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Lucy looked up and watched the big wheel turn. A shadow above the heavy cloud cover.
“So it turns out this is sort of a big deal, huh?” Verona breathed the words, looking up.
“You’re just getting that now?” Avery replied, not taking her eyes off the sky.
“She’s playing the dope for laughs, don’t worry about it,” Lucy said. “But also assume we’re being listened to. The invaders are down there somewhere.”
Avery frowned, glancing down. “Sure would’ve been nice if they’d backed off. Crummy that Eloise and Liz helped us out and now they’re helping Musser.”
“Yeah,” Lucy replied, voice soft.
“I should go,” Avery murmured. “Timing’s a bit hinky.”
“The timing is a bit hinky,” Verona replied, stressing the ‘is’.
We should be hearing from Rook soon, about why things were timed exactly like this, Lucy thought. They were dropping this on Kennet. It took time. Matthew’s ritual finished later. They’d talked about two scenarios. That either Miss would go as early as theoretically possible and time things so that it all dropped shortly after Matthew finished, or she would wait and Avery would go with her, and they’d tweak depending on the situation.
This was kind of between the two, which was awkward and weird.
“Maybe something went wrong,” Lucy said. “Delays? It’s not like it’s easy to get where she needed to be, right?”
“Maybe,” Verona said. She rubbed at her palm.
“Have texts written but not sent, think I’ll send now,” Avery said, checking her phone, looking between it and the sky. Lucy leaned in closer to look. “Going to see if I can meet her and help from the Paths. So you’ll either see me soon, because I can’t, you’ll see me later, because I was able to meet her, or… you know where my letter to my family is.”
Lucy nodded.
Garricks. Message sent. Avery pointed at Verona. The message told them to communicate with Verona until they heard from Avery again.
Zed. Message sent. She pointed at Lucy. Lucy nodded.
Nicolette. Message sent. She pointed at Verona.
All the way down the line.
Division of labor.
“Don’t forget to organize the goblins. You won’t have the Snowdrop bond to help that along.”
Lucy nodded.
“Good luck then,” Avery said.
“Same to you,” Lucy told her.
“Try to have Kennet still around when I’m back?”
“It’s what we’ve been doing,” Lucy said.
Avery’s eyes dropped.
Verona stuck her elbow out to the side, jabbing Lucy lightly.
“Didn’t mean that the way it sounded-” Lucy said.
The group on the ground had noticed them. Heads turned and looked up at them, as they looked up. Cyn still had that red ball thing above her head. Lucy gave it a wary glance.
“I know,” Avery replied. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh hey,” Verona said. “There’s one name I don’t think you assigned to either of us. While you’re gone, shouldn’t you pass me your phone and let me take over texting duties? Pretend to be you, keep the fires alive, drop mysterious messages?”
“Fuck off, Ronnie,” Avery said, smiling. “I can only imagine what hell you’d wreak.”
“Be safe, eh?”
“You too.”
Avery jogged off.
“Fuuuuuck,” Verona whispered. “Can’t believe they got our prisoner. That lady with the orbs is like a freaking tank. Bam, bam, bam, can’t stop her, can’t get at her.”
“Not much we can do at this point. We mostly wanted her gone to-”
The group standing below had regrouped enough to get their bearings, and as part of that, the first of them had noticed the sky.
“I thought something was off. They had a plan.”
“What?”
“Look.”
“Marlen, get to Musser. Tell him not to make a move yet. Watch out for anything green, gold, or black, while you’re at it. Or reptile related. Limit the practice you use.”
“Not to make a move?”
Marlen had emphasized the ‘not’.
“We can’t afford it. One wrong move and the illusion shatters, and we’d be the ones owning the consequences.”
They’d gotten it, more or less. Lucy was wondering if she’d have to tell them.
The timing had been hinky, as Avery had phrased it, but they hadn’t taken things too far, she hoped. The shadow was just indistinct enough it would draw attention but could maybe probably be explained away.
If this worked right, then it put most obvious practice stuff off limits.
Lucy’s heart was thudding hard in her chest. Her hands were clenched at her sides, and she was trying to put on a brave show against the invaders with good posture and presentation like Guilherme had taught her, but her fists were shaking. She’d hooked thumbs into the corners of her pockets so they’d be anchored against something.
Cyn’s orbs went out, the suddenness of it making Lucy’s already pounding heart do a hard skip-beat, while Lucy backed up a step. Liz looked up at them again, a sad expression on her face. She lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Giving up!?” Lucy called down.
“Got what we wanted! We’ll leave! Not looking to fight any further!”
“I told Milo there, but were you aware Marlen is trafficking in humans?” Lucy called out.
“Mr. Moss mentioned that in passing!” Liz called up to the rooftop, glancing at Marlen, then Milo.
Verona took a bit of a step forward, calling down, “to a really fucked up dude! Castrate a few hundred men and boys, impregnate most of the women fucked up! Like seriously!”
“She swore to him she would,” Lucy added.
Liz frowned.
“Do you have a car?” Marlen murmured.
“We- we parked out of town, Angie came in one but you’d have to ask the person who owns the vehicle,” Liz said. “We should probably talk about-“
“I think I’ll go on foot, then co-opt my own transportation then. I’ll tell Musser you did good,” Marlen replied. “Good luck. If you can fuck things up for them, I’d consider it a favor. They drugged me, humiliated me.”
“One drugging I’m aware of!” Lucy called down. “And that was a goblin stopping you from escaping! I think we were pretty damn fair!”
“Yeah, I’m going to go,” Marlen said.
“Hold-” Liz said, reaching. Marlen angled her body away, evading the reaching hand as easily as she’d evaded everything else. “-on.”
Marlen extended a level stare in Liz’s direction, taking another step back, toward the opening in the chain link fence.
Eloise leaned in closer to Liz, murmuring something.
“Handle it later. For now, we’ve still got a bigger situation. That soldier won’t stay down forever, and they could have help coming.”
The movement of the wheel was making shadows pass slowly over Kennet.
Liz still had her hands raised.
“Mind a super quick question with massive implications?” Verona asked Lucy, quiet.
“What? Ask.”
“What percentage of the big power battery do you think I could skim off, if it meant possibly stopping or even maybe possibly recapturing Marlen?”
Thea’s battery you brought back from Thunder Bay? “Ummm. We need that.”
“I know. But I was thinking I could do something similar to how I delayed John.”
Lucy’s heart sank at the mention of John. She felt that shaking in her hands again. “Very very little? I think everything we were hoping to stall by keeping her is starting to happen anyway.”
“Musser,” Verona concluded.
“Basically. So if you can stop her then that saves people some grief, but if you spend too much… we need that battery to reinforce like, everything here. Every percent counts.”
“Or we end up with a lot more grief. Got it. Maybe half a percent?”
“Okay. I trust you.”
“Going.”
“Luck.”
Verona nodded quickly. Then she drew out a bit of glamour and became a bird.
All of this felt so reminiscent of the end of summer. John. The feeling of the inevitable. The desperate attempts at damage control.
They couldn’t lose. No way.
Just the idea crossing her mind was making her feel more panicked, because the idea that crossed her mind was that if she drew too much connection between this and the end of summer, she’d start panicking and screwing up. Bringing it to pass.
Looking down at her hand, Lucy glanced at the ‘Vikare’ swoop.
She’d figure something out later, for that.
For now… she looked down at Cyn, Milo, Eloise, Liz, Tyson, and Raleigh. Angie’s group was around the other side. She’d overheard all their names while tracking them.
Marlen was jogging out toward the road, but it was a weird jog. Like she couldn’t quite turn her personal benefits off.
She couldn’t do anything about the bigger group.
She reached into her pocket, broke the end off a bit of chalk, and dropped it onto the roof. She crushed it underfoot, then touched her earring as she dragged her toe through the calk and into a quarter-circle. The chalk naturally found its shape as a loose connections and sound diagram.
“Hey,” she said, voice quieter. She let the spirits move out from the diagram, carrying her voice a bit.
The group looked up at her.
“Hey!” Eloise called up. She moved her hand near her mouth, and held it there. “What is this!?”
Doing something similar with hand position and connections, to let the sound travel up the twenty or thirty feet to the roof where Lucy stood.
Lucy shook her head.
“Where did your friends go?”
“Before?” Lucy asked. “I said I was sorry, Liz.”
“Yeah!” Liz called up. “I know this isn’t ideal, but I’ll try to find a-”
“No, let me talk. I said I was sorry before. Push this any further and I expect to be a lot less sorry. Leave. Eloise helped my mom, you gave us shelter when the dorms weren’t safe. Okay. You get a pass. Your… acquaintances, they get a pass. Take it and leave.”
She made her voice especially hard with that last question.
“Us being here might be your best chance at a good outcome with Musser,” Eloise replied.
