Let Slip – 20.e | Pale

Gillian shook her head.  She barely put any breath into the word, “No,” as she formed it with her mouth.

“Are you going to get me in trouble if I say fuck ’em?  Let them rot?”

She let out a short laugh, scandalized.

“Easy does it, Wye,” Tanner said.

The smile fell off Wye’s face, and he stared into her eyes.  An unspoken, ‘well?’

“There’s a lot I don’t like about it,” she said.

He leaned forward, abruptly enough that Gillian leaned back.  He asked her, “What do you like about it, then?”

“You’re being aggressive,” Tanner said.

“You are,” Chase added.

“Wow, even Chase is saying it,” Wye said.  “There’s no time.  And I want to hear it from Gillian now.  What do you like about the place?  What do you want to see more of?”

She shook her head a bit, wordless.

“Who do you like, then?  Who would you risk your life to save?”

“The younger kids, they-”

“Fuck the kids!” Wye raised his voice, springing to his feet.  Tanner jumped to his feet too, halfway between her and Wye, hand out.

“Easy,” Tanner said, quiet.  “You’re drunk.”

Wye turned away from Gillian, pacing across Alexander’s office.

Gillian flashed a grateful smile at Tanner, who smiled back.  The effect of daring to make eye contact with him and smile at him, and getting a smile back as a reward for that dare made her feel- she thought about all the pieces of her she’d learned about in school and lessons, head to toe, organ, Self, and Soul, and how those lessons had been missing notes on the warm quivers that could hit all of them at once.

Just from a smile.  She hoped she wasn’t making a fool of herself.

“Gillian!” Wye’s voice was sudden, shocking, and a splash of cold water- or hot water, given his emotion, dashing across the moment.  His accusatory finger was aimed at her.  “Are the kids cute?”

“What?”

“That you like.  Back home.”

“Yes, of course.”

“It’s a scam,” he said.

“Wye?” Chase said.  “Sit down.  Drink water.”

“You’re drunk too,” Wye retorted.

“I’m handling my shit,” Chase said.  “You’re not.”

Wye sat, drank water, then looked at Gillian.  “Cute kids.  It’s a scam.”

“I don’t get it.”

He paused, drinking more water as Chase filled his cup, finger raised.  Then, dropping finger and resting cup askew on his knee, he explained, “Anywhere you go, any place like home, the Belanger residences, whatever you want to call it, there’s always going to be kids.  Miserable place like that, what is there to do except make kids?  And what, the kids are cute?  The kids make you happy to go home?  They’re kids, the entire evolutionary reason they’re cute is to make us want to care about them.  They’re blank slates, we can imagine the best in them, because there’s not that much in them.”

“Not a kid person, Wye?” Tanner asked.

Gillian smiled at Tanner’s joke, even as she felt uneasy about what Wye was saying and doing.

“You can find kids anywhere.  Not good enough.  What keeps you going back?” he asked.

Gillian couldn’t come up with a response.

“Because she lives there?” Tanner asked.  “It’s not fair to interrogate someone over their feelings about home, when they don’t have a lot of other choices.”

Wye sighed, leaning back, draping an arm over his eyes.  That kind of move usually looked melodramatic, but it fit Wye in this moment.  “I’m not trying to open a rift between you and them, Gillian.”

“Okay,” Gillian said.  Then, after a moment’s thought, she said, “Feels like it.”

Nicolette had told her to be upfront with her thoughts and feelings, or they’d get trampled and pushed aside until even she stopped believing them.

“No,” Wye said, arm still draped over eyes.  “I’m wondering why I go back.  I thought if you had a good answer, it’d help.”

“Sorry,” she told him.

“Why’s it on your mind?” Tanner asked.  “The news you just got?  That Maxwell’s retiring, or stepping down his responsibilities?”

“Yeah,” Wye sighed the word.  “Leadership vote at the end of the month.  I think a lot of people dream of enacting change, you know?” Wye asked.  He dropped his arm from his face.  “But how many actually get around to it?  I think I have the chance.  Alexander’s momentum is still going.  The family might pick up and leave, and if Old Maxwell is out and I’m calling shots, that’s a pretty good chance to reset.”

“Sounds good,” Chase replied.

“But I don’t know if it’s worth what it takes.  How much of a damn fight it’ll be.”

“You took over,” Tanner addressed Chase.  “The Whitts look to you.”

“Kind of.”

“Why only kind of?” Tanner asked.

He was so sharp.  He’d clearly had a lot to drink, too, but he was asking the right questions, saying the right things.

He briefly met Gillian’s eyes, and she pretended to just so happen to be in the process of turning her attention to her ginger ale.  She took a drink.

Chase groaned as he settled onto the seat at the end of the leather couch, enough empty space for two people between himself and Wye.  “Hmm.”

“Hm?” Wye grunted.

Chase was a guy who made Gillian think of the way her parents looked way older than they’d been in their university yearbooks.  An old fashioned mullet-ish haircut that resulted from some laziness with getting his hair cut while still trying to comb it into a semblance of order, a suit, and a general heaviness around his belly and face made him seem closer to forty than his actual age, eighteen.

“There’s nothing as formalized as what Wye is doing,” Chase answered Tanner.  “No family council.  Nobody pulling the strings or organizing things, as far as I can tell.  Except kind of me?”

“Could be there’s people, but they haven’t lined up to see if you’ll talk to them,” Wye replied.

“Shit, that’s a scary idea.  What, a test?”

Wye nodded slowly, before finishing that second glass of water.  “Seeing if you’re paying enough attention to know or ask who’s who.  Because there are going to be people who manage the family.”

“Shit,” Chase muttered.  He ran his fingers through his hair.  “Shit, no.  Don’t go telling me that now.”

“I’d have told you sooner if you let on sooner,” Wye replied.  “But I’m not going to pry into your family business without being asked.  That’s bad politics.”

“And interrogating Gillian isn’t?” Tanner asked.

“Gillian’s cool, right?” Wye asked.

Gillian nodded, taking another sip of brownie-made ginger ale.

A bell on the shelf dinged.

“Oh, is that my- my ride?” Gillian asked.  Safer to phrase it that way.  She stood, smoothing her skirt across her lap.

“No,” Wye replied.

Gillian, in the middle of reaching for her bag, stopped.

“Your mom’s…” he turned to look at the shelf.  “…forty-five minutes away, by my estimation.  That’s Nico pulling up to the building.”

“Oh,” Gillian replied.  She sat herself down, twisting around to look at the shelf to see if Wye had any way of tracking where her mum was.

“Can’t get away from us that easy,” Chase said, smiling.

“I want to eventually be a full-time employee,” she told him, hoping that phrasing would sidestep the verbal trap.

“You’re on the right track,” Wye said.  “The help’s appreciated.  You did good work today.”

He picked up his glass of whiskey, and she internally winced, but she picked up her ginger ale, and clinked glasses with him, Chase, and Tanner.  This was a post-work celebration party.  Augury contract done and dusted, two new contracts underway and ahead of schedule.

But yeah, she didn’t want to get away from them, but she didn’t want to be close to them, exactly, either.  Not in that way, not with the group.

“Want to do anything while you’re still here?  Hear stories about Alexander?  Or the school?”

“Show me more tools?” she asked.  “So I can do better faster, if there’s a situation where you’re telling me, ‘Gillian, use the magic dartboard-‘, or-”

“We don’t have a magic dartboard, do we?” Tanner asked.

“I think I’ve seen a dartboard in deep storage,” Wye said.  “Not sure if it’s magic.”

“Huh.  We should get it out, figure it out.”

“I think the only person who’d really know would be Alexander, and he’s gone,” Wye said.

He talked about Alexander a lot more when he’d had drinks.  And he was sadder when he’d had drinks.

“I don’t know what you have, or what’s for what, that’s my point.  Magical abacus, doll, or-”

“Show me on the doll where he touched you!!” Chase said, abrupt and loud.

There was some light chuckling from the other two, and Tanner glanced at Gillian from behind Chase, rolling his eyes.  She smiled at that more than at Chase’s ‘joke’.  Which Chase seemed to interpret as encouragement.

“Show me, woman!” he repeated.

