Author: Wildbow

Gone and Done It – 17.a | Pale

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Elizabeth Driscoll’s sight had a way of framing people and things.  Each person was marked out in two dimensions, given a border and a faint background, and in each corner of that frame was an image.  It resembled old maps and where those maps often had dragons or the four great forces of the wind in the corners, the items contained in the frame of whatever she looked at with the Sight told her a great deal.

That was normal.  That was the sort of thing she expected to see.  She sat at a table in a crummy old roadside diner with a sign out front that had staining on the white plastic, where stainless steel had rusted and the rust had been spread by weather, and three other individuals sat with her.  Each of them were framed like playing cards, the colors of their clothing and bodies muted, and the depth of their bodies dampened, with the images in the corners of the Sight-provided frames.

There was only one recognizable last name from her time at the Blue Heron.  But two of them had links.  Milo was a specialist from a lesser family of war mages, the Songetays, and had married one of her old classmates’ older sisters.  Angie Demarest had almost been Angie Whitt.  She would have married Chase Whitt if Chase hadn’t ended up getting apprenticed to Alexander.  Elizabeth had little liking or admiration for Chase.  She was still glad he’d managed to dodge this bullet.

Milo Songetay kept his hair and beard at a level too short to be called stubble but too long to be bald.  It was raw, brutally efficient, and stood at a contrast to the high-end clothes he wore and the nice car that was in the lot outside.  It made her think of someone who worked on Wall Street, too busy to actually groom beyond the necessities, but with the money to spare on the luxuries.  He didn’t work on Wall Street.  In his frame, going clockwise from the upper left, were knife / chalk outline of a body / goldfish in a bowl / binoculars.

Elizabeth had been asked to pick up Cynthia ‘Cyn’ Gaspard, who sat across from her now.  She knew of Cyn but hadn’t ever had cause to meet her.  Cyn was a sleeping giant, roused by necessity and paydays.  Growing up, paying attention to the Driscoll family business, it felt like every conversation about an ongoing crisis tended to have that ‘should we bother Cyn about this?’ moment.  Usually followed by a no.  There was an Other who was a problem, dozens could die, should we bother Cyn?  No.  Let’s handle it in house.  The spirit world was leaking into the real world in a suburb in Waterloo, should we bother Cyn?  No, let’s not go that far.  Rope / temple / money / stone.

Cyn normally dressed like she worked in a garage, sometimes with actual coveralls.  She’d been dressed like that when Elizabeth had pulled up.  She’d made Elizabeth wait for forty minutes while she went inside, got dressed, and packed.  She’d emerged wearing a cream colored blouse with frills at the throat and a calf-length dress with a print on it that looked like 70’s wallpaper.  Her eyes were perpetually three quarters of the way closed but the parts of the eyes that Elizabeth could see glowed like cartoon radiation.  Green and bright.  She never turned off her Sight.

Cyn was a problem solver, especially when it had to do with gods and spirits.  She wasn’t on Durocher’s level, but she wasn’t minor either, and unlike Durocher, she was available, if expensive.  Most of the time, Durocher only paid attention if she found something interesting.  Cynthia Gaspard only paid attention if she had to, for five figure sums or situations that couldn’t be ignored.

Elizabeth hadn’t been filled in on which this one was, but she could draw some limited conclusions.  Cyn was on board for the Musser situation, at least for a little while, and as of right now, Cyn the problem solver saw the pair of women out in the parking lot as a problem, based on how those glowing green eyes were focused on them.

Angie looked like a weird fit for the old fashioned diner, with hair permed into wild rolling curls, and heavy eyeshadow.  She was petite, wearing a loose fitting blouse with a denim skirt with a hem that had trailing threads.  She leaned over the table, almost draping herself over it, in her effort to get closer, as if the table was the only thing that kept her face from being a half inch from the face of whoever she was talking to in the moment.  More than anything, Angie conveyed the image of someone who chewed gum constantly, but didn’t shut up long enough to break the illusion and let anyone realize she didn’t have any in her mouth.

Angie Demarest had done more talking than the other three of the people at the table combined.  In the top left above her right shoulder were a pair of wedding rings linked together, but there was nothing on her finger, so that was pretty indicative of what the driving topic of discussion had been.  She scribbled away with the crayons on the dipsosable paper placemat, apparently trying to emulate Gogh’s Starry Night, with the placemat almost in the center of the table, with how she leaned forward and toward those she was talking to.  Wedding rings / portrait in a frame / baseball bat with nails driven through it / flower arrangement.

“I was watching this woobtuber, called himself Dong Dog Doug.  I told you how the family said that if they couldn’t arrange a marriage of equivalent value for me among practitioners, they’d help set me up with anyone I named, within reason?”

“You told us,” Milo said, as he daubed a french fry in a careful two-to-one mix of mustard and ketchup.

“So I watch these guys, and I get super into it, and if they say they aren’t from the area, or if I find something while searching, it’s like, damn, right?  Mini-heartbreak.  Then move on.  It’s like when I wanted a puppy, and finally convinced my parents to say yes to it, and I went back to the store, and it had been sold.  There was this one time, they moved the camera, and they had a pillow with some drawing of a woman on that.  I clicked off that stream so fast I almost sprained a finger.”

“Why are you looking for potential husbands on woobtube in the first place?” Milo asked.

“Because you get a sense of them, how they handle themselves.  Gotta look at how they dress, how they hold themselves, how they handle the pressure.”

“That’s how they handle themselves on camera, not in reality,” Elizabeth said.

“How they handle themselves in front of an interested audience is how they’d handle themselves in front of the woman they’re in love with, and they’d be in love with me because the Whitts would give them a potion.  And because I’m sexy as fuck.”

“You shouldn’t,” Elizabeth said.  “I wouldn’t.”

“You can’t.  Because you’re not sexy,” Angie told her, pausing in her drawing.  “Sorry, but I’m being honest.  You dress in shades of brown and you look tired, Lizzie.”

“I’d be more interested in her than in you,” Milo said, daubing another french fry in his mix.

“What the fuck?” Angie asked.  “Fuck off.”

He looked over at Elizabeth.  “I’m not interested in you.  Don’t think I’m coming onto you.  I’m just sick of this.”

“Sure.”

“Fuck you both.  Getting on my case?”

“Don’t give people love potions.  It’s hollow,” Elizabeth said.  “And screwed up.”

“They fucking owe me, right?  That’s indisputable.  I’m supposed to marry Chase Whitt, he finds his way to a better position, they make a deal.  I get whoever I want, provided it’s not international, too rich, protected, whatever.  Nothing that gets in the way of the practice.  That’s the deal.”

Elizabeth’s focus was on the parking lot.  Two women- one in a car, one standing by it.

The woman in the car didn’t have a frame.  But there was a decorated background behind her and it extended through most of the lot.  The other woman’s frame was irregular in shape, moving.

Cyn wasn’t taking her eyes off them.  She’d drawn something on a napkin and pressed the napkin against the wall, just below the window.  Presumably why they hadn’t been noticed.

Angie kicked the table.  It was bolted to the floor by a single metal pole, so it didn’t really do much more than make a racket.  “Hey!  Don’t ignore me!”

Elizabeth turned off her Sight and paused.  She looked around the diner.  “Were the walls green before?”

Milo sat up and looked around.  “What?”

“Hey,” Angie said.  She pushed her drink toward Elizabeth.  Milo reached out and caught it before it could tip over.  Angie frowned, seeing the orbs of Milo’s eyes turn into red, raw nuggets as he blinked his eyes.  She leaned further over the table to look past Cyn.  “What’s going on?”

Milo looked, then went to get up from his seat.  Elizabeth reached out, seizing his wrist.  “Don’t.”

He remained in a position, not sitting, not standing, legs bent, hand on the table, other hand held by her.  “Don’t what?”

“Don’t,” she told him.  Her eyes went to Cyn.  “Right?”

“Yeah,” Cyn said, calm.

“Don’t do anything.  Don’t move.  Don’t push.  Don’t make too much noise.  Don’t raise too much attention,” Elizabeth said, quiet.

“I’m very good at moving and pushing, and making noise,” Milo said.

“I know,” Elizabeth said, calm.  “And you’re meant to be my bodyguard.”

“Yours and Cyn’s.”

“Cyn doesn’t need a bodyguard so much.  But yeah,” Elizabeth said, keeping her voice level, quiet and calm.  Had the trim on the tables been gold?  “My role?  The reason I’m part of all this?  My family’s good at keeping track of the big stuff, we’re Historians, we track patterns in cities, map areas, help with rituals that are city-wide.  I’m here to give advice on the ongoing Lordship business.  So let me fill my role, let me give the advice in this particular moment.  You fill your role, and guard.  Please.”