Lucy thought about that. Then she flipped Eloise off, turning and walking over to the hole in the roof. She hopped inside and through, to the tiled bathroom. The entire bathroom had been scrubbed to be as immaculate as a decades old bathroom that had been exposed to elements could be. She stepped out into the hall, and saw down at the end of the little hallway, goblins were trying to hang up a sheet over the shattered window.
Lucy hurried over, hopped up onto the ledge beneath the windows, and took one end. “This isn’t Chloe’s nice sheet, is it?”
“Prisoner’s,” Nat said.
“Let me help, then.”
Ramjam passed her a nail, and she took it. She was about to put it in between her lips so her hand would be free for a tool, when he went, “Ehm.”
“Hm?” she asked.
“Don’t put that in your mouth. It’s been on adventures. Adventurous nail! The stories that could be told!”
Lucy looked at the nail that was about a half inch from being pressed between her lips. She gave it a dubious look.
“But seriously, I don’t want you to die. Living is good, adventure nails in your mouth mean maybe not being alive much longer!”
“Right,” Lucy replied. In lieu of using a hand or anything, she pressed her forehead against the sheet to pin it in place, got her diagram-editing marker from her pocket, and managed the awkward process of working her necklace out of her shirt, slipping on the weapon ring so she could turn the marker into a mallet. It was a task, to juggling marker, necklace, sheet, and nail. She slammed the mallet into the nail, nailing it in place.
“That’s good. Nice work. Hot damn,” Ramjam said.
“I put a nail in a sheet, Ram.”
“Terrific.”
She took another nail and took over for Tatty, Nat, and Kittycough, who were trying to handle one nail and one hammer between them, while squeezing in at one end of the window ledge. One solid hit from Lucy’s mallet drove the nail in enough to hold up the sheet.
“Great! Job done! The adventurous nail was on such legendary adventures, visited such terrible places, did such things! Then it finished by doing what nails do! It’s terrific, could bring a tear to your eye. Like some Greek hero goober, killing monsters, riding a boat, getting cursed, all sorts of wild stuff, gets home and makes shoes. Hey what? So normal!”
“I think I’ll go wash my hands,” Lucy murmured, looking between the nail and her hands. “Someone come with?”
“I’m pooped,” Tatty said, slumping down. “I’ll supervise. Ram, keep going!”
“It’s super normal! It’s destiny, the nail went ways a nail never should go-!”
“With blocking the windows, you blunt-brained boob! Work!”
“Ram? Or Nat?” Lucy asked.
Nat hopped down. Her piercing-laden hand clapped the floor with a sharp sound as she landed. She followed after.
Nat, or Snatchragged, had always been kind of… taciturn? Quiet. She liked hitting stuff and thieving, but when she wasn’t, she was maybe one of the most reliable when a goblin was needed to surveil an area. Park her somewhere, let that one eye behind the curtain of hair do its observing. She followed after Lucy, hand periodically scraping the floor or jangling when she touched the doorframe to swing herself around the corner, following after.
Lucy washed her hands thoroughly, with double emphasis on the one that had handled the nail.
“How are they, downstairs? Is it safe to approach?” she asked.
“Move slow,” Nat warned.
Lucy nodded. “Snowdrop’s gone with Avery. So if you guys don’t have anything you’re doing, and if Toadswallow doesn’t have orders that he thinks take priority, come to me? You’re one of the more responsible ones.”
She wondered if Nat would complain about Toadswallow being in charge, or buck at the idea of being responsible. But Nat nodded.
“They’re still outside.”
“Hopefully they’re leaving,” Lucy replied. “Get the other goblins organized, kay?”
Nat nodded again, before loping off, compensating for the fact her piercing-laden right arm was probably three-times as heavy as her other arm by periodically using it almost like a leg. Moving like a little one-armed gorilla.
There was a little hand towel, old but clean, and she used it to dry her hands and arms.
She took the stairs one at a time, surveying the situation and checking the slices of the room that became visible as she made her way down.
Grandfather had pulled off his bloodstained shirt, and was pulling on one of Nibble’s. It apparently took him some effort with the way that it clung to him. A shirt that would have been a loose fit on Nibble was stretched across Grandfather’s broader, more muscular chest. She could see a grisly bullet wound in his lower stomach, covered in a pad of bandage that was held in place with clear tape. The tape crossed salt and pepper body hair without much care for how painful it’d probably be to take off.
He paused when he finished, looking at her- her chest?
No. The ring and dog tag she’d pulled out while nailing up the sheet.
“You okay?” she asked, whisper-quiet.
His eyes lingered on the tag and ring for a second. “Yeah. Gut shot. It’ll take a little while to heal.”
“The ghouls?” Lucy asked, quiet.
She could remember being not all that far from here and being attacked by Chloe.
“Recovering. Think they’re going up to their bedrooms to sleep things off until nighttime, soon as the light’s blocked. Nibble’s worse off than Chloe.”
Lucy nodded.
She moved quietly and slowly as she crossed the main floor.
She saw them in the corner of the kitchen. Nibble curled up, Chloe sitting in the corner between two cabinets, with her arms and legs wrapped around him, almost pinning him while hugging him. Chloe had an ‘x’ of shallow cuts on one side of her face, with the shallowest parts forming a nearly dotted line. Her hair clumped at one point at the side of her head, maybe where it had frozen.
Lucy ventured close enough to be visible, and leaned against the corner, waiting until Chloe spotted her. Chloe’s eyes caught the light as she raised her face, milky white discs.
“I heard the sky looks pretty cool,” Chloe murmured, quiet. Nibble startled faintly in her arms at the sound of her voice.
“Yeah,” Lucy whispered.
“They ruined my sweater. Got it all bloody. Plus my arms and face, but you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ll heal the damage, might be point zero zero two percent more ghoul than human because of it, but I’m used to all that.”
Lucy nodded.
“Belongings don’t heal like that. I liked the sweater.”
“It’s a good sweater. Maybe let me go shopping when this is all over, okay? I can go hunting for a decent replacement when I do my own shopping.”
Chloe tilted her head, resting it against the closed drawer to her right. “Thank you. I really got this place looking super nice, I thought. Least they could do when they came charging into my home is notice, don’t you think?”
“Blam blam,” Nibble murmured. “Nice house, blam, now die.”
Chloe chuckled softly, before putting a claw on the hat he’d pulled over long hair, rubbing it.
“How are you, Nib?” Lucy asked.
“Usually better at this. Injuries are one thing. That cold felt like dying.”
“For me too,” Chloe said. “But I’m used to teetering close to all that. I don’t mind the chance to take care of Nibble, hm? Nap? Then eat later?”
Nibble nodded, eyes on the ground.
Lucy looked over. Then, being careful to move slowly, she walked over to the television, which had fallen screen-down onto the floor. She lifted it upright. There was a crack in the corner of the screen. She thought about using glamour to mend it, then reconsidered. Glamour and tech weren’t so great together.
She grunted as she lifted it back in place, then hit the power button. Nothing. She looked, and found it unplugged. Right. Still needed that.
Plugged in, it worked. She found the remote and turned up the volume.
She returned to her spot at the corner of the kitchen, leaning against the wall there. “How’s that? I know you can’t see it, but some background noise?”
“Helps,” Nibble said.
“Want the remote?”
“Always.”
“Putting it on the ground, then kicking it toward you, okay?”
“Yep.”
She placed it on the floor, then kicked it across the floor of the little factory-break-room-turned-kitchen. Nibble instinctively lunged, pulling hard, and Chloe’s grip was the only thing that stopped him from breaking free and coming right at Lucy. His eyes fixed on her for a moment.
He breathed hard, three breaths in a second and a half, then stopped breathing altogether, visibly calming himself down.
Lucy admitted she was doing something similar.
With his foot, he moved the remote into hand’s reach. He put it on his knee, and then leaned back, into Chloe, eyes closed.
“You shouldn’t bother with me,” Nibble said. “Go save Kennet from the invading assholes. The wheel in the sky is only one step, right?”
“What are we saving if not the chance to back each other up like this?”
“Lots of stuff. Food supply for ghouls like us. Freedom from having some Lord in charge.”
“Bad experience with those,” Chloe said. “When they start cleaning house, ghouls usually get the boot pretty easy. Even though most just eat the dead, instead of making people dead.”
“There’s that store Chloe always coos over when we pass by on patrol. Where she got the one coat she likes. Gotta save that.”
“I will keep that in mind,” Lucy said. She thought. “Oh, actually. Chloe? Pass me your sweater?”
“Why? Want to see the brand?”
“Maybe it’s salvageable?” Lucy offered.
Chloe held out an arm. The sleeve was soaked with black-tinged blood and torn in three places. The other sleeve wasn’t better. “Don’t think so.”
Lucy clapped her hands, before holding them out.