She leaned back as he leaned forward.  “I don’t know what you want me to do- I don’t-”

“Chase,” Wye said.  He shifted position on the couch, legs across the length of the brown leather, and stuck out the toe of a wingtip shoe to jab a bit at the side of Chase’s pelvis.  “Sit.”

Chase sat.

Wye pointed at Gillian.  “You were heard.  I’m thinking right now about tools that would be good to teach you about, that wouldn’t take more than thirty to forty minutes to get into.”

Gillian felt nervous.  She’d started the day feeling like a daredevil.  She’d asked how they were doing, they’d said there was lots of work they’d been contracted to do due at the year end.  She’d asked to come, her mum had said no.  So she’d asked Maxwell, who had said yes.  West, Owen’s friend from the storeroom, was delivering some things out to one of the more remote Belanger families, but mostly to the Blue Heron, Maxwell had her ride with the guy, and she’d endured the guy talking very excitedly about some game where you were some depressed bunny rabbit or something, for the entire drive.

But she’d got here, and they’d kicked ass.  She really, really liked when they were working as a team, a well-oiled machine of future-sight and figuring out what was going on in the world.  She’d been worried that Nicolette was away, but it had been good.

And then they’d finished and brought out the drinks.  And it had gotten a little less comfortable.  She was glad that she’d come to see it, to get a taste of it.  Not the drink, but the vibe.  No Nicolette checking in.  Just… this.

She felt like she’d screwed up with Chase, giving the wrong signal, and she had no idea if she was giving the wrong signals to Tanner, because half the time it felt like she was so obvious he’d laugh in her face and the other half the time it felt like she was trying so hard not to be obvious she’d signal a total lack of interest.

And Wye, talking about stuff that Maxwell and her mom wouldn’t be happy with…

“Come in!” Wye raised his voice, in the split-second before a knock on the door.

The door opened.

“You’re annoying, Wye,” Nicolette told him.  “And I can smell the alcohol.  Done work, I see?”

So this was an everyday thing?

As Nicolette came in, Gillian raised a hand in a little wave.

“Gillian.  You’re here.”

“Helping with the year-end work.”

“Is your mom around?”

“Nope.  But she knows, she called a little after I left, I told her the family head wanted me to work, political string-pulling, she can’t make me leave, so she had to wait until the end of the day.  So don’t feel like you have to snitch.  She’s on her way.”

“Yeah?  I can imagine the mood she’s going to be in.”

“Yeah.  But it’s got to be better, right?  Than sitting around?” Gillian replied, trying to sound more casual than she felt.

Nicolette wasn’t alone.  Gillian had seen the woman in video calls, but to see her in reality was entirely different.  It looked like every bone had been broken, set at intentionally wrong angles, and then fused there, she used a walking stick as tall as she was, one hand curled over the top, forearm on the left side, elbow on the right, as if her limb had curled to conform around it from the regular use.  With every movement of the woman’s arm, Gillian could see past the opening in her sweater sleeve to the forearm, where twisted muscles strained and worked triply hard to keep things in order.  All of the breaks and bends should have made her small, compressing everything inward, but she was tall, long-limbed, even with that.

It was really hard to believe this woman wasn’t an Other.

“What are you drinking?” Nicolette asked.

Gillian blinked.  She looked at her glass.  “Ginger ale.  Why?”

“I’ll have some, if that’s okay?” Nicolette asked, picking up the glass bottle.  “Any actual ale in it?  I don’t want to drink.”

Nicolette’s focus being on her, the guys watching, that was awkward.  But the stare from the woman made this feel a lot different.  Like she was being skewered by the individual gazes.

“You don’t need to check up on me.  I get enough of that from my mum.”

Nicolette poured and drank some.  “I know.  Gillian, this is the Bitter Street Witch.  Witch, Gillian.”

Even the way Nicolette referred to her, it made her feel more like this imposing, awkward presence, vaguely hostile.  As if everyone present had to bend to accommodate this word and name that would turn heads if used in public.

“Hi,” Gillian replied.

The woman didn’t answer.  She gave Gillian a look, like she was sizing her up, or something.  And her expression changed in tiny ways that made Gillian feel like whatever the witch had seen, she didn’t like.

“I’m curious,” Wye said.  “When you move out for good, will you stop being the Bitter Street Witch?”

“Will you give up the name your mother gave you when you stop sucking on her tit?” the Bitter Street Witch asked.

“Woah,” Chase replied, laughing as he said it.

“Not that attached to my mother, actually,” Wye said, taking it in stride.  “I’ll take that as a no.”

“We were talking about that, about the places we come from,” Chase said, as he got a hunk of bread slathered in butter.

Wye, leaning his head backward, until it was almost upside-down, over the low back of the couch, gave Chase a look.

“Were we?” Nicolette asked.

“Don’t.  Don’t do that,” he told her.

Nicolette didn’t reply, and drank her ginger ale.

“This can’t be a space where we have to censor everything we say.  We work together for too long, too closely.  If you start introducing that bullshit, then between work shit, practitioner-school politics shit, and family politics shit, and inter-family politics shit, then what the fuck?” Wye asked Nicolette.  “What do we do?  I’d go crazy not being able to talk this stuff over with you guys.”

“I’d worry about you going crazier down the road, when you’re dealing with the rippling effects of drama, because the wrong person let the wrong detail slip.”

Wye sighed heavily.

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” Nicolette told him.

“And light is the head that has been severed from its accompanying shoulders at the orders of the crowned,” the Witch said.  “It’s not all bad.”

Nicolette smiled.  She seemed to miss the part at the end where the Witch glanced at Gillian as she talked about heads being severed, then at the guys when she said it wasn’t all bad.

It felt different than with Tanner.  With Tanner, most of the time, Gillian felt like she could use him for cues.  He had a good head about these things, was clever, paid attention to people.  If he smiled, Gillian felt like she could smile too, she wanted to smile.

Nicolette- she really, really respected Nicolette.  And Nico’s situation wasn’t all that different from Tanner’s.  They’d both stumbled into the supernatural and it had been really, really ugly.  Really tough.  Really good at a lot of this.  Including the practitioner politics and business.

Except sometimes Nicolette smiled at something or did something, and it felt like Gillian’s instincts were… not that.

Her instincts about this Witch… they weren’t good.  But they were not-good in a way that made it really hard to put her finger on it.  Just the timing of glances, and word choice, and the intensity of a stare from someone who already stared very intensely.

“Has anyone checked on Seth recently?” Nicolette asked.

“Uhhhh…” Wye trailed off.  He looked at the others.

“Let me amend my question.  Has anyone checked on Seth in the last few hours?” Nicolette asked, voice taking on more of a tone.  “Or… today?  Since I left to pick up my apprentice?”

Wye shook his head.  “There was a lot going on.”

“Fuck me,” Nicolette replied.  “You said.  You said I didn’t need to worry.”

“You don’t, technically.  You choose to, and, okay.  But you don’t need to.  And I’ve got wards, cameras.  If there’s a drop of blood, if he starts screaming, if anything invades, I’ll know.”

“And human contact?  Dealing with the little things?  Like the fact the toilet clogs for him, or he gets random health flare ups?  Other inconveniences?”

“He won’t die.  That’d be too merciful.  So… he’ll keep going.  Health problems come and go.”

“Wye,” Nicolette breathed his name.

“It was a busy day.”

“And you want to run the family?” she asked.

“I actually kind of don’t, but that’s beside the point.”

She gave him the finger.  “If you don’t care, then don’t care, but don’t tell me you’ll look after him when you won’t look with your own two eyes, okay?  Or when you won’t speak to him or do the actual bare minimum in caring for your cousin?”

She strode out of the room, stopping at the door.  “Sorry about this, Witch.  If you want to go to my room, I can show you the curse stuff after I’ve sorted Seth out.  Order food and drink in the meantime, hit the library, whatever, I’ll find you.”

The Witch nodded.  She followed after Nicolette, walking staff knocking against the floor as she rested most of her weight on it, and picked up a slip of paper from beside the door.

“Would someone do me the biggest favor?” Chase asked, voice pitched so the Witch wouldn’t hear.  “Dislodge the fat, thorny stick that someone wedged up my old apprentice’s vag?  Please?  Her voice gives me such a headache when she gets like that.”

Gillian saw how Tanner exhaled heavily through his nose, and interpreted that as Tanner being diplomatic about a gross joke.

