke taking the form of jagged shapes, not soft wisps and curls.  Or, perhaps, the shapes were already there in the air, jagged and fanged, and the smoke only filled them up.

She used water that wasn’t from Dish’s shrine to wash his, being careful not to wet the cigarette, and then fished in her bag for some packaged pepperoni.  She still wasn’t eating meat, only fish sometimes and only then to be polite or supplement her protein if, say, Declan used a spoon to eat his way through the remaining three-quarters of a tub of peanut butter, because there weren’t any better snacks.  But she wasn’t going to be like the dog owners who tried to feed their animals vegetarian diets.

She opened the plastic and approached Lott, watching him through the narrow eye-holes of the wolf mask.  He didn’t turn her way, but he looked at her sideways as she got closer.  It was hard to tell, because she couldn’t look at him directly, or she’d only see the shadows of the snarling heads.

She bent down, tore off a bit of pepperoni, and offered it to the dead rat spirit.  It snatched the morsel from her fingers.  She offered to the shadow, and it took it.

When she turned to go back for her bag, she saw Dish, standing at the foot of the mound.

“Hey.  What’s going on?  Why did you leave your shrine?”

Dish stared off to the side.

“Everything okay?” Avery asked.  She picked up her bag, and she pulled off the wolf mask tying it loosely to the side of her bag.  “Dish?”

Both Lott and Dish were staring off into the distance.

“Trouble?”

Dish reached out a hand.

Avery jogged down the hill, careful with the placement of her feet, and paused before reaching out, to take Dish’s hand in her own.  It was her turn to be gentle, to be careful in how she reached out between human and spirit.  Her hair stood on end before she made contact.

She saw through Dish’s eyes, a version of the forest with bright colors, rolling fog, everything as vivid as the individual spirits were against their backdrop of normal reality.  A collage reality, where everything was either too distinct and sharply outlined or separated from the rest, or they were blurry, blending in and blending definitions, fog and foliage mingling until the eyes started to lie.  Avery recognized it as the spirit world.

That viewpoint raced, traveling along the perimeter.  Dish pushed her own power into the perimeter, even though she wasn’t the strongest of spirits, and the same patterns that marked her skin traced their way along a wall, a border.

That same wall was starting to chip and crack.

Something dark and animal moved through a space that wasn’t spirit world, was foggy to Dish’s senses, too well hidden in the mists.

The perimeter traced its way around Kennet, but as that dark shape slipped forward, it found a place where a tree’s roots arched, a small triangle of space formed by the main trunk and root system, the reaching root that stuck off to the side, winding between rocks, and a trench.  A gap.

The beast that entered the gap was too large for the hole in question, which strained the root and strained the perimeter around it.  It wormed its way in.

Its head swung her way, eyes bright and yellow, opening wide until she felt like they would swallow her up-

She pulled away, closing her eyes and turning her head to the side, removing her hand from Dish’s.  She waited a few seconds, eyes shut, before opening them again.

Reality was normal again.  Dish waited patiently.

“Thank you for letting me know,” Avery said.  She retrieved her phone and dialed, to let the others know.  They’d be sleeping in, but if things got bad or if she got hurt, at least she’d be waiting twenty to thirty minutes for her friends to get to her, not hours while they worked out she had gone missing.

If they even noticed, with everything else going on.

She messaged Zed and Jessica too.  Messaging Brie was part and parcel of communicating with Zed.

Then, pulling out the black rope and tying it around her wrist, she set off.

Both Lott and Dish followed her.

“You’re coming?” she asked, stumbling, pausing.

They flanked her.

“Okay,” she said.

She sent a signal to Snowdrop as well.  Snowdrop was winding down after a busy night with the goblins, but as Avery communicated her worry, Snowdrop stirred to alertness, said something to the goblins keeping her company.

Avery used the black rope, and the wraith and spirit had zero trouble following.  They weren’t physical, and that meant things more than like, you could put your hand through them.  No, there were other aspects, like how they existed in reference to things.  Spirits were especially conceptual, so spirits could latch onto something and they’d piggyback along with that thing.  Or things latched onto them and got pulled into the spirit’s general flow.

Echoes were similar, but they latched onto feelings and impressions, memories and relationships.  They liked to stick to places or things, and could flicker between sticking to a house they were attached to and an object from that house, not paying too much attention to the distance between the two things.  It was harder, yes, but that tended to mean it burned more power to go back and forth, not that it’d take more time.  Because echoes weren’t necessarily smart about it, a lot of them burned themselves out.

Snowdrop was using the Warrens, and had company.  Avery could sense that.  With eyes open and Sight looking out, she could see a shift in the pattern of the fog, a dimming of the light, like a cloud had passed over the sun.  She couldn’t see past the leaves overhead to verify if that was true.

The Wraith Lott disappeared from her side.  As she rounded a bend, he was further up the path, pointing.

At a stick?  Sure.  There were still leaves on it, but it was a pretty good whacking stick.

“Talk first, scare them off, violence and killing only if it comes to that!” Avery called out.

He fell back to moving alongside her, not really running so much as he was just regularly to her right, eyes forward, standing there as she passed tree after tree.

Dish, meanwhile, was just hovering, legs behind her, the dress rippling and rotating, the blue orbs that were her eyes turned forward as well.

Water made it an awkward stretch to cross, so she used the black rope, leaping-

She windmilled her arms, and landed awkwardly on wet rock, sliding into the water, scraping her calves some.

She looked around and saw that there was a family who had a house on Kennet’s outskirts, bordering on the water, with a dock as part of their backyard.  Some old guy around thirty or so was fishing.  He’d stopped to look at her.

Ah frig, that scrape hurt, and it’d get noticed.  She was usually walking ahead of people, and this scrape on the back of her legs was something her family would see.  She picked a fleck of shale out of the back of her knee, and her fingertips came away bloody.

She found another vantage point, and made the leap with the black rope, more safely this time.  Feet thudded, the morning heat was warm against her skin, and her wet shoes squished a bit.  She was pretty sure they’d dry before she was home.

For now, she had to check on this intrusion.

Snowdrop emerged from a car that had been driven out into the woods and left there, a rusted husk.  Nat and Butty followed her, while Cherrypop rode on her head.

“Hey, nice,” Avery said.  “Arriving with the cavalry, based on a feeling?”

“Terrible teamwork,” Snowdrop said, dry.

“Ey!  It’s your fault, not mine!” Cherrypop cried out, banging a hand on Snowdrop’s head.

“Come on,” Avery said.  She reached out a hand for Snowdrop, and Snowdrop took it.  It made it easier for the both of them to use the black rope.  Snowdrop looked tired, dark circles under her eyes, and Avery knew she was pulling in double shifts, day and night, sleeping when she could.  It felt bad to pull her away, but Snowdrop got upset if she was left out.

Apparently Cherry sitting on Snowdrop’s head didn’t attach her to the black rope.  As they disappeared ahead, Cherrypop dropped out of the air, landing in the greenery.

“Godder!” Nat mumbled, picking up Cherry.

Avery was pretty sure Snowdrop was trying to be helpful and support the local goblins out of a bit of guilt over leaving.  As much as Avery was leaving friends, so was Snow.

She squeezed Snow’s hand.  Snowdrop smiled back.  Snow was wearing her headphones, but only around her neck, a top with a solid white front and a gray mesh back half, to allow for air flow, a dark gray skirt, and a pink belt that was mostly hidden by the top, the dangling end of the belt behind her.  The front of the shirt had two images, one upper left, one bottom right.  In the upper left: ‘what other mammal has two opposable thumbs?’, the opossum head, and two thumbs sticking out to point to her face.  In the bottom right, the opossum was shown full-body, sitting slouched, screaming, legs sticking out, revealing that it was the feet, not ‘hands’, that had the opposable thumbs.  ‘Aaaaaaaaa’.

Lott’s wraith stood ahead of the path, pointing, one hand raised in warning.  Avery leaped ahead to Lott’s side, slowed, and approached with more care, holding Snow’s hand in one of her hands, holding the heavy baseball-bat sized stick in the other, a few leaves bouncing as she moved it around.