Milo looked at Cyn.  Cyn wasn’t even in a position to see Milo, with the angle of her head, but she might have sensed the connection that came from being looked at.  She nodded.

Milo sat back down.  “Tell me what they are.”

“One’s big, and the other takes over.”

“Takes over?  Like a jockey, echo, invasive spirit?  Possesses?”

“No,” Elizabeth said.  “It’s like…”

Inside that irregular frame were images.  There were more than four, and they mutated, each flickering between symbols.  Over her head was one, translating from turtle shell to pearl to ring with a jewel to snake eating its tail to snake wrapped around a staff to harpoon impaling a fish, rotating a hundred and eighty degrees to become a pole with a flag attached to sign-

It snapped over to the frame of the rust-stained plastic sign above the diner, overlapping, then slowly rewound backwards, dragging the sign’s symbolism with it.

It was like a brute force password attack, just trying letter combinations until it found something right.

“You ever read Vonnegut?” Elizabeth asked.

“Some.”

“Ice nine?  Ice so cold it turns water around it into more ice nine?  Something like that?”

“Didn’t read that one.  But I get the gist.”

“If you get up, or if you make a fuss, if you open the door, you might let the cold in,” Elizabeth said, quiet and calm.  “Let’s not let the cold in.”

“Are they here for us?”

“No,” Cyn said.  “Or if they are, they don’t know it yet.”

“You said the interior changed,” Angie said.

“Yeah.  Not just the interior.”

The music playing in the kitchen.

“On the far away island of Salasmond, I said Myrtle the Turtle was queen of the pond…”

“Can I get you anything?” the waitress asked.  She was a girl about Elizabeth’s age, carrying a coffee pot.  “Top up?”

Cyn pushed her coffee mug across the table.  Elizabeth followed the woman’s cue and did the same.  Milo held his out.

“Long trip?” the waitress asked.

“Yeah.  Big project.  Putting out a lot of fires.  Some literal,” Elizabeth replied.

“Sounds important.”

“Might be the most important work we do in our lives,” Elizabeth said, fixing her eyes on the stainless steel band that fixed the handle to the tempered glass of the coffee pot.  Staring it down, focusing on it.

“Wow.  Well, I’m glad to help, then, even if it’s by giving you coffee.  Hard to imagine something like that.  I’ve never been more than an hour’s drive from here.”

“Really?” Elizabeth asked, almost letting that concentration slip-

No.  Even with the faint lapse.  The band of metal looked like gold now.  She looked away, looking up at the waitress.

“Sad, isn’t it?  Never had the excuse.  Looking after my siblings.”

“I’ve got a little brother.  I sort of know what that’s like,” Elizabeth said.

It was like someone had hit a dimmer switch when she hadn’t been paying attention.  The dark areas of the diner were darker, the light from above yellower- moving toward gold.

“Good for you.  Give him all the love you can spare, even if he makes you want to slap them silly sometimes, isn’t that right?” the waitress asked.  Her earrings were gold, the name tag gold, the dress black and green.

“I suppose.  I try, even with the age difference.”

“Well, there’s your coffee.  Can I get you anything else?” the waitress set the pot down and got out a notepad.

“Come back in five?” Cyn asked.

“You sure?  Anyone else?”

They shook their heads.

“See you in five, then.”

“So the one takes over,” Milo observed.  “The other?  Big, you said?”

The other.  Elizabeth glanced out the window.  She turned over her paper placemat and borrowed a black crayon from the mess that surrounded Angie’s placemat.  “In my Sight, if a normal person is framed like this-”

She was partway into drawing a rectangle around a stick figure when Cyn put a hand out, stopping her.

“Don’t draw them.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said, putting the crayon down.

Angie reached over and took the crayon back.

Cyn explained, “The green and gold one helped take over the house with the third-string family members.  Basil’s.”

“Ah.  Damn.”

“The other one might be the same.  So don’t draw her.”

“It’s not- not nearly the same.  Very stable.  What I was going to draw- if a normal person has a rectangle around them, like a painted portrait, just the right size for them. She feels like… like the frame is so vast I can’t see the edges or corners of it.”

“Good to know,” Cyn said.  “Have you ever seen something comparable?”

“Gods.  But they fill the frame.  This feels more like a hidden object game.  Tiny figure in a vast, picture spread across two pages, where the picture might change as you go through the book, but the figure is always there to be found.”

A pigeon landed on the edge of the car door.  Elizabeth watched as the irregular golden frame around the black woman in the green dress snapped out, seizing the bird, like a frog’s tongue catching an errant fly.

The woman in the car put a hand out, cupping it around the pigeon.  The frame lost its grip, pulling back.

The woman stepped away from the car, walking over- to the door.

“Don’t move, don’t act, don’t look,” Elizabeth murmured.

The bell on the door jangled.  The woman walked over to the counter.

Elizabeth kept her focus on the outside, even as she heard the woman order pie.  To go.  The driver of the convertible was talking to the pigeon.

“Cyn,” Milo said, pointing.  Not at the window, but below.

Elizabeth looked.

The paper the connection block had been drawn on had altered.  It wasn’t a connection block anymore.

Cyn withdrew her hand before the permanent marker could reach her fingertips.

The woman got her pie in a paper container with a bit of ice cream, then sauntered out.  As she walked over to the car, the frame again snapped out toward the pigeon, and was rebuffed.

The woman in the driver’s seat, cigarette in one hand, other hand around the bird, helped the bird into flight with a flinging motion.  It seemed to disrupt the frame enough that the bird wasn’t captured on a third attempt.

As Basil’s monster walked around the front of the car to the passenger seat, sitting down next to the driver, she glanced sidelong toward the window where the four of them were sitting.  Elizabeth avoided the eye contact, her focus on the paper placemat with its facts about Ontario.

The car drove off.

“One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand…” Elizabeth murmured.

Everyone else at the table remained silent.

She kept counting.

“…nine one-thousand…”

In her Sight, the edge of the frame moved away.  She sketched down an estimation of just how big that frame was, along with notes.

Cyn gathered up the various placemats, her paper with the corrupted connection block, and then got her phone out.  She dropped it into her glass of water.  “Your phones.”

“You’re not serious,” Angie replied.

Elizabeth handed over her phone, shaking her head.  It got its own dunking.

Milo did the same.

“You’re actually serious,” Angie said.

“Now.”

“My Sight isn’t all that but it seems like she’s gone, so maybe there’s-”

The stares from each person around the table seemed to be enough for Angie to finally shut the fuck up.

She handed over her phone, then held her hand across her eyebrows, head tilted so she wouldn’t see as it got its own dunking.

“Let’s figure out what we need to figure out.  A place like this will have a landline,” Cyn said.

“Why the hell can we use a landline and not our phones?” Angie asked.

“Because the phone holds data, and that data can be corrupted.  The landline doesn’t hold much more than a list of speed dials, at most,” Cyn said.  She emptied salt from the salt shaker onto the table, nudging it into a circle.  “Elizabeth?  Could you do what you do and fill us in?  Anything helps.”

“Yeah.”

Elizabeth reached down and got her bag.  She found the living map by touch, because it wriggled.  It held the appearance of a road map, like anyone might have in the glove compartment of their car, but moved of its own accord, folding rapidly into origami-like patterns, showing new things on each revealed face.

“Wait, that’s bullshit,” Angie said.  “That’s a load of bullshit.  You’re saying the map doesn’t have data?”

“That’s a fair point,” Milo said.

“Claim matters,” Elizabeth said.  “The woman in the car had enough claim over the bird to retake it.  The map’s mine, it was secure.  If I had to guess Cyn’s intent, we have less claim to our phones.  They aren’t really ours, maybe?”

“My suspicion is that if she was going to reach out and put something permanent in anything, it would be something easy, like the papers with new drawings on them, or it would be something rich in data and connections.  Like a phone.”

“Bullshit,” Angie said.  “If I have to lose my phone, you should have to get rid of that.”

Elizabeth planted her hands on the map, pinning it to the table, as the waitress returned.  Cyn held the little dessert menu that was tucked between the napkin dispenser and the salt and pepper shakers, hiding the view of the papers and the salt ring.

The waitress’s dress was gingham blue, her name tag plastic, her jewelry something like stainless steel.  The lighting had changed back to normal.  The coffee pot had a band of stainless steel or aluminum around the neck.

The Other hadn’t even been trying, and she’d gained so much influence.  Now that influence had slipped away.

“What sorts of pie do you have?” Elizabeth asked.