“You packed light,” Wye observed, turning his attention to the Witch, who’d put her order in for food and then wandered around to the tables where the augury stuff from a full day of work was still scattered.  Her bags were in the doorway.  There wasn’t much there- probably only a change of clothes and some things.

“I’ll stay the weekend, go back.  There’s preparation we need to do.  We’re anticipating Musser showing up again.”

“Hmph,” Wye grunted.

Gillian looked between the two, trying to judge what was going on.

“I meant what I said, by the way,” Wye said, answering the silence.

“What did you say?” the Bitter Street Witch asked, leaning over the table.

“I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but I’m curious.  About you… your home, attachment to home.  It’s pretty bloody, isn’t it?”

“Mm hmm.  Why?”

“You’re giving up your leadership, right?  Moving away, working with Nicolette?  The way I see it, you can’t be a warlord and do that.”

“Did you damage your ears or your brain with some half-formed practice?  I packed light because I’m going back.”

“But you’re- longer term, I mean, you’re… it sounds like you’re going to be working more and more with Nicolette.  You clearly like it here- as long as you stick to the rules and collaborate, we don’t mind you here.”

“Thank you for deigning to put up with my presence.  I’m giving up nothing, Belanger.  I’ve made it clear to any who may temporarily rule in my temporary absence.  I leave to get stronger and I come back stronger.  For my territory.  For my idiot brothers.  For myself.  If I can’t, that’s my failure.  But I will.”

“But what-” Wye glanced at Gillian.

Gillian realized she’d unconsciously pulled back, deeper into her seat.  Something about the exchange, Wye talking about scandalous topics and the Witch being so naturally unpleasant…

It felt like there was less air in the room.

“What do you do if you leave, you get better, you get stronger, and they’re not worth going back to?” Wye asked.

“This conversation might be one of the first times you’ve said or asked me something that didn’t feel like you were making small talk and playing nice, to keep Nicolette in your corner,” the Witch replied.

“Are you dodging the question?” Wye asked.  He looked as serious as Gillian had ever seen him, and she’d seen him after the Carmine had appeared… four feet from where Gillian now sat.

“If I don’t like how it is when I get back, which I probably won’t, I change it.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Then I decide if it’s a me problem or a them problem.  If it’s a me problem, I leave again, get stronger, come back harder.  If it’s a them problem… change them-”

“But if you can’t?  If it’s not worth it?”

“Then I leave.  Sometimes that will happen.  Momentum helps.  Right now, we have it.  We’ll fight to keep it.  But without it?  If they have no momentum, if they’re stuck, and getting involve gets me stuck?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s like dying.  Unchanging, being unable to change things.  I might be ugly and vicious, but I’m not ready to die yet.”

Tanner asked, “You think you might try to change the whole…”

“Being ugly?” the Witch asked.  She glanced at Gillian.

“Being vicious, instead.  Seems like it’s easier.”

“Don’t underestimate the viciousness an undercity warlord is capable of,” she replied, smiling.  “Might be easier to snatch up the body of some pretty little thing…”

She turned her full attention to Gillian.

Goosebumps stood up on Gillian’s arms.  She felt locked in place, like some curse had just fallen on her.

She blinked, because she couldn’t bring herself to move otherwise, and used her Sight as her eyes opened.

The Witch had turned back to Tanner.  The hawk, the spider, and the crow kept close company with the Witch, Spider at her back, one leg on the walking stick. hawk at her shoulder.  The Witch said, “Easier to change my attitude if I’m comfortable in my own -in a sense- skin, than the other way around.”

The goosebumps had not gone away.  They were worse, seeing the motifs of her Sight.  Gillian closed her eyes for a second, still unwilling to move- but she didn’t want to see the animals that she was used to working with on the side of someone dangerous.

The door opened, and broke the spell.  Gillian put her hand out to the armrest of the chair she was sitting in and used it to balance herself as she turned toward the door.

Nicolette.

“What’s with the atmosphere in this room?” Nicolette asked.  She adjusted her glasses, and the light that glinted off of them was tinted.  “Wye?  Tanner?  Chase?”

“You’re assuming a bad atmosphere is us?” Chase asked.  “Things were fine before you guys arrived.”

“Seth’s alright, just in case you were wondering,” Nicolette said.  “But he’s in a pretty dark mood.  You can’t do that to a person.  Leaving them in what’s basically solitary confinement.”

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t leave him in our care again,” Wye told her.

Nicolette looked like she needed a moment to compose herself.

How long ago was it that Nicolette had been out of her mind, head cracked open, spirits leaking in?  A kind of Forswearance of her own, except she hadn’t even begun to ask for it by awakening or anything.

“Gillian,” Nicolette said, meeting Gillian’s eyes.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll take the Witch to my room, show her my setup, then we’ll go to the ritual stage in the main classroom, work on offensive curses.  Blood, feathers, omens, that sort of thing.  I don’t think your mom would complain about you learning some self-defense.  Especially if you’re around this lot.”

“Again, you’re demonizing us,” Chase whined.

“We’re not that bad, Nico,” Tanner said.

“They’re not that bad,” Gillian agreed.

Nicolette gave Gillian a look, sympathetic or sad, and it was another of those jarring things, like her smile earlier, that made Gillian feel like there was some fundamental difference between herself and Nicolette.

“Offer’s open.”

Gillian glanced at the Witch, then shook her head.  “No.  My ride is coming soon.  But I’ll take you up on that offer later?  Is that okay?”

“Alright,” Nicolette said.  “Sounds good.”

“Chase,” the Witch said.

“If you want to know what thorny branches shoved into genitals really looks like, bring me one, pop some painkillers, I’m happy to help you demonstrate.”

The tone.  It did so much.  Like she actually would.

Gillian felt those goosebumps again.

“Ah,” Chase replied.  “No thanks.”

“What’s this?” Nicolette asked, as she picked up the Witch’s bag.

The Witch shook her head, smiling.  She collected the food she’d ordered.

The door closed behind them.

“How long are we putting up with that thing?” Chase asked.

“She’s intense,” Gillian said, quiet.

“I’d rather have her around than, I don’t know, Maxwell,” Wye said, sighing.

“Even with the threats to my person?” Chase asked.

“Your very, very little person, Chase?” Tanner asked.

“Fuck offf,” Chase replied.  “Oh spirits fuck me, I’ve already got a headache.  Tomorrow’s going to be miserable.”

“Lot of work to do, so… fix that,” Wye told him, looking and sounding tired.  “I’ll talk to her and Nico about the threats.”

“I think she was implying a threat to me too,” Gillian said, voice soft.

“That sounded a lot like a joke,” Tanner told her.

“Oh.  Right,” she replied.

It didn’t to her.

Now she felt like Nico and Tanner weren’t on her side, and Tanner wasn’t on the family’s side, maybe, and…

All eyes present were on her, or glancing at her.  She drew in a breath, and the smell of Wye’s cigarette was thick in the air.

“It’s a little stifling in here.  I’m going to get my things together and get some fresh air,” she said.

“Alright,” Wye said.  “Check in before you go?”

She did as she’d said.  She stopped at her room, which was two doors down from Nicolette’s, got her clothes and toiletries.  She pulled off the tie she’d been wearing, got her jacket and boots on, and stopped in to say her goodbyes.

It was disconcerting, stepping outside after being in that room, when it had been so bright, heavy with smoke, heavy with people– people she’d wanted to impress.  Heavy in her attention with Tanner there, in the same way she imagined being in a casino could be all glitter and glamor, excitement and noise.

The night was so quiet and cold.  Her breath fogged.

Today had been a good day, hadn’t it?  Why did it feel like a failure, somehow?  It wasn’t just that her mom was on her way and she’d be so mad.

She wasn’t sure she’d ever been hated before.  She was certain the Witch hated her.

And Wye- did Wye kind of hate her too?  In his way?  Did Chase?

Did she?  That was a startling thought to cross her mind.  Did she hate herself?  Why?

Stagnancy.

Was she even changing?  Or was she being changed?  What was she after?  What was she doing?

