Author: Wildbow

Left in the Dust – 16.9 | Pale

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It would take time for the counter-claimants to arrive.

Verona drew a circle around the property with a stick, keeping inside the treeline.  Lucy watched, wearing the weapon right, carrying the Hot Lead, mask on but pushed up and away from her face.

Rubbing at her hand, Verona walked over to the couch, placing the phone there.  The last message was from Avery.

Lucy came in, and stood by the door.

Lucy in front, ready to defend her.  Avery in the flanks, out of sight but still helping.

“If anyone would deny me my claim, I bid them to come.  I’ll answer them in unfair contest… because I don’t think fair is exactly a thing.  I swear as the third witch of Kennet that I’ll hold what I have here, in the undercity, and in the Kennet to come.”

She drew circles inside the living room, grabbed a chair, and placed it within.  She didn’t sit inside.

Instead, she added a square diagram around it.  The same one they used to move between the overcity and the Undercity.  She wasn’t even done drawing when lines began to lift up and circles stood an inch off the floor, glowing lines in air instead of chalk on floor.

Overlapping that diagram, she added the one she’d illustrated, for the Kennet to come.

She wondered if Charles would see, notice, and put it together.

She could hope he was rusty, after a decade.  But it was more likely his attention was elsewhere… which wasn’t to say it couldn’t be more than one place at once.  Still, she hoped he could see this and maybe if anything would distract him from giving it the full consideration he’d need to give it, it would be Musser making a play.

She added to the diagram.  A triangle, uneven, with a straight line drawn from the center of the diagram out to the front hall, where Lucy sat with a view of the door.  Back toward the living room, at an angle that just barely had room, going to the couch, the phone there.

And back to the center.

She placed her bag at her feet and sat, pulling a foot up onto the seat beside her.

More of the lines were glowing, intensifying.

The light coming in from the window dimmed, as if a heavy cloud had passed over the sun.  Which wasn’t out of the question.  There had been storm clouds on the horizon.

But it wasn’t that.  The darkness swept in faster, the lines shuddered, then jittered.  Airplane turbulence shakes that touched the house.

Bowing her head, Verona lifted the cat mask into place, tying it with the ribbon behind her head.  Even pulling it back as tight as it would go, the mask didn’t hurt any more than it obscured her peripheral vision.  Her fingers touched staples as she re-adjusted it, then hands fell to her knees, pushing her upright more than she straightened upright.

The room was dark now, the lines bright and airborne, shaking like they were trying to break free.

With a tearing sound, she was plunged into the House on Half Street, Undercity version.  Blurry figures of thugs were caught in time, slow motion that wouldn’t ever let them finish the motions they were in the midst of- being smashed, being wounded.  Blood, bits of glass, and splinters of wood flew through the air, catching the scant moonlight from the cracked front window.

“This would be cool with some good music,” Lucy said, from the front hall.

“Silence is good too,” Verona replied.  “Punctuated by us talking.”

“Who’re they?”

“The squatters.  I handled it last night.  Christening this place in blood.”

“Aha.  Hmm.  Your mask.”

Verona reached up.

Two thirds of her mask were gone.  The cracks had been diagonal, and only a section covering most of her left eye and the upper left part of her face was there, an ear poking up.  The ribbon had extended, wrapping around her head to make contact with another portion of the mask to hold it steady.

She nodded in acknowledgement of that.

“Intentional?”

“Nah, but I’m going with it.”

Lucy drew a rapier out using the hot lead and weapon ring, standing as she faced the front door.  She jerked her head, moving the tip of the rapier toward Verona.

The new houseguest walked down the front door to the entryway to the living room, stepping into view in the process.  Something ‘tok tok tok’ed across the floor as she moved, a walking stick.

A staff.  The Vice Principal, with Mallory behind her.  She wore a private school uniform, but stars and moons had been bleached and painted onto it, and the hose she was wearing was crusty with blood on right side of her right leg.  A star was bleached or burned into her cheekbone, the slightly indented region filled in with yellow paint.  There were two similar marks on her left hand.

“Heya,” the V.P. said.  “That Matthew guy said I should come.  But there was really no point, because I got the message.”

“Yeah?” Verona asked.

“I’m supposed to say ‘no contest’ or something?”

“You can.  You could also ask me for a favor, with the idea being that if I don’t grant it, you’ll challenge me.  Lots of big scary types will do that.  Like if there was a deity in our backyard, they might try that.  Or you could just challenge me.  Try to stop me, or exact more of a price that way.”

“Hmm.”

Verona reached into her bag and fished out a top with a zebra pattern on it.  It was meant for runners or something.  She held it up and stretched it out.  “Bit big for you, but I found it in the thrift store.”

The V.P.’s eyes glittered, then narrowed, as if she could try to hide her interest.  “I can fight you for more, right?”

“You could, but if you fight me, there’s a chance you get nothing except an ass whupping.”  Verona reached out and prodded one of the people who was airborne, head turned as far as it would go to one side, a spray of blood still drifting glacially through the air, from a blow that had been struck last night.

“Bad argument to make to an undercity kid,” the Vice Principal replied.  She squared up her posture within the doorway, facing Verona, cast iron wand in one hand, staff in the other.

“Or you could give me a gift for goodwill,” Verona said.

“That’s a worse argument!” the Vice Principal raised her voice.  “You offer me something then say I could have more, maybe, or –or!- I could give you something and get nothing.”

“Goodwill.”

“Which is basically nothing!”

“You only think that because you’re overly aggressive,” Verona told her.  She waggled the shirt.  “Want?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me no contest, then.  Or fight me, and I’ll probably kick your ass.”

The girl in the doorway tilted her head as far to the right as it would go.

Gliding more than he walked or moved, the Vice Principal’s steed came to the window, metal clacking against the frame as he brought his hands forward.  He was a twelve foot tall man with a wire-and-bar dog kennel meant for a large dog lashed around his head and other cages around his fists.  He was heavyset enough that she couldn’t tell if he was clothed or not, with belly hanging down, and flesh hung down into and through the bars of the kennel.  He breathed hard but made no other sound, and didn’t move.

The Vice Principal tilted her head the other way, and he moved noiselessly off to the other side.  Around behind Verona, like he was ready to lunge through the exterior wall of the building to get to her.

Verona didn’t flinch or show her anxiety.

“Have I been good for this side of Kennet, you think?” Verona asked, sitting forward in the chair.

“Yeah,” the kid replied.

“Because that’s what this is about.  Do I, Verona Julette Hayward, get to have this little patch off the border of the Bitter Street Witch’s territory, to have to myself?  Where do I end up, in the big picture?  I think a big part of that answer is whether I get to hang around here and figure out ways to kick the asses of people who need an asskicking.”

“Yeah but that’s all about you.  Me?  I want more stuff.”

“Take the zebra shirt, okay?” Verona told the kid, exasperated.  “And any energy, magic and blood I don’t lose fighting you is going to mean I can do a better job of kicking the ass of the people who won’t be satisfied with a cool shirt.  Like the Foreman.”