“Cherry, apple, and there’s a strawberry rhubarb, but I honestly wouldn’t go for that one.  Cherry and apple are about even in quality, comes down to personal taste.”

“Cherry, then, please.”

They waited until the waitress was done, then Elizabeth released the map.  She reached for the papers that Cyn had set aside and surrounded with a ring of salt.

“If you use that, you’ll have to destroy the map after,” Cyn warned.

“That’s fine.  I can make another.”

Cyn let Elizabeth take the drawing.  She touched the corner of the paper to the map, then laid fingers on the edge.

“Where are you going?” Elizabeth whispered.

The black permanent marker traced a line down the highway.  It finished with a circle around a settlement.  The crease of the map made the settlement name hard to read.

“Kennet.  They’re going to Kennet.”

“What’s that?” Cyn asked.

“Town.  One of the few territories we haven’t taken.  I briefly attended school with three practitioners that were from Kennet.”

“Kids?” Milo asked.

“Yeah.  Thirteen, I think.  Nicolette- she’s the augur I mentioned,” Elizabeth told Cyn.  “She had a relationship with them.  Enemies first, then friends.  They’re positioned weirdly with this Lordship business.”

“Weirdly how?” Cyn asked.

“Well, to start,” Milo said, answering before Elizabeth could.  “They live in the same place that thing that took over Basil’s house is going to.”

“There’s a link, then?” Cyn asked Elizabeth.

“A tenuous one,” Elizabeth said.  “One of the kids was working with Thunder Bay’s group, against us.  Up for debate if she was involved because she cares, or if she was involved because the Lord said so.  The Alexander-Bristow thing?  Similar.  It’s hard to pin down.  As far as I’ve figured it out, drawing on comments from Nicolette, Alexander took a weird liking to them after Nicolette ran across them in a bad way, Bristow thought he’d go after their town because it would annoy Alexander or uncover something about what Alexander was doing behind the scenes…”

Elizabeth pointed at the circled town on the map without touching it.

“…and Lawrence Bristow got on their bad side in the process.  So they sided against him, more or less, in the fight over the Blue Heron.  But it came out feeling like both Bristow and Alexander lost and the three of them were a part of why.”

“Alexander, even?  The disappearance?”

“Death, we think.  There’s a suspicion-” Elizabeth again pointed to the circled town.  “But like I said, it’s hard to pin down.”

“Are they strong?” Milo asked.  “If things like we just saw are connected to them…?”

“I won’t say no.  But it’s not like Durocher.  Or even Cyn.  It’s… raw.”

“Durocher is as raw as you get,” Angie murmured, dropping her volume as the waitress came by with the pies on plates.

They fell silent, waiting as the waitress refilled Milo’s coffee again.

“Different sort of raw,” Elizabeth said, when the waitress was gone.  “It’s almost as if there’s a lot of things on fire, and these kids are standing really close to the fires a lot of the time you go looking.”

“Are they arsonists, or the matches in something else’s matchbook?” Cyn asked, sitting back.  She speared the tip off her pie with her fork.

“Can’t say for sure,” Elizabeth said.  She watched the vanilla ice cream melt across the top of her pie.  She didn’t want to eat while she was thinking and talking, so she held her fork by the very end, the tines tapping the plate faintly.  “Feels like the latter.”

“Your friend Nicolette’s not saying?” Milo asked.

“She’s treading a fine line.  Nobody has explicitly asked and I think the vague answer you’d get if you pressed her for an answer wouldn’t be worth hurting your relationship with her by forcing her to one side of the line.”

“Treading a line why?” Milo asked, past the steaming mug of coffee he held just in front of his mouth.

“Same logic as I’ve heard people give about the Musser thing.  It’s not worth the cost of being on the wrong side.”

“I can’t imagine they compare to Musser,” Milo said.  “Do they?”

“No.  You’re right.  They don’t.  But… at the same time?  The whole business with the Carmine?  Gainsayings, outright, open, dangerous interference from a force that a lot of senior practitioners in the area would go decades without thinking about, normally?  Guess where the new Carmine used to live?”

Milo pointed at the map.  “Kennet?”

Elizabeth nodded once.  “That’s one big fire they were standing next to.  Literal and figurative.”

“He was linked to the Devouring Song, wasn’t he?  That was going around for a while, the Blue Heron seniors and staff put an end to it?”

“And the Choir’s origin was…?” Elizabeth asked, leading.

Milo pointed at the map, offering a quizzical grunt.

“Yeah.  Another big metaphorical fire,” Elizabeth said.  “One Alexander openly compared to the god capture that founded the Blue Heron.  Nicolette got a pretty parcel of power as her share for helping.  And so did…?”

She pointed at the map.

“Aha,” Cyn said.

“Do you want to know what’s funny?” Elizabeth asked.

“I do want to know what’s funny,” Milo replied, dry and humorless.

“They didn’t even apparently need the share of power they got for tipping the Blue Heron staff and seniors off on how to beat the Devouring Song.”

“Would have been really fucking nice if someone had explained all this to us,” Angie said.

“I just did,” Elizabeth replied, fork still poised over the pie she wanted to eat.

“Sooner, I mean.”

Elizabeth thought about the most diplomatic way she could frame things.  She looked up at the ceiling for a moment before deciding to say, “I think it was a lot more useful to have a big problem that most practitioners in the wider area didn’t understand, alongside a ready solution, than it was to have a partial explanation that left everyone divided and debating what to do.”

That said, while the others exchanged glances, she took her bite of cherry pie with a bit of ice cream at the back of the fork.

It was good.  Good balance of pastry, ice cream, and the tartness of the cherries.

“Why is he waiting?” Cyn asked, pointing at the map.

“To remove the problem?” Milo asked.

Cyn nodded.

Elizabeth took her time finishing the mouthful.  “Momentum, I think.  It’s a lot easier if it’s one of the last territories left to take, spirits and everyone else ready to steamroll over one small town as readily as he steamrolled over the last fifty-six.”

“When you’re done your pie, you should call in.  Let them know that this town is apparently collecting measures that could break the momentum,” Cyn said.

“Perhaps even before?” Milo suggested.

“I’ll compromise,” Elizabeth said, talking with a bit of a mouthful.  She picked up her plate and fork, and brought them with her to the counter.

“Everything okay?” the cook called back.  The waitress was serving a guy coffee at the other end of the diner.

“It’s good.  Do you have a landline?  I”ll pay.”

“By the cash.  Let me rinse this soap off my hands, I’ll get you set.”

Elizabeth waited, eating her pie, until he came and brought the phone up onto the counter, turning it around to face her.  The plastic was discolored from age.

She dialed, then waited.

“Driscoll,” was the response.

“Father.  It’s Elizabeth.  Calling from a landline.  We’re in the boonies, not all that far from Thunder Bay.  Picked up Cynthia Gaspard, checked on some Lordships as we came and went, to make sure the leadership is stable.”

“What do you need?  You’re safe?”

“Think I’m safe,” she said.  Hearing the familiar voice of her father made her want to let her guard down.  To bring knees up to chest and get cozy, curling up in a chair or something.  “Had what might’ve been a close call, though.  We thought I should pass it on.”

“Tell me.”

She did.  Detailing everything she’d seen and Seen.

He answered, “I couldn’t say for sure about the ‘big’ one.  It sounds like a demiurge.  An Other with her own pocket domain, usually divine, almost always powerful.  Except this one has no defined borders.  But if she has that kind of structure around her, it’d keep the frame in a position to want to give the full picture.”

“Yeah.  Feels right.  I wonder how well she could bring that domain from the abstract into reality.  What it takes, what it might look like.  All I saw was a pigeon, and an old castle, faint on the canvas.”

“I don’t know.  The other one?  It’s from the Basil situation,” her father said.  “It’s a Bugge.  A glitch in the system.  Information and idea unpinned from the systems that normally contain those things, by way of accidental ritual and coincidence.  A powerful, corruptive idea with no boundaries.  That one in particular is the Turtle Queen.  She took over an area.  We worked with the McKintoshes on that one, a small role, but the Winters took point.  Before your time.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll send you the notes.  It’ll be good for you to have them, regardless, and you may need them.”

“Will I?”

“If you’re inclined.  I’d like to send you.  You’d stay with the group you’re with.  Go to Kennet.  They’re in the middle of their second Demesne claim in a short span of time, so it’s easy to enter.  Then you add the fact they’re apparently knotted, and the fact the Carmine Exile is rooted there… it feels like a response somehow.”

“Do you think they’re working alongside the Carmine?”

“One way or another.  But I’d be sending you to figure out more about what’s going on.”

“I think we need to start communicating with more people about what’s going on.  Paint the fuller picture.”