The depth of how much her thoughts were spiraling spooked her.  The only thing she knew for certain, in the midst of it, was that she was hated.  She was hated by someone, and Nicolette was friends with that person and the guys didn’t believe her and if there was anything else to how much doubt was seizing her, she couldn’t wrap her thoughts around it.  She’d worked her ass off today, to impress, she’d been overstimulated throughout, thoughts constantly going, constantly learning, Soul and Self quivering in warm ways around Tanner, and Chase being mildly alarming and–

The headlights shining startled her out of it.  Her mum’s car.

When she’d said goodbye to the guys, who were lighting up cigarettes and joints, music on, Wye had said it would be fifteen minutes.  How long had she been standing here, dwelling on things?

Her mother pulled up, close to the doors, leaving the car running.  Clearly unhappy.  She got out of the car, and circled around.

“Look at me.”

Gillian reluctantly looked up at her mother’s face.

“And?” her mother asked.

“Can we go home?” Gillian asked.

Her mother turned away, walking around to the driver’s side, leaving Gillian to open the side door, drop her bag inside, open the passenger door, and sit.

Wye had stepped outside, and raised a hand in a wave.  Gillian’s mother didn’t wave back, instead shifting gears and turning to go.

“I shouldn’t have gone around you, I guess,” Gillian said.

“That’s a very quaint sidestep of an apology.  You’re not actually sorry,” her mother replied.

Gillian stared out the side window, belatedly buckling her seatbelt.

“And if you had apologized just now, it still wouldn’t have been the first words out of your mouth.”

There was no music on the car radio.  The snow was wet, and the wheels made a lot of noise slashing through the slush of it.  Her mother wasn’t driving fast in this weather, and it meant the drive back would be excruciating.

“If you’re going to do this long-term, you need to figure out how to handle it so you don’t have that look on your face at the end of the day,” her mother told her.

“There- there’s one woman, I think you might know her, she-”

“Don’t tell me.  Don’t you dare,” her mother replied.

Gillian, a bit stunned, just sat there in the dark car interior, in a car that slashed its way through wet muck, in an otherwise dark, hilly bit of woodland.  No streetlights, only headlights.  Her mother’s face a ghostly image in the dark, features hard.

“What do you mean?” Gillian asked.

“If you want to go to the circle and work for them?  Figure it out, but don’t do it if you’re going to look like that after one day.  And don’t you dare ask me for help in figuring out how to handle it.  I won’t help you into their clutches.  Get a handle on it on your own, without leaning on others for help, or stay away from them.  I really hope it’s the latter.”

“Clutches?  They’re not monsters, mother.  Or, most of them aren’t.”

Her mother smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile at all.  “The stress of today was worth something after all, then.”

“Not any of the guys.  It’s someone new.  Someone Nicolette brought.”

The smile dropped away.

“They’re not monsters,” Gillian said, voice firm.

Her mother didn’t respond, but the car sped up a bit.  Driving into the cold, wet dark.

“Then guard.”

Gillian watched as her mother turned, marching away- first step a limp, then a bit more focus after that.

“Not a babysitter!” the practitioner said.  She turned to Gillian.  “Not a babysitter.”

“Yeah,” Gillian replied.

“You’re older than me.”

“Yeah, I know.  I work for the circle, I can handle stuff.”

“Then come with?  Help handle?”

Oh.  That was a little more-

Gillian took in the scene.  The version of the practitioner with the cat mask was swinging a metal thing around.  Homunculi were all over the place.  The end of town closest to the main road was on fire.

She could see her mom going to the storehouse.

“Or go… I think the storehouse is pretty safe, my friend Lucy mentioned.”

What did that mean?  What was she supposed to do then?

The more time she’d spent with Wye and the circle, with Nicolette, the more Gillian felt like there was a divide.  Those who did and those who didn’t.

She didn’t want to be someone who didn’t.

“I’ll try to help.  I’m not strong.”

“What do you have?  Best practices, items-”

“No items.  They’re in the storehouse.  Where my m- mother is.”

“I don’t figure they’ll let me walk in and grab everything useful, huh?”

Gillian shook her head.  “I’m okay with curses.”

“Same style Nicolette uses?”

Gillian nodded.  “Not as good.”

“Limited uses?”

“Got… I don’t know.  Something like twelve.”

“Hold onto those, then, stay close, use them if I signal.”

“Or I could use them as I see fit?”

“Gods and fucking spirits,” Verona hissed.  “You’re your mother’s daughter.”

Affronted, Gillian replied, “What’s that supposed to mean?  Fuck you.”

“I can’t spend my time arguing and fighting with you-”

“I’m not like that.”

“I- I’m not about to gainsay my potential backup.  I’ll take your word for it.  I have resources, I have magic items, I can cover a lot of this.  You can’t, you don’t have a lot.  So watch my back, cover the gaps, okay?”

Gillian nodded.

“Julette!  How are we doing?”

“Big things are hatching.”

“Yeahhh.”

Gillian got up from her crouch, rune hot at the side of her neck.  Her brain still felt like the bricks that made up her thoughts weren’t all sitting together with no space between them – probably why she’d been a little more argumentative than usual.  She could see more of the homunculi.  And she could see bigger things.  Like lobster people, lurking, with collections of the lesser homunculi around them.

“Turtle Queen’s taking some territory-” Julette pointed with a metal thing- a cheese grater?  Heavier than that.  She pointed at more homunculi.  Reptilian.  “And the potion you had me throw?”

“You hit that one, the big guy came out stillborn, the little guys who were meant to listen to him don’t have a champion?”

Julette nodded.

“Cool.  Kinda wish it would’ve spread.”

“You studied that stuff, not me,” Julette replied.

Verona’s eyes flashed.

Gillian, standing back a bit, half-turned to watch their literal backs, used her own Sight.

The animals were painted, and she’d only learned a few years into training with her mother that her mother’s weren’t the same.  They had more expressive faces than real animals- except for the spider, who was veiled, and they had a style around them, that extended into the environment.

The hawk’s feathers extended into the earth, painting out lines in patterns Gillian didn’t quite understand.

“There’s gaps,” Gillian said.  “That way… past the Turtle Queen.  But my mother said there was danger in the trees.  And that way.  The-

The red lines were less dense, like the pens that drew the ink on paper were running out and the line was almost dotted, or interrupted in parts.

“-War’s influence, it’s thinner there.”

“Past the stillborn?” Verona asked.

Gillian nodded.

“That way then.  I want to circle forward, past the storehouse, get Lucy some backup.”

“Okay.”

Verona pressed a finger to her lips, then pulled a paper with a pre-prepared diagram from a stack of notecards.  The stack had a bit of twine around it, and the twine had a token on it, with the same suppression rune that was used in some spellbooks, so diagrams could be put to the page without activating.

It was a method with drawbacks.  Damaged books could blow up or turn into a real mess, if the wrong parts got damaged- especially corners.  Others had non-practitioners write down the symbols, but that could activate with a practitioner’s hand brushing the page, or any other sort of ownership taken over the image, even slight types.

What got Gillian, though, was how many cards there were, the willingness to spend power without power sources.  The fact she’d gone that far.

Gillian had twelve or so prepared curses in her coat- black envelopes with small lizards and mice in them that she’d fed cursed blood and then killed and dehydrated.  Twelve compared to… to what?  Thirty?  Fifty cards in a stack?

She opened her mouth to ask something, but the inscription on the paper she’d been given glowed, and no sound came out.

Verona pressed a finger to her lips again, then pointed, holding up fingers.

Three.  Two.  One.

Julette led the way by a couple paces as they rushed across.  At this part of town, there was no road or driveway between houses.  It was a bit of hilly ground, dirt paths in the months that snow didn’t cover the ground, and houses plopped down out of nowhere.

So they ran across snow.  The snow covered rocks, rises, and dips under a mostly flat plain, and Gillian tripped or slipped a few times before noticing that Verona and Julette weren’t stumbling any.  She started following in their footsteps.

The first bit was fine.  But there were more homunculi as they got closer to the gap between Marlowe Crane’s place- next to the storeroom, and the so-called ‘guest house’ which was meant to be for visitors and overflow in case of emergency.  Maxwell’s old mistress had been living in it for about as long as Gillian had been alive.  She did let people stay with her when need be, but it was still a sore point.