“Yeah?” the kid asked.  She put a hand out.

Verona threw the shirt.  The kid caught it.

“No contest, then.  If you kick his ass.”

Verona’s bag tipped over.  Contents spilled out beneath the chair, rolling across the floor.  Vials of ink, a thing of paint, chalk, and pencil crayons.  They hit the wall and there was a cracking sound, as if she’d thrown things against the wall hard enough to shatter plastic and break pencils.

Ink, paint, chalk, and other materials shot up from the baseboards to the wall like lightning.  It was art like Verona’s figure drawings, covering a patch of wall three or four feet across, extending floor to ceiling.  An overlarge naked man with one foot on the floor, one leg bent, one arm stretched overhead, flesh a chalk white.  A young girl was balanced on the hand on one foot, leg extended behind her, upper body reaching out across a portion of the ceiling.  Black ink filled the space around her, leaving spots for stars.

A mural.  Visible in the gloom of a lightless room at night only because the lines of the diagram were glowing again.

“Huh,” the Vice Principal grunted out the sound.  “Neat.”

She turned to go.  Mallory hurried forward, stopping in the doorway.  Her tattoo artist friend.

“Go away,” Verona told her.

“No contest,” Mallory replied.

“Of course no contest.  I don’t think you could beat me if I swore off using practice.”

“I said no contest!  Why are you complaining?”

“Because you’re such a goober.”

“Who wants a spot on the wall.”

“Ah.”  Verona sighed, pulled one of her pens out of her pocket, aimed between some of the slow-motion figures who were still stumbling or falling through the air, chased by the blood sprays that suggested the directions the hits had come from.  She threw it against the wall, and it cracked like the other things had.  Black etchings in pen ink painted some needles, razors, and sketchy prison-style bits of botched-together machinery into the void around the big dancing man and his little dance partner.

“Fucking awesome, cool,” Mallory breathed.  “I’d wish you luck but that’s too much effort.  I don’t like you that much.”

Verona scrunched up her nose at Mallory, who smirked and then left.

“More people outside,” Lucy said, from the front hallway.

“Yeah.”

“Did you plan that, with the mural?”

“Nah, but not complaining, now that it’s happening.”

The diagram shuddered, and the lighting, which was already dim, disappeared.

They weren’t spirits, but they had aspects to them that were spirit-like.  Frayed at the edges, multiple images running into one another like they were sitting on the surface of water and the waves had crashed together.  The same faces from different angles.

They flooded into the room.

Old house, with memories new and old.

These were new ones.  They were the stuck-arounds, who’d been here for the last month or so, maybe.  Who had partied here, lived here, had dealt with drama here, had loved here, had fought here.

There was a vague kind of coordination in how they came at her.  Different pairings and groupings of emotion.

Trick’s on you, Verona thought.  I’ve got years of expertise in dealing with shitty, stubborn emotions.

She got to her feet, reaching for salt-

Echoes could carry the emotional patterns that had impressed them onto the fabric of reality.  About half the time, they did it because a dying moment had impressed those patterns in, but thinking of them as ghosts was a lie.  Emotions weren’t the only pattern they could carry though.  It was what made them very good at plugging into spirits and things, like how Edith was a complex spirit.  They could carry elements, and they could even bring scenes to life, or manifest some fragile things into reality.

This area might have been more receptive, because the scenes illuminated the room, rain outside, older teenagers and twenty-somethings shouting and chaotically storming inside.  Three of them were badly hurt.

“Fuck the Family Man!” one shouted, bringing a girl with a visible break in her jaw over to the couch.  “Fuck him to hell!  I’ll burn that neighborhood to the ground, next time!”

The pain of having one side of her jaw break and fold in on itself hit Verona all at once, chased soon after by the pain of a forearm that had been cut with a large blade, the skin and flesh hanging away from bone like a banana.  Then, as if refusing to be outdone, her hand twinged.

She dropped the salt.

The echoes crashed through each other.  The aftermath of two confrontations, one lighter, with lots of smaller injuries.  Bites and pencil stabs from kindergarten shock troopers.  The other brutal- the Family Man or his lieutenants had gone out of his way to make the injuries graphic.

Concussion symptoms, bruises, cuts-

Other echoes followed.  A teenage girl fighting another teenage girl, grabbing for hair- to adjust for height, the image was lowered, knees touching ground, calves and feet disappearing beneath floorboards.

A wave of them, disabling her, followed by a wave of them on the offensive.

Verona fended off the reaching hand and arm- which was hard when she passed through it.  It was like fending off the cold spray from a shower head.  She could put hands in the way but the spray still reached her, traveled around, still got at her.  Fingers gripped her.

She managed to get her hands on her bag, got the salt-

She swung it, unsure if the tab at the side was open.  The hand pulled on her hair, wrenching, trying to pull hair out of her scalp, and it might have succeeded if the echo had grabbed less hair.

Salt cut through the echo, and the grip dissolved.

There were others.  A guy wearing only boxer briefs shoved a girl up against the wall, shouts drowned out by cries of pain from elsewhere.  He came for Verona, aiming to do the same, but crashed into one of the images of the wounded that had appeared here.

Like a wave breaking up on the rocks, he came to pieces.

A playful fight between two guys erupted near her, the two of them ringed by a small crowd, consisting mostly of those she’d beat up with a table leg.  One pushed the other to the ground, pounding his ribs a few times for a laugh.  Then, sparked by some jealousy or old grievance, he kept hitting, hit harder-

Verona could feel the phantom blows radiating off the echo.  She grunted, and that reminded her that her jaw was broken.  Kind of.  But it was a weak echo- she waded through it and that was enough to dissolve it.  It started to reform, but that took time.

She needed her left arm back, so she cast salt on the couch, where the two wounded echoes had been put while others saw to their medical care.

The phantom pain in her jaw and arm dissipated, and the lights went out.

It took her a full second to realize what the scene was, as she felt the emotions wash over her.

A phantom attacker came at her in the dark, swinging a weapon at her leg.  Verona twisted- but the pain and injury were part of the scene, part of the pattern.  She couldn’t avoid it, so instead, she went with it, twisting, stumbling, turning her back and making her best effort at lining herself up-

Walking backwards into the impression of herself left behind by another echo.  An echo of a guy that was terrified in the darkness, dealing with a silent, camouflaged attacker.

She owned the other end of that moment, so she reclaimed it, absorbing it into herself.  She fell backwards, leg still smarting from the smack with the table leg.  She hit ground, and the darkness broke away.

Another attack from echoes, another wave of scenes.  Hangovers, sickness, an OD.  Someone with killer heartburn and nausea choking down what might have been cough syrup, knowing it would make the heartburn and nausea worse.  Not caring.  It was a medication that caused drowsiness and she wanted the drowsiness.

Adding onto the vague headache and disordered thoughts that came from one echo’s head injury.  She was on hands and knees, holding the box of salt, and getting up was hard now.  Too hard.  She opened her mouth and vomit flavored foam filled it, clogging her throat.

She slashed out with the salt.  Another vague spray.