Chloe leaned forward into Nibble, until he leaned forward, and wrapped her legs around his waist, working from an awkward position to get the sweater off. She was wearing a simple tee underneath. She covered Nibble’s eyes with one hand and lobbed the balled-up sweater at Lucy. It landed at Lucy’s feet.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chloe said. “I tear clothes up all the time, happens when your joints get all spiked. Throw it in the trash.”
Lucy took the sweater over to the couch, laying it out. She got her compact out, and doled out a bit of glamour. She went through the motions necessary to extend the pattern and design out- same as if she was taking feathers from a bird and trying to spread out the featheriness to her entire body. It took some doing to get the exact pattern lined up, and she kind of gave up on that. It kept wanting to be adventurous, elaborating on the pattern. She had more luck putting the sleeves together so each could inform the other. Changed the color of crimson blood to the pink so that wouldn’t be as much an issue, then removed the pink-tinted bloodstain on the next pass.
She walked over and held it by the collar, showing Chloe the end result. “Sleeves might be a little bit distorted. Not sure the knitting lines up one hundred percent.”
“Perfect. Wonky sleeves, loose socks, cozy,” Chloe said. She inhaled. “It smells like sunshine and warm grass. Even from over here. I don’t get to smell that a lot.”
“Is that going to be okay? It’s high summer glamour. I dunno if that’ll carry enough positive energy to burn you.”
“Give? Let me see.”
“It’s glamour, so if I throw it, it might shatter.”
“Okay. Hmm.”
“Just walk over. Hand it over,” Nibble said. “It’s okay, I think. Slow?”
Lucy approached, slow, carrying the sweater. She slowed more as she drew closer.
“Try not to be so afraid,” Nibble murmured. “Makes it worse.”
“Telling me that doesn’t help.”
“I can tell. Whoops.”
But Lucy got close enough to extend it out. Chloe took the sweater and stroked the sleeve carefully with the backs of her clawed fingertips, careful with the spiked ridges at her knuckles. She hugged it close and inhaled, deep.
“That’s fragile, like I said, so… gentle hugging?” Lucy warned.
Chloe nodded, not moving.
“If you pass that to me, I can hang it in the sun. It’ll strengthen the glamour. Then by the time you wear it, it should be good.”
“Thank you,” Chloe said, without moving.
“For sure. I got pretty fussy about getting nice clothes. I annoyed my mom enough about taking care of them, she made me learn how to do my own laundry,” Lucy said. “Still kinda learning, but yeah.”
“Yeah,” Nibble said, settling in deeper, sitting there with Chloe behind him, squeezed in awkwardly. It looked like they were almost going to nap there, in the corner of the kitchen.
“No issue with the positive energy?” Lucy asked.
“Tickles my nose a bit. And where the cuts are.”
“Might be it’s like washing clothes with too much detergent, itchy, could cause a rash. Give it time and it should settle. Glamour’s like that.”
“Okay. Thanks,” Chloe murmured.
“Cool,” Lucy asked. “Pass it back? I want to make sure this glamour sticks like that, I’ll hang it up. And I should get going, like Nibble said, do what I can to coordinate.”
Nibble moved, and nudged Chloe twice before she let go of the sweater. He took it and passed it to Lucy.
“Thank you,” Chloe said, again.
“For sure.”
“I liked that sweater. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, smiling. She un-bunched the sweater. All good. “This’ll be just by the door, okay? Get it when it’s dark out.”
“Thank you!”
“For sure.”
Lucy took it over by the front door, and hung it on a shovel with a broken, weather-worn plastic head that was by the door. Some ancient thing that had been used by factory workers to clear the snow, decades ago.
Angie and Liz were standing by the truck that was sitting halfway through the gate. Liz was talking to one of the guys that had come with Angie.
“Shouldn’t make a phone call, with the Bugge and other interference.”
“The guys we left behind have some practice that can communicate through mirrors. Has to be safer.”
“Appreciate it!” Chloe called out, behind Lucy.
Lucy saw the people by the car look her way. They’d heard.
“Don’t want any trouble,” Eloise said. She stood off to the side, near the side of the building.
“You said that before but you’re still here.”
Behind Lucy, Grandfather stepped outside. Immediately, the group around the car shifted positions. The immediate response saw a natural and automatic reposition from the two guys, Tyson and Raleigh, Asher Hennigar, and the guys he’d brought with him.
“Just getting sorted out,” Liz called out. “The Turtle Queen infected the car briefly, we wanted to check nothing was lingering. Something can cling to a receipt or logo.”
“Walk, then. Go out onto the road, turn right, and keep going. If I’m feeling generous, and if you’ll swear you won’t hurt them, I can send someone to drive the car after you.”
“We can drive,” Liz replied. “Lucy… we really want to come out of this with the lowest number of casualties and the least amount of collateral damage possible.”
“Leave.”
“Can you just tell us? What is that, in the sky?”
“I’m straining myself to be nice, Elizabeth,” Lucy told her. “You hurt people I care about, you’re attacking my town. You’re supporting a tyrant.”
“Tyrant? That’s extreme,” Tyson replied.
“In the small scale, and in the large. You let Marlen go when there were very good reasons to keep her. If we’d kept her a bit longer, we could have continued to weaken the asshole she was going to sell people to. Controlled the damage.”
“We can help handle that,” Liz replied, softening her voice, like she was talking someone down off a ledge. More likely, Lucy’s words were coming out with a hard edge and Liz was trying to do the opposite, to bring things closer to center.
“We don’t want you to help handle that. We don’t trust you, Liz. You’re not good, here, you’re not helping good happen, we have no reason to trust you’ll ever help good to happen, so long as you stick your nose into this. What we want is for you to go. And maybe if there’s any decency to you, you can lose some sleep over imagining that Marlen got away with selling three humans to a monster, because of what you did. Leave.”
Liz turned and whispered something to Asher Hennigar.
“Can we get a ride? I know it’s a lot of people for one car.”
“Some of the ladies Might have to sit on laps. Get squeezed in.”
Liz looked back at Lucy.
“Okay.”
“Shotgun!” Angie shouted.
“Gonna have to sit on someone, Ang,” Asher told her.
“You?” she asked. “You’re cute enough.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
They piled into the car. Raleigh, one of Asher’s friends, sat in the window, because there weren’t enough seats. Liz sat hunched over on Milo’s lap, position awkward because there wasn’t enough headroom. She looked out the window at Lucy.
Lucy nodded a little. It was fine if it was awkward. So long as they were gone, so long as there were less invaders.
“Where are we going?”
That was Tyson asking. He was driving.
“Towards downtown. We’ll talk with the others and organize. Try communicating with Musser.”
Lucy tensed.
Come on, Liz. Eloise. Say something. Do something.
“I don’t want to get on their bad side.”
Liz’s voice.
“I don’t know about the others, but she’s a kid. Deep well of power to draw on, decent duelist, sure, but we can handle it.”
That was Milo.
“I meant more- she’s a friend of a friend.”
“And Musser’s inner circle gets us a lot of friends.”
Asher again, that last comment.
“Can someone get rid of this? Burn it, whatever? We didn’t vet it for Bugge influence.”
“I got you.”
“Thanks, Ang.”
Angie rolled down the window as the car made a three point turn, going to leave through the gap in the fence.
As the vehicle moved toward the street, Angie Demarest pitched the bag of car trash out the window. Receipts and food wrappers spilled out, along with a crushed can.
Rather than turn right, toward the exit of town, they turned north. Toward downtown.
Lucy’s fists clenched, but they weren’t shaking from fear, this time.
A group of little kids almost walked into traffic, because they were looking up at the sky. The car stopped, honked lightly, and the group hurried across the street.
A good-sized group of the invaders had gathered at one end of downtown, about three blocks away from Verona’s place. It seemed like they’d checked a few places to eat and they’d gone ‘this place is decent enough’. The end result was that most of them were at Yeast Inception, and the surrounding area had cars parked all over.
Eloise, sitting just by the big front window, hammered on the glass, getting the attention of one of the guys who was standing outside smoking. He hurried forward, intercepting one of the children who was walking among the parked cars. A girl who was about ten years old, with messy hair, who’d keyed one vehicle in passing.
The other two broke away, which provoked a response. People inside hurried toward the door, organized loosely by Eloise.
That didn’t stop the kids from getting to one car. One kid used a pen-like tool to shatter a window. The other pulled something out of his jacket and tossed it through the opening.
They hurried to the next car.
Lucy, standing on the far end of the street, whistled sharply.
They looked at her, then skipped the car, moving on to the next. Window, little plastic box they opened the lid of and tipped into the car.
The man who’d caught the one girl howled as she got in position to sink teeth into his arm. She fought like a mad cat, scratching, kicking, shrieking, biting more, getting sleeve, and shaking her head like a dog with a toy.