The ground was littered with chewed up papers.  Avery bent down and picked one of the more intact ones up.

An eye, on a piece of paper barely big enough to cover her thumb.  A section of the paper had been bitten away.

“Did the dogs eat someone’s homework?” Avery asked, showing Snowdrop.

“That looks like the kind of homework most of us get,” Snowdrop said.

“Not me,” Cherrypop declared proudly.  “I didn’t go to school!”

Avery moved ahead a bit, checking, and heard a rustle.  She held a finger to her lips, urging the others to be quiet.  Dish and Lott watched her.

In the clearing was a black, vaguely canine beast the size of a horse.  His eyes were yellow, its fur black and curled at the very tips, and it looked more elegant than anything a groomer could accomplish with a real animal.

Its mate was lying down near its feet.  Not nearly as big as him, her fur was black near the body but red at the tips.  Everything about how she was shaped suggested, like… gender?  Avery was sure there was a term for it, but real life dogs were hard to distinguish the gender of, unless you looked between their legs.  Here, the female was slender, the male muscular, in ways that changed their very frames.  She was only half his size.  This was weird and different.

More different and weird.  The mama animal was breastfeeding.  Two pups and three naked human babies suckled at her teats.

“Okay, heck,” Avery whispered.

The larger beast growled.

One of the three babies, who had black hair curling like the big wolf’s did, turned its eyes toward Avery.  They weren’t human eyes.  The mother beast licked the baby’s hair, and it went back to the teat, gulping greedily, fingers winding their way into fur to get a better grip and pull itself closer.

“Guilherme left this out,” Avery murmured.

“They’ve been around for a while,” Snowdrop replied.  “The babies?”

“Right.  Maybe it’s a new thing.”

The male beast growled again, deeper.

“I hear you,” Avery told it.  “I see that your mate is feeding… don’t want to cause too much fuss.  Can you guys speak English?”

The beast growled.

The female stuck her nose up, nudging him, and he went silent.

“Stinky!  Tryhard glitterstink animals!” Cherrypop called out, top of her lungs, which wasn’t all that loud.

The beast growled again, walking over its mate and then standing over her.  She nosed at his leg, communicating something.

Nat growled at him, punching at the ground a few times with her one oversized arm that was more piercing than flesh.

“Guys,” Avery told the goblins.  “I’d like to go with talking things out if possible, let’s not taunt them.”

“Stupid fluffy-”

“Cherry,” Avery warned.

Cherrypop fell silent.

Butty stood at the edge of the clearing, smiling with too-white teeth, skin too blemish-free and glossy with sweat.  He wore a pink t-shirt as pants, legs through the arm holes, his wide beltline stretching the bottom end of the shirt out, a precarious grip on very slippery skin, but the neck-hole of the shirt stretched out between his thighs, an opening that threatened to let certain dangling things dangle out.

Well, it was nothing Avery hadn’t seen, with two brothers, a dad, and a grumble at home.  Probably.

The animals seemed agitated.

“Guys, shhh,” Avery shushed them.  “There were supposed to be more of you, I think.  Other… fauna ephemera?”

The male looked back, toward the perimeter and the space beyond it.

“Right,” Avery said.  “I kinda get it, if you have pups and… half-pups?  If you wanted a place to shelter…”

The female nodded.

“You know English?  You just don’t speak it?” Avery asked.

The female lowered her nose to the pile of suckling younglings, furred and furless, canines and humans with a bit more going on.

“There’s a process,” Avery told the animals.  “If you’re willing to follow it, maybe accept being watched or guarded by some other Others, or some security precautions… maybe we could talk about letting you in.”

She didn’t know what to say to them beyond that.  She wasn’t sure she trusted them, when they’d speculated that they were a ploy from Maricica.

One of the human babies started making complaining noises.  She couldn’t get a grip on the fur and she couldn’t get close to the teat.  One of the bigger, four-legged siblings kept moving and because she had to climb over her siblings to get in place, she kept losing ground.

The mother beast nudged at the complaining child, and even adjusted her position, but after one more frustrated attempt, the child began wailing.

It was a savage, rough wail of a sound that had defined Avery’s early years.  Declan and then Kerry.  The kind of noise that set nerves on edge, and ran against the otherwise idyllic scene.

The little human babe with chubby limbs, blood red hair and yellow eyes sat down in the dirt, screaming in every pitch that could make a caring human being upset.

Why was it that the more Avery got into this world, the more it felt like the kinds of actions that made a decent human being were punished?  This, with the baby she felt forced to ignore, when her instinct was to bend down and console it.  Talking about the Garricks, earlier today.  The heavier topics.  Earlier this week, Cleo had baited her with talks of negotiation and would have shot her for sticking her head out of cover.  If Avery had been a little nicer and a little more willing to talk things out and find common ground, she’d have been shot.

This felt like a trap too.

She didn’t want to become the kind of jaded, jerkhole practitioner who just gave up, who let a child cry, but…

Was that the way this went?  Did she stop wearing the deer mask and start wearing the wolf one more regularly?  Did she carry meat with her?

The shadows in this clearing were deep.  She wondered if that was the way these Fae beasts worked.

“What’s this?” Avery asked, holding up the paper with the eye on it.

The father-beast growled, faint, low, and quick.

The baby moved on all fours, crawl-hopping toward Avery.  Spry for a kid that looked that young.  Avery backed up, but as the kid drew nearer, the father-beast tensed, and the mother beast’s hackles rose.

“Heck no,” Avery said.  “I’m not-”

“Watch him!” Snowdrop shouted, twisting around to run as the father-beast dropped low, then leaped from crouch to a pounce-

Avery grabbed Snowdrop and bowled her off her feet, tipping the two of them over.  She stomped her foot three times, the third stomp barely more than a scrape of foot against grass at a bad angle.

The father-beast completed the pounce, but Avery’s wind-shoes kicked in, and a gust of wind helped propel her about ten feet along the clearing, hugging Snowdrop close.  She skidded on rain-wet dirt, grass, and some of the scattered papers with eyes on them.  Snowdrop became an opossum to make the process easier.

Avery lay there, holding the stick out as a weapon.

Snowdrop’s warning had been for the other wolf-thing that had come out of the trees.  It was a male, but slender and long-limbed, with silver-gray fur.

It had been right behind her.  One lunging, a distraction ahead of her, to get her to back up right into the slender one’s bite.

The mother rose to her feet, head low, and she stretched, front low, rear end high.  In the process of stretching, those milk-swollen teats receded.  Pups bounded around her, babies groping upward, until the process was done.  Then they seemed to lose interest, or to realize the meal had been put away.

As more wolf-things made their appearance, it was like deeper clouds had passed over sun.  The clearing was cast into false twilight, with only thin shafts of light stabbing through.

Five wolf-ish beasts in total, not counting the pups, canine and dangerous, each a work of art in how they moved, in the fur, in the eyes.  They entered from the fringes, one passing within five feet of Avery as she loped into the clearing, a wolf or very large fox with braids across whole sections of her silver-blue fur.

They gathered together, five of them, the pups out front, two babies sitting clinging to the father-wolf’s leg, another baby standing uneasily by the mother, fingers clutching the fur of her side.  They made a kind of tableau, posed in a way that humans would have trouble managing, without instruction, in a dark clearing where the light suited them.

There’s more than just wolves, aren’t there?

Avery turned, but as she turned, one wolf-beast sprung into action, moving into the woods to Avery’s right, not far from where the goblins were.  While she watched it move, another two moved out of sight, one at a walk, another at a run.

“You really want to do this?  You intrude and then you attack?” Avery asked, pressing a feeling into Snowdrop.  Snowdrop sat at her shoulder, peering behind her, while she turned her back to the wolves, watching the woods.

A snake longer than she was tall wove its way through branches, a lightning bolt of white scales with black speckles that took two seconds to pass in full.

The beasts had brought a twilight kind of gloom with them and they’d left it behind as they slipped out of sight.  With that gloom had come a quiet, silencing distant noises of the highway, of animals, birds chirping, insects buzzing.  Some scattered papers rustled, and some branches rubbed against branches, but the noise of the area had faded away.