Homunculi pounced as they reached the alley between the buildings.  Verona used cards for water.  They didn’t make much light, and the cold water was as good as fire considering the fact it was winter, cards hitting ground and producing miniature waves that sloshed over homunculi and left them numb and floundering.

There were ten long paces between the two buildings, and a slight slope, but the accumulated snow and the humps of snow that were buried bushes narrowed it down to maybe two paces, trampled by the feet of people who’d passed this way.  Gillian kept flinching, moving to throw one of the two envelopes she was holding in a death-grip with gloved hands, then holding back because Verona usually had it covered.

Julette got bit, threw the homunculus aside, and got pounced on by another.  Verona pulled that one off and threw it at another group, chased by a spell card, to splash the three of them.

One a couple of paces from Gillian screeched.  She saw the animal pairing her mother called Fiadh in the shadows behind it, eyes wide and yellow, a wolf with a dying rabbit in its teeth, the rabbit’s mouth open in a silent scream.

On instinct, she took the paper Verona had given her and threw it.

Silencing the screecher.

Her boots sounded as loud as the screech had been, now that she was no longer under a silence effect.  Her breaths were heavy, breath fogging, she slipped on one section because she hadn’t been paying attention to the footing Verona and Julette had been using, and Verona reached back to help her.

Circling around to the back of the one building.  The shadowy area between Marlowe’s house and the woods was less chaotic than where they’d been, and there were less homunculi.

But not none.

One of the lieutenant homunculi jumped down.  It looked like a lobster crossed with a gorilla, with the plating biased toward the front end.  It landed near Julette, and shoved at her, hard.  It didn’t do any harm, but the girl was pushed into deep snow, and it looked like she was bogged down.

Lesser homunculi dropped down in the bigger one’s wake.  Each a couple of feet tall, naked and patterned like the gorilla one, but without much plating.

“Gillian!  No, don’t throw, but be ready!” Verona shouted.

The big one turned at Julette, as she floundered, about waist-deep, one fist raised.

“One!” Verona shouted.  Silence spell card held against the stack.  She threw a card at the homunculus lieutenant.

It ignited, fire blazing, lighting up part of the Other.

“Two!”

Another.  An outgrowth of ice, crusting the lab-created Other where it wasn’t frozen.

“Gillian!  Three for the combo!” Verona shouted, her attention now fully on the lesser homunculi, half of whom were sinking into snow and half of whom were able to carefully perch and crawl on the crust of snow without breaking through.

Gillian wasn’t-

This wasn’t a finisher.  She didn’t have finishers.

She still tore the envelope and threw it.

The homunculus swatted out, and she was afraid for a moment it would bounce back at her.

But the contents of the envelope spilled out.  If omens were water, then this was sludge.  Oily and black, condensed nastiness, condensed hampering.

The contents of the envelope acted as if they were alive, landing on the moving fist of the Other, running up its arm, crashing into shoulder platings like some cartoon animal running into a wall, deforming in the process.

Painting that ‘wall’.  Soaking in, a black stain at shoulder, arm, and upper chest.

It shifted its weight, dropping one heavy limb to the ground for stability, and the ground beneath snow gave way.  Muddy, or icy, or it just hadn’t been very solid ground to start with.  It sank in much like Julette had.  Feet slipped, until it was almost on its belly in the snow.

Fiadh the wolf with the rabbit in its jaws, oversaw.

Struggling.  In other circumstances, this could make a quicksand mire, getting caught on a fence, or something like that.

“I have more!”

Verona pressed the paper against her stack of spell cards, and the suppression rune.  “Hold onto them!”

Gillian stepped back.

Verona was busy with the lesser homunculi, using the last of her water cards, turning to means of manipulating snow, burying them and driving them back.  She left her flank partially exposed to the homunculus lieutenant, who struggled.

Julette struggled as well, forging her way forward.  She wasn’t cursed.  Just inconvenienced.

As the homunculus fought past the curse, finding more and more footing as it did, Julette reached it, lunging.

Tool catching on armor at the thing’s forearm.

She dragged it across the armor, and armor all across the creature went from somewhat shiny to chopped up- sandpapered, but more violently.  Fragments flew from the edges of each scale.

It barely seemed to care.  She reached out again, backhand, hitting the armor.

The limb raised.  Julette, holding the tool, was raised with it, and the tool had caught on something hard, because it wasn’t pulling free or doing that damage again.  It was stuck on.

It punched down, and Julette became a cat while in mid-air, landed in snow, became human, and grabbed the upper end of the large plate of armor the tool was connected to, foot resting on the back of the tool for traction.  Or to push it further in.

Gillian stumbled back as fire erupted from the creature’s face.

Verona.  Distracting and supporting.  It gave Julette the ability to shift what she was grabbing onto.

Pulling back on a weak point, her magic weapon just below that weak point.

She tore away a chunk of armor, the tool as something that it had to bend against.  A scoring line.

Apparently because the tool was part of the process, it did its magic.  All across the creature, about half of the armor also shattered, breaking off.  Red, raw flesh was left exposed, like when Owen from the town council had fallen down the stairs drunk and skinned the absolute crap out of his shin, toenails catching on the way down and tearing out.

And that’s why you trim your nails and toenails, her mother had warned.

It leaned its head back, inhaling, the mouth that had been hidden beneath an axe-head shape of chitin now revealed, filled with knobby little teeth, and it screamed.

Without sound.  Julette had a hand out, doing much like Gillian had, pushing the silence rune onto him.

“Careful!” Gillian shouted.  “You’re also-”

-also being the kind-of recipient of the curse effect on the big guy at the same time, as a cost of opening that door.  It was weak, but as the Other noticed Julette and moved to retaliate, swinging a heavy forelimb sideways like a wrecking ball the girl’s feet dropped about six inches, lodging in snow, slipping when she tried to move.

The homunculus lieutenant hit Julette, caving her chest in, and fell over, slipping.  Homunculus falling left, Julette falling right.

Verona turned, mouth moving, but there was no sound.  She was distracted as a homunculus pounced at her.  She caught it with the same hand that held a spell card, and winced as it took a v-shaped chunk out of the edge of her hand.  She swore without sound.

The spell card lit up, and the water splashed out.

The big one’s eyes fell on Gillian.

Scrambling back, she reacted on instinct.  Two packaged curses, thrown.  One for pain magnification, one for causing retaliatory pain every time it acted.

“Don’t-!” Verona started.

The vague shapes of the viscous omens splashed out.  Shadows chased their way around- one a lizard with nails stuck through it, one a mouse surrounded by a cage with pins pointing inward but not making contact.  The hawk and spider watched over the setting of the curses.

Julette reached over, rasp in hand, and nicked the creature on raw flesh.

Skin all over its body tore, its back arched, and it fell over.  Lesser homunculi scattered.

Unconscious.

Verona picked her way past the snow, walking over to Julette.  She removed the silence rune.  “Alive?”

“Mending?”

“Very, very slowly.”

Gillian looked around, reaching inside her coat for more enveloped curses.

Verona crouched over Julette, then began moving her fingers.  “You got your fake blood on a nice sweater.”

“It’s a junk sweater.  I wore it because we were going through the Warrens to get here.”

“Maybe to you.  I really liked it.  Ask before classifying clothes as junk.”

“We’re going to be such hoarders if we keep going this way.  Cardboard boxes for me, junk sweaters for you…”

“It’s not junk, or it wasn’t until you went and bled all over it,” Verona said, poking Julette in the stomach.

“Ow.  Exposed organs.”

Dust and bits of leaf and wood were drifting around, stirring into the air and floating in a low-gravity, lazy tornado as Verona moved her fingers.

She adjusted, painting with her fingers, and ribs moved beneath the sweater, caved-in portion abruptly fixing itself.

“Stop complaining, sweater-ruiner.”

“We can get the pigeon to find a good replacement.  They enjoy that.”

“I liked it the way it was.  A bit tattered.”

“Pshh.  The loose bits of yarn are distracting.”

Gillian frowned.

This was- it wasn’t what she’d expected.  She’d heard about and seen the Kennet practitioners in various work for the circle, and Nicolette had mentioned some incidents, like the one familiar setting a fire to a room in the east wing.

It stirred up uncomfortable feelings.  She looked at the hawk, perched on a roof, looking out toward the sounds of conflict, and she saw the way it was painted, vibrant.