Cutting through some.  One echo that was in the process of colliding with one of the floating bodies absorbed most of it, unfortunately.

It was another joint attack, and she’d cut past the revulsion, disgust, and sickness just in time to summon up her strength, as more echoes hit her, aiming to play off her weakness.

Happy memories.  Boyfriend and girlfriend in the early stages of their relationship.  One guy sat in the lap of another guy, fingers in the guy’s hair, rubbing his head, leaning in to try to kiss him and pass him a cigarette at the same time.  The cigarette fell into his lap, prompting a moment of panic, and a lot of laughter- one sided at first, then mutual.

The kind of warm moment and good laugh someone carried with them for a lifetime, maybe.

More moments, warm and distracting.  Eating together.  A deep philosophical talk, edges filed off by the warm buzz of alcohol and the haze of pot.  A kid who acted more like a dog than a child was fed.  Head bent over the kitchen sink, the kid’s hair was washed, fleas leaping off, five to ten at a time.  Verona was treated to a fast-forward of the kid learning to love and trust their caretakers.

It felt like there was a strategy behind all of this.  Injuring her and then lunging in for the kill.  Then getting her feeling sorry for herself, followed by trying to get her to feel sorry for them.

“Nah,” she grunted, spitting away foam.  She remembered, and patterns responded to memory.  She put out a hand to point-

The radiator.

Five different people had been chained up there at different times.

She concentrated on the memory of freeing them with the keys Grabsy had taken off the captors, making it vivid in her mind’s eye.

The echoes from near the radiator were unleashed, and charged into the mass of others, sympathetic.  Verona reached out to push one, keeping it from running into one of the bodies that was flying slow-motion through the air.

Echo collided with echo, and the ones from near the radiator were intense, vivid, and whole.  They each cut past three or four lesser echoes before disintegrating.

She kicked one of those bodies, and sent it flying, crashing through a whole cluster of overlapping echoes who’d all gathered on one armchair.  They disintegrated.

The scene of people being wounded and knocked this way and that was symbolic of the fact she’d kicked them out, cleared things away, and made a claim.  It helped.

Each toss of salt didn’t just cut through echoes, but it littered the floor with salt, and made their movements hurt them, taking off a bottom layer of their feet with every step they took.  These weren’t intelligent echoes with anything driving them, so they didn’t know enough to stop moving.  So she had to stay out of their way, nothing more.

In the front hallway was the mastermind.  Sort of.

It resembled a wraith king or superecho.  A bunch of echoes had come into this house, through that front door, and as they kicked off shoes, took off jackets, or just paused, they’d had a similar feeling.  Sometimes it was faint, sometimes it was more intense.  Now those echoes blended together.

A feeling of coming home.  Of being able to relax some.  Of this place being theirs.

The superecho turned to look at her.

Verona didn’t move as it directed some echoes to come for her.  They passed over salt, legs crumbling, and disintegrated before they could do much.

The superecho looked around, faces blending into faces, taking in the house.

Without supporting architecture and emotions, the echo represented only a moment… and that moment passed.

It disintegrated, and faint images and outlines appeared throughout the house.  Not a mural, but texture to turn chipped paint into something more interesting than featureless white or gray paint.

As the influence of the various echoes began to falter, the remainder crumbling or stumbling into obstacles, Verona could see Lucy again.

“You okay?” Lucy asked.

Verona rubbed her hand, which continued to twinge.  “Yeah.  Think so.”

It was hard to explain the fatigue that gripped her.  It wasn’t like she’d actually been cut or bruised.  It wasn’t like her muscles were that tired- though she might have tweaked a muscle in her shoulder swinging the box of salt around, letting the salt spout out the little hole.  A heartsickness and emotional fatigue.

“Okay,” Lucy said, after studying Verona a bit.  She pointed her rapier out the open front door.

Standing at the entryway to the front hall, Verona could lean forward and see that three people stood out there.  Matthew, the Foreman, the Bitter Street Witch.

Lucy pointed at Matthew.

He closed the door behind him.

“You want to fight?” Verona asked him.  “Going to challenge my claim in a surprise twist?  If so, put your dukes up.”

“Let’s take a moment,” Matthew answered her.  “This is a gauntlet.  One thing after another.  I could’ve come when the other council members did, but I’ve done some work in the Undercity.  They know me here.  I figured I could wedge in.  Give you a breather.”

Verona retreated to her chair.  She got one of the eco-friendly bottles out of her bag and drank water.  She paused.  “You’re really Matthew?”

“Yes.  I’m Matthew Moss.  Born and raised.  Host of the Doom of Edith James.  For a little while longer, at least.”

She nodded.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” he said.

“I think if I dwell, I’ll do worse than if I move ahead.  It’s echoes.  The wounds are phantasmal.”

“Time still heals wounds of the heart.  It helps sort out thoughts,” Matthew told her.    He glanced to one side and down, a dark look in his eyes.  “Allegedly.”

“I’d rather move forward.  The time window is narrow.  Let’s try to get this done while Musser is distracted.”

He nodded.  He looked around.  “No contest.”

Inside the living room, on the wall to Matthew’s left, the mural painted the wall.  A giant eye, black as onyx, surrounded by hyper-detailed eyelids and motes like those cast off by a fire.

She could hear the approach of the Bitter Street Witch even before Matthew was out of the house.  Like with the Vice Principal and her staff, there was the ‘tok’ of a walking stick on floorboards, but this was heavier, more meaningful, and slower.

The woman stepped into the living room and leaned into the doorframe.  She was wrapped around the six-foot walking stick almost like a snake in one of those medical images, wrapped around a winged staff, hanging off of it with bent limbs.  She squinted one eye as she cracked her jaw, eyes peering around.

Reaching inside her draping coat, the Bitter Street Witch pulled out a bird with twine binding its wings.  She bit off its head.

“Deciding if you want to challenge my claim?” Verona asked.  “It’s a house on the edge of the Vice Principal’s territory…”

It took the Bitter Street Witch a few seconds to chew and swallow the small bird head.  Still chewing and coughing slightly in an effort to choke it down, she approached, staff ‘tok tok’ing as she came closer, holding the bird’s twitching against the staff as she walked.

“My territory too.  Don’t play that game,” the Witch told her, voice a bit raspy.

“If you want to challenge me, we should negotiate the terms of the contest.”

The Bitter Street Witch reached into a pocket and pulled out one of the free newspapers that got distributed once a month.  She balled it around the headless bird corpse, then reached out with an arm that looked like it had been broken six times and healed wrong each time.  The fingers weren’t any better- one looked like it curled backwards, pointing back toward her.

Verona took it.

“A gift.  I won’t contest the claim.  Pay me back later.”

The mural extended slowly.  A naked woman, painted from the feet up.

“Keeping an eye toward the future?” Verona asked.

“Yeah.  Nicolette told me about all this.  My options.  No contest.”

“Thanks.  I’ll remember that.”