Which made it very telling when she could hear the wings of birds flapping.

Nat screeched, and tumbled into the clearing.  She swore something that was unintelligible, because her tongue hadn’t fully healed.  Bloody tufts of gray fur were stuck to the piercings in her arm.  She looked past the strands of her long hair that covered a lot of her face to Avery, breathing hard.

“Fight,” Nat said.

Avery nodded slowly, trying to watch her surroundings, trying to keep a- sense of what Snowdrop was watching, sensing, feeling, what ears and whiskers told her.

Five days, Avery thought.  Five days, there would be the fight for the Carmine Throne, and then… then maybe, she hoped, she could put the wolf mask with the bent nails in it away.

For right now, Avery reached for her bag, touched the mask- small opossum hands acted as a second hand to help unknot it from the side of her bag.  Those same hands pressed the ribbon against the side of her head, while she tied it.

When she finished and turned more of her focus outward, she noticed that Lott stood next to her, a very different silhouette than the wolves here cast.  Dish was in the trees, sitting on a branch.

Lott reached for the branch she held.  She moved the end of it toward him.  He touched it, and she could feel the emotional resonance.

“You want it?” she asked, quiet.

Lott didn’t move.

She could really do with the echoes and spirits communicating better.

Edith had talked about this.  It had come up in the books.  Spirits represented, they attached, they could take up residence.  A lot of the time, it was stuff that made sense.  Put a spirit of sharpness into a knife, get a sharper knife.

But the other way was to force it a little more.

“We cooperate, Other and practitioner,” Avery said, watching the animals move.  Butty and Cherrypop had entered the clearing too, and they were kinda sorta watching each other’s backs.  “Lott, I’d like to think you and I can get along okay.”

Lott was silent.

The father-wolf remained where he was, sitting.  It felt like the tableau was coming together again, a trap closing in, but Avery wouldn’t last very long on seeing that final image with everything in its specific place.

“We’re linked by deals.  This branch is of this terrain, it’s linked to you by the shrine.  I protect this place, and it is linked to me.  By these three points-

Snowdrop alerted Avery to something behind her.  Avery moved to one side, swinging.

The snake bobbed, avoiding the sideways swing, then retreated like something had pulled it into the trees by yanking the end of its tail.  Fast to strike fast to retreat.

“-be bound until you wish to free yourself.  Cooperate with me, let’s protect the shrine and this town.”

The wraith’s essence moved into the stick, and it became like his shrine was, jagged edges, branches falling away to leave just spike-shaped juts, and a wrapping of barbed wire.

But he wasn’t all spirit and the ability to easily take up residence in hallows was mostly a spirit thing. The echo part of him kept holding onto the stick.  His arm lined up with Avery’s, his other arm hooked around her neck in a move that could have strangled her if he was more substantial.  The echo-ness of him took up some residence in her.  In her clothes, in her skin, in the eyes behind the mask.  Her clothing moved a bit in a wind that wasn’t there, in darker colors than they’d been before.

She could feel him on her heart, like a weight had been placed atop that hammering organ, both literal and emotional.

He was a guy who’d hurt his friends really, really badly.

Avery clenched her free hand.

“Hey papa wolf?” Avery called out.  A hint of Lott’s voice overlapped hers.

The wolf met her eyes.

“Might want to send your pups and babies away.  If you want to pick this fight, there’s a chance that seeing you get your ass kicked would scar them for life.”

“I’m running a bit late for the shrine thing, compared to my usual,” Avery confessed, “But I was wondering if I could run some stuff by you?”

Miss and Toadswallow were already awake, sitting in Toadswallow’s little run-down bar.  Early morning light shining in through the gaps between the plywood at the window and the window frame hit some of the glass surfaces and created blinding streaks of light that intercepted any view of Miss’s face or hands.

“Late is good,” Toadswallow said.  “If you set an expectation you’ll be right there at the bum-crack of dawn, they’ll hold you to that expectation.  Mix things up a touch, be fashionably late.”

“Am I interrupting anything?  I didn’t expect you two to be together.”

“I may be a goblin with few peers, but I do have my refractory periods, you see.”

“I… don’t?”

“I must succumb to the embrace of Dream, young witch.  I’m catching Miss up on matters so she can look after things while I rest.”

“That’s good,” Avery said.  “Do you mind the interruption?”

“Not at all, not at all.  Do you want a donut from the dumpster?”

“No thank you,” Avery replied.  “Already grabbed a snack.”

“Did you wish to speak to Sir Toadswallow or me?” Miss asked.

“You.  Just, uh, trying to get my ducks in a row.  I try to stay in touch with a bunch of people out there.  Some of them are Finders.  The Garricks.”

“I see.”

“Do you know them, or…?”

“No.  You’ve mentioned them in passing, some time ago.”

“I want to make sure I’m ready for whatever is happening at the end of the summer, and the Lost stuff really… it resonates with me, but I do so much other stuff mixed in, I sorta lose track.  I thought it might help me feel more centered if I brushed up, maybe negotiated with the Garricks.”

“I see.  How can I help?”

“Do you know anything about the station promenade?  It’s kind of a hub?”

“Yes.  I’ve passed through.  I don’t remember much, it was never a place I dwelt for any length of time, but I saw enough of it to get a sense of the nuances.”

“And you like… you have a sense for how that stuff works?”

“Yes.  Part of it is how I sense reality.  Part of it is my nature.  I belong there, the patterns are easy to fall into.”

“Is there anything I could do for you in exchange for some tips?  I think I’d be more comfortable owing you a favor, and the Garricks would probably be super grateful, which makes me stronger… seems like it helps everyone a bit.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily object,” Miss said.

“Can we trust the Garricks?” Toadswallow asked, his tone somehow a bit sly.

“I think so?” Avery asked.  “I haven’t seen any major red flags, but I’m not the best person at seeing red flags in the first place.”

“It should be fine,” Miss told Avery.  She moved her hands as if she was folding one over the other on the dirty counter, but Avery obviously couldn’t see that.  “But I think you should strive to put a proper value on this information.”

“Some of the value is in making alliances, right?”

“Some.  But asking full price for a service doesn’t take away from the alliance.”

“Doesn’t it?” Avery asked.  “A friendship shouldn’t count who owes what, right?”

“Beware having that kind of friendship with someone who sees you as a commodity,” Toadswallow said.

Avery frowned at him.  He shrugged.

“Put a fair price on the information and I’ll tell you.  I’ll give you something to start, a hint at a second thing, and we’ll hold the third in reserve, for when you’ve verified they can and will pay.”

“What sort of price?”

“That is certainly a good question to ask,” Miss told Avery.

Toadswallow grunted as he sat down on the counter, knees hooked over the edge, shoeless feet dangling.  “If you don’t even know, then you’re in no way equipped to barter.”

“I didn’t see it as a barter, I saw it as a thing where I’d give them something, they’d give me something, and if they shortchanged me, then maybe that hurts the friendship.  Isn’t a huge problem with this world how transactional it all is?”

“If you don’t see it as a transaction,” Toadswallow said, “and they do, then-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Avery said.  She sighed, rubbing at her temples.  “Sorry to interrupt, ugh, it’s early, I was hoping to make this quick and hit the shrines before it gets too hot out.”

“You run the risk of giving them one free pass for something major.  If they bilk you, after you’ve given them treasure?” Toadswallow asked.  “This is important?  The station was where you bound yourself to Snowdrop, and vice versa?”

Snowdrop was napping nearby, and stirred a bit at the sound of her name.

“It was.”

“And John was there, all hell broke loose, didn’t it?”

“It was big, yeah.”

“It’s a key location,” Miss said.

“That, to me, sounds valuable.  So give it value.  Ask for an appropriate price.  What are you giving them?  An answer to a riddle?”

“One answer to a riddle in a sea of riddles, I guess?” Avery asked.

“Indeed,” Miss replied.

“How long would it take them, then?” Toadswallow asked.  “How long to find the answer themselves?”

“I don’t know.  It really depends on what kind of hint Miss is providing.”

“Then let me tell you the first.  It is fundamentally impossible to traverse directly from one end of the promenade to the other.”

Avery blinked a few times.