Gillian couldn’t help but feel like she… wasn’t.  Vibrant.

Verona helped her- familiar?- to her feet, grabbing her hand and hauling her upright.  She pulled the silence slip off the stack of papers, while Julette got the one off the arm of the homunculus.  They crept further along, keeping to that space between the backs of the buildings and the trees, which hadn’t really been cleared of snow.

They could see a man, not especially imposing, with a cannon hanging from a strap.  It would have been too heavy if it was a conventional cannon from something like a pirate’s ship, but it looked like it was forged out of torn scrap metal welded together.

An orange light appeared in the mouth of it, and then a fiery blast sprayed out.  Gillian shrank down- not because they were anywhere near the target zone, but because the obliteration she could hear -and that her Sight was showing her- meant a place she’d known all her life was probably gone.

“I think what would really help is having someone watching our backs,” Verona said.

“You’re telling me to stay?”

“Can you camp out here, we’ll give you a hiding spot with some connection blocks, glamour, and silence rune, and you’ll need to be ready to signal the Turtle Queen or get help?”

Gillian looked at the situation.  There was a small sea of homunculi around the man, and a teenage boy stood by, acting as something like a squire, holding a stock of items.

She wanted so badly to do something about it, but…

“Okay.”

Verona set up the connection block and passed over her silence rune.  While she was doing it, Lucy was in the vicinity of the cannon guy, supported by some Belangers Gillian recognized.

“Good?” Verona asked, stepping back, surveying the block.  She didn’t wait for a response.  “Good.”

“Keep an eye out, in case I need a curse.”

You don’t need a curse.

Gillian shifted position, sitting on a rock with her coat pulled down a little too far at the back, so she could keep snow from soaking through her pants.  She was just far enough back she could see, but branches cloaked her position, helped by the connection block.

She watched the confrontation.  Verona, cloaking herself in darkness, drawing closer to the flanks, while Lucy had the guy’s attention.  He moved conservatively, turning slowly, his shield kept between him and the Belangers with guns.  It looked like it was plated with gold coins, forming a scale texture.

Verona was holding back, holding a red rock over her head.  To bash him with?

No.  It was a power source or something.

Lucy sidestepped a blast of flame with what looked like casual ease, looking like some old fashioned duelist, except with no rapier in hand- just an empty hand out, flat, extended as if she wanted to give him a handshake.

Gillian watched as the man dropped his cannon- almost onto the boy he was with, and grabbed something else from the boy’s arms.  It looked like a discus, or a frisbee, still made of that twisted, torn scrap metal.

He threw it, Lucy sidestepped, and it disappeared into the snow.

A bear trap that looked massive enough to take a third off any of the buildings here sprung out of the snow, red-hot, flipping through the air, followed by a dozen smaller ones like the one the man had thrown.

It snapped closed at the apex of its trajectory, and cut through four of Lucy’s summoned foxes and Lucy’s right arm and shoulder.  Two of the foxes exploded into a mess of muted fireworks and gas clouds.  Smaller, red hot bear traps plunged, snapping violently closed as they hit solid surfaces, or disappearing into snow, faint steaming plumes marking their location.

Lucy, in the midst of it, gradually disintegrated into what looked like snow, coming apart where the twisted metal teeth bit into her.

One of the foxes that hadn’t been snapped up by the trap unfurled.  Silent and swift, Lucy darted forward, adjusting her footing, and ran briefly atop the snow’s surface instead of her feet sinking into it.

She could probably run on water, doing that.

The squire -the boy with the extra weapons- had noticed Verona.  He shouted alarm.

But the guy with the shield couldn’t do much.  Lucy was right there, spear out, jabbing- forcing him to lift up the door-sized shield, turning it sideways for the extra width and back up, one end of the door blocking off the periodic rifle shots, and the other catching the spear thrusts.

Another shouted warning from the squire.

Lucy, stepping forward twice in quick succession, leaped, stabbing at the same time, trying to get the height to get the spear over the rotated shield.

Backing up, he almost stepped on a bear trap.  But he seemed to know intuitively where it was, moved his foot, and used the toe to flip it up, catching it with a gloved hand and throwing it toward Lucy.

Already flourishing her spear to swat aside a homunculus in the process, Lucy used the spear, poking it in the air, letting the thrown trap snap the spear in two, before throwing her weapon aside.  It became a broken branch.

Lucy backed up a few steps, middle finger raised.

And Verona’s practice activated.  A torrent of water that swept out, washing over him, washing through snow, more like being hit by water with a mass and speed equal to a truck than by anything else.

The splash hit him, his shield then reversed, splashing Verona with about half the strength.

Gillian would have worried, but Lucy didn’t seem to mind.

Verona stood, holding a glass jar, and the water that had soaked her -in minus fifteen degree weather, mind- was sucked up, pushed into the jar.

Gillian wished she could hear what was being said.

She wished a lot of things.  That she was strong enough to do more.  She had what Nicolette had taught her for self defense, and she knew enough to be a pretty damn good Augur, at least compared to the average but-

It was hard not to be bitter.

That bitterness scared her.  It combined with other feelings and other things she’d been thinking about for months now.  It combined with opportunities she’d wanted and not been given, opportunities she hoped for, that were being taken away as the world seemed to go crazy and dissolve into war, and…

Verona threw the glass jar.  Not at the man with the shield, but off to the side.

A cat in the snow became her artificial copy, caught it, and whipped it at him.

The man was already frosting over from being drenched.  A fresh layer of water added to that.

They were all casually stronger here than Gillian might ever be.

What did Gillian have going for her?

She’d thought, at least, that she had Tanner.  And they were arranging a marriage for him.

The thought, stark, dark, and horrifying, ran through her like a sword to the belly.  This is how I become my mother.

Doing everything she was supposed to, and being overlooked at every step as a result.  Or being the odd person out in the room.  A girl in the boys club.  A second choice for a wife.  A stagnancy like being dead.  Bitterness.

There was the realization and the fact she was here, losing her home, seeing people she knew get hurt, knowing the kids could get hurt… seeing it all in perspective, the individual struggles and threads and things she’d been trying to reconcile and figure out, the doubts?  The sword in her gut might have been metaphorical, but she felt like she was dying, right this moment.

Where to go?  What to do?

If she could creep closer, if she could maintain some of the connection block, if she could use the silence…

She fixed her gaze on the squire.  There were tools.

Slowly, carefully, she began to dismantle the connection block, lifting it down, trying to adjust it to another angle, so she could move without it falling to pieces.  The silence was easier, at least.

She was halfway through the process, connection block dissolved to a third its normal strength, when she saw movement.  The spider was perched on the corner of the building, looking down at people.

They were traveling the same route she, Verona, and Julette had taken to get this far.  Circumventing the battle and the chaos, trudging through snow.

They stopped at the big building that was the workshop, with the storeroom adjacent.

No longer as protected as she’d been, Gillian moved closer.

One adult woman, two teenage girls.  And Seth.

He looked so different.  Especially compared to how he’d been when Forsworn.  Put together.  He wore green under a trim black winter coat, instead of the usual Belanger blue, and his eyes glowed in the dark, coppery hair an intentional, styled sort of messy.  But still- still Seth.  Slight slouch.  The opposite of Chase, he looked younger than his age.

The adult woman drew something in chalk on the side of the building.  While she did, Seth paced, touched fingers to his eyes, and withdrew some of the light of his glowing eyes, coating the ends of his fingertips.  He flicked it at the building, and illuminated the wards.

He and one of the girls started working on them.

Like vault breakers in some heist movie.  Distractions elsewhere, artillery bombardment from one of their main guys, the hand attack, the darkness eruption, and the homunculi.  Then, while all that happened, they broke in here.

Gillian hesitated.  She looked at the spider, crouching overhead.  Looming.  It looked bigger than it usually was.  It was turned toward her.

Her imaginary friend for four years now.  In a sense.  A tool.  A sign of things to come.  Or, in the spider’s case, a sign of all the things that weren’t coming to Gillian.  Destiny.  Fate.  Opportunity- for both good and bad.

The girl who was with Seth turned her head abruptly.  Gillian noticed, too late, that the connection blocker had fallen to pieces.  Squeezed to death in her hand as she’d unconsciously clenched her fist.