The mural finished.  A woman mid-leap, naked, with the head of a bird- or a mask shaped like a bird head.  Large birds were nailed to her arms, their wings outstretched, and some of those wings had birds nailed to them.  The wingspan stretched out to the ceiling, extending behind the girl that was balanced on the naked man’s upstretched arm.  With the fact that the undercity version of the house was in the dark, the only real illumination from the moving lines of the diagram, the light and shadow played off one another, making it look a bit like the wings were flapping.

The Bitter Street Witch reached out for one of the figures that had moved only a few inches since they’d first appeared.  An older teenager, off balance after a blow to the stomach, spit flying from his mouth.  The Witch flicked a finger, scattering a droplet of spit.  “Unwrap the bird if you need an answer to a riddle or a hint about what the future holds.  I don’t know how well it works.  If this Nicolette’s worth her shit, it should help.  If not, that’s on you.”

“Okay.”

“Foreman’s next.”

“Yeah.”

The Bitter Street Witch left.

The Foreman’s boots were heavy.  Floorboards creaked.

He was big enough he had to duck his head to get through the doorway, and it was a large doorway, to let the light from the living room reach the rest of the house.  Not that it was light right now.  He had tools, weapons and crap strapped to his legs, a weapons strapped to his back, and ruddy red flesh, like he’d gotten sunburned, or he’d spent too long in front of hot forges.

“What does a little girl like you need with a house this big?” he asked.  His metal teeth glinted in the gloom.

“Three houses this big, kind of.  Three versions across three versions of Kennet.”

“Nah,” he replied.  “One day all of Kennet will be mine.  All versions.  I don’t know if this gets in the way of that-”

“Totally does.  But also, you’re nowhere near good enough at what you do to pull that off.”

“Fuck off.  Pulling me away from my work for this.  Voice in my head, light in the distance.  No.”

“We should negotiate the terms of the contest.  I-”

“I beat your face in until you give up.  How’s that?”

“You’re a leader, right?” Verona asked.  “Faction leader?  You want to rule Kennet?  Okay.  Prove it.”

“I don’t need to prove anything to you.”

“Controlling something as big as Kennet means you need help.  People to manage things wherever you’re not.  Maybe you scare them into service, maybe it’s love or respect…”

He scoffed.

“Your favorite ally against mine.”

“You’ll use bullshit magic.”

“I won’t magic,” Lucy said, behind him.  She still had the rapier.  “Just this.”

“You?”  Contempt dripped off the one-word question.

“Up for it?” Verona asked.  “Your best against my bestie.”

Lucy smiled slightly.

“She won’t use magic magic?”

Lucy shook her head.  “No.”

“Then yeah, I want to see this.  Except I’ve got to go get him.  You’ll pull some shit when I’m not looking.”

“Name him.  Call him.”

“Stew Mullen.”

“Time works in a different way while we’re doing this.  It feels like it’s been a few minutes, but in reality Stew just got a tickle in his brain, heard your voice, and wandered over.”

Verona looked out the window.  A figure approached.

Lucy, behind the Foreman, nodded.

Verona grabbed her bag and followed them outside. The sky was moonless and starless, and streaked with the plumes of smoke from the Foreman’s corner of town.

Stew Mullen was a patchwork of scar tissue on a very large, very muscular man, carrying a sledgehammer in each hand.  Head contusions and skull fractures had turned his forehead into something almost inhuman, layered scar tissue and reorganized bone forming a heavy brow.

“You’ll fight the kid,” the Foreman told Stew.

Stew started forward, walking awkwardly at first, then starting to break into a run.

“Not me, not just yet!” Verona called out.

Stew slowed, confused, and looked back at the Foreman, who shook his head.

Lucy descended the stairs double-time, then strode over.

Stew pointed at her, looking back.  The Foreman nodded.

“I hate fighting,” Lucy murmured.  “Doing this for you, you know.  ‘Cause I love you.”

“I know.  I’m sorry,” Verona replied.

Stew charged again, now with the correct target in mind.  He was reckless with the sledgehammers, swinging without care, caution, or rhythm, and he was strong enough he apparently didn’t notice they were supposed to weigh something, and swinging them was supposed to be hard.

Lucy ducked low, and jabbed him in the knee, then darted out of the way.

Stew didn’t seem to care.

“This asshole will kneel on hot coals and not notice.  Kneels on slag, gets hot oil sloshed over him, belly to toe.  Scar tissue’s at least an inch thick, hard as rock,” the Foreman explained.

Lucy jabbed here and there, and it didn’t seem she was getting anywhere.  She switched stances, baiting out an overhead swing, then jabbed at a shoulder, only for the point of the rapier to skitter off the flesh there, catching at one spot where flecks of metal had sunken in and scarred up.

The overhead swing reversed, hammers flying up, and Lucy stepped back.  She glanced at Verona.

Verona took a cue from the Vice Principal, and angled her head, looking at Stew, then angled it to give a pointed look to the Foreman.

Lucy shifted her footing.  Stew was the kind of brute who wasn’t very bright.  She moved this way and that, baiting out swings, backed up a little more-

Stew charged, closing the distance.  Lucy ducked and rolled, and let Stew’s momentum carry him into the Foreman.  He crashed into the man, and got shoved to the ground.

“Pathetic,” the Foreman growled.

Lucy glanced back at Verona.  Verona nodded, then did the head tilt again.  “Be careful.”

“Yeah, I am.  I’m pretty sure a good swing from one of those hammers would kill me.”

“Scared?” the Foreman asked.

“Being careful,” Lucy murmured.

“Get her,” the Foreman barked.

Stew came at her hard, swinging recklessly.  He shifted footing, then swung one, hitting dirt, and chipped a plume of dirt at Lucy.

Blinded, she backed up.

“Hold,” Verona warned.

“Giving instructions?” the Foreman asked.

“You told your guy to get her, I’m telling her how not to get got.  It’s even.  You set the precedent, moron,” Verona replied.  “And it’s leadership.”

“Get her before she can see, and fucking kill her,” the Foreman barked.  “I’m insulted it’s taken you this long.”

Stew charged.

“Hold-” Verona called out.

“Fucking-” Lucy swore.

Stew raised one hammer.

“-and left!”

Lucy darted to one side.  Stew seemed to think left was right, and jerked to one side before overcorrecting.

Lucy wiped her eyes clear, shook her head, and saw Stew recovering, charging at her.

Verona did the head tilt again, eyes flicking.

Lucy frowned at her.

It felt like, just a little while back, they would’ve been able to psychically communicate.

Trust me, and… “Be careful.”

Lucy backed up, weapon ready-

Right into the Foreman.  He put a foot out, right on Lucy’s rump, and kicked her, stumbling, in the direction of Stew.

Lucy only escaped because Stew was slow on the draw.

“There,” Verona said.  “You help your guy, I can help my girl.  Precedent.”

She swung her bag around out to be in front of her, then reached inside.  She had to check two glass bottles before she found the right one.  Spell card-

She lobbed it.  Stew was busy swinging, nettled by Lucy’s jabs-

The alchemical liquid sloshed over the back of his head and shoulders.