The kids made a mad dash for it as the practitioners left the bakery, shattering windows as they cut between cars and crossed the street, even getting one windshield, which appeared to be double-layered. Shame.
Lucy had been on the flip side of this, before, bringing people back to Kennet below. She knew how nasty they could be. How the chase was as the person chasing.
“Not that one!” Lucy called out.
They skipped another car.
Didn’t want to hurt the employees.
The men were faster, almost catching up with the kids, but the alley they ducked into was pre-rigged with traps. Some goblin things from the market had been set up there.
Others hung back, turning to look at Lucy. They paused as a group of older men came down the sidewalk, one of them shielding his eyes from dull sunlight as he looked up at the sky. Tense.
Just ordinary citizens.
Eloise murmured something to Asher, who was looking more and more like the man in charge of the more aggressive fighting force.
“Something’s off. Her attention is divided, but it’s fuzzy.”
“Ellingson?”
“Yeah.”
Lucy threw a paper airplane from a point that was out of sight. It soared across the street, and inside the folds were markings: a void surrounded by vitrum signs. The wind caught it and guided it toward the opening of the window with the fragments of glass all around it.
Eloise grabbed for it and severed the connections.
The paper airplane came apart in her hand. Lucy had enlisted a quartet of the Vice Principle’s kids, and raided childhood books. Every dinosaur picture, every reptile, every turtle, clipped out. Pages with words had been torn to shreds.
You want to stop to clean out your car? Throw your trash out onto our property? Lucy thought. Clean this up.
Eloise swiped her hand, but there were innocents around, and that made the practice hard to use. Besides, anything too fishy would risk breaching innocence, with things as strained as they were.
Meaning she couldn’t stop it from littering her clothing, or falling onto the car.
A ward inside the car glowed faintly, pushing the paper away. But again, there were bystanders. The men on the sidewalk. It couldn’t be too overt. It couldn’t defy reality or expectations.
In a way, it was like the skeptic effect that had followed Sharon around, when the Aware had come.
A paper airplane with lots of confetti packed into it was excusable, Lucy figured. Confetti somehow not getting in the car at all, or on Eloise at all? That was different.
Three men crossed the street, hurrying after her.
I am three very pissed off foxes, Lucy thought. She’d divided herself into glamour duplicates. She hurried away, using the earring to track who was where, and take the paths that put her furthest from them, navigating between downtown buildings. The further she got, and the more reasonable doubt she obtained, the better.
It meant she could push things. That she could lie to reality and expectations with the glamour.
They were surrounding her. She could hear the heavy footsteps, one man suddenly started running very fast as he got out of sight of innocents. Circling around to cut her off.
She found a hiding spot by some trash.
Car break ins and vandalism, that was acceptable, as far as the illusion went. Toadswallow had offered steep discounts on his tricks for anyone who wanted to do mischief. Lucy had checked with Louise and the council, and then given permission for undercity kids to be active. Lucy hadn’t had to twist any arms. She probably could have asked the volunteers for money and they would have paid for the chance to perpetrate this kind of assholishness.
One of the boxes was about a half-foot by a half-foot square, filled to the brim with bedbugs, and a light explosive that would scatter them after a minute. One was a slippery little stinkbomb that spread a light oil. The oil itself had no odor, but when it interacted with sweat, it combined to make something that smelled like hot dog shit. Another was a pair of lacy red thong panties that were animated with a dull intelligence, so they would slink around and hide from the owner of the place or vehicle they were in, revealing themselves only to romantic partners.
Not exactly siege-breaking, but Lucy wasn’t going to tell them not to use that last one.
The men came at her from opposite directions. They paused as fireworks went off.
That would be another one of the tricks. Fireworks, with a very strong, rotten-eggs smell of sulphur. That could potentially start a fire.
But again, treading that line of preserving innocence.
There was a little bottle that would let out mist, and the mist would stay low, leaving traces on every surface it touched. Which included the seat it was dropped onto, the lower parts of the door, the console, and the gas and brake pedals. A very adhesive, hard to remove residue.
There had been others, and the kids had been eager to tell her how awful some of them were, but Lucy had been distracted with organizing things and getting the confetti.
Lucy was calm as they came at her.
She’d established the reasonable doubt.
She let the glamour dissolve.
The chase had drawn some people away. The cars were a distraction. Eloise was busy trying to make sure their ride didn’t get co-opted, and that they were clearing up the confetti.
I am two foxes made of glamour.
It didn’t matter. Inside the washroom of the building, a swirl of smoke became Lucy, and Lucy sat on the toilet, feet on the seat.
She moved slowly, closing the door, then latching it, not putting her feet down where they could be seen.
“Hello?” the man in the stall next to her asked.
She moved her feet around to rest the soles of her sneakers on the rim of the toilet, lifted the seat to have more footroom, then then stepped up onto the piping that served in lieu of a tank at the back.
She tossed more Turtle Queen confetti over the top of the stall.
“What the fuck? Fuck me, what the fuck?”
She hopped down, unlatching the door-
A sword blade slammed through the divider and toward her. She nearly tripped over the toilet as she moved back. Nearly stuck her hand in the water, too.
Another two- one was wavy, the other straight.
“Fuck you! Fuck this! Let a guy shit in peace!”
She shifted her footing on the rim of the toilet, then leaped between two blades, getting the door and letting herself out.
She hurried. Glamour, to paint herself black. Glamour, to hide herself. She strode across the bathroom.
He opened the door, hiking up his pants as he did. He saw her, a smudge of shadow. He had a card in his hand, more a playing card than the notecards Lucy and the other two used for spell cards.
He used it. Another sword, manifested out of a hole in reality. Oversized.
She used her weapon ring. Marker to pole. Pole to slam at the blade as it grew sword-thrust fast in her direction. Pushing it aside.
Well, pushing herself away, instead. The blade didn’t budge. Her back hit the wall and the glamour shuddered, parts of it breaking around her.
But she was close to the light switch.
“Fuck!” he swore.
She moved with the shadows, crossing the bathroom, away from the door and twoard the toilets, resisting the urge to kick out at him or trip him as he ran by.
He found and hit the light switch.
The lights were tinted green, now. And Lucy, shadow in the gloom of the unlit room, became more or less nonexistent. The little bits of graffiti here and there had changed. King to Lizard. A scrawl had come to resemble a tortoise below a crown that was narrower at the base than it was at the midpoint.
“Fuck me fuck, fuck, fuck,” he swore. “Sheathe in soul, withdraw.”
The various swords and blades that were jabbed through the stall divider and the big sword that was suspended in the middle of the room at Lucy’s chest level receded to the place where they’d come from.
The bathroom door opened. One of the invading practitioners stood behind one of the Yeast Infection employees.
“What’s the commotion?”
“It’s fine. I’ll leave.”
“And your friend?”
The practitioner turned, and saw the Turtle Queen standing by the sink.
Behind his back, the influence was creeping up. The graphic on the back of his jacket was changing, lines and words sliding around and transforming. All out of sight of the employee.
“Man, look- I don’t care what you get up to, but don’t bother the other customers, don’t bother my employees, and don’t leave a mess.”
“I’m not with her.”
“I should hope not,” the Turtle Queen said. “Not yet.”
“Yet? Fuck me. Let me by.”
“Hold on, what’s going on?” the employee asked.
“When you’re with me, I won’t allow you to do property damage like that.”
“Property damage?” the employee asked.
“Sir, let him by,” the practitioner outside said. “You can’t confine him. You’re not a cop.”
“I could make a citizen’s arrest.”
“He put a hole in the wall of the stall,” the Turtle Queen reported, as she put gold lipstick on. “Very small hole.”
“What the hell is going on today?” the employee asked.
“Let me by. I’m not above hurting you,” the sword practitioner told the employee.
He raised a hand. The Turtle Queen caught his wrist before he could slap the man.
“No,” she whispered. “Not them.”
The influence crawled more heavily across him. It looked a lot like it was coming from the leg of his pants. The confetti might have landed amid the pants that were around his ankles, as he’d been on the toilet.
“Yes, Queen,” the practitioner replied.
“Again, really don’t care what kind of shit you’re getting up to, but this is a family restaurant.”
“Look, let me deal with my buddy here,” the practitioner outside the door said. He looked concerned. “I’ll pay for the damage, we’ll get him out of here.”
“You’d better.”
It took three practitioners to get the Turtle Queen’s new minion out of the restaurant. It wasn’t a control or influence that would last, but it would throw them for a loop. Fast to do, hard to remove.
A fourth practitioner who’d been part of the invading party stepped toward the Turtle Queen. She only smiled, staying close to the employee. Audacious, knowing they couldn’t use practice, or do anything overt to her, so long as she was being reasonably peaceful, in front of innocents.