“I’ll raise the idea with Abraham.  Are you okay with this, Elizabeth?”

“With what?”

“Me sending you.  Dealing with this.  If your instincts say you shouldn’t…”

“My instincts are we’re using all of this as an excuse.  I have this mental image of how this is playing out, that it’s like the moves Lawrence was making against Alexander, but there’s no Alexander in this.  Not that Alexander was even around or doing much when it all happened at the Blue Heron.”

“Hmm.”

“There’s no resistance, no pushback, just a greedy man taking power.  And then you’ve got this secondary group, off to the side.  Disruptive.”

“If we attach ourselves to Abraham Musser and he succeeds in all this- we’ve already thrived, compared to where we once were.  We’re being asked for advice.  We’re being paid.  The mortgage that was making your mother sick to her stomach is paid off.  We have so much work available to us your aunt and I are talking about bringing on apprentices.  We have sixty new Lords and many of them want to shape and grow the settlements in their domains in some fashion.  We are experts in that.”

“It’s good.  I said as much, before Headmaster Musser had the big get together.”

“But you sound worried.  You describe things in such negative terms.  A greedy man, Liz?”

“Isn’t he?  Is it inaccurate?”

“He’s a man who takes the opportunities available to him.  If a man found a rich gold mine for pennies and bought it… yes, greedy, but is that so unwise?  And is it a bad thing if we make ourselves someone he wants to ask for advice, while he profits?”

“No, father, not necessarily.  But you told me to mind my instincts.  That you valued my input.  Especially now that I’ve had an education through the Blue Heron.”

“I’m immensely proud of you.  Of getting that education.  Of you being in a position where he considered your opinion worth something, getting our foot in the door.  Your instincts got us here.  I’m also in a kind of agony.  Because I want you to be safe.  But I also want you to thrive.  I think of that as a special kind of hell formulated for parents.”

“The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  I can be safe and thrive.”

“But you can’t be perfectly safe and also thrive, Liz.  And these next few days and weeks, it puts the dilemma directly in front of us.  I imagine there’s a calculus that goes on in the mind of a man like Musser.  That he’ll have to choose who belongs to his inner circle, when all is said and done, and he is on top.  It begins with that meeting you attended, with Nicolette, Basil, the Legendres, the Hennigars, and the others.  You having the knowledge and the skill gets you there.  But I think it ends with something different.  Giving good advice isn’t enough.  He has plenty of people for that.  It’s about who’s willing to put everything on the line and show their worth when they do.”

Elizabeth gripped the phone handset harder.  She didn’t reply.

“If you don’t, you end up hurt, shattered, or traumatized.  I don’t think Milly Legendre is doing very well right now.  The Legendres- after the barriers fell and many Legendres were captured and taken hostage along with that house, I don’t think the Legendres passed Musser’s test.  If their star rose with his, they won’t stay that way.”

“And this invitation for me to go to Kennet and puzzle things out is our test?”

“That’s my instinct.  It’s my instinct that when you’re talking about Abraham in a dim light, the takeover-”

“It feels hollow.  What we’re doing.  Hollow in meaning but with lasting ramifications.”

Her father fell silent.

“I’m not saying I won’t go.  I’m saying… you urged me when I was little, to listen to my fears.  To look for the reasons I was afraid when and if I felt that way.”

“The idea was to keep you aware of men and boys who would prey on you.  Practitioner families are isolated enough from law and societal norms… it makes it worse, I think.  It made me want to keep you from practice, as godawful as it sounds.  Because you’re a girl and they’re… there.  There’s an establishment of them.  Women too, I’m sure, in their own way, but-”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Elizabeth, leaning over the counter with phone to her ear, looked across the diner at Angie Demarest.

She answered her father, “But the principle applies, doesn’t it?  You’re giving me these tools, this education, this knowledge.  Advice, to recognize my concerns when I have them.  Don’t give me all that and then fail to listen to me when these days and weeks may be the ones that define our family for the next few generations.  Please.”

Her insistent tone had drawn a look from the waitress a little distance away, where she stood by the cash.

“Alright,” Elizabeth’s father said.  “Tell me.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t.  Or that I won’t help.  You trained me to look at the big picture.  At cities in motion.  I think the Bristow-Alexander situation was a microcosm of what’s happening now.  There’s no Alexander but there was barely one then, there.  Maybe we’ll see the pattern play out with someone stepping up to represent Alexander in a final resistance.”

“We were on the wrong side of that then.  It’s only by your political acumen that you managed to stay in Musser’s good books.  We’re on the other side now.”

Yeah.  They’d sided with Alexander.  Elizabeth had been living in one of the workshops, working on a project, and she’d sheltered Alexander’s group for a few nights.  Until Bristow’s maneuvering with her parents had led to her and her little brother Dom being pulled away.

Elizabeth tried to think of how best to frame this.  “There was no right side, then.  Everybody kind of lost.  This situation could end up being that.  The fight over the Blue Heron was a microcosm of what’s happening here and what’s happening here is representative of what’s happening in the practice as a whole.  Abraham Musser stands for the practice as a whole.  Including the parts you talked about.  Where ugliness is part of the establishment.”

Her father’s voice took on a tone that sounded like he was breaking into a lesson.  “History is marked with times people found voices, opportunity, and took risks to change things.  Isn’t it worth it to try to be in a position where, perhaps, women have more of a chance, more positions of respect?  You were invited to that meeting.  How many young women were there?”

“Me, Nicolette, Marlen, Hadley, Raquel.  But Hadley and Raquel were there because their fathers were.  The rest of us- because we have skills, we filled niches.  And maybe because he felt like if he didn’t hire us, his opposition might.”

“I’d like for the next meeting of that import to have you invited because you’re head of the Driscolls.  A meeting where you have power.  Where you and others like you have more of a voice because the steps were taken now.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“Do you not want to go?”

“I do, actually.  I’m intrigued.  It’s relevant to what we do.  I think it’s a key piece of a dangerous puzzle.  But.”

“But?”

“But as much as I think I could look after me, I worry about you.  That you’re so caught up in looking at this rising star you don’t see the possibility it could fall.”

“I see a pattern at play, father.  We saw this at the Blue Heron.  Hitch yourself to a rising star, that’s fine.  But be poised to recognize when it becomes a sinking ship.”

“Even if it means we don’t rise as far?  Musser will sense my hesitation.”

“He might respect it.”

“Alright.  In the interest of recognizing what you said, you’re right.  I should listen.  And I’ll tell you now.  I swear to you, I’ll think on what you’ve said, and I’ll keep it in mind.”

Words of some import.  Elizabeth pressed a hand to her heart.  It did mean a lot.

“What do you need, Elizabeth?”

“I need someone who can manage connections.  Well enough we can fend off the Bugge.”

“Tall order.  But I’ll talk to Musser.”

“I want to get rid of Angie,” Elizabeth said, quiet.

“How much of that is because she’s a detriment to what you’re doing, and how much is it because she’s loathsome?”

“You talk about wanting better for me.  I think she’s everything you want to save me from.”

Her father’s tone and manner of speaking had changed, to the opposite of that lecturing style he’d adopted earlier.  It was soft, weary.  Maybe it was his version of uncertainty. “What if she’s a test, Liz?  What if you proving your ability to manage Angie Demarest now is what leads Musser to give you power, a year from now, instead of doing what he’d do now, and putting some strong eldest son in charge instead?”

“What if me accepting the help of scum like Angie Demarest or the help of a murderer like Milo now is what passively leads to the accepted use of others like them in the future?”

Her father was silent.  Digesting that.

“If you have an order, I’ll follow it,” she told her dad.  “You’re head of the family.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Elizabeth.  Follow those instincts.  Drive that way.  You have the tools, even to assess things from afar.  It’s up to you if you enter.  But if you do, you should have them with you.  I’ll send someone that way, too.  Just in case.  It might be an errand boy, but if Musser decides this is worth doing, it’ll be someone better.”

“I’ll need a replacement for my living map.  I can make another- I will, given the chance.  But in the short term-?”

“I’ll send you mine.”

She nodded.

“Call when you’ve decided.  Keep me up to date.  Ask if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She hung up, then held up a five dollar bill.  “The call was in province, but just in case there’s any long distance charges from things pinging around.”

“Hope everything’s alright,” the waitress said.  She brought the phone down from the counter, taking the five dollar bill and taking it over to the cash register.

“I guess I’ll find that out soon.”

The three practitioners were waiting at the table.

“Oh, look who it is.  Miss shouldn’t, wouldn’t, can’t,” Angie said.

“What do they think?” Milo asked.