“Reaching one end is valuable, as far as the boons imparted” Miss said.  “But you could not do it.  I could not do it.  The Wolf couldn’t.”

Avery shivered.  “So if it’s impossible… how are there boons?”

Miss shifted position, then said, “Directly, Avery.  One cannot traverse the Promenade, as you’ve termed it, by the Promenade alone.  One must depart by train, retaining the means to return by train.  It necessitates the walking of specific paths, which will each be subtly different if entered by way of the Promenade.”

“Aw heck,” Avery said.

“How long would that take?” Toadswallow asked.  “How many attempts before they realized…?”

“That even with careful navigation, the arrangement of those on the promenade will always foil you at certain stages?” Miss asked.

“Yes,” Toadswallow said.  He turned to Avery.

“Depends on the tools used, advice you get, they have like, a pegboard and a screaming egg, among other things, that let them cheat little things, so it’s impossible to say, exactly.  Ten or more runs?  Twenty?”

“Each taking days?” Toadswallow asked.  “Weeks?  Months?”

“They’re doing shorter test runs to check some basic rules and survey the territory, but I think the next big attempt is in late September.”

“Ten or twenty more attempts, each separated by weeks or months.  Let’s say they’re efficient, and it requires two years.  How many hands are involved in this?  How many tools expended?”

“Ah,” Avery replied.  “Bunch of people.  Some tools, some power.”

“Two years, a bunch of people, resources.  Even being conservative, putting their wages at the lowest possible, I’d say you could set your ‘walk away’ price at sixty thousand dollars and you wouldn’t be amiss,” Toadswallow purred.  “I’d triple that for the initial ask.”

“I don’t think they have that kind of money.”

“Put a price point on the practice and tools they’d give you, or favors they might owe you,” Toadswallow told her.  “You’d be saving them years of effort, and as a fellow mortal, I think there are few things more valuable than time.”

“I’d appreciate half of whatever’s earned,” Miss said.

“You-” Avery paused.  “Yeah, sure.  Of course.”

“If you’d give them too generous a deal, you now shortchange me, which is your choice,” Miss said.  “Our relationship will stand, mentor and practitioner, acquaintances, even friends, however you wish to describe us…”

“Well, you sorta saved my life by helping me out on the Forest Ribbon Trail.”

“Mmm.  I don’t mean to focus on labels, only on your principle.  I won’t keep a tally, Avery.”

“Appreciate that,” Avery replied, frowning, “I really do, but that sorta makes me feel more tense about this.”

“Good,” Miss replied.  “I do think we all benefit if you earn what the information is worth.  It serves goals both short term and long, for everyone involved.”

“Goals, huh?” Avery asked.

“It would cheapen your alliance with them if you made your help cheap.”

“Do you have long term goals, Miss?  Do you have a bigger plan?”

“I do.  Do you want the second tidbit?”

“Are you trying to dodge the question about what you’re really planning?” Avery asked.

Toadswallow chuckled.

“Ask, then,” Miss told her.

“You’ve got a long term plan.”

“I do.”

“Not a question,” Toadswallow told them.

“You picked me out in advance.  You were watching me, the night the Carmine died.  You weren’t far away.”

Miss altered the tilt of her head, but Avery couldn’t really see much beyond the different angle.

“True,” Miss said.

“Also not another question.  So rude, when she says ‘ask’.”

“Enough, Toadswallow,” Miss said.  “Yes, Avery.  I know the moment you’re thinking of, and the issue behind the question.  You could tell Toadswallow if you wanted.”

Toadswallow rearranged his belly fat, in a way that really didn’t line up with how a human might manage their fat, because the fat he moved to one side stayed put.  He put an elbow on the bulge and then but his chin on the elbow, smiling.

“I don’t want to stir anything up, and I got the motives, when I saw.”

“I see,” Miss said.  “Then yes, let’s sum it up and say yes, I had plans and you were a part of it, I made certain decisions in light of those plans.  You know, and you’re letting me know you know.”

“What did you do, Miss?” Toadswallow asked.

She waved a hand, dismissive.  Not that it was visible, but Avery got the gist of it.

“What’s worth going that far?”

“Or not taking action at all?”

“Ahhh,” Toadswallow breathed the word.

“At the school, were there any Chosen in attendance?” Miss asked.

“At least one,” Avery replied.  “Ulysse.  At least, that’s how I understand it.  I think some people used the term.  He was this super handsome guy that got a bunch of huge powerful divine gifts and a kind of divine mandate to spread the word or something?”

“A champion of a greater power?” Toadswallow asked.  “Was his a Judge?  God?  Primeval entity?  Angel with a plan?”

“God,” Avery said.

“Gods are such a paradox,” Miss said.  “They have so much power, but so little ability to exercise it.  With the barriers of innocence so firmly in place, if you stand up too tall, you get knocked down.  Otherwise, the innocent might see you.”

“Do you dislike innocence?” Avery asked.

“I think I hate the framework that it’s built upon.  Perhaps one day innocence could be changed into something else.  Perhaps one day we could be done with forswearing, the gainsaying our poor Verona had to struggle with this past week, and the other attached structures.”

“Practitioner society?” Avery asked.

“Very much practitioner society.  But that is a monolith that will be very hard to budge.  The people who have that power are reluctant to part with it.”

“Right,” Avery replied.  “Like how Musser is in Kennet and he’s really hard to get rid of while he’s sticking his nose into things.”

“Like that, yes.  Perhaps I will last long enough to add my own slow resistance to the steady and inevitable expansion and distortions of those concepts.  I don’t expect I’ll die of old age, I’m not that sort of Other, so perhaps I will live to see everything change, for better or worse.”

“Why us?  Why this?”

“I’m not a god, but if you gathered all the forces of Kennet together, perhaps we could approximate a very small one.  And as a god may do, I thought we could have our chosen to push for our goals.  While we remain safe in our little realm, perimeter mostly secure, interfering ideologies absent, we can empower you as our representatives.”

“I… maybe this is a question I’ll regret asking, but the Choir was a lot of Kennet’s power base.”

“It was.”

“And you guys were a bit… reluctant to give it up?”

“We knew it would make things harder.  We knew it would lead to something like we’re dealing with today.  Musser running rampant, enemies at our gates, echoes and spirits wandering around, Witch Hunters we’re ill equipped to deal with…”

“It was also kinda messed up.”

“And yes.  Ultimately, you may be our Chosen, in a small and less-than-perfectly accurate way, but we did want to hear your input.  We aren’t human, our values aren’t the same.  There are times people die and I feel little.  Goblins are more casual about violence.  But doing what we were doing necessitated you have power not just as gifts, but as free individuals with the ability to choose a course and have a say.  You said it was wrong, we… generally agreed.  We sent you off.”

Avery nodded.  “Some of the culprits might’ve sent us off hoping we died.”

“Perhaps.  But to get us back on track, I had no less than ten individuals in varying degrees of consideration for my purposes.  Snowdrop may be able to see a bit around corners and inside things, but I have my own talents, and they include being able to see deeper.  The various individuals I considered, dismissing some over time, picking others, I felt like they could be useful, in the right scenarios.  Perhaps one needed to be older, and I’d suspend judgment for a time.  Or Verona’s friend Jeremy would need something to set him on the right path for my purposes.  You were a consideration.  I liked you.  Then the Carmine Beast perished…”

“And I looked.”

“You turned your head, I decided in that moment, and I had a sense of where to look to find people who would complement you.  I knew we’d need practitioners to forestall some of the inquiries that could become what Musser is doing right now, seizing control over what we’re doing.  It was Alexander Belanger and not Musser who came, his goals differed and were more subtle, with an eye to the long-term.  It was nonetheless good to have you where you were.  I just wish times had been less…”

“Reamed out?” Toadswallow asked.

“Tumultuous.”

“What’s the plan?  You pick practitioners?  Then?”

“Hold to old ways.  The direct compact, the Other as the sponsor, handing down knowledge, power, and a philosophy not painted using the waters of the womb”

“What?”

“Practitioner families,” Miss clarified.  “As we discussed, practitioner families are a monolith.  By being a new power on the scene, not of the practitioner families, you’re naturally a force that destabilizes.  Unfortunately, we saw that in sharp effect with the fall of Belanger and Bristow.”