“The fuck!?” the Foreman called out.  “Magic bullshit.  You lied.”

“Lucy said she wouldn’t use magic.  She’s not.  I am, or I did,” Verona replied.  “I like to think of it as good teamwork and leadership.”

“I think it’s more of an excuse for me to break you into itty bitty pieces,” the Foreman snarled.

He brushed past Stew and Lucy, and Lucy found the opportunity to jab him in the back of the knee.

“Fucking-!” the Foreman growled.

He had a large wrench he liked to carry with him, slung over his back with a chain connected at the end and most of the way up its length, but he didn’t draw that weapon.  Instead, he drew out a gun that he had strapped to one calf.  A cannon of a weapon, with a barrel Verona could have stuck her hand and most of her arm into.

Verona drew out a spell card, holding it up.

He turned on Lucy.  Verona threw the card.

It was a metal warding card, meant to deflect bullets.  But it moved through the air, seeking out a connection, and it repelled the barrel.

The gun fired into dirt.

A cannon like that was apparently a pain to load and reload, because the Foreman abandoned it, casting it to one side.  A single-shot weapon.

He pulled out the wrench.

Behind him, Lucy navigated around Stew Mullen, and as he bent over to pick up a hammer he’d dropped, she ran up his back, stabbing him where the alchemy had splashed.

Flesh was as malleable as clay.

One sharp jab from Lucy, rapier penetrating shoulder, and that malleable flesh parted.  Bone slipped from socket, and Stew roared.

She leaped off his back.

“Just stay put, Stew!” Verona called out.  “Surrender, disavow your shitty Foreman leader, and I’ll get you medical treatment!  Let him surrender if he wants to, Luce.”

“Of course I’d let him surrender.”

“You keep fighting, Mullen!” The foreman barked.

“Stop,” Lucy told Stew.

“Stew, guy!” Verona called out.  “Stop.  Really truly.  We can get you sorted, okay?”

Stew twisted around, and the act of bringing an arm to bear made muscles and flesh tear a little.

“Fight!” the Foreman barked.

Mullen sat down.

“Good man!” Verona called out.  “Don’t tear yourself to pieces following this dickwad.”

“Ronnie,” Lucy called out.  “What the hell kind of messed up alchemy are you concocting?”

“Oh that?  That’s meant for self-application!”

“What the hell kind of messed up alchemy are you concocting!?” Lucy asked, louder this time.

“Diluted!”

“Stew, I swear, if you don’t get up!” the Foreman growled.

Stew didn’t get up.

He wheeled on Verona.  “Fine.  I’ll handle you myself, little girl.”

“Will you?  I think I win?” Verona asked.  In the background, Lucy motioned.  Verona gave her head a tight little shake.  “You’re violating the terms of the contest now.  We were supposed to have champions fight.  They fought.  Your guy’s clearly lost.”

“We did and that’s done with.  Now I’ll smash that cat mask through the back of your skull.  Just business, little girl.”

“Bad karma.”

“I don’t care about any of that shit.”

“Yeah, well…”

Verona backed toward the house.  The Foreman advanced.

And another figure followed behind him.

He didn’t realize until a large hand had closed around his head.

The Family Man.

He wrapped an arm around the Foreman’s head and another under the armpit, reaching up for the neck.

“You.”

“Shhhhh,” the Family Man whispered.  “Be careful, Foreman.  I want you to die bloodlessly.”

The Foreman was strong, his muscle and stature extended by the warping of the knotting around Kennet.  The difference was that the Family Man was strong, but it was an unnatural strength.  A fluid strength instead of a hard one.  Muscles moved and rearranged, and he made muscles bulge where a normal arm didn’t have muscles, trapping one limb.  One knee raised, pressing against the back of the Foreman’s left arm, limiting its range of movement.

The Foreman grabbed an explosive from a front pocket of his vest, and tossed it up-

The Family Man snagged it with an overlong tongue, and whipped it away and off to the side.  Lucy scrambled to get clear.

Stew, kneeling, arms limp at his sides with shoulders destroyed, only rocked from the shockwave of the blast, and let out a guttural moan.

“I barely have a family anymore,” the Family Man whispered.  His eyes locked with Verona’s, then moved to Lucy.  “They’re having my sons and daughters but they hide from me when they do it.  I don’t have luxuries, nobody listens.  They want me and I want them but I can do nothing about it.  And I can no longer butcher a man who displeases me.  But I don’t need to butcher someone to destroy them.”

The Foreman scrabbled for a grip, fighting to pull the arm free.  Inch by inch, he worked the hand at his throat away and off to the side.

The Family Man’s arm snapped, forearm breaking.  Muscles contracted, gripping the shattered bones of the forearm, and dragged them out of place.  The bones of the hand retracted, leaving it like a thick, empty glove, then twisted the arrangement of bones a hundred and eighty degrees around, so the broken ends pointed forward, the hand-bones near the break.  They slid through the boneless half of the forearm, stabbed forward, and the forearm bones thrust past the hand and into the ’empty glove’.

Slamming into the side of the Foreman’s neck.  Two hard, irregular fingers jammed into two specific points.

Cutting off at least one kind of circulation.

The Foreman passed out.  The Family Man released him, and watched with dispassionate eyes as the Foreman fell to the ground, limp, too unconscious to break his own fall.

Lifting one foot, the Family Man looked down, rearranged muscles in his legs, and drove his foot down faster than the eye could follow.

Shattering the spine at the base of the neck.

“Not a drop of blood.  What a relief,” the Family Man purred.  He smiled wide with very white teeth as he looked at Lucy.

In the gloom, his flesh was too white, too bright.  Muscles in his arm rearranged, fixing the break.  His muscles looked like pale snakes braiding into one another before the definitions between them smoothed out.

Hmmm.  Crap.

“The things children these days are getting up to,” the Family Man purred.  He looked away from Stew as he walked forward, one hand raised to shield his eyes.  “Ghastly.”

Verona reached for a knife, and she nicked the back of a finger.  The hand twitched with the pain, then twinged with a hand cramp.

The Family Man drew closer, and she could make out more details in the shadows.  His eyes were covered in cataracts.  He was partially blind- too blind to see that amount of blood.

“I’ve staked my claim,” she told him.  She saw that he was going to enter the house, and hurried to beat him to the punch, running up the stairs and then backing into the house, retreating from him.  “How do you answer it?”

“I won’t give you a damn thing.  You’re but a child, poorly raised and in need of a stern hand.”

“My parents weren’t all that bad until a few years ago.”

“It’s so dark out,” the Family Man said, stopping at the front door, looking up at the sky.  “What kind of claim are you making that’s this dark?”

“I don’t see why I have to give you any answers.”

“I was called to give an answer, but I can’t give an answer until I know what I’m answering,” the Family Man told her, ducking his head to enter the front door.  He closed the door behind him.

Retreating into the living room, where the circle and the chair were set, Verona set the bag down but didn’t sit.  Through the front windows she could see Lucy, behind the Family Man.  Unsure what to do.