“Bugge, and something demiurgic, maybe,” Elizabeth said.

“Wasn’t divine, wasn’t linked to any higher power of a sort I know of,” Cyn said.

“Something in that direction, at least,” Elizabeth said.

Cyn nodded.

“What next, then?” Milo asked.

“They want us to go to Kennet.  Once we’re there, we meet someone, assess the situation, and we decide if we’ll go in.  There’s a Demesne claim going on, so the door’s open.”

“Let’s go then,” Cyn said.  She motioned for Angie to get out of her way.

Milo paid the bill but not the tip.  He stretched as he stood up.

“Nobody’s impressed with you, you dry-ass, shades-of-brown wearing loser.”

Elizabeth was in the middle of reaching for her messenger bag with her wallet.  She picked up the bag and then turned around to face Angie.  “What?”

“Didn’t hear me?”

There is something seriously wrong with this woman.

Elizabeth opened her wallet and paid the tip, plus some.  Angie reached for the money, and Elizabeth stepped forward, closer to Angie, blocking the reaching hand.  “Don’t.”

“You’re not hotter than me.”

What brought someone to this point?  Where their worldview came down to something so small and petty?

“This stupidity is interfering with the job we were given.”

“What’s to stop me from taking that money the moment you step away?” Angie asked, staring her down.  “You’re a historian.  You make big diagrams, research cities, woo, lame.  You ever been in a fight?”

“We sparred at the Blue Heron.”

“I’ll amend my question.  You ever win a fight?”

“Yeah,” Elizabeth replied.  “But you know what’s better than being able to fight?  Having the pull to decide what fights happen, and when.  You can yap at me all you want about being more attractive, whatever, talk big, try to be intimidating, but go on about it for a year, a decade, it doesn’t change anything, doesn’t make it true.”

“I’ll amend the question again.  You think you can win a fight against me?  Here?  Let’s say, in the parking lot.  No weapons, no magic items, nothing to the face.”

“I’m the bodyguard,” Milo said.  “So this is the point I gotta step in and say no fighting.”

He put a hand on each of their shoulders.  Angie almost snarled as she reached out, seizing his wrist.  He reacted quickly, adjusting his grip.  Holding her by neck and elbow, arm twisted.

“You need your bodyguard?” Angie asked in a crooning, taunting tone, moving head and body closer, reaching out with a free hand- pulled back by Milo so she couldn’t make actual contact.  She smiled.  “Because you know you can’t win?”

“Yap all day, whatever, say what you want,” Elizabeth told her.  “Your words won’t really matter.  But I say the right words to the right people?”

Elizabeth made herself move closer.  Milo was forced to move Angie a step back to prevent her from scratching or grabbing at Elizabeth.

“If I do, you won’t ever get married, Angie.  Your vicious little family will never grow.  You’ll wither on the vine, so to speak.  I don’t need to fight you to destroy you.”

The taunting, crooning, smiling affect dropped away.  Angie looked at her with distilled loathing.

There were probably right words that Elizabeth could find and say.  But mostly this was about posturing.  She held her gaze level to Angie’s, trying to convey power.

Angie broke away from Milo, striding across the diner.  “Gotta piss.”

“She’s not riding with me,” Elizabeth said.

“Yeah, you got that right,” Milo said.  “I’d be failing my duties as a bodyguard.  I don’t suppose we could call her a taxi?”

“Too far away, and taxis are out anyways.  There’s a practitioner with a haunted bus line or something.  Sometimes camouflaged as taxis.  No public transportation for the time being.”

“Would we really be losing anything if we put her on a bus anyway?”

Elizabeth sighed.  “My dad thinks she’s a test.  If we show we can handle her-”

“We get more jobs with help like hers?” Milo asked.

You were part of that same line of thought, you know, Elizabeth said.

“Sorry if I antagonized that, saying you were more attractive.”

“She’s the human equivalent of a chihuahua,” Elizabeth said.  “I feel like she’d be antagonized by at a shiny patch of light on the wall.”

Milo snorted.  “How about you get started.  I drive fast, I can catch up.  And she’ll be easier to handle if you’re already gone.  One of you keep your Sight on, make sure you don’t drive right into the influence of either of those two things if they happen to make another rest stop.”

Elizabeth motioned to Cyn, and they headed out to the car.

Diagnostics.  Assessing a town.

She brought the thermometers out.  Abyss-tainted mercury, the tear of a god, a gilded leaf on a bead of water, and other similar devices let her track the ‘temperature’ of certain influences.  Abyssal, Ruins, Faerie, Goblin…

She got precise measurements on one side of the wide road with construction vehicles parked all the way down it -taking a weekend off, apparently- and then got measurements on the other.  She moved closer, then did the same.  She typed the results into her laptop.

It produced a series of planes- overlapping squares with their own tilts and heights.

Nothing stood out as so strong or influential that she felt compelled to track anything else.

“High volume of spirits,” she reported.

“They have shrines around the perimeter,” Cyn said.  “Eclectic.  More as though they wanted to have the shrines and didn’t care much about what took the shrines as hallows.  Except it’s a good fit.”

An arrangement of objects on bars and strings, like wind chimes, or a baby’s mobile.  Considering one of the objects was a knife, though, not for most babies.

A car pulled up.

She’d texted Milo to ask him to take his time catching up.  Meaning she could work in peace.  That peace had ended.

The arrangement gradually tilted as she got closer to the threshold of the town.  It tilted to its very limit on the ‘edge’ front.

There were faster ways to assess things, and to get a more complete picture, but they required she get a bit more involved, and she didn’t like to use those methods when dealing with a place that could be actively hostile.

With her Sight, she could see the town- stare into the canvas, past it.  She’d done multiple rituals over the years, each one with long term effects, costs, and benefits.  Many of them were to enhance her Sight, to increase her capabilities, and help her get a sense for the locations.  City magic, history, memory, echoes, incarnations, she’d run the gamut of related practices, picking up key ones here and there, to assist her in what she did.

Staring down the town, she could see it in frame.  The lifeline was almost always the water source, and the water source was a river without much water running through it.  She could see the history and the town resembled someone drowning.  That spark of life at first settlement, surging at the start of industry, rail line, materials brought from elsewhere to be made into steel here.  Then that had dried up.  It had flagged in strength, gone beneath the metaphorical waters, a slight surge, for hunting.  Then the drowning.  A surge for winter activities, drowning again.   But with those last ones, especially as cars got faster and people traveled on their own between cities, this place became a rest stop.  A gas station and surrounding fast food places, maybe some shops to peruse.  It was an insufficient thing on its own to keep Kennet afloat, but it meant that when things were good, they were sufficient.  There was time to rest, to breathe.  When things were bad, they weren’t as bad as they could be.

And things had gotten bad.  A bloodstain, spreading out from a large building at the edge of downtown.  The death of the last Carmine.  The edges of the image frayed and burned.  More bloodstains appeared, as if the map was laid out flat and droplets were falling from the heavens.  Most were small.

And then that contact with the outside world had, as of the end of summer, been cut.  She had to watch three times to catch the full ramifications.  The knotting.  The fading- a third of the population leaving, with more still packing up to go every day.

“I don’t think they’re friendly with the Carmine,” Elizabeth noted, as she stared at the map that loomed in front of her like a wall.  Her eyeballs felt hot in their sockets as she pushed her ritual-enhanced Sight.  “Or if they are, they’ve got a mean streak I really didn’t see when I was at the school with them.  He killed their town, or delivered a mortal wound that’s likely to kill it, anyway.”

“Good to know,” Cyn said.

“It’s knotted.  Which is contributing to an undercity.  I’d heard that.  There’s a dark half of the town.  Sometimes they’re antitheses to the town above.  Sometimes they reflect everything the residents are holding back.”

“What I’m hearing is this place is a mess,” Angie said.

Elizabeth wondered if Angie was contributing to the conversation because Milo had talked with her.

“I’ve been to towns that were halfways into the Abyss.  Towns that were haunted, towns that were ruled over by hostile Others who treated humans like puppets.  Dangerous places.  This town-”

Elizabeth turned off her Sight and looked at the town as a whole.

“-It looks so quiet and quaint.  But it’s one of those dangerous places.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Cyn said.  “What are you thinking?  How do we handle it?”

“I’m thinking we should-”

Another car approached.  It stopped, and a young woman got out.

Hair straight and blonde, wearing a pretty dress too light for the cold weather, compensated for by a jacket too large and warm for the mild cold.  A tattoo of a centipede extended up and around her neck, down out of sight along her sleeve, to her hand.

Elizabeth’s heart sank.

“Eloise.”