“Hello there,” the girl said.  She was pretty.

Seth looked over, still working.  “Hello, Gillian.”

“I remember you from the pictures,” the girl with Seth said.  “I’m Cameron.  Seth’s apprentice.  And girlfriend.”

Gillian instinctively wanted to say something snarky about that.  Condolences.  Or you sure drew the short straw, huh?

She wasn’t sure how much of that was ingrained.  How much of it was the same sort of thing that all Belangers were doing to screw over her?

She threw the silence rune aside.  No use sneaking around now.

“I see why you’re doing what you’re doing, Seth,” Gillian said.

“Cool,” he replied, still working at dismantling wards, fingers touching parts of the diagram that stood out a half-foot from the wall.

“Too many of us are shortchanged.  And you- you got chances some of us didn’t, but you still…”

He paused, looking at her.

“I mean, you got to be in the circle.  Smoking and drinking with Alexander.  Earning good money.  But you also got screwed over a lot.  It’s pretty unforgiving.  The way Alexander treated you, the way he forswore you to… it sounded like it was to make a point.  That’s pretty unforgivable.”

Seth nodded.  “Yet so many seemed to accept and forgive it.  The family didn’t overthrow him or send over a contingent.  The rest of the circle, Nicolette excepted, continued to work under him.  Until he died, of course.”

“It was a short time between him doing that to you and him dying, you don’t know what happened behind the scenes-”

“Do you?”

“No, I- no.  I’m not trying to get you to forgive them.  I- I’m in the middle of realizing how fucked up all this is.  This place.”

“The circle too.  The school.  Wye and his boys,” Seth cut in, venom in his voice.

“Absolutely!  Yes,” she replied.  “I’m still realizing.  Like I’m- were you still realizing, before Alexander forswore you?  While you were in the group?  Did you feel like this?”

He stepped closer, walking past the others, until there were ten feet between him and Gillian.  “Are you asking me to use a practice?  Should I read your emotions?  Use an augury technique to reveal my naked spirit body and shove myself deep inside you?  Explore the depths of Gillian fucking Ross, see how sympathetic she is?  All her feelings on the family?”

She spread her hands.

“Are you tempting me, cousin?” he asked, making the last word an epithet.  He was more angry now, eyes still glowing, until he was out of shadow, into the light of the moon that slipped past the edge of the nearby rooftop and trees, when his eyes went back to normal.  “Cozying up to me, saying the right fucking things, about how fucked this family is, getting me off fucking balance?”

“I dunno, Seth,” she replied, quiet.  “All I know is it’s fucked up.  I’m still figuring it out.  I’m not a good manipulator, I don’t think.  I’m not good at a lot of things.”

“You didn’t do more than stop in twice, to say hi,” he told her, eyes glowing again as he was in the dark.  “Didn’t push for better, didn’t give me more than the bare minimum.  And you want me to think you fucking sympathize?  Or to open up vulnerable avenues for you to attack me through, as I dig in and look for an answer?”

“She’s stalling.  Time we’re taking for this is time we’re not getting stuff,” the older woman said.  The features of her face were odd.

“Gainsay yourself,” he told her.  “Put yourself at our mercy.  We’ll take you with, tie you up into a pretty little package, and investigate your inner depths on our own time.”

She didn’t want to.

“Even that takes too much time,” the woman said.  “May I make a suggestion?”

“Sure,” Seth said, with enough darkness in his voice that it sounded like he was spitting out an invective at Gillian.  “Take it away, Helen.”

Helen stepped up to Seth’s side.  She was a fair bit older, but it was hard to tell.  “Say you’re on his side.  Ten seconds, no fancy wording.”

“I-” Gillian hesitated.

“Say it.  Any other answer is as good as saying you’re not.”

The time limit passed.  Gillian couldn’t say it.

The hawk inched closer, hopping along the gutter it was perched on.  The spider was tense.  And Cillian loomed close.

She’d tucked an enveloped curse into her sleeve.  She moved her arm, flexing her hand backward, until it started to slide.  She caught it.

She threw it at Seth.

Curse exploded out.  She’d forgotten which one this would be.  It was plague.  Plague was good.  Plague spread.

Seth protected the girl he was with, taking the brunt of it.  Gillian was already running.

She could hear his reaction.  Projectile vomiting.

The hawk flapped madly.

Glancing back, looking out for the imminent danger, Gillian tripped on snow and fell, landing at the feet of the wolf, its face close to hers, blood on its muzzle and a currently dead rabbit hanging from its teeth.

“You burned our homes.  You hurt people.  Scared kids.  You’re- this isn’t good, Seth!” she cried out, as she scrambled back up to her feet.

Hands reached out of nowhere, grabbing her.  Pulling her off balance.  She fell again.

The girl who’d been with Seth was doing to the curse what he’d been doing to the wards.  Unpinning it.

Shit shit shit shit.

The moment it was loose, an incomprehensible amount of vomit streaming from his mouth, he gestured, casting it off, flinging it back toward Gillian.

She was ready, another black envelope in hand.  She used it to intercept the incoming one- one curse crawling around the outside of the envelope, another squirming within.  She threw the double pair back.

Sent back once, returned to sender- returned to her, and then reversed once more, sent out to the victim with some gravy added.

But hands were appearing again.  Grabbing at the unconscious, de-shelled homunculus.  Lifting it up and throwing it.

So it caught the curse instead.

She had more.  She hadn’t spent everything she had.

“You might’ve actually been trying to manipulate me, you bitch,” Seth said.  Cameron stepped closer, hand on his shoulder.  “I’ve got a storeroom to break into.  And a lesson to teach the Belangers.  We ransom her with the others.”

Gillian remembered.  She raised her voice.  “Turtle Queen, Turtle Queen-”

“Shut-” Seth raised his voice.

“Turtle Queen!” Gillian cried out.

Lights from fire and flashlight coming over the tops of the big workshop building took on a gold tint.

A black woman in a gold dress stepped over the peak of the roof, looking down on the scene.

“Don’t eat me, I know I summoned you, don’t eat me, don’t take me!” Gillian called up.  “Protect the building!”

The Bugge looked down at her.

Gillian had only read about them in books.  Now she was hoping one would…

Move down the roof.  Chased by a flock of converted homunculi.

To the storeroom.  Where the diagram still stood out, illuminated, wards made obvious and easy to tamper with.

The glowing lines took on a gold tint and began to twist, taking on new configurations.

“Fuck,” Seth muttered.

Whatever deciphering he’d been doing had just been thoroughly re-scrambled.

And the buildings with the kids and vulnerable, and the accumulated treasures, power, and books of the family?  Or this end of the family?  Secured.

That was, Gillian thought, a pretty cool moment.

“Toward the trees,” Helen said, voice low.  “Harry?”

The youngest girl present nodded, moving away from the building and homunculi.

“She takes over symbols and writing, things with meaning.  They’re worse with untamed nature.  We can run, and she won’t-”

Homunculi leaped down.  Attacking.

Gillian backed away a bit more.

Even Seth had picked up a little offensive power.  There were only about a dozen homunculi, and there were four of these practitioners- Seth and Helen as adults, and then the two teenagers, one almost or already eighteen, the other barely into her teens, by the looks of it.

They fought off the wave of little creatures, then stood there, one step away from disappearing into the trees.

“We can use Gillian for ransom, at least.  Her mom’s on the council, last I remember,” Seth said.

“Want me to handle it?” Helen asked.

“I’d love for you to handle it.  Her fucking mother never gave me the benefit of a doubt.”

Gillian retreated a step.

The woman held up what looked like thirty black chopsticks, gripped all as a bundle in one hand.  There might have been threads attaching them.

The youngest of the four was behind her.  Holding six- three in each hand.

“Each corresponds to parts, see?” Helen asked, holding up the sticks.  She used a thumb to push up one stick, and there were letters in gilded writing on the end.  Gillian wasn’t close enough to see.  “Head.”

She moved the bundle left, then right.  Helen’s head and Gillian’s head moved accordingly.

Gillian yelped, stumbling back, nearly falling again as she stepped into snow.

“Here.  Just for you,” the woman said.  She gave the bundle a single shake.  Head went down- and so did two other sticks.  With a swipe of her hand, she broke them.  “Legs!”