Avery frowned.

“Few others could have or would have done what you did, because they either lacked the power, or they had the power but they were tied to establishment.  Having those men fall in the way they did was not my intention.  Had I been around, I would have steered you in different directions.”

“Why send us to the school in the first place?”

“In part, to multiply your power.  In part, to get you away from the culprits.  In part, to put you on display.  To get people whispering.  For the same reason I’d have you casually offer the Garricks information worth a possible two years of their time.  Making Kennet strong makes it easier for you to put power on casual display, which makes the path you walk more enticing for other would-be practitioners.  This would take generations, but… I think virtually any path would.”

“Okay,” Avery said, frowning.  She’d have to let the others know this.

“You’re a conniving woman,” Toadswallow croaked out a purr, “You led us all to believe you made the choice quickly, a few random children who would mess up and give us someone to point at and laugh at, who could cooperate enough to say the necessary words if someone like Musser stuck his nose in.”

“Not that it actually helped when we did say the words,” Avery said.

“It would have, if you’d asserted yourselves earlier in the summer.  Bristow and Belanger’s fates raised the stakes, and the power in evidence with the ground as blood-soaked as it is has his curiosity.  I think the man is deeply insecure about the fact he doesn’t know enough about what’s going on.”

Toadswallow chuckled to himself at that, shaking his head.

“We think the culprits want to act on a much faster timetable,” Avery told Miss, quiet.  The goblins were sleeping elsewhere, the bracelet wasn’t ticking, it was just her, Toadswallow, and Miss.  She was sure.

“I do believe so,” Miss said.

“You already got Edith,” Toadswallow said.  “Charles is in custody, far away.  Maricica is the one who remains.”

Avery nodded.

There was also Bluntmunch.  Mayyyybe Gashwad, but Lucy seemed to trust John’s assertion that it wasn’t their little hyper-violent little savage.  Just the big lug and possibly the goblins working for him, unwittingly.

It felt bad.

“What are they up to?” Toadswallow asked, eyes narrowing.  The monocle he wore made the narrowing of one eye much more exaggerated.

“We think, uh, they’re not going to waste any time.  Sacrificing Charles to the Carmine Throne, so he can, I guess, immolate himself, to pull some big changes.  I think, uh, maybe destroying most practitioner families, somehow.”

“Forces would be forced to step in and act against him, remove him from the throne,” Miss said, “Or remove the validity of the throne altogether.  Lordships would be declared, the fights over those lordships would be vicious, and families that weren’t destroyed in the initial moves on Charles’s part would destroy one another in the infighting.  Once made irrelevant or once successfully challenged, Charles would be unseated.”

“Cig said a lot of that.”

“And, if you’ll accept my cynical take,” Toadswallow murmured, “Without change on a real, heartfelt level, we’d only trade the old set of families for newer ones, and the equilibrium would find itself once again, with only the smallest necessary changes needed to prevent another Carmine Charles from arising again.”

“Rook and I have come to similar conclusions.  She thinks those changes would include a more aggressive attempt at uprooting small communities like ours, to make sure there isn’t another similar plot fomenting within,” Miss said.  “More lordships in general, more fighting, more wariness about Others and independent practitioners.”

“Reminds me of Bristow,” Avery said.  “He wanted to prune out the bad students, forge these intense bonds between families, arrange everything in a really harsh, structured way, with himself in a prominent position, of course.  I can see that being like you’re talking about.  Lordships, fighting, wariness, treating anyone who isn’t part of the network as a problem.  Saw some of that at the end of the Blue heron thing.  All to get the practitioner community ready for some vague distant threat.”

“Perhaps not so vague and distant?” Toadswallow asked.  “Perhaps a young man with a knack for putting Others together, who’d bought him drinks and lent him a listening ear?  A friend forsworn by another friend, angry in his exile?”

“If he really was talking about Charles then we’re going in circles,” Avery said.  “He’s worried about Charles so he cracks down, Charles makes big changes in his brief time in the seat, things get worse, practitioners crack down?”

“I do believe that’s a cycle that’s been playing out for a few centuries now,” Toadswallow told her.  “In varying forms, shapes, scales, and places.  In fact, they don’t even really need an excuse.”

“Yes, it’s nothing so specific as a real threat or Charles in particular,” Miss replied.  “Other groups point to a future doomsday, but when the time comes, they shrug and name a new date.  Or they speak of their so-called benevolent dictator sweeping in to rescue their government.  Or of rapture, their good and blessed rescued from the earth, the evil left behind.  It’s a tool for those at the top and a crutch for those at the bottom.”

“All of us ladies, gentlemen, and assorted others need something to look forward to,” Toadswallow said.  “For myself, I’ve been brewing a bit of gas that would make even a goblin weep, and there are goblins sleeping upstairs.  Will I wake one this morning with a belch or a tear of flatulence?”

“You dream of bigger things too, Toadswallow.  You told Rook of it, and Lucy, as it happens.”

Toadswallow leaned back and spat onto the floor behind the counter.

“Yes, well, the distinction, dear Miss, is that I will pursue that dream.  I have to, at this stage.  But this chemistry inside me can always be left to ferment one more day.  It is my tool and my crutch.”

“The difference between a dream and a…” Avery reached for the word.  “Fantasy?”

“It’s something else when used against you,” Miss said.  “Bristow, by the sounds of things, held that threat of the inevitable incoming danger as a cudgel to beat others over the head with.”

“Yes, well…” Toadswallow trailed off.

“Well?” Miss asked.

“Do you really think the threat doesn’t exist?  Dark things brew that have nothing to do with my gut.  Some of those things will threaten everything we hold dear.  Perhaps even in our lifetimes.  Or our children’s lifetimes.”

“Perhaps,” Miss said.

Avery shivered.

“Which isn’t to say his means of dealing with it is the right one,” Toadswallow told Avery.  “Or that it was.”

“Right,” Avery replied.

She pulled on her connection to Snowdrop.

Toadswallow looked upward, as footsteps creaked in the apartment above this little, disused bar.  “One’s up.”

“It’s Snowdrop,” Avery said.  “I called her.”

“Ah.  Why?”

Avery made a face.

“Something problematic?” Toadswallow asked.

“Before she comes, to wrap up our other conversation, Avery?” Miss asked.  “I would encourage you to get a fair price for the information.  Making you three powerful is in line with our goals, and I no longer have to fear as much that they’d recognize what I’m doing and feel the need to deal with me.”

“Did they already?” Avery asked.

“They barred me from entry.  But if I’d explained some of this to you, I think they might have contrived to put Montague into the perimeter and power it with me inside, obliterating me or turning me as plicate a being as Montague is.”

“A corrugated Miss?” Avery asked.

“Indeed.  For the second tip, you may hint that I know something about the arrangement of the shops on the Promenade, that eludes human eyes.”

“Okay…”

“The Station Promenade?” Snowdrop asked, as she entered, rubbing at her eye with the heel of her hand.  “I don’t wanna go.”

Avery held the trepidation in her heart, and let Snowdrop feel it.

Snowdrop forced herself to wake up a little faster.  She leaned into the counter just beside Avery.  Avery handed over a little carton of strawberry milk from her bag, and Toadswallow offered a dumpster donut from behind the counter.

“I’m probably leaving Kennet, Toadswallow,” Avery told him.  “To Thunder Bay.  I’ll keep my responsibilities, stop in regularly, but… at least for a little while, I’ll be living there, going to school there.”

“Ah,” Miss said.

But this was mostly about Toadswallow, and Toadswallow’s dreams. Avery watched his expression change.  Shock, though not enough to dislodge the monocle, which dangled from an eyebrow piercing, then a look of… frustration?  Disgruntlement?

“I suppose you’ll be taking my goblin sage?”

“The goblin sage won’t be taking herself,” Snowdrop said, around a partial mouthful of donut.

“Is there a compromise?  A way around it?”

“I can’t have a goblin sage that only shows up on weekends, Ms. Kelly,” Toadswallow replied.  “Would you leave her behind?”