“Liz, darling,” Eloise greeted her.  She approached, put hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders and they did the ‘kiss-kiss’ of one another’s cheeks.  “Before I forget.  At your father’s request, a replacement map.”

Elizabeth took it, and pocketed it.  “Thank you.  You’re our connections expert?”

“Best available right now, I’m afraid.  I bring a request.  Not obligatory.”

That probably means it’s obligatory, but they’re being nice about it.

“What request?”

“They think Marlen Roy is being kept captive in Kennet there.  If you happen to go in, carrying out a rescue mission would be very much appreciated,” Eloise informed them.

It wasn’t that Elizabeth disliked Eloise.  They’d never had cause to really fight.  Eloise was easy to get along with, even.  Almost an inverse of Angie.

But Eloise being here- she probably was the best connection manipulator Abraham Musser had ready access to.  Before, she’d been willing to tell Cyn that this wasn’t doable.  That the various forces and dangers she was tracking needed a more concerted response.

Eloise made it theoretically doable.  Turning around now and finishing what she’d been about to say to Cyn?  That this was too dangerous?  It would look bad.

She would fail the test.  It would affect her whole family.

Elizabeth filed Eloise in.

“You should know.  That perimeter?  They have another problematic Other who can fuel it.  Cutting off practice.”

“Shit,” Angie muttered.

“They dropped it on Musser in the middle of a fight with Witch Hunters.”

“And Musser survived?” Milo asked.  “Huh.”

Might’ve made a deal, maybe.  Or maybe he’s strong.

It made Elizabeth uneasy.

She went to the trunk of her car, opened a chest, and pulled out a coin.  One face of it was burned, blistered, and scratched.  “Going to disappear a moment.”

She snapped the coin through the air, tracking its movements with her eyes.  This took practice, to snap the coin so it maintained the appearance of flipping without actually spinning.  She caught it out of the air and slapped it to the back of her hand in one motion.

The slap of coin to hand produced a faint shockwave.  The wind blew past her, thick with the smell of fumes.

Same town.  Same general outline.  But the sky was darker, the factories at the bottom end of town were spewing thick plumes of black smoke, the water level in the river was higher, and there was just a lot more gray.

She flipped again.  Caught it again, slapped it to the back of her hand-

The appearance of a centipede with moist fungus growing out of its head, right in front of her face- she stepped back.  She walked right into Eloise, who was standing right behind her, arm outstretched, Schartzmugel extending out from her hand.

The color tones of the trees around them and the tint of the light coming from the sky above shifted subtly.  Like a cloud had passed over the sun.  Except the sky was overcast.

“Best if you don’t do that if I’m not close by,” Eloise remarked.

“Was it the Bugge?” Elizabeth asked, eyes scanning the surroundings, with Sight and without.

“Slaps are one of her motifs.  Even the slap of a hand against the back of a hand?  Gives her an in.  Is there another way to use that coin?”

“No, not really.”

“Is it important?”

“Gives us easy passage between the overcity and undercity.  Me and anyone I’m touching.  Yes.  It’s an escape route, and I don’t have many easy ways of getting us between the two.  Which we might need if we’re looking for Marlen.  What did you do?”

“Corruptive influence?  Meet high perversion,” Eloise said.  She stroked the length of Schartzmugel’s centipede body.  “My familiar is a little too poisonous to eat, but I don’t think she can help herself, so she has to pull away.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said.

“Let me know before you use it,” Eloise told her.

“We’re doing this, then?” Cyn asked.

Elizabeth nodded.  “Just… don’t let your guard down.  As quiet as it may seem, be ready for anything.  Stay focused on the goal.  The rules that say we get a fair shot at denying any claim are our best security.”

“Makes it hard to pull any detours,” Milo said.

“We’ll have to figure it out,” Elizabeth replied.  “Move slowly, keep your eyes out.”

The others nodded.

“No funny business, no jokes, no distractions, no putting pride above safety,” she said, to Angie.

“Fuck you on about?” Angie asked.

Milo reached out to touch Angie’s shoulder.  She shrugged away from his hand.  “Fuck off.  I’ll do my job.”

They walked into town, coming in from the western end, down the on-ramp to the highway, past a rest stop at the end of town.  It made it possible to move toward the source of the claim without moving too fast.

Elizabeth used a practice while she walked.  Digging into the history of things.  She watched a flickering mess of previous events.

“All good?” Milo asked.

“Looking through past records… can’t really see my surroundings.  Guard me?  And don’t let Angie shove me or do anything while I’m doing this, or I might not be able to resume this practice again today.  It’d interfere with the task of rescuing Marlen Roy, and that’s something Musser would need to know.”

Angie muttered something.

They’d been walking for ten minutes along the upper end of town, towards the downtown area, when she saw a glimmer.  A scene, marked by gunfire, faint.

“Stop.  Using the coin.”

“Bring me with,” Eloise told her.

Liz nodded.

She moved Eloise’s hand to her shoulder, then flipped.  She caught the coin out of the air, slapped it against the back of her hand-

Schartzmugel snapped out, sliding out from beneath Eloise’s skin to a full ten feet in length, forelimbs extending as he pulled further away, the fungus expanding to a crown- a halo-like effect.

Liz could see the faint influence of the Turtle Queen.  A shift in colors, like a phone filter.  She could see it retreat further.

“What’s Schartzmugel doing?” Liz asked.

“Trying to get eaten.  Got close.  Now she’s retreating further,” Eloise said.  “Do what you wanted to do.”

Elizabeth nodded, and focused more on the practice, peering into the past.  She’d had a setback, with the shock of Schartzmugel jousting with the Turtle Queen, and that had taken her a bit out of it.  She dug- found that image again.  She isolated it.  With many vision-related things, focus and attention did a lot to make them clearer.  It was even possible to ‘fall into’ an image.

She nicked a finger, and then flicked the bead of blood toward the image.  It stopped in the air, suspended within the memory.

“Forma.  Viscerum.  Solidatur,” she ordered.

The bead of blood split into a thousand sub-beads, fanning, forming a light coating on the edges of the transparent image.  The image became faintly red tinted.

She squeezed out and flicked two more beads of blood to bring it even closer to reality, and to highlight the attacker.

A man, big, broad shouldered, with too many muscles- they slithered around him like slugs beneath the skin, bulges of muscles without places to anchor to, adding to his bulk and monstrousness.

Marlen, half on her bike, one foot on the ground, wheels spinning.  The monstrous man reaching out- he’d chased on foot and he’d almost caught her in this moment.

She drew a quick circle around them and the images, then looked at Eloise.  “Flipping.”

Eloise nodded.

Another flip brought them back to the others, and brought the images with.  The Turtle Queen didn’t make another move that warranted anything from Schartzmugel.

“That’s Marlen,” Milo said.

Elizabeth nodded.  “There’s our girl.  And there’s one of the monsters we might be running into, here.  Looks like she went to the darker side of this town for some reason, and I don’t know that she got out.”

“Think she’s alive?”

“She’s alive,” Eloise said, walking around the image, turning on her Sight.  “Let’s keep moving.”

Elizabeth gathered up the memory, condensing it down into a single point that represented the scene.  Marlen’s motorcycle key.  She pocketed it.

“Anthem apparently answered and softballed the last Demesne claim this group tried,” Eloise reported.  “Now they’re trying another.  The Belanger circle thinks there’s something to it.”

“Are they coming?”

“Later.  We’re the scouting and rescue group.  Figure out what’s going on, rescue the potential hostages, report back.  Then the big guns come.”

Having the motorcycle key made it easier to trace Marlen’s path.  They passed a house where a battle had happened.  She didn’t need to visit the undercity where the fight had happened to bring out the trace of memory.  Marlen, injured, being carried away by soldiers.

She consolidated it into the form of a bullet.

If she could collect three of these, she could create a slideshow of images- more than three images.  She could paint a picture about what happened to Marlen.

“Does Marlen have family?”

“Not really.”

No next of kin that would potentially want to see.

That was sad.

They passed through the sleepy downtown area, where two out of every three stores seemed to be boarded up or going out of business.  A fair few families were out, but it felt thin.

There was graffiti of a crowned turtle.

She’s only been here for a few hours, and she’s working like a guard dog.  Finding her footholds.

Those sorts of things could go badly very easily.

Eloise nudged her.  “Liz.  Sorry to disturb your memory-sight-”

“Not seeing much.  Downtown is too crowded.”

“Mm.  Look.”

Liz looked over, giving up on the memory sight.

She saw a big building with a vast parking lot, framed by trees.  It looked like one of the centerpieces of downtown, and by her memory of the map, it was where the Carmine had died.  And where the knotting had started.