“You should leave too,” the employee told the Turtle Queen. His shirt had turned green- and with it, all the employees’ uniform tops had. “You shouldn’t be in the men’s bathroom.”
“I’ll leave. I don’t like his friends though, so may I use the back?”
“Yeah.”
The fourth practitioner put a hand out, stopping the door from closing. He looked at the confetti still on the floor. Then he used his Sight, while he was the only one standing in the doorway.
Lucy’s glamour fell away. The camouflage that made her indistinguishable from the bathroom walls, stalls, and fixtures crumbled.
He reached for his pocket.
But she let the glamour keep crumbling. Hair, face, head, neck, shoulders, all of the things that made her Lucy kept crumbling to dust, so fine it seemed to slip through the faces of the tile, like sand through a sieve.
Reasonable doubt. So long as she held onto that, she could tell the universe ‘that was glamour, the real me escaped’.
It wasn’t like this guy knew enough to say different.
“Can’t even go to the bathroom alone, anymore.”
One fox, the real me, remains. Lots to do.
Standing on a rooftop a block away, fox mask on, Lucy crossed the roof, hopping across to the next roof. She picked up speed as she found her footing. Running toward the woods that separated the lower end of downtown from the waterline.
The kids she’d grouped together would be that way.
She checked the coast was clear, veering for a point where branches leaned over the road, then leaped from a point twenty feet up. A card for smoke, and a pinch of glamour, to make the motions and alter her shape and form.
She became smoke as she met the cloud, negating any need for a proper landing, then emerged the other side, running. Creating a blade.
If there was anyone still chasing the kids, she’d try to get ’em.
She wasn’t near done.
“…didn’t manage to catch any in the woods. I think they didn’t want to go in the woods without protection from the Turtle Queen, so they turned back.”
Verona nodded as Lucy gave her report.
“You?”
“Marlen turned back. I turned her around twice, fed the glamour with a half percent or so of power from the battery to create scenes that’d turn her around. She had to go to the others, to ask if the knotting made leaving impossible, or if they’d set something up.”
They were touching base. Verona had brought food and they were in her kitchen, eating while Verona did some quick alchemy. Peckersnot was sitting on the counter, eating a chunk of burger.
“Yeah, got a glimpse of Marlen, sorta figured,” Lucy replied. She washed her face free of sweat in the sink. Her eyes stung with it.
“Might have backfired a tich,” Verona said. If they think they can’t leave, they might camp out. The car thing might also backfire some.”
“They wanted to get one of their guys out. Had him bound up, two on guard duty, on either side of him, one in the driver’s seat. They left before Marlen came back. In the bedbug car.”
Verona snorted. “Bedbug car.”
“When they don’t outright disappear, they’ll probably conclude it’s possible to exit.”
“Hmm. Right.”
“I don’t think we can devote any more resources to stalling Marlen. I don’t think there’s a point, beyond helping the people she’d transport.”
“Hoped we could corner her. If I’d been able to divert her to the woods, I sorta hoped I could turn the woods against her. Loop it so she got stuck going back to the same point over and over again. If we could do that, I think we could catch her again.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Nah. She didn’t go that way, despite nudging.”
“Okay. Help with the rest?”
“Sure. Want a potion?”
“Uh, think I’ll pass.”
“Four left, but ten more came in around dinnertime,” Verona said, lifting herself up to sit on the counter. She pulled her bag into her lap and got her water bottle out, reaching past Lucy to fill it up at the sink.
“Things change after dark.”
“Yeah,” Verona said. “The innocents go inside.”
“They’re planning on releasing some controlled Others. Complicating things.”
“Okay. We’ll deal. We have to.”
“Big thing? We can’t let them start unraveling what we’re doing to protect Kennet. I’d like to think they’d stop and let the ritual stand so it protects the town, instead of just ruining the ritual to screw with us, but they’re kinda assholes.”
“That’s a big weak point.”
“The Dog Tags are guarding the item collections and diagram. We could set something up.”
“Need to make some edits too, before the big crash.”
“Next stop, then?”
Verona nodded. She looked around the kitchen laboratory, rubbing at her hand.
“Hey. I don’t suppose you have a top I can borrow?” Lucy asked.
“This isn’t about what Eloise said, is it?”
“Do you?”
“You can’t let her get to you.”
Lucy gave Verona her best ‘I’m unimpressed’ look.
“I’ve got a top. But you should do you. Come on. Guard our stuff, Peck.”
Peckersnot gave a thumbs up, sticking out both feet with one pointed ‘big’ toe sticking up from each.
Lucy followed Verona upstairs. Verona had some clothes lying around. She put some stuff aside, and held up one long-sleeved top. Dark purple, with a built in hood.
“Sure.”
“It’s a bit dirty. Not sure of the brand, actually, but it’s from the thrift store. There was a box of stuff that some dude had grown out of they let me loot.”
“It’s fine,” Lucy said. She pulled off her top, then pulled it on.
“Keep it if you want. But you shouldn’t sweat this, you know.”
“I’ll- when there’s time, I’ll make sure to check what I buy next isn’t made in sweatshops or something. For now I’d rather wear this.”
“Okay.”
“It was supposed to be what I’d call bulletproof. But that bullet- metaphorical bullet from Eloise, sorta stung.”
“I bet she’s pretty good at doing that, huh?”
“I guess,” Lucy said. She sorted herself out, then used a trace of glamour to change the color of the top to red.
“We’re running low,” Verona remarked.
“On the glamour?”
“High Summer glamour. We’re basically out of Dark Fall. We have the High Summer Rose for a renewable supply, but that’s with Avery’s stuff.”
“So I shouldn’t use it for frivolous stuff, huh? Shouldn’t fix Chloe’s stuff?”
“You absolutely freaking should. Self matters. Having more Self is armor against some practice, even if it’s changing the color of a top to match your tastes, make it more yours instead of a borrow from me. But… whatever happens after this weekend, we’ll probably be moving to conservation mode for High Summer.”
“Leaving us with only the Winter stuff. Guilherme has been meaning to teach me how to use it.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Lucy murmured.
“Is it weird, that a part of me is happy?” Verona asked.
“Happy?”
“That this is all happening? That I have an excuse to put other stuff aside? That I have an excuse to do big, cool stuff?”
“You should find outlets that don’t need excuses, y’know.”
“I knowwwww,” Verona replied, dragging out the word. “But you get me?”
“I get it.”
“Big part of it is having Avery around, even if she went off to the Paths and junk. And having the excuse to be with you, working on something cool.”
Lucy put a hand out, her fist bumping Verona in the lower shoulder. “Yeah. When I think of how the Garricks reacted to the plan, I can imagine how much mileage we’ll get out of this in the future, when talking to new practitioners. Lead them on, let them think it’s theoretical, then drop the reality, that it’s something we actually did. That’s cool, in my books.”
“If it works,” Verona said. She rubbed at her palm. “I really hope it works.”
“Same here. In the interest of getting all that done… we should go.”
Verona nodded. She led the way back downstairs.
“Pecker!” Lucy called out.
Peckersnot peeped a response.
“Can you meet up with the goblins? I’ll be at the Arena. We’ve got to sort out the ritual and we should set up security.”
That got a peep in response. Lucy looked at Verona.
“That’s a yes.”
Verona let Lucy through the front door, holding it open as Peckersnot, delayed by having to get down from the counter, got around to running through.
Lucy caught a glimpse on Verona’s face as Verona closed the door, making a hand gesture to bid it to lock itself. Concern. Something deeper.
“You managing?”
“More or less. A little freaked.”
“Valid,” Lucy replied.
She didn’t want to pry, because history told her Verona would resist and pull further away.
Instead, she clapped a hand on Verona’s shoulder, running beside her for a minute.
Is it the same thing I’m feeling? Like this is the end of Summer? That things went so horribly wrong the last time?
It made her eyes want to well up with tears. Moisture there but not gathering. The rings and dog tag were there, shifting against skin as she ran.
The guys gone from her life- it prompted a thought.
“Peckersnot,” she called out.
Peckersnot had pulled ahead a little bit, scampering forward. He paused, looking back.
“One more thing? Can you get a message to one of the Dog Tags, or one of the undercity people who know where Guilherme’s cave is?”
It had been drilled in over and over again in the Blue Heron. That the first step to handling a threat was to identify. Figure out what you were up against.
That was an issue they were bound to run into. That there were so many new practitioners coming into town, and she didn’t know what they did. That they were releasing Others now- starting with the human-ish ones who could pass for normal. The other, more monstrous stuff would come out later tonight, when people had gone to bed.
Lucy tossed her mask into the air, then caught it.
Verona was busy making the edits to the diagram. Lucy brought her the tools she asked for, and kept them out of the way otherwise.