“I claim this house in all aspects.  In Kennet above, Kennet below, and a Kennet yet to be.  Spiritually, in shape, form, meaning… to make it truly mine.”

“Why is it dark?”

“Because you went blind?” she asked.

“I stared into the sun until I was sure I could make out enough to see what I needed, but not enough to see blood.”

“There were probably better ways to handle it.”

“Why is it dark?” he asked, again.  “I can see light and shadow.”

“Sometimes that’s how rituals look.  Awakenings, this.”

“There’s a part of me that has a feeling for this.  That shuddered, tremored, and yearned for things as I brought Kennet together, coordinated, and made declarations.  Most of the wives and daughters of Kennet were to give birth together, the men and boys were to be butchered, the butcher’s cuts served before us all.  There was a seed of meaning there and I would have been its flower.”

Might’ve been a god.

“That part of me doesn’t tremor or react at all to what you’re saying.  It reacts to all of this… but not those words.”

“I’ve got a lot more to do, so if we could move this along…”

“There’s something in you that’s dark and willing to harm others.  I saw it the night you came for me and cursed me.  Did the parts of the ritual for the Kennet above and Kennet yet to be look like this?  This dark?”

“I don’t see why I have to answer,” she told him.

“Because you’ve made a claim, I’ve been invited to answer it, and I need to know to give a suitable answer.  Say that again and I’ll give the same answer.  The Marlen girl with the motorcycle and slippery nature mentioned threes were important.”

“I started with this.  Kennet Below.  I’ll cover the others later.”

It felt like an intrusion, having the Family Man in her living room.  Her space.  He reached out to touch the wall, bringing his face closer to it, then touched one of the wounded that moved in slow motion.

“You need anything?” Lucy asked.

“Don’t know yet.  Thanks for the help back there, by the way.”

“Yeah yeah,” Lucy said it quickly, like it barely warranted a thought.

There was a bigger problem here.  The Foreman was dealt with and Verona had an image on her wall, a fist clenching a hammer hard enough the handle was breaking, blood and viscera leaking out.

“They won’t be dark,” the Family Man said.  “This side of Kennet is a reflection of our base wants, our impulses, the things the people above would keep hidden and unsaid, or second guess.  To truly claim this place as your own, you have to face that darkness.  That makes sense to me.  That stirs the tremoring.”

“You talk a lot,” Verona noted.

“You cursed my tongue, so my words don’t hold sway over those who followed me.  But I think they hold some sway here.”

“Maybe.”

Unfortunately, it looks like they do.

“How does this work?  The claim, my answer?” he asked.

“You can choose to ‘no contest’ it, letting my claim go through, or you can challenge the claim, in which case we work out a contest that’s reasonable.  Differences in power and claim matter a lot for that negotiation.”

“I’ve told you what this side of Kennet is.  It’s pure.  It’s dark in that purity.  Brutish, violent, free.  Am I your last enemy here?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.”

“Then I’ll be your obstacle.  Fight me, child, and fight me on the terms of this side of Kennet, dark, pure, base and violent.  If you’re going to take this place when I don’t want you to, you need to be more representative of this side of Kennet than even I am.”

As he talked, Verona could sense a shift in things.  It became visible toward the last of it.  A faint glow, like he was as much a light source as the diagrams now.

That kernel of nascent, possible divinity in him.

He’d stumbled his way into the right answer, and wormed his way into the fabric of this whole challenge in a way that made him stronger.  Arguing any part of the terms he’d outlined would weaken her claim more than it helped her.

“To the death,” the Family Man told her.

I’m not sure you can die.

“No,” she replied.  “Until surrender.  We’ve clashed before and we showed you mercy while also soundly defeating you.  That’s precedent.”

That felt right.

And by the looks of it, it resonated with him too.

“Pity,” he replied.  “I hope I can change that precedent soon.”

Verona nodded, and then she bent down to where she’d set her bag, pulling out some alchemy, as well as a bundle of twigs and twine- various spirits layered on one another.  “Alright.  Give me a second.”

“Take all the time you need,” the Family Man answered.

“Ronnie,” Lucy said, from the front hall.

“What’s up?”

“You’re fighting a pig in mud, you know.  Playing his game.”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty worrying.”

“Yeah, well…” Verona paused.  “Race to the bottom, maybe?”

“I don’t think I want to see what that Verona looks like.  Because I’m pretty sure this guy can sink way lower than you can.”

“Will you excuse us?” the Family Man asked.  “I think this is about me and her.  We don’t need any observers except…”

He indicated the slow-motion wounded and the diagram.

Lucy met Verona’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Verona said.  “Thanks though, Luce.  Appreciated.”

Glamour, tools.  Ugly Stick and Rasp.

Verona threw the twig-and-twine arrangements out into the air.  Each individual part had papers attached to them.  Those papers were set to trigger on movement and meeting with the air… and that arrangement would create a connection to markings on the dining room table, off to Verona’s left.  Each piece was pulled to a spot on the table, where a greater diagram was already set up.

She tossed out the rasp and sanguine stone.

“I may start, then?”

“Yeah,” Verona replied.

He crossed the living room.  She pulled out spell cards, and she was glad she could go top-to-bottom.  She’d arranged the more offensive cards by the element, and she was happy starting with fire.  Igniting the Family Man, small detonations that took away chunks of flesh.

He was fast to heal.  When flesh got burned, he tore it away and cast it to the side.

The floating bodies were a forest he had to push through, shoving arms and bodies out of the way.  It cost him seconds.  Verona cost him more seconds with the spell cards, holding her ground from the main point in the living room.

He was twisted up in a way that made his flesh fluid.  He was strong, durable, he had everything she didn’t in a fight.

The diagram on the kitchen table sorted itself out, the individual pieces aligning, and the amalgamation of Engine Head, Unveiled Skullbone, Lott, rasp, and sanguine stone was summoned into existence.

The summoning crashed into the Family Man like a speeding car.  It punched and where it punched, it drove in splinters of glass and nails.  The Family man fought back, and the summoning headbutted him.

It was really easy to imagine that something like the Family Man could have a limit to its healing.  That if someone hurt them long enough, you could deplete some supply of power, and the healing would slow.

That wasn’t always the case, though, and with that trace of divinity in the Family Man, it was possible he was existing on another level.  By different rules.  Maybe he just couldn’t die.  Maybe he would always heal until he was some paragon of physicality.  To change him from that could be like pushing water out of a human-shaped bowl.  If that water didn’t have anywhere to go, it could end up back in the bowl.

The summoning was a little hardier than her initial incarnation, which had used the Hot Lead.  But it used the Sanguine Stone, which Clementine had given her.  The stone, when squeezed, gave power, but at the end of the squeeze, it offered up an intelligence that would try to turn the linked practice back on the user.

Verona was forced to watch, judge when it wasn’t making headway, and then cancel it, knowing it wouldn’t disappear right away.

She used two different glamour packets.  One to conjure up a Verona- something she was getting better at, after making and remaking the Fetch so many times.  One to create darkness, to hide herself.