Pushing with her Sight, she could see the building as it was in the undercity.  Broken, roof partially collapsed, tree growing out of one section that had crumbled, with fires burning endlessly, having long since charred the surrounding concrete at the side and upper corner of the building black.  In that double-vision, blurry image, two of the Kennet kids stood amid the fires and smoke.  Watching.

Whether they were arsonists or matches in an Other arsonist’s toolkit, they were definitely playing with fire.  Making an alliance with the Turtle Queen.

She thought about reaching out to them, maybe to communicate something, but then the pair of them ducked out of sight.

She could track them, somewhat, but both had erratic movement, and the moment they switched to animal forms using what might have been glamour, her ‘lock’ on them broke away.

“Was a lot nicer when we were on their good side,” Eloise said.

“If they sent even one Other our way, I’d ask if we could talk.”

“There’s been goblins spying on us,” Eloise said.  “You didn’t catch that?”

“Thought you might, with the Sight.”

“I focus more on places than people.  I get a sketchy framing of a person, but that’s about it.”

“They’re keeping their distance.  They’re cornered.  They’re spooked,” Eloise murmured.  “They’re attached to this town, in more than one way.  Demesne, family, responsibility, it’s where they grew up.”

Elizabeth frowned.  “What Musser is doing wouldn’t- it doesn’t hurt that much.  It’s not like Musser’s going to raze the town to the ground, until there’s not one building left standing.”

“But it wouldn’t be theirs,” Eloise said.

There weren’t any signs of the ‘big’ one.  The woman in the convertible.

They approached the site of the claim- one house among many in a neighborhood that felt sparse.  There were ten houses on the street and it felt like there was room for fifteen.  Each instead got an oversized, often irregular yard.

The house had a dark atmosphere.

Eloise nudged Elizabeth, and Elizabeth looked over.

A woman stood nearby, eyes burning like embers.  The frame around her was fractured.  Barely holding together.  Images from multiple frames overlapped.  A burning house, candy, a bloody moon, a corpse mid-autopsy, a pitch black hand with a wedding ring on one finger, a woman curled up in fetal position in what looked like a grave-

The more she looked the more the images broke up and distorted.  There was a trace of echo in there.  The distortion looked like how the different phases of an echo could crash into one another like waves.

“Could I ask her for an audience with the girls?”

“She has a pretty minimal connection to them.  I don’t think she’d go out of her way and I don’t think they’d listen to her.”

“I was telling the others earlier.  That it didn’t feel like they were on the same page as the Carmine.  That he ruined their town.”

“Mmm,” Eloise murmured.  “Fits.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I don’t- there’s no elaboration for that.  Multiple sides, and she’s not on theirs.”

“And the guy in the house?”

“Complicated.”

Elizabeth nodded.

There were others, further down the street.  As they looked over, Elizabeth saw their eyes flash.

Were they local, or-?

“Friends,” Eloise said.

The other group was three young men, eighteen to twenty, give or take.  One was a Hennigar.

They walked over, one of them with thumbs in his belt loops.

“You make your claim?” Cyn asked.

“Yeah.”

“What do we watch out for?”

“He’s a guy with a strong claim, hosting a strong Other.  But it gets weaker every time he calls it out.  Still, if it catches you off guard, it’s going to pulverize every bone in your body.”

“Strong claim to the house means he gets to set more of the rules for the contest, if we go in objecting,” Elizabeth said.

“He’s not too bad.  Reasonable.  I think he wants to conserve his strength.  So if you ask him to go easy or ask for a simpler contest with lower stakes, he’ll say yes.”

“Just don’t mention you’re here to set up the Lordship,” the Hennigar boy told her.

Elizabeth stepped away from the group, toward the house.

“What are you doing?  I should go first.  Test the waters,” Milo said.

“I have no objection if she wants to put herself in harm’s way,” Angie said.

“I’ll go,” Elizabeth said.  “It should be fine.”

She found the front door open.

She hadn’t actually ever done one of these.  There’d been one Demesne contest when she was little, before she’d even been brought into the practice.  She’d gone as a formality, to give a gift and declare no contest.

The house was dark.

The man in the chair was maybe ten years older than her, of average build, with a bit of muscle, a flannel shirt worn over a t-shirt, hair short, the traces of a short-shorn beard trying to draw a straight jawline that wasn’t quite there- his chin was too round.  It created the illusion, but the illusion was only just that.

Not so bad looking, honestly.

But his eyes were black, and the shadows beneath his brow deep.

Black sphere / a gore-strewn tree / a heart-shaped void / a burned hand with a ring on it.

She recognized the face.  The framing had been different back then, though.  Nicer.

“Elizabeth Driscoll, responding to the claim.”

“Hi Elizabeth.  I’m Matthew Moss,” he said, his tone bordering on dangerous.

“You dropped the kids off at the school,” she said.

“Good memory.”

“It’s sort of a thing.  Any way you could call them?  I hoped to barter.  Maybe get the prisoner released?  Marlen?”

“The human trafficker?” he asked, voice hardening.

Defensive.

“Is she?  She wasn’t, the last time I looked into her.”

“She made arrangements she tells us she’s sworn to fulfill.”

Elizabeth paused.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked.

“You know the Lordship is going to happen, right?  You have the bulk of the practitioners in this end of Ontario, surrounding regions, just past the border- people are calling people in from overseas.  They can summon Others.  They can use rituals.  I know you have an Other who can shut off the practice, disrupt it.  But that’s not nearly enough.”

“And?”

“It feels like you wouldn’t have two demesne rituals in the span of a week if it wasn’t for what Musser was doing.  You’re up to something.”

“I’m securing my house.  Hopefully to keep my ex-wife out.”

“Wow.”

“It’s justified, as bad as it may sound,” he said.

“She’s just outside.”

“So I heard.”

“If you help arrange for me to talk to any of the girls, I’ll plead no contest.  I’ll talk to them, try to convince them-”

“To stand down?  To bow to Musser?  To accept a Lordship over their town, over which they’ll have minimal say?”

“It could be arranged to a threefold leadership.  The three of them as Lords, even.  Maybe.”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“Musser gets what he wants, they get what they want.”

“Do they?  How the fuck do you know what they want?”

“Isn’t it what everyone wants?  Peace?  Stability?  Power enough to ensure you can keep those two things?”

“No,” he said.  He lurched to his feet.  It looked like he was sore from a previous altercation.  “I don’t think that’s what everyone wants.”

“Okay, well… I’d still like to offer.  Just to rule it out.”

“And what about us, Elizabeth?” he asked.  He didn’t move, but she sensed something dangerous from him.  “What of us Others?  We cede all this ground, we have to either leave our homes, or we live under a Lordship, administered by a man as- by a man like Musser.  If I have to explain why that’s dark and worrying, this conversation might as well be over.”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said, voice soft.  “Mr. Moss.  I don’t believe you’re properly Other.  Or if you were, you aren’t anymore.  The fact you can make a demesne claim is telling enough.”

“I keep my foot in both worlds.”

“You- it’s plain to me that your foot is far more in the world of man than the world of Other.  Maybe it was different before, maybe it’s been gradually changing, as that Other in you gets weaker and weaker.  But you’re a practitioner now.”

“Fine,” he said.

He didn’t look like it was fine.  It looked faintly like he’d lost something.

“Okay?” she asked.  “Then-”

“Then it doesn’t change anything,” he talked over her, his tone almost belligerent.  Then, softer, he repeated, “It doesn’t change anything.  I was close enough to the Other for long enough.  I know what they fear, what it means to fear being bound.  What it means to be an Other and facing down the likes of Musser.  To borrow an aphorism, give me liberty or give me death.”

“To drive my point home, I think if you use words like aphorism that’s pretty much sealing the deal on you being a practitioner, Mr. Moss.”

“Fuck right off with that,” he said, with more humor than venom in his voice.  Then, more serious, he added, “I mean what I say.”

“I know.”

“If this is your argument for those girls?  It’s not going to get you what you want.  The cost of living under Musser is too great.  That doesn’t change if they’re a trio of lesser Lords here, with him as a grand overseer of the region.  The cost of this even being a Lordship, instead of a place that can define itself, it’s too much.  What you’re doing with this Lordship business is one of the most horrific uses of practice and seal I’ve seen, and I tore out my own eyeballs as a child, for a ritual.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s history,” he said.  “Let’s stay focused on the future, Elizabeth.  What Musser is doing is wrong.  You’re enabling him.”