Tashlit wore a hooded sweatshirt, but kept to the shadows at the middle of the roof, where the lights over the parking lot didn’t reach from either side. The eyes on her hands moved, watching the roads and trees.
A car approached. Lucy looked with her Sight, and she could see the stains and blades. She could see the ribbons tied to blade handles, and the direction they pointed.
They weren’t leaving town.
If those weren’t practitioners, Lucy wasn’t sure she cared what happened to them.
“Pea green S.U.V.,” Lucy reported. The sound diagram she’d drawn on the roof’s edge caught her voice, transmitting it to the matched diagram on a slip of paper. “Practitioners. They’re not leaving town. They’re coming from the eastern end of Kennet. Go for it.”
A car pulled out of a parking spot, and turned onto the same road.
“Need help?” Verona asked.
“You do that. How close are you to done?”
“Close-ish. Four minutes, give or take.”
Have to delay four minutes, then.
Lucy had already done her part, setting up protective wards. She’d already seen enough.
“Miss First Witch of Kennet, I need clarification.”
The voice came from the diagram.
“What clarification?”
“The S.U.V. I see is babyshit green, not pea green.”
“It’s the same- yes. That one. Babyshit green.”
Verona cackled.
The car that had pulled onto the road carried on its way. A bend in the road hid them from one another until the middle stretch.
The car veered sharply, aiming for a head-on collision. Lucy’s Sight could see the wards kick into action- swords embedded in the side of the car exploded into stain, filling the air. Her normal vision could see how the S.U.V. veered sharply. An observer might explain it away as very defensive driving.
But the turn was too sharp. Whatever force repelled the car and helped it create the distance, it couldn’t really work against what was meant to be a head on collision. The turn had to be too sharp, the break in momentum was too much, and it turned onto its side.
Lucy’s anklet told her the coast was clear. She pulled her mask on, then took the ladder down.
This was all a disaster.
Ever since John, it had never felt right.
The thoughts of him were heavy in her memory as she walked around to the front of the building and broke into a run. Past the place she’d confronted him. Past where he’d entered.
She dipped into the trees. Markings on her arms glowed briefly as they warded off reaching branches that might have blocked her way or scratched her skin.
Goblins were on the tree branches, eyes glowing.
“Got ’em good!” Tatty screamed.
There was another crash.
“Might’ve gotten got back,” Lucy said. “Fan out, be ready if they go for the trees.”
Butty hiked up his radiation green thong, like somehow that contributed to being battle ready.
The crash hadn’t been any retaliatory practice. It had been the car of undercity people pulling back and ramming the crashed car. Apparently while people had been in the midst of climbing out. It had rolled onto its roof. One person seemed able-bodied enough to squeeze through the window with the slightly crumpled frame, but others were slower.
The other car had taken some damage at the nose, but it was a pretty sturdy sort, with an exaggerated grille on the front.
The man who’d successfully crawled out got to his feet. He spotted Lucy. “I’d wonder if you were a fourth one, but you’re pretty recognizable, sorry.”
Lucy adjusted her goat mask.
Being identifiable was a problem. So in this instance, she was prepared to change things up some.
Three men. One well, two injured.
And Liz. Liz was slowest to move. One of the men helped pull her free.
They could see the people from the undercity getting out of the car that had rammed them. They moved closer to their car.
“Am I supposed to remember you?” Lucy asked.
“Never seen you before, you’ve never seen me, pretty sure,” the man said. “But people have this amazing ability, whether they’re practitioners or not. They talk. Keep an eye out for the three kids.”
“Yeah. Guess you should have kept more of an eye out.” Lucy flicked out a spell card.
She wondered if one of the men could manipulate connections, like Eloise had done, and this was a good excuse to get them to play their hand. It didn’t work. The spell slip became fire, on the underside of the car, which was already damaged from being rammed on the second impact.
“Told you to leave, Elizabeth,” Lucy said. She stepped into the trees.
“Others would come in my place. All you’d do is get someone less friendly.”
“I don’t think of you as a friend or ally, Elizabeth,” Lucy said. “I gave you a chance to back down. I then gave you a chance to leave. You could have counted your win, freeing the human trafficker, then left, been safe. I’d never want to see you again, but nah.”
The fire spread. The people who’d found some kind of cover or defensible position by the car now had to move away from it. It forced them toward the middle of the street, into the open, with trees on one side and fences and hedges protecting the houses from the sound of passing traffic on the other.
“Weren’t very nice about how you offered surrender,” the man on the one side said. “Or so I hear.”
“You’re invading my town, overriding our institutions, you’re attacking our people. You’re releasing criminals. Nothing was forcing me to be as nice as I’ve already been.”
“I know what you’re doing,” Elizabeth said.
“Do you?”
“In a general sense. I had to improvise a thermometer, but once I did, it went straight to the maximum value I had.”
“Have you told Musser?”
“Or anyone else local?”
“I wanted to talk to you, first. I was getting a ride to the car and I would’ve gotten a bit more information.”
“Yeah?”
“This won’t stop Abraham Musser. It just risks messing things up for every resident here.”
“We’re not doing it to stop Abraham Musser. We’re doing it so Kennet can still have residents, down the line.”
The spreading fire popped and sputtered. It had reached some water, maybe. Not fuel.
“I don’t know why you think that would work-”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s none of your business,” Lucy told her. “You don’t know the full picture. Just like you didn’t with Marlen.”
“This might be why you need Musser. To manage things, keep things in check. This isn’t your playground. Lives are going to be impacted.”
“Do I look like I’m playing?” Lucy asked, narrowing her eyes behind the goat mask with the bent nails decorating it. “Don’t fucking condescend to me. You don’t know the situation and you’re going to tell me how things should be?”
“Want us to take ’em out?” the other car’s driver asked her.
“Let the others grab ’em, since they’re closer. Leave Elizabeth there, unless she tries making a move.”
“Others?” Elizabeth asked.
Sockgnash broke branches as he rushed through the woods, reaching out. An arm about as big as Lucy was from head to toe reached out, grabbing one of the men by the head.
Yanking him off his feet and into the trees.
Goblin screams and battle cries followed as they mobbed him.
“Lucy,” Elizabeth said.
“I was mostly only talking to you to buy time for Verona to finish. Are you going to defect?” Lucy asked. “Help us? Actually fucking listen?”
“I’m not going to defect. I’m trying to help from this side.”
Lucy was kind of disappointed the car hadn’t blown up. There were two men left, and the more able bodied one had a wand out, held parallel to his leg, his body partially turned.
“Which one of you is it that’s protecting this group from the Turtle Queen?” Lucy asked.
None of them even so much as glanced at the others. Good poker faces. Nothing in the connections that Lucy could see.
She hoped it was that they had good poker faces, anyway. The alternative was that they had a means of fending off the Turtle Queen, like a charm they could wear or something written on paper.
Right now, one of the biggest advantages Kennet had against the invaders was that the Turtle Queen was a constant pressure. So long as they were reliant on the three or so people who could apparently fend her off, they had to stay in groups. They had to avoid triggering words and situations.
That, combined with the pressure against practice- civilians noticed big groups. They would notice practice. It forced them to clump, to hold back.
This kind of attack, striking out at anyone who broke away from the bigger group? It would hold them back even more.
The driver of the other car and his buddies from Kennet below went after the two men, moving dangerously close to the burning car. Lucy watched as the one uninjured man doubled over, and his arms split into three or four smaller, longer, narrower arms, that bent and wove in and around one another, reaching.
The driver barely flinched, swinging a fist and punching the tangle of limbs, pushing it aside. The splitting-arm man looked momentarily surprised he hadn’t at least had the advantage of causing fear.
And it became three against one very quickly.
Elizabeth turned, reaching into her jacket.
But the accident had been noticed from a distance. The fire was probably a big part of that.
Lucy could hear the incoming sirens.
Lucy moved into the smoke from the fire, staying to the shadows between the overturned car and the trees.
If she could circle around to Elizabeth…
The man on the ground screamed, body bending.
These freaking Hennigars and their students, Lucy thought.
She watched as he forced himself to his feet, fighting past pain, forcing things that were broken back into place. Bruises faded.
For those distant bystanders, the screaming wouldn’t be anything too weird. It was a car accident.
Lucy went after him before he was done. Rather than use the weapon ring, she drew the Ugly Stick out.
The Ugly Stick made stuff a hell of a lot harder to heal, potentially disfiguring. This was a guy who could heal. It just cost him.
So she’d make it pricey.
He lunged for her, still screaming. Every second bought him more healing, got him closer to normal, so he’d be in prime fighting shape. She knew from things that had come up around the Blue Heron and the fight over the ownership of it that the Hennigars could add on benefits. Get to the point where they’d die or were too injured to keep going, scream, and then get restored, with optional super strength, special weapons gifted from War herself, or other junk.