“I… don’t think so,” Avery said.  “If she said she wanted to stay…”

“I don’t,” Snowdrop said.  “I would declare I’m leaving right now if it meant I could make Cherrypop cry, or any of the other jerks who’ve made my life suck so much lately.  Unfunny and mean, most of ’em.  I’d leave to see you make the face you’re making right now, Sir Toadswallow.”

Sir Toadswallow made a willful effort to change his expression to something closer to neutral.  His chin had retreated enough that jowls had threatened to swallow up his mouth.  “But?”

“But… Avery’s the worst.  I know she needs me.  But.”

Toadswallow nodded, digesting that.

“It wouldn’t be forever,” Avery replied.  “This thing with my parents is only supposed to take a few years.  You could see it as Snowdrop getting the worldly experience and training she needs, maybe?”

“Yeh,” Toadswallow said.  The feigned affect slipped a bit.  He sounded more like a Gashwad.  “Yeh, yeah.  S’good.  Don’t you worry about me.  I will figure out a temporary sage.  Might put off plans, just to be safe.”

“Maybe Ramjam as goblin sage?” Avery suggested.  If he’s not a co-conspirator?  “For later consideration, after everything wraps up?”

“Maybe.  He’s a good one.  Good attitude.  We’ll see.”

“Does the plan change if the outcome of this summer changes?” Miss asked.

Toadswallow looked up, hand hurrying to fix the angle of his monocle.  Like just that question had changed his outlook, lifted him up.

“I don’t think so,” Avery said.

Toadswallow deflated, then turned, climbing down from the counter to the stained, stainless steel back-counter with the sink and various tools for bartending.  He climbed down onto a stepladder and grunted as he made his way to the ground.

“Are you leaving?” Avery asked.  “I don’t want this to be on bad terms.”

“You’re fine.  You’ve got a good heart, kid,” Toadswallow said.  “You have your reasons, I won’t pry.”

“You can pry.”

“No,” he answered.  “No, I’m- you do what you have to.  Take good care of that opossum.  Help us get through this summer, I’ll do what I can on my end.  For right now, though, I’m going to cheer myself up by sitting on a goblin’s face and channeling a stream of gas in their face-holes and out their end-holes.”

“Sorry,” Avery said.

“Not sorry, screw you,” Snowdrop told him.

“Nah,” he replied.  “No need for that.”

Snowdrop slumped over the counter, arms folded, chin on hands, and Avery rubbed her back.  She sorta wished someone would rub her back.  Miss couldn’t, really.

“Can’t even ask you to change your mind on the grounds of friendship, after talking about the prices.  The price to buy your staying would be too high, would it?” Toadswallow asked.

“It’s not like that, Toad,” Avery replied.

“Yeh, fair.  Augh.  Why’d you pick such good ones, Miss?” Toadswallow asked.

“Good ones?  The three practitioners of Kennet?”

“If you’d picked regular underaged fuck-ups like you’d let us think you were doing, I’d just be laughing at the chaos, I wouldn’t have gotten hopes up.”

“Enough of that,” she said.  “Avery will get the wrong impression.”

“Ahh, you’re right.  I only mean you’ve done a good job, Avery, picked a good familiar, someone I wanted on board, selfish as I am.  I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.  This isn’t a fuck-up.”

I wish I was as sure as you are, Avery thought.  It didn’t not feel like a fuck up.  It was just a question of how staying was something she was sure would make her miserable for a long while, while leaving was a gamble.

“We won’t come back even on holidays,” Snowdrop mumbled.

“We’ll stay friends, you can be sure of that.  We can even travel.  It’s only a few hours by Warrens,” Toadswallow told Snow.

Snowdrop extended a hand and gave him the middle finger.

“Have you told the others?” Miss asked.

Toadswallow paused, looking back.

“Shouldn’t you?”

“They’re fighting, they’re scared, they’re frustrated,” Avery said.  “I think if I told them right now it’d just… distract.  They might even take all that scaredness and frustration and… I mean, it’s already part of why they’re fighting, I’m pretty sure.  I’m trying to put all my energies into getting stuff sorted and getting ready, so at least Kennet’s in good shape when I leave.”

“Very well.  Shall we continue talking about the Garricks, then?  The negotiation, things you might want to ask for?”

“Practices, tools?”

“Yes.”

“We keep running into the fact we don’t know the basics about some stuff.  Like Realms practices, according to Zed.”

“Ah.  I see.  I think there’s a balance to be struck in how much you want to work with them in the future.  There are ways you could ask for information about certain paths, that you could then use to share information about those paths.”

“Kinda paving the way for stuff I can later sell hints and answers about?  If you’re helping me out?”

“Yes.  Though if you’re leaving, we’ll have to arrange a-”

The building shook for two or three seconds.  Bottles rolled on the floor, and plywood rattled in window frames.

There were a few seconds punctuated by the occasional confused shout, muffled by the intervening floor.

Then a goblin screamed like he had been set on fire.

Snowdrop laughed to herself, head buried in her arms.  Through the bond, Avery could feel the amusement, and the very same sadness Avery herself felt.

This was tough.

They were tough.  They treated the forest like a playground, running up branches like they were stairs, coordinating easily.  Avery had watched Lucy fight with Guilherme and she was pretty sure Lucy would have been better at this whole thing than she was.  Verona probably would have dodged the situation or figured out a trick to get past it.

For Avery, it was a tenser thing, a defined arena, a clearing in twilight, a number of players- birds, snake, the wolves, the stag, the spirits, her, even Snowdrop.

First thing to handle- well, surviving the initial onslaught was the first thing.  But the first thing to handle was her arena.  Her soccer field, her hockey rink.  Lucy had her arena, but Avery in the wolf mask kind of stole a few pages from Lucy, as a matter of habit.

“Eff your merals, ephemeral beasts!” Avery shouted, slinging one of the Finder’s Knots at the ground while mid-air from a leap.  The bound up pool ball hit the soil and shattered the twilight.  Darkness broke away in translucent triangles, and every bit of breakage cascaded to lead to more.  The beasts hesitated.

Yeah, that helped.

It meant they weren’t gliding gracefully through the trees now, they actually had to move around the occasional rock or bush, instead of treating them as a means of accelerating.

Avery used the hesitation to swat at the side of a wolf’s head with her Lott-enhanced stick.  The echo clung to her.

Another ephemeral wolf, the one with braids, found her bearings.  She had an old fashioned knife in her teeth, and whipped her head upward, slinging it skyward, the blade disappearing into the foliage.  Avery wasn’t sure if it was passing above the treetops or if it had stuck to something up there, but it didn’t come down.

The wolf threw two more in quick succession, drawing blades out of the thick braided ruff of fur around her neck and shoulders.

“Stop that!” Avery shouted.

The wolf leaped, turning in the air, kicking-

The knife had come down, and the kick sent it flipping in Avery’s direction.  She only barely avoided it, her hand pressing Snowdrop down flat against her shoulder as the knife zipped past.

The wolf landed, then leaped to one side-

Drawing Avery’s eyes.

She wasn’t a fighter.  She was a flanker, a mover.  She moved, aware that every time she got captivated by the weirdness of these beasts with their circus tricks and little illusions, they came at her from the sides.  Snowdrop was already focusing attention on the snake that slithered out of the shadows and into taller grass and weeds.  Avery’s trajectory carried her away- she tried to keep everything in sight, saw the braided wolf that had jumped to the side had run up a tree, gaining height, leaped away, paw kicking out-

Kicking a falling knife out of the air.  Avery ducked behind a tree, and black roped around.  Blade hit wood and embedded there.

The third knife was coming down.  Avery knew there were wolves in the trees, watching and waiting for opportunity.  If she got sucked too much into one fight, they’d come at her from the sides or behind.  If she didn’t devote herself to one fight, then the fights didn’t really get resolved.  Which was the whole freaking problem with literally everything right now.

The stag was there, shy, keeping to darkness, eyes too white in the gloom, standing out like the spirits stood out. It was white-furred, with black antlers that branched out nearly to its hindquarters, each prong a perfect point.