“The world could be a brighter, stable, more pleasant place-”

“Do I look like I give three damns about bright?” he asked, his voice hard, his eyes black.  “What’s your artificial brightness to a ghoul if it’s not harm and death?  What’s your pleasantry to a goblin but poison and nuisance?  What’s your stability worth if it’s under fucking Abraham Musser, who stands for all the worst of you?”

“You say that, knowing you side with flesh eaters and goblins?”

He heaved out a breath.  “I don’t think this could go anywhere.  You’d only distract the girls.  Do you have a preference for the contest?  Stakes?  Nature of contest?  I’m only asking to be nice.”

“Distract them from what, Mr. Moss?  What are they doing?  You’re playing with fire, keeping the Turtle Queen around.  Along with some demiurgic Other.  You’re clearly doing something with the Demesne claims.”

“Preferences for the contest?” he asked.

“Please.”

“Preferences for the contest?” he asked.  “Which I’m liable to ignore.  If you choose to make this a fight, I don’t think you leave here without multiple broken bones.  Final time I’m asking.”

“No contest, Mr. Moss,” Elizabeth told him.

He relaxed a bit.

“Good luck with the ex-wife situation.  She looks like a real mess.”

“Yeah,” he replied, voice soft.

She went to leave.

“You’re in one piece,” the Hennigar boy commented.

“It was about ideas, not fighting.”

“Didn’t seem that bright to me,” one of the other practitioners said.

Elizabeth looked across the street at the woman with the burning eyes.  She glanced over at Cyn, who was staring the woman down.  Cyn seemed to like having a singular target to fixate on.

“Next?” Eloise asked.  “Let’s get this out of the way and then go poking around.”

Milo turned.  “Might as well.”

“Heads up!” Angie called out.

It wasn’t really a threat or anything.  A car parked further up the street had lost its emergency brake.  It rolled slowly toward them.

“Trouble?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not sensing any intent or direct connection.”

“Feels coincidental.”

“Yeah.”

The car picked up a bit of speed- but someone walking could have outpaced it.  Or stood in front of it and halted its forward momentum with hands on the front, even.

Not that she’d try.

Elizabeth used her Sight and peered at the car, the surrounding area- the framing.

There was a bent nail and a stripped screw in the frame.

“Gremlin!  Heads up!  Back away!” she shouted.

“Intent,” Eloise said, almost like an afterthought.

As people were busy getting their mental footing and reacting, the car’s tires squealed.  It lurched from inching forward to speeding, turning a sharp curve.

The other group of practitioners that had preceded them had been gathered around their car.  They hurried away as the incoming car crashed into it- under it.  The nose of the incoming car was low enough it went under the bumper and back tires.  It smoked.

The smoke intensified.  Eloise grabbed at Elizabeth’s arm, and through the direction Elizabeth faced, she could track the connection at work.  Smoke, woman with the burning eyes.

Those eyes burned especially bright.

The smoke doubled in intensity about a second before the car exploded.

It wasn’t enough to lift up the other practitioner’s car, but it toppled it onto its side, and sent crap flying.  Maybe intentionally, with the gremlin stuff at work.

The Hennigar had been least willing to retreat- probably because it cost him power to walk away from a situation, so he got the brunt of it.

“Incoming from multiple sides,” Eloise murmured.  “Gremlins or goblins.  Maybe a mix.”

“Usually a mix,” Milo said.

“They’re not after you or me, Milo,” Eloise said.  “We still have to do the claim.  They’re coming after those who’ve answered the Demesne claim already.”

Eloise and Milo both looked over at Elizabeth.

“Now would be a good time for a coin flip,” Eloise told her.

Cyn was facing down the ex-wife.  Civilians were stepping outside.  The goblins kept to shadows and places they could attack from without being seen.  It limited practice but gave the goblins some limited freedom to act.

The Hennigar howled.

“Don’t-” Elizabeth started.

“Shit,” Eloise said.

“Why shit?  What’s shit about this guy screaming his head off?” Angie asked.

“If he does that, he has to pick a fight and win.  It’s how the Hennigar’s gore-streaked practice works,” Elizabeth explained.  “They get hurt or basically killed, they scream, they pick the fight.  He’s hurt, he screamed-”

“And there’s no fight,” Eloise said.  “The goblins just pulled back some.”

The Hennigar boy got to his feet, rage in his eyes.  Elizabeth could imagine the mental calculus, as he realized he’d been baited.

His choices came down to targeting an innocent, which would have repercussions, especially if they noticed anything, targeting one of the two buddies he’d been hanging out with…

Or targeting them.  Their new group.  Maybe whoever he thought he could get away with hurting.

The drab, unexciting Historian might be one such target.

“Go!” Eloise shouted.  “Out of sight!  Around the house!”

They ran.  The Hennigar boy came tearing after them, almost roaring.

Around the corner of the house, between hedge and house, toward a slightly overgrown backyard with scattered leaves on the grass.

“Flip now,” Eloise told her.  “Hands on her.  We protect her.  They can’t really come after us.”

Elizabeth felt the group reach for her, putting hands on her shoulder.  She flipped the coin, and she fumbled it.

It was meant to be a controlled flip, and in her nervousness, she’d messed up.

She caught it out of the air.

Fifty fifty chance.

The Hennigar boy came tearing around the corner, moving with increased speed.

She slapped the coin down, and the shockwave rippled out, making her squint.  She realized at the last second that Milo had stepped away.  He wasn’t touching her.  He wouldn’t go with her to the undercity, as part of the coin flip.

Filling his role as a bodyguard.  Stupidly.

Milo was a killer, not a fighter.  The Hennigar boy was very much a fighter.

She opened her eyes.

They were in the same location.  The same house, a similar hedge.  But the sky was darker, swirling with smog.  There were old toys stuck in the dirt, pale doll faces looking up like skulls.  Someone had written something on the fence and nobody had wiped it away.

A dog howled, ragged.  It felt ominous.

“That’s not a dog,” Eloise said.

“What is it?” Angie asked.

“Goblin.”

“There’s goblins on this side too?”

“Waiting for us in case we crossed over, or approached on this side.”

They ventured out toward the street, and Elizabeth saw doors open.

People from the houses.  Residents.

A firework went up, followed by a thick plume of smoke.  It didn’t explode that loudly.  There was no light, no shower of sparks.  Just a smear of black smoke against an already black stained sky, over a dingy town.

More people stepped outside.  Kids.  Old people.

An awful lot of them were armed.  One man had three dogs on chain leashes.

“They readied the entire under-town against us?” Elizabeth asked.

Eloise nudged her.

She looked over.

Off to the side, crouched on a roof- a witch in a cat mask.

“Get us out of here already, you lunatic,” Angie murmured.

“Top side won’t be much better,” Eloise replied.  “They’re letting us answer the claim, because they have to…”

“These people don’t know they have to,” Cyn said.

“Whatever.  Either way, they come down on us like a ton of bricks.”

“Get us out of here, lunatics,” Angie said.  “What’s above has to be better.”

Elizabeth flipped.  The man with the dogs let go of the chain leashes, letting the dogs free.  One went for his neighbor.  Two more went for their group, darting across the street.

The coin slapped against her hand.  Schartzmugel protected her again, reminding them of just how in the thick of things they were, that a Bugge could snap out in her direction if she made the slightest misstep.

Back to the surface.

Which wasn’t any better, not that Elizabeth would say so, gainsaying Angie in the process.

The civilians grinned and shuddered all around her.  The practitioner’s car with the damage at the rear bumper was growing what looked like spider legs made of veins, and lurched into awkward movement, like a foal learning to walk, except creepy as shit.

Another of the witches stood on the rooftop, watching.  Lucy Ellingson, with the fox mask.

“Liz,” Lucy called out.

“Can we talk?”

“Surrender.  We’ve got two more of your practitioner allies over here, going after my friend Avery.  I need you to surrender now.  The only real reason I’m giving you the option is you were kind to us.  You sheltered us in the middle of the Bristow-Alexander situation.”

Elizabeth thought of her dad.  Her family.  Her dad’s hopes.

“You don’t know what I lose if I surrender.”

“You think our stakes are any lower?” Lucy asked.

“Mr. Moss explained some.”

“Give up,” Lucy told her.  “We’d take you into custody.”

Elizabeth looked at the others she’d arrived with.

From the sounds of it, behind the house, Milo was dealing with the Hennigar boy.  Or being dealt with.

They could do this.  Maybe.

“No,” Elizabeth said.  “Sorry.”

“Hey, that’s the first thing you’ve said I respect,” Angie said, smiling.

That didn’t feel like a great endorsement of this course of action.

But she didn’t see a better one.

From the way Lucy held herself, maybe the girl felt the exact same way, on the other side.

“I’m sorry too,” Lucy Ellingson replied.

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