And then all they had to do was win a fight. A win by fight to the death was best, but any win counted. If they could, they got to stay fixed up and living. If they didn’t, things went wrong.
But he’d lunged. She was ready for it. She’d telegraphed with body language and gaze that she was going for the head. She twisted, turning, and struck his calf.
Hits with the Ugly Stick always felt spongey.
He finished screaming. The sound of the fire changed. He smiled. He gestured, and the car, resting on its roof, shifted. The partially open door broke, and metal prongs stuck out. He pulled it free, for an easy weapon.
The catch with being a gore-strewn was that they had a limited time to get that kill to keep themselves going.
“Fuck off out of my town,” she told them, before ducking back into the trees.
He chased. No hesitation, no worry. He ran straight into Sockgnash’s reaching hand, and stabbed Sockgnash through the wrist, slamming the length of metal into a tree. A goblin, possibly Doglick, came lunging at him from a higher branch, and he caught the goblin, hurling it as part of the follow-through on the catch.
He screamed again. Lucy could see the tree branches bending, the ground shifting.
He walked between two trees, hands out to the side, and the trees bent, giving him branches with damage near where they attached to the trunk. He broke them off with ease. A club in each hand, with wicked splinters sticking out.
It’s like a custom, living arena, just for him.
She thought about using her own.
She worried it wouldn’t work. That he’d made arenas so much his thing that it would trump her. It would give up big advantages.
So, as her alternative for playing his game, she got in a fight with him.
The trees were being actively unfriendly to her, but she was stubborn, and she was still pissed about all of this. He seemed to be able to swing without regard for the branches that closed in all around them, while the Ugly Stick got caught on everything, as did her arms and legs.
He clipped her shoulder, and she tried to duck away, only for a root to trip her up. He thrust with his club-stick, and hit her with the stump end. She could feel the spike-like splinters dig into the general area of her sternum.
But in the doing, he’d stepped closer. Peckersnot was directly above, and ejected snot from his nostrils onto the man’s head.
Gashwad leaped onto him, smashing a wasp nest onto the guck.
Lucy kicked him. “Embarrassing.”
“You think that bothers me any?”
Sockgnash came tearing at the man, holding the metal that had impaled his hand. The big goblin hauled on the handle to rev the chainsaw that was embedded in his shoulder, and then charged in.
Trees, branches, and roots slowed that charge just enough- helping the Hennigar’s backhand swing to connect. The club met the goblin’s chin, and Sockgnash looked like he might have been knocked out. But momentum was momentum. The big goblin crashed into the man. The Henniga rstumbled forward, and Lucy was waiting, jabbing the Ugly Stick approximately where the bellybutton was.
“Clumsy as shit,” Lucy grunted the words.
He shoved her, two-handed, into trees. A spike of wood jabbed her shoulder from behind.
“I heal, you don’t.”
Lucy could see the lights of the ambulance and police car. A flashlight shone into the woods, and she turned, backing off, going deeper into the trees.
“Psst.”
Toadswallow’s monocle gleamed.
“You came. Getting your hands dirty?”
“So dirty, my dear, you cannot imagine,” Toadswallow murmured. “I have a lady to impress.”
“I think your Bubs doesn’t need impressing.”
“A relationship is maintained by always trying, dear Lucy. Whether it’s a romance or a mentorship. I have to impress you too, don’t I?”
“Wouldn’t object,” Lucy said, her voice quiet.
“Watch your step,” he said. His hand reached up to her belt. He jerked her this way and that as she retreated.
The Hennigar was fighting Sockgnash and the goblins. He clubbed Gashwad out of the air, and caught a goblin trap that was thrown at his head, hurling it back to sender. Tree branches moved in the wind, clearing the way so nothing would block it from going where he wanted it to be.
“This is annoying,” Lucy murmured.
“Annoy back. Bait him in.”
“Hennigar, or friend of Hennigar, whatever your name is,” Lucy called out. “I lay a curse on you with words. The coward’s death, the simmering pot, bated breath, anger’s rot. Fail to strike and feel the pain-”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the Hennigar called out to her.
“-Fail to harm and feel the strain.”
“You’re aware of what my practice is?”
“Every blow missed, a portion turned back, every fight not taken, feel the chickenheart’s wrack.”
“You’re just trying to force me to do what I’d do anyway,” he told her. “Beat the everloving shit out of you and your friends.”
It was a Guilherme lesson applied to a goblin situation. Get your enemy to act exactly to their inclinations, wherever convenient.
It worked to bait him in. He walked into Toadswallow’s first trap.
The trap detonated. A spray, cone-shaped, firing upward. They looked like nails, but were whitish, and stuck into leg, groin, lower belly, and the undersides of upraised arms.
Lucy watched as the ‘nails’ thawed rapidly. Each was a worm, and they grew more animated as they thawed, rocking a bit at first, then bending, then lashing, fighting for any purchase they could get before digging in deeper.
He screamed, and it was a rage scream.
The worms were forced out, as if pushed away from inner flesh by the scream.
“Already kicked a goblin’s ass, that’s good enough to give me a reset. Now as for you-”
He moved quickly aside. The ground shifted- a tree or rock covered in soil, and hidden traps rolled away from his foot.
He came for her. She was already prepared. Just had to connect- even if it meant letting him connect with her-
A chain caught her wrist, and lashed it to a tree.
“I know that kind of basic curse pattern from the Blue Heron,” Elizabeth Driscoll called out. She’d ventured deep into the woods, and was holding something that held goblins at bay. “Injure, pair with an insult, escalate two more times.”
“Didn’t know that one,” the Hennigar said.
Lucy used glamour to change to fox form, tumbling onto her back and rolling over because of the awkwardness of her forelimb’s position as it came free of the shackle. She darted forward-
Toadswallow stepped into her way. Guiding her away from a trap she would have run into.
The Hennigar punted Toadswallow into that same trap, chasing immediately behind her.
She’d laid the Chickenheart’s Wrack on him, but that wasn’t enough. It would add to the consequences of not following through, and unless he hurt others, he’d feel more and more like he was having a heart attack. Punting Toadswallow had bought him a reprieve.
She’d applied it with words, at a distance, so it wouldn’t be especially strong. Still…
She raced through the woods, and the more distance she managed to get from him, moving on four legs, the less the woods fought against her.
She reached the road, and bolted out, glancing both ways to look for traffic, before crossing the road behind the police car.
“Scared me!” one of the officers exclaimed.
Just before the Hennigar kid came tearing out of the woods right behind him, a vein standing out on his forehead.
“Fuck,” Lucy could hear the multi-arm guy saying. He was sitting on the back step of the ambulance, a blanket around his shoulders.
The Hennigar ignored the cops, following after Lucy, but the same environment-claiming effect he’d been using didn’t work on an area as wide-open as the road. Lucy avoided going into the hedges, and when he walked forward a few feet, she crossed maybe ten or twelve feet on all fours, before looking back.
Multi-armed man’s mouth moved.
“Defend yourselves. He’s raging.”
The same All-Innocents-are-a-bit-skeptic level of stuff applied. Even mid-rage, the Hennigar seemed to know enough to hold back, or the practice forced him to, getting weaker.
He couldn’t go all out against the two cops.
One shouted, drawing a gun, ordering him to stand down.
He lunged, grabbing one and pushing him backwards so his head was touching the back windshield, and the gun popped off, firing.
This worked.
He put up a fight, but it was an awkward struggle, trying to be convincingly normal to innocents, but not lose, either.
In the end, he got the worst of both worlds. He got shot once more, put up a fight and then got wrestled to the ground by two men.
As soon as he was down and cuffed- two sets of handcuffs, even, Lucy saw, they started on treatment for the bullet wounds.
The other guy didn’t even try to intervene or stop them.
“His family will get him out,” Elizabeth said.
Lucy became human again, and groaned loud enough to be heard. Elizabeth was at the edge of the trees. “You think that makes it better or okay? It’s just a sign something’s really screwed up.”
Elizabeth stepped forward, and Lucy was able to see the goblins behind her. And Verona.
Her hands were bound behind her back.
“He’s got a curse on him. I wasn’t able to lay the clumsy fool insult curse on him, but…”
“He’ll feel compelled to start trouble, go after people,” Elizabeth said.
“Might make it more costly to get him out,” Lucy said.
“Not so cool for the people he’s locked up with,” Verona said.
“You’re not wrong,” Lucy sighed the words. “The curse was fun, the story spun, the cops shall take him for a ride. Chickenheart be undone, I see the curse as satisfied.”
She felt it release, like a tension in the air.
“Would’ve been funny though,” Verona said.
“Fitting more than funny, to me. Yeah.”
Lucy sighed. She hurt in ten different places. She pulled the goat mask off, and looked more clearly at Elizabeth.
“I wouldn’t have gotten caught if I wasn’t trying to manage the situation. For your benefit, as well as ours.”