High Summer glamour, which wasn’t really about the darkness… but there were times it could play out that way.  To get glamour to cooperate, she’d have to make sure she handled it in a way befitting High Summer.  A dramatic appearance.

This was how all of this worked.  Every practice had drawbacks, consequences and prices.  She had to keep each in mind, answer one with another-

She canceled out the summoning.  It twisted, roaring, and then charged her.

Smashing through the glamoured Verona and into the fireplace.

Verona caught the rasp out of the air.  She passed the ugly stick to the same hand that held the rasp, and stepped over to the chair.

She chugged one of the alchemical brews while the Family Man recovered from the battering.

It was from one of the texts on the Atheneum Arrangement.

Some families dealt in certain tricks, like alchemical preparations for hosting, or alchemical introspection.  Because there were so many depths to plumb and some things were irreversible, many families had ‘test run’ chemicals.  The sixberry admixture that had been in the Halflight text was one, for hosting.

One direction alchemy could go was the Jekyll-Hyde dynamic.  Though the books just called them Hydes.

Test runs were important for that, because it was irreversible once set in motion and tended to end with a Hyde side dominant, a broken, weaker Jekyll, or both dead.  Usually the whole thing happened as a secret or side project for the practitioner, to solve some critical problem they were dealing with.

Buying a little bit of time, power, or problem solving at the cost of a lifelong war within themselves.

The nature of the dynamic and the divide depended on a lot.  There were any number of directions Verona could have gone.  Like chasing a more adult, elegant version of herself, or accessing some inverse part of herself that would be a good daughter to her dad, and a disciplined student.  With the regular ritual and alchemy, once that divide in the Self was marked out, it was permanent.

This drug was meant as a test run for all of that.  A way for a prospective Hyde to test what they might end up becoming.  As often as not, it was a gateway into being a full Hyde… usually because the effectiveness dropped steeply.

It tasted so bad, and the texture wasn’t any better.  Dissolved teeth, from one of the animal skulls in her room.  Blood.  Honey.  Cat fur.  Melted into an uneven slurry with gelatinous lumps in it.  Now that boiled through her.

Race to the bottom?  I won’t go there.  But I’ll acknowledge there’s a part of me that damn well could.

Her thoughts got darker, a headache and stomachache gripping her.  She crumpled to the ground.

“Do I even have to do anything?” the Family Man asked.  “It looks like you’re defeating yourself.”

Black steel wool scrubbed deep into and through her brain, digging into the folds.  A headache as bad as any she’d had.  The stomachache was similar.

And then, switch flipped, the black was the normal, the lighter texture and softness the intrusive element.  The blackness in the stomach found a drain, lanced through her, and her blood reversed direction.

She hissed.

I’m a problem solver but I’m not as fast as Avery.  I’m creative but I crack in the face of most repetitive tasks and long slogs, unless it’s something I’m really into, like practice.

The thoughts felt removed from what her body was doing.  She twitched as she stretched, straining muscles.

Her body moved.  Now she was fast.  The teeth and cat hair were critical.  She hadn’t transformed, but her skin was bruising, and her hair seemed whiter when it flicked in front of her eyes.

Her joints were flexible, and she wasn’t just quick in terms of running.  She was able to catch him a few times with the Ugly Stick.  He tried to grab the weapon away and she rasped him.  The drag of the rasp cut his skin twenty or thirty times at the point of contact, and the rest of his skin took the cue and cut itself.  Until he was more bloody, cut flesh than regular flesh.

It cost him a second.  She stepped back three times, fought an involuntary full-body twitch-

That’s one.  One rebellion of the body before the change cancels.

She’d nearly tripped over the box of salt she’d used for the echoes.

If it was good enough for the old man ghoul…

The thought was late.  Her body was already kicking the box of salt into the wall, then swung the club into it, hard.

Demolishing it, while casting salt all over the Family Man’s rasped skin.

Kinda might need that, actually.  Oh well.

With a foot, she brought her backpack up into the air.  Contents spilled out, and she grabbed a packet of paper.

The mess sprawled across the floor.

I’m not sure I’ll have a ton of time to clean that up.  Hm.  Let’s focus on winning this, at least.

With teeth, she tore the packet of paper open.  Her hand twinged, the cramping starting- but even without that, she found herself fast but not coordinated.  Fingers struggled to turn the packet upside-down one-handed.  So she chucked the contents into the air, one Thorn in the Flesh, and she caught it.

She started to dart forward, but another full-body twitch seized her.  The blackness that had taken over her mind began to dissolve at the back, becoming a regular headache.

That’s two out of three.

She went after him, avoiding reaching hands and punches.

His muscles bulged and twitched.  He swung an arm for her head, then instead of just stopping the swing and reversing for a backhand, he reshuffled muscle and bone, elbow becoming hand, reaching straight for her, while the hand and forearm withered and disappeared into his wrist.  She smacked it aside with the ugly stick.

A frenetic exchange of blows happened- and she was losing.

And running out of time.

Cards! Verona screamed at the version of her that was in control.  A fighting-mode Verona.

It wasn’t listening.

Cards, cards, create an opening!

It listened, pulling spell cards out of her pocket.  Flinging them.

It wasn’t remembering what the cards were.  A shock of electricity that danced from three different wall outlets to the Family Man.  Smoke.

Ice.  Verona recognized the card in the second it was held before being thrown.

Go.  This one!

The Family man’s upper chest was frozen by the card.  The Ugly Stick smashed it.  And the Ugly Stick had the property of slowing healing and making injuries more likely to be permanent or scarring.

Giving her an opening to jab the Thorn in the Flesh into the flesh.  She thrust out the Ugly Stick tip first, driving it in deep, between ribs, while pushing herself away from the Family Man.

“This is a test of whether you can be dark enough to belong here,” the Family Man said, prying at the wound to try to pick the thorn out.  He gave up and let the flesh heal around it.  “But are you really you?”

Verona twitched, shuddering.  Every joint popped, every muscle felt strained, twisted in the wrong direction, until something fixed itself, and the muscles returned to their usual configuration, her limbs to their usual length.  The taste of bile and the crap she’d drank filled her mouth, and she spat.

Mid-spit, her heart stopped.

Her blood started flowing the right directions.  Her heartbeat resumed.

Man, was that unpleasant.

Man, was it also a really fucking short transformation, too.  She’d hoped to have more time to get something done.  And the next time she did it, even if she went a complete other direction, it would last a shorter time, according to the books.

But to get an edge in a once-in-a-lifetime ritual?  Yeah.  That was okay.

She huffed out a sigh.  “I’m me.”

“If you win a victory using that, it takes away from the idea you belong or deserve to stay here.  Not that I think you’ll win.”

“I earned that victory by working with that darkness.”

She flicked another card at the Family Man.  The other, quicker, more instinctive Verona had messed up the card orderings.  She used more ice, moved in to smack it-

And shied away as he prepared to grab her.

He tore the chunk of frozen flesh away.  Then he looked down.

The healing was slower.

The Thorn in the Flesh poisoned practices, slowing and weakening them.  It also applied to effects like the Family Man’s healing.  And his divine instincts.