Avery ducked and circled around trees to keep those ridiculously extensive antlers from skewering her.  The deer didn’t press and Avery had the feeling it was waiting to pull out something big.

But that had to wait because third knife was coming down any second-

Nat had leaped onto the wolf’s back, and was punching it in the head with her oversized, piercing-riddled fist.  The wolf was struggling in the attempt to bite Nat or get her off, and it looked like the punches hurt.

Butty McButtButt was out there too, off to the side, keeping one or two of the five wolves at bay, smiling like the kid who’d brought naked photos of his mom to show and tell.  Just… way too happy to be breaking rules, yet slightly deranged at the same time.

The braided wolf couldn’t catch the knife, but one of the birds did.  A bird wearing a bird’s skull over its head swooped in, intercepting the falling knife, and turned it from a fall straight-down through the branches into something angled, aimed for Avery.  Avery avoided it, keeping Snowdrop out of the way too, but the blade hit tree and hit Lott.

The wraith was pinned to the tree, and as Avery stepped away, Lott pulled back on spirit and his own essence.

The weight of him left her, and the changes to her stick left as well.

Dish descended from above.

“Me and you, bound by pact, you and this land, bound by shrine, me and this land, bound by awakening!” Avery rushed the process.

Dish swooped into the whacking stick.  Avery whipped it through the air, and the leaves on the end caught the bird.  Each leaf a chip of ceramic, sharp as glass.

The bird fluttered awkwardly, then hit ground, its little helmet coming free.  It landed amid some of the scattered papers with eyes on them.

The frick was with those papers?  They weren’t glamour-

Snowdrop leaped off of Avery’s shoulders, became a girl, and caught the bird.  One hand around the neck, one arm around the bird itself.

Barking made Avery think one of the ephemeral wolves was coming, but as she turned, she recognized Doglick.

More reinforcements.

And, she saw, there was flickering.

Zed had managed to locate her and was booting up some technomancy.

This had started as a clearing in a bit of forest, touched by ephemeral twilight, their turf, kind of.  She’d shattered that.

Now it was becoming a bit more Zed.

One of the wolves that was giving a twenty foot berth to a smiling, waddling Butty was moving right toward her.  Another distraction?  She moved, expecting some snake to be coming up behind her.  No such thing.

“Surrender!  Communicate what Maricica told you to do, tell us about the beautiful man, we’ll let you go, we might even help you!”

The male wolf turned and he leaped at her, biting-

She swung the stick, aiming for the open mouth, and he bit into it.

The stick shattered into shards, every flying bit of porcelain flying away from Avery.  The shards cut up the wolf’s face, mouth, cut a line across the closed eye, and took the tip off one ear.  Locks of beautiful grey fur dropped away, neatly cut.

The stick shuddered, and the bits of ceramic flew right back to the stick, finding their place and reconstructing it.

She could feel Dish inside the wood she gripped with both hands.  She could feel her like she’d felt Dish’s hand on her wrist and the back of her neck.  She was pretty sure Dish only had one more of those in her, and Dish would be recovering for weeks.  Maybe she could put power into dish, a bit of blood for direct Avery-to-spirit power, but… that was her Self.  That was a super-emergency type thing, for when she had absolutely no power and lives were on the line.  She’d have to think of other options.

She touched the dog tag, and to her Sight, a pretty little bird in the trees drew a direct line to it.

Ready, waiting.  Maybe to intercept John, maybe to intercept anything Avery tried to do like throwing a spell card or throwing her own knives that she could somehow kick out of the air and at people.

These freaking animals knew strategy.  They coordinated.  Avery swung the branch through the air to ward off anything that might be lunging at her.  Snowdrop turned on her shoulder to keep watching her back, giving her extended senses.  Even if it was unfamiliar opossum sight and hearing.

More trees flickered.  A concrete wall appeared between two, just in time for a bird to fly into it.

One wolf huffed out a small breath, and in the next moment, the animals all darted away.

Avery sagged back against a tree.

Was that it?

Or was this the trick?

She used Sight, she remained ready, holding the stick, breathing hard…

The complex wraith Lott had freed himself.

Five minutes passed and she didn’t let her guard down.  Across those five minutes, the goblins wove in and out of the clearing, checking the surrounding space.  Butty walked by at one point with one of the papers with eyes drawn on them over each of his eyes, stuck there by means Avery couldn’t figure out.

Snowdrop sat down by Avery’s feet, holding the bird.  Avery thought about the means of capturing the bird, maybe to ask it questions, but Snowdrop didn’t mind holding it and Avery couldn’t think of any great ways to keep it bound without possibly letting it escape in the meantime.  Maybe if she had silver chain or something to wrap around it.  The chain the dog tag was on was just stainless steel.

Nat sat down across from her, standing guard.  Nat wasn’t one for conversation.

Avery jumped as she heard a rustle, and Nat hopped to her feet.  Avery relaxed as she recognized the source, motioning for Nat to relax.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded.  “Brie?”

“Guarding camp.  We were up late, she doesn’t get hangovers like I do but she likes morning sleep.  We haven’t had a chance to do that much while we were at the school.”

“I’m glad she’s getting something good out of this.”

Zed nodded as he looked around the clearing.  “You know there are some practitioners who basically never get into fights?”

“Grr.”

“That’s a creepy mask, you know.”

Avery nodded, and then she pulled the mask off.  It was so heavy in her hands.  her ears hurt where the ribbon had pulled down on the tops of them, sawing in a bit.

Zed walked over, then bent down, and he picked up one of the papers with a simple eye drawn on it.

“What is it?” Avery asked.

“Wye.”

“What’s Wye have to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” Zed said.  “But if Wye’s involved, Nicolette wanted to be too.”

Avery raised her eyebrows.

“Let me call, and we’ll see-”

Avery’s bracelet ticked.  She stepped away from the tree, turned, and held her stick out, a branch made out of ceramic, white with blue patterns, with the occasional leaf that was rigid, a chip of porcelain in the shape of a leaf.

“It’s me!  I’m not hiding myself.”

“Calling Nicolette,” Zed said.

Wye emerged from the trees, hands raised.  Zed stepped forward a bit, between Wye and Avery, phone at his ear.

“Surrendering?” Avery asked.

“Ha, no.  But I did want to talk.”

“Nico.  Do you have your webcam handy?  Let me bring you into this.  I’ve got it rigged,” Zed said.

“Rigged?” Wye asked.

“How about you don’t ask, use that augury of yours?”

“I am being exceptionally careful with my eyes,” Wye said.  He pointed at the papers.  “See?”

“What are they?” Avery asked.

“Targets.  I scattered them to the wind, I figured if you had any of those thorny flowers ready to poke my eyes out if some super basic condition was met, well, better paper than peeper.”

“Okay,” Zed said, absently.  “Okay, this works about fifty percent of the time.”

He held out the phone, and an outline appeared in the air, like it was drawn by lasers.  It filled in with details, all drawn out in dark blue light.  No color, just lots of dots in various density.  Nicolette, a hologram version of her.  Some of the lines that were traced around her looked like magic circles.

“Hey Nico.  Been a bit,” Wye said.

“A comfortable bit,” Nicolette said, her voice slightly distorted by the speaker.  She looked around.  “What are you doing, Wye?”

“Contract work?” Wye asked.  He shrugged.  “Musser has the money, I have the ability.  Gotta rebuild what the Belangers lost this summer.”

“Can you see through all those eyes, Wye?” Nicolette asked.  “Quantity over quality, overwhelming defenses?  Brute… forcing?”

“That’s the techy term for it,” Zed told her.  “Good memory.”

“I try.”

Wye shook his head.  “A clever idea but no.  Just… eye protection.  Listen, uh, I think you guys know, I wanted to make it clear for the kids of Kennet, but I’m not a fighter, okay?  Nicolette could probably thrash me in a contest of practice.  Her omens and summons.  I’ve never cared all that much, beyond the basics.”

“And?” Avery asked.

“And this is one big drawn out fight.  Losses on all sides.  I just figured, here we are, I want to make it clear… no hard feelings.”

“You’re kind of on our turf, Wye.  Turf we swore to protect.  Musser pinballed a zombie thing in our general direction yesterday, it caused a lot of chaos, brought Witch Hunters into close proximity with innocents,” Avery said.