“What’s it practitioners say? Gods and spirits?” Lucy asked.
“That’s right.”
“Gods and fucking spirits, can we please gag her so we don’t have to listen to this anymore?”
“Okay,” Verona said, clapping her hands. “Goblins…!”
Her raising her voice had turned the heads of the cops, way down the road. They had their hands full, though.
“…Who has the least offensive, most effective object we can use to gag Liz here?”
They were winning little confrontations but losing in the big picture.
The night stretched on, and now the more monstrous others were out.
They’d had forty or so invading practitioners in Kennet. Maybe five invading practitioners who were too hurt, captured, or unable to really contribute to Musser’s side of the battle efforts.
Everyone was awake, pretty much. Non-practitioners mostly slept, but the rest of them were making the moves they could. Still being careful. Still mindful of the wheel that showed in the sky when the clouds were brighter with the lights of the town, and the sky was starry. An absence of stars.
She let herself inside.
“Need anything?” she asked. She tugged on the bike locks they were using as chains.
“Not especially,” Matthew said.
“Can I borrow your basement?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think I’d see this young woman again.”
“I’ll be right back, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Do I have permission to practice and mess around?”
Lucy brought Elizabeth down the stairs, and into the basement. There, she fiddled around a bit.
It wasn’t hard to set up the binding. This was where Edith had been kept. The pattern had been established, the grooves dug in, and the lines flowed easily.
Turning the end of the basement into a cage without bars.
“Bucket should still be enchanted. Use it for trash, bathroom. There’s a mini-fridge with water, juice- juice probably is expired, if it hasn’t been cleared out,” Lucy said. She bent down. “Oh good, it’s sorted. Looks like there’s a bit of cheese. Should still be good.”
She undid the chains, freeing Elizabeth. Then she reached for the gag-
Elizabeth beat her to it.
“Don’t preach at me. You’re bad at it,” Lucy told her.
“I won’t.”
“The way we figure this works, people can’t enter this space unless they’re making a claim. Unless, like you, they’re firmly claimed. Verona thinks that since a spellbinder can bring someone they’ve mind controlled in that’s already made a claim, I should be able to bring in a prisoner. They can’t mess with the property without permission, there’s rules about that, to keep people from trashing a would-be demesne in the challenge.”
“So breaking in the locked basement door, undoing the cage practice, that’s out, huh?” Matthew asked, from behind her.
“Unless you say they can.”
He nodded.
“That okay?” she asked.
“Might warp this place, a tiny bit. Making it so it’s a Demesne that naturally wants a prisoner in the basement,” he said.
“Do you want me to- I could take her to the ghouls, but they had a rough time of it. And the others know where that is.”
“No. It’s fine. This place will always have Edith’s shadow in it.”
“Your comments about your messed up ex wife really ring different now that you’ve said that,” Elizabeth said.
“You don’t know nearly enough about way too many fucking things you really like to have opinions about,” Lucy told her.
“Maybe.”
“When the claim ends, a lot of this will be relaxed.”
“I’ll let you out then,” Matthew said. “If I’m able.”
Elizabeth nodded. “And not all that long after that, this big ritual you’re doing finishes?”
“Basically,” Lucy said. “Is this the point where you tell us there’s something huge we missed and it’s all going to go wrong?”
“No. I’m going to avoid having a big opinion on something I don’t know enough about. said I wouldn’t preach. But I think it’s going to go wrong. Not because- just because you’re up against so much.”
“Then you’ll want to get out of town between the time you’re freed and the time it comes down.”
“I guess so. You should too.”
Lucy shook her head.
“Your contest?” Matthew asked.
“You sure you don’t need anything? I could give you a rundown of events.”
“Nah. Got filled in recently. Save the war stories for later.”
She nodded.
“What day?”
“Night two out of three. One and a half days, one night left.”
He nodded.
“Some curse slips. Might be up your alley.”
“It’s been a good decade or so since I dabbled in that, but yeah. Thanks.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, giving it a pat as she walked back up to the stairs.
“No contest,” she told him.
“Thanks.”
She exited the house, and she saw Edith standing outside, irises burning-coal orange in the dark.
“Creepy,” Lucy said.
“Yeah. We’ve got company. Want me to take care of it?”
“You’d get in the way,” Lucy said. She reached for her glamour compact, and she got out a bit of winter glamour. “It’s handled.”
“You’re so sure?” Edith asked.
Lucy didn’t reply. Instead, she brought the glamour to her mouth, and she blew.
Lucy walked away, stepping into the shadows. Edith backed off too.
Milo came walking down the street, sniffing at the air. “Ellingson! First witch of Kennet!”
She felt the tug.
“Lucille Ellingson!” he called out.
Another tug, on her being. On her attention. Establishing a connection.
“You kidnapped Elizabeth Driscoll! She’s growing on me, kid! How are we going to do this!?”
He walked down toward Matthew’s house. Others converged on the area. A handful of other practitioners, who were searching, looking around. Here and there, their eyes glowed with Sight.
“I know she’s not with the cat-masked girl. Veronica or whatever her name is. Nobody’s seen the deer since she ran away, after we freed Marlen. So I figured I’d ask you.”
He stopped when he was directly in front of the house. “Chilly. I was wondering which side of you I’d face. I was very interested to hear about the goat mask, the more brutal approach.”
The wind blew, and with it, her short cape fluttered.
“There you are.”
She hopped down from Matthew’s roof, onto the lawn. It was dark and late enough nobody had noticed. Her hair caught the wind and the ambient glamour and got longer.
“What mask will you show me? Faerie fox, or goblin goat?”
“Winter.”
Milo smiled. “Ballsy. We were doing some investigation. Elizabeth said you had a Faerie go winter at the end of summer. That’s barely enough time to learn anything, when the Faerie’s learning to adapt too.”
“It’s been enough time to learn something.”
“Has it? Because we’ve dueled in the rafters above your prisoner, in the factory. I didn’t see much.”
“You’ll see what I’m capable of now.” The rapier she drew was narrow and translucent.
The rest of Milo’s group hung back, apparently aware of how these things tended to go.
Milo drew a pair of knives.
He was faster than a human should be. Blades formed an X and caught the rapier blade, he slid down, directing the blade off to one side, so he could get close enough to thrust.
Her hand brushed his aside.
The Winter glamour in the air swirled, building up as she continued to fight. Her blade raked a circle into the road, and the white sparks that it kicked up stayed, a glowing circle that slowly expanded out.
That was around the time he realized that something was wrong.
The air grew colder. Her cloak and clothing caught the cold, her eyelashes froze. Her breath fogged, and produced more glamour.
She pressed in, faster in the cold. When her feet needed to slide, they slid. He wasn’t so fortunate.
A cut penetrated his stomach.
The wound drifted, like a soap bubble in the wind, as the rapier was removed. Traveling up his body and toward his arm.
He was stricken as the rapier pierced his chest, his lung. He coughed as he pulled away. But that wound too drifted.
She accelerated. She pressed in. She showed him a brand of cold fury.
He’s a murderer, Lucy thought.
A mass murderer.
She leaned in close.
“I didn’t fight you in the rafters, Milo Songetay.”
“I intend to answer the claim of Matthew Moss!” Milo called out.
“Finish this first.”
“I intend, I demand the right, that is my prerogative. Do anything, and I’ll have you condemned for interfering in the edicts of the Seal!”
They were words with a hint of fear to them.
She stepped back, pulling the rapier away.
Leaving Milo to stagger back, catching his breath.
He went straight for the door, so the attempt at reprieve couldn’t be turned against him.
To answer Matthew.
A ten minute break, before the door opened again.
He’d claimed Elizabeth. He seemed to have no intention of resuming the fight he’d just started.
And, getting one foot out the door, he was beheaded by a rapier so cold it froze the stump of his neck on both sides of the cut. Dust and ice particles chased after the head as it rolled.
A minor gainsaying had stripped him of a share of his power. He’d panicked.
Matthew put a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder, and pulled her back inside, shutting the door.
Milo might’ve realized Elizabeth was inside, then beat Matt, taking Elizabeth as his reward. But Matthew and the house still stand, the claim continues.
Still in the shadows, Lucy watched herself walk up to the sidewalk. She spied the people who’d come with Milo as they saw her and elected to back off.
She’d shown them three faces, now. One of her above, the fox. One of her below, the goat. And one of the fantastical her that didn’t exist yet. Maybe she’d never exist.
Guilherme, dressed up as her, having borrowed a lock of her hair and her cloak, served in her stead. Helped create the myth, and keep the enemy off balance.
This would escalate things. But it would also give them pause, slow them down.
They’d had forty or so invading practitioners in Kennet. Six of whom who were now too hurt, were captured, unable to really contribute to Musser’s goals, or dead.
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