She’d put it darn close to the heart.

She wouldn’t have the Thorn again until he was defeated and she picked through his corpse, presumably.  Or if he somehow pushed it out, in which case she’d have some claim to it, with a higher chance of finding it.

For now, though, it was doing good work.

She threw cards.  She focused on the section that had been put out of order, depleting it.  Smoke, sound, fire, acid.

“Those are annoying.”

He shoved one of the wounded out of the way.

Her body was unexpectedly tired, as she moved to put some distance between them.

His chest expanded, and ribs parted.  Limbs twitched, muscles elongating, to make his arms longer, the elbow and shoulder pulling a considerable distance away from the joints they were meant to connect to.

He reached out, arm sweeping low, then arcing to grab for her, and he knocked the chair into her way.

Between exhaustion and the unexpected, she fell over it, and he grabbed her.

I’d counted on having more time with that drug in me.

She wrestled, struggling.

Ribs parted and closed, like the jaws of a beast turned sideways, and with each opening and closing, ribs rearranging themselves between cycles, he found his slower progress to healing and burying the damage the spell cards had done.

“Alchemical exclusion, cold.  To hand!”

The runes on bottles lit up, and one canister flew to her hand.

The Family Man caught her wrist before she could chuck it into his open chest.

He knit ribs together.  All healed.  No more opportunity there.

“How much will your witch friend cry after I tear you in half?” he asked, holding her arms out to either side, gripping one wrist and one upper arm.  He tugged, straining her shoulders.

He’d tear her arms from the sockets.

He pulled on her sleeve of her sweater instead, tearing the shoulder, ending up with a fistful of sleeve just past her hand.  She dropped the canister in the process, and it shattered on the floor.  Creating a patch of ice.

She looked around, feet scrabbling on his abdomen, one hand caught inside her sleeve.  Hand with the ugly stick unable to move the stick enough to do any real harm.

Her foot tapped a wounded teenage girl who was moving in slow motion.  The light kick prompted a dramatic reorientation in trajectory.

She swung her feet around, caught a different wounded at the wrist, and swung him in the direction of the Family Man.  Working her arm through, she reached out and got the arm free.  She dangled by the one hand now.

He decided to throw her hard into the couch, then closed the distance a moment later, shoving one of the wounded aside.

She stuck a leg out, stopping that wounded from moving.

It took him effort to move them but it was easy for her.  Like she and they were in zero gravity and she had more strength than the Family Man.  She used her feet to put the wounded image between her and him.

This is why we do our prep in advance, Verona thought.  That’s a representation of a claim I have on this place.  Clear away echoes- I could have done a better job of that.  Set up claim.  Having paperwork becomes a tangible advantage in tough contests.  Same for other kinds of claim.

The not-really-human shield bought her time.  Time to get glamour.

She became something small, halfway between opossum and snake, darting between his legs.

He shoved the body aside, and stared at an empty couch.  She stood behind him, fanning out some of her remaining spell cards.

He wheeled on her, and she pressed the wad of cards onto his skin.  They stuck there.

She hurried back, while he tried to peel them away, and grabbed for the wrist of one of the wounded, hauling them in front of her to be her shield.  The cards acted as if they were glued in place.

His upper chest became an eruption of mingled effects, ranging from wind or glitter to a fiery detonation and a crackle of lighting.  The force of it knocked her meat shield away.

The Family Man’s chest was cracked open again.

Verona reached inside, and found his heart.  She found the thorn, too.  Pushing with her thumb, she brought the point of the thorn to the heart.

He grabbed her wrist.  “Child.”

“You should surrender.”

He squeezed her wrist, threatening to break it.  She pushed the thorn millimeters deeper.

His flesh slowly healed around the edges.  Slower than before, with the placement of the thorn.  It was about twenty seconds from wrapping around her hand and wrist.

“If your flesh starts to close up around my hand, I’ll shove that thorn in all the way.”

“If you do anything except withdraw your hand and that thorn, I’ll tear your limbs off,” he breathed the words into her face.

“Another contest?” she asked.

“If this is about claim, and having a place in the undercity… name five people who want you here.”

“That doesn’t matter.  Want is irrelevant.”

“Mallory, the Vice Principal, the Bitter Street Witch, the dopey nameless boy with a crush on me, Freak and Squeak.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It will,” she told him.

There was a vague sense of vertigo.  The flesh drew closer to her hand and wrist.

“The undercity of Kennet is becoming a different place than the one where you looked like you were top dog for a short while.  Cooperation, alliances.  Cool people getting a chance to be cool.  Places are opening for business.  There are more truces, for the goblin market, the cinema, the hospital.”

“None of that matters.”

“And what have you been doing?  Hiding away, feeling sorry for yourself?  If we want to talk about claim and who belongs in the undercity, what the hell kind of excuse do you have to be here?  I challenge all that you are.  The knotting that gives you power, the divinity from a faith in you that has died.”

The vertigo feeling intensified.

The house shifted.  They tilted, and both fell onto the couch, with Verona atop the Family Man.

The fall made her hand move.  The thorn pushed in deep.

“I can work with this side of Kennet better than most.  And if I’m not a hundred percent perfect fit?  I’ll adjust things.  I’ll make them better, for me and for others.  I’m getting my own fucking patch of Kennet to myself and you’re in no place to stop me.  Now surrender, or I swear, I’ll find a way to disconnect you from the knotting, and this goblin taint that’s slowing the healing is going to become something that kills you damn fast when you stop being someone who heals and changes like you do.”

She pushed the thorn in a hair deeper.

He released her wrist.

“I’ll let you have this house.”

“Damn right you will,” she told him.  She tore her hand out of the wound, leaving the thorn where it was.

She’d get it later, maybe.  After this loser got himself killed.

Arm dripping with blood and fluids, she stepped away, keeping one eye on him.

Putting the chair back.

In what looked like fast forward, he got up and left.  The door banged.

Diagrams glowed, and the darkness lifted with another tearing sound.

The light that shone through the window was bright and white, to the point she couldn’t see anything beyond.

Her mask was one cat ear at the upper right corner of her forehead, crossing diagonally across her face to the lower left side.  Ribbons held it firmly in place.

“You’ve set a difficult task before us.  But I shouldn’t be surprised, should I?  We didn’t get to know each other very well, but you seem like the type to throw curveballs when it comes to things like this.”

“Mmm,” she grunted.  She got water, drank some, then rinsed off her hand.  Only when she was done did she turn.

The victory over the Family Man had given the walls streaks of white, like torn banners.  White flags.  They added artistic flourish and dimension to it all.

“How are we meant to arbitrate an attempt to claim a place that doesn’t exist yet?” he asked, with a slight growl in his voice.

She turned to face Charles.  The Carmine Exile.

“You’re a little biased, and you said you wouldn’t interfere,” she told him.

“Yeah,” Charles replied.  He turned to go, but paused to remark, “You’re not going to like what the other three decided on, for how you can claim a Lost and future Kennet.”

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