“Yeah.  Just your bog-standard hallow man.  Echo or wraith in a fleshly vessel.”

“Innocents were put at risk.”

“Yeah.  I get that.  I don’t agree with it, but Musser’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

“You might want to consider whether the Wye-led Belangers want to associate with those types,” Nicolette said.  “He’s not that different from Alexander or Bristow.  And the thing about Alexander and Bristow is that you tend to really regret what they drag you into, you know?  Even my introduction to Kennet was Alexander-provoked.”

“Yeah,” Wye replied.  “There’s a balance, though, you know?  I figure I’ll do my job, maybe give him advice when I figure he might listen, steer things to a better place-”

“While enabling him,” Zed told Wye.

Wye shrugged.  “Maybe.  Anyway, Reid needs a friend, with everything going on.”

“I heard.  There’s healing,” Zed said. “Or is Musser being a dick about that, saying no?”

“Nah, he’s not saying no to magical healing.  But a lot of the healing gets harder if you wait a while, and practice got turned off for a bit that night, so there might be some scars.  But I’m getting sidetracked.  I just wanted to make it clear… at least from me, there’s no hard feelings, I’m going to do what I was contracted to do, I’ll go back to school, do some stuff part time, some teaching, some learning, networking.  I respect you, Zed.  Nico.”

“It’s more than that, isn’t it?” Nicolette asked.  “If it was just making sure you weren’t going to get poisoned when you came back to school, it didn’t require this.”

“Lurking in the woods, waiting for the fight between some Fae animals and Avery to wrap up?” Zed asked.

Wye gave him a half-smile, and adjusted his glasses.

“I’m curious if you care about staying in our good books,” Avery noted.

“I- I wouldn’t mind,” Wye said, smiling again.  “But that’s beside the point.  I just figured, uh-”

Lucy and Verona arrived in animal form.  They shucked the forms and hurried to Avery’s side.

“Recap?” Verona asked.

“Fought the Ephemeral animals, they slipped away, because of course.  Snow got one.”

“Didn’t!” Snowdrop said.

“Wye turned up a bit after Zed did.  Saying he doesn’t want there to be hard feelings.”

“How convenient for you,” Lucy said.

“It’s a day long journey for the contest to the Carmine Throne, unless you’re here already or you’re coming here,” Wye said.  “Advance notice is being given, Judges are reaching out, the contenders are coming into play.”

“We figured that’d happen at some point,” Verona said.

Wye nodded.  “Your guy, uh, John, he’s expected.  Then some of your standards, goblins, some desperate, low-tier practitioners, uhhh, the big dog from that group you were just fighting.”

“The ephemeral father-wolf?” Avery asked.

“The alpha, if you want to call it that.  Not that alphas are a thing, in animals or humans.  It’s only ever scared bluster.”

“Like Musser?” Lucy asked.

Wye smirked.

“Get to your point, Wye,” Nicolette told him.

“The Mussers are making a bid.  Family with a lot of clout, you know?  They put a lot of stock in conflict, violence, raw power.  Carmine stuff.  So it’s not a surprise.”

“Musser himself?” Zed asked.

“No,” Nicolette said, at almost the same time Wye did.

“No,” Wye repeated himself, like it was an afterthought, or he thought it wasn’t clear enough from him and Nicolette speaking in unison.

“The kids?” Zed asked.

“One of them,” Wye said.  His forehead wrinkled as he raised his eyes from the ground to looking at them.  He was worried.  “They’re strong, he’d give them stuff.  I don’t know if he’s decided, I think he might think if I figured it out I’d intervene, but that’s harder when… Reid’s a mess, and Raquel… she’s just a kid, you know?”

“Teenager,” Lucy said.

“Yeah.  Barely.  She wants approval so bad it hurts her, bends her thinking, you know?  She wants to do it, she wants Musser to ask her.  She’d throw herself seriously into a fight she wouldn’t win, a big game of musical chairs with one chair, that kills everyone that doesn’t win the seat.  And Reid… guy’s broken.  Picked a fight he couldn’t win, you guys, the Witch Hunters.  He’s my friend.”

“What do you want, Wye?” Nicolette asked.

“Help?” Wye asked.  He shrugged.  “I’m not a fighter.  I see stuff.  I have some money, and that’s about it.  I can’t see a way forward that doesn’t have one of these kids jumping into this, eager to jump into this thing they’d almost certainly lose, and they have more money than I do.  I would owe you.  I’m- if you want me to beg, I will legitimately beg.”

His face changed, like he’d screwed it up to start sobbing, but successfully fought the expression away a second later.

“You might want to reconsider who you’re working with and what you’re doing,” Nicolette said.

“Contracts are signed, my hands are tied until this business wraps up or seven more days pass, whichever comes first.”

“Alexander warned about that kind of thing,” Nicolette said.

“Yep.  Figured, longstanding client-Belanger relationship… didn’t think he’d go at this messy a situation this hard.”

“Alexander warned about that too,” Nicolette said, folding her arms.

“So anyway… thought I’d ask.  I asked.”

“I’m not exactly on the best terms with the Mussers,” Zed said.  “I’m not sure if this would help me or hurt, there.”

“It’d be a feather in your cap as far as I’m concerned,” Wye said.  “A favor owed.  Maybe from the kid too?”

“I’ll think about it, talk it over with Brie, Nico, and Jess, might depend on these three and their opossum.”

Wye gave another half-smile.

“But probably no.”

“Figured.  Nico?  Contract?  You and me, no Musser involved?  Generous terms, I know the Belangers have resources you miss.”

“Probably no,” Nicolette said.  “I mean, Musser scares me, I’d be interfering with him, he runs the school I’m living at, unfortunately.  And, you know, you’re my competition.”

“Wow.”

“Anything that makes you weaker only helps me, right?”

“They’re kids,” Wye said.  “Eighteen and thirteen, give or take a bit, just in case I missed a very recent, very quiet birthday.”

“They’re kids, yeah,” Nicolette said.  “I’ll talk to Raquel.  I think, you know, I sorta get it.  Where she’s at.  I’ll call her, but I’m not sure you can save people who don’t want to save themselves.  Especially if Musser is standing between you and them.”

Wye looked at Avery.

He chose her, instead of the other two, to appeal to.

It kind of made her angry.

“I’m kinda tired of being forced to be the bad guy,” Avery said.

“That means no, then?”

Avery looked at the others.

“We have so much we’re doing, and Raquel is kinda nuts,” Verona said.

“It’s not just Raquel,” Wye said.  “Reid too.  Guy’s at the lowest point, he’s… not a bad person.”

“Might try to gainsay you on that one,” Verona murmured.

“He loves his cousin, he tries, he’s just… he’s been so poorly equipped, being raised like he was.”

Verona clicked her tongue a few times.

Bad guys and good people, Avery thought.  She thought about the conversation about Charles’s goals.  About how Charles and Miss basically wanted the same thing.  But Charles wasn’t willing to wait, and he was apparently willing to put himself on the line.

The wolf mask that hung off the side of her bag was heavy.  The deer mask sat beneath water bottles and paper towels.

“We’ll see what we can do,” Avery said.  “We’ll talk it over, at least.  Give it another shot, maybe.”

“Then as initial payment for your taking that time to talk it over, and to build some goodwill… those aren’t dumb animals you were just fighting.”

“Got that.  One of them kickflipped some knives at me.”

“Badass,” Lucy said.

“Stupid,” Avery told Lucy.  “Cartoonish.”

“I get you,” Verona said.  “Attack the glamour-ish-ness of them by badmouthing them, attack the illusion.”

“No, it was really just sorta stupid,” Avery said.  “Scary, but stupid.”

Verona gave her a thumbs-up.

Wye cleared his throat.  They turned to him.

He went on, “More than that, they’re circling around and they’re going after your shrines.  If you hurry now you can probably intercept ’em, scare ’em off.”

Avery nodded, backing away a step.  She looked at the others, and huffed out a sigh.

They broke away, briefly discussing strategy, how their enemies fought, what they could do, before splitting up.

Next Chapter