Gillian’s legs snapped backwards.  She fell, screaming as bone grated against bone.  The fall nearly knocked wind out of her, as she expected to hit snowbank but hit trodden footpath instead, the parts that hadn’t been stomped down digging into her back.

Helen shook the bundle- and the two broken sticks were fixed.

So were Gillian’s legs.

She breathed harder.  “Illusion?”

The woman kept getting closer.  She stepped onto the unconscious homunculus that was vomiting a bit with each exhalation, then hopped down.  “The furthest thing from it, as I see it.”

Gillian reached for her coat, where she had more envelopes.

Helen gave the bundle a shake to get one stick loose, then bit it hard enough to snap the wood.

Gillian’s arm broke in two places before she could get her hand to the right pocket.

She looked up at the Turtle Queen.  The building was changing, the influence crept across it.  Blue paint was green now.  White trim was black.  Snow-

Snow was slow to change.  Taking on a sooty texture.

She couldn’t or wouldn’t step in closer.

Broken arm limp against her front, Gillian lay on her back, looking up.

Helen’s upper body took up two thirds of her field of view.  The Turtle Queen stood in the sky-backed final third.

“Help,” she pleaded.  “Borrow me if you need to.  Do-”

The Turtle Queen hopped down, landing behind Helen.  She raised a hand-

And Seth, holding a carved rod, hit her with something Abyssal.  Dark and violent.

The woman disintegrated.

“Dead?” Cameron asked.

“Still alive.  Her influence is there,” Seth said, looking around.  “But that’ll slow down.  Let’s finish before she figures out an angle for a round two.”

“Storeroom’s still out?” Cameron asked.

“Looks like.  Fuck.”

“Don’t-” Gillian begged.  “Don’t hurt me more.  You don’t have to break anything.  I’ll come with.  You can hold me ransom.  I’ll make it easy.  I’ll swear to.”

“We’re not taking you anywhere,” the youngest practitioner- Harry said, voice soft.

“But-”

“Horrific practices,” Helen said, pushing sticks up, while holding out a hand.  Her arm extended up, elongating, then as another stick was pushed up at an angle, it forked, then forked again.  Multiple arms sticking out of the sleeve.  She twisted her hand as she snapped everything together into a singular fist.  She turned it around, opening it, and showed Gillian the fractal arrangement of little arms and hands swirling in her palm.  “Give you a hold on things most would think are out of reach.”

Gillian felt alarm sing through her.

“If they want a fix, I’m the only expert they can reasonably afford,” Helen said.

“Fix?” Gillian asked, hands and feet pushing against ground to try to move her back and barely moving her.

“Doing what I do, you incur a debt.  A whole lot of permanent horrificness I’ve turned temporary.  Now let me call on forces.  Star-mother and the Black Pitch Stalker, the Urgaritic nether-ruins serpent.  Hammer this home.  I don’t want it coming back at me.”

Light around them changed.  The air got heavy.  Rain began to fall, freezing.

Lightning flashed without sound, and something dark loomed on the rooftop.  The Turtle Queen was withdrawing.

Helen pointed the bundle of black sticks down at Gillian.

“Seth,” Gillian said.

“That feeling you had?  The doubts?” Seth asked.  “If you meant that-”

“I did.  I really did.”

“-it’s because… this world’s rotten.  Things were meant to change and we locked it in instead.  The Seal’s like some fucking tree that’s been in bloom so long that it doesn’t know what to do with itself.  All the practitioners since Solomon did that.  Twisting its original purpose.  Building it into something that doesn’t change and never gets fixed.  Just… fruit rotting on the branches.”

“I’m not your enemy.  Not like that,” Gillian whispered, because she didn’t have it in herself to speak with a normal volume.

“Rot needs to be cut.  It needs to be burned out,” Seth said.  “I’ve never been a man of many convictions.  But I actually believe this.  And you’re part of that rot.”

Gillian shook her head.

“Mic drop?” Helen asked.

“They can reach out, we’ll let them know our demands.  They want a fix, they have only one person who knows this practice well enough to undo the worst of it.  Mic drop.”

Before the thought was finished, Helen dropped the sticks onto Gillian.

The sticks hit Gillian, and they plunged into snow, each barely more than a glossy black chopstick, but each kicked up plumes of snow like one ton boulders had just been dropped.

Helen turned to walk away, hand sweeping through the air as she passed Seth, nodding.

She had the black sticks again, clutched in one hand.

But she’d left something else behind.  An energy in the air.

Gillian, paralyzed with fear, unsure what to do, watched as the world dissolved, broke, and folded into itself.  Single things became many and many things became infinite.  Only the fact that she couldn’t grasp how many different things were becoming infinite kept Gillian’s mind from reaching out to find the end of that infinity.

The departing practitioners became horrors- multi-limbed, multi-bodied, many-headed, sometimes, with features in the wrong place.  Bending past the third dimension and racing into others.  Buildings went the same way, an ugliness devouring everything, as insides became synonymous with outsides, and alchemy infested wiring sprawled out and touched infinity, forming webs of flesh.

She could see the centers, and she could see through those centers, like she was looking at beads of dew on grass and seeing the world upside down and backwards.  They extended, the depth of that look racing out to far horizons, and she could see down the length to the past.  To the things that were made and the things they were made from, and she could see the origin and the alchemy that had birthed the flesh and she hated it.

She hated it on a level past living things hated being on fire.  She hated it past the point a mouse, tormented by a cat, would hate that cat, to the depth of its weary, doomed existence.  She hated it on some base, universal level she felt like she wasn’t meant to touch.  Wrongness.

Things were meant to be right and they were wrong and she hated it to a depth that made happy little internal quivers over a boy seem so fucking trivial she wasn’t sure what the point of anything had been.

A tear rolled down her cheek as she realized that this was just the beginning.  That the world around her was ugly now and she hated it and she’d taken one of infinity steps down that road, each a measure of magnitude worse than the last.  Reality grated on reality like glass shards scraping the edges of glass shards.

A burned crimson black swept over things.

A sea of flesh extending around her, folded and bent and chemical and noise, a cloak that swept out, swept down.

The world got uglier, twisting and bending and extending out, and that burned crimson mess unfolded every time things folded.  It was like a face drawn on a scrambled Erno Magic Cube.  It was scrambled lines and mess when the cube was in the right configuration, but now that she was scrambling… she could see most of him.

And finally, when the world was truly unrecognizable around her, there was a man who was recognizable.  Light from something golden shone on one edge of his body.  He threw the residual crimson-burned weirdness over one shoulder like he was throwing off a cape, and then there was no cape in the air or on the ground.  He was thin, with circles under his eyes, hair combed tidily, wearing a suit with no tie.  The alignment of him and her weren’t quite the same, so effects moved on his skin and clothes, sometimes making it look faintly chapped, or sunburned, or like sunshine was on it, or something.  The gentleness with which those effects moved over her made her think of light shining on the floor of a pool.  Dappled, always moving.  Predictable and unpredictable.

A calming presence.

“If you understand what I’m saying now, then stop doing anything.  Stop breathing, stop blinking,” he said, his voice faintly accented, gentle.

She did.  He was her lifeline.  Anyone or anything close to reality could have been.

“You haven’t moved much.  That’s good.”

Me not moving or having momentum is how I got here.  I made one move and it was one that doomed me to this, Gillian thought.

“Try to stop crying,” the man said.  “Keep your breaths as shallow as you can manage while still staying conscious.  Go limp, but don’t tense muscles to protect yourself as you let head and body down to the ground.  It’s paradoxical, but in the process of trying to go limp, you might tense other things.  Don’t blink.  Don’t twitch a finger.  Don’t move a muscle.”

She lay there.  She let everything go limp.

“I don’t have a fix,” he told her.  “But let’s not rule anything out.  We keep it from getting bad in the meantime.  If you move, you tear.  Across reality.  If you scream, if you breathe too deep, that distorts your mouth, or alters the shape of your upper body.”

She knew some of this.  But it had been paragraphs in a textbook.  Sterile.

So much different to live it.

“The reason so many horrors have so many arms is they- when in the worst of it, they reach out, or- we humans use our arms a lot.  They reach for tools, or to do something.  And the arms break and splinter and each splinter is a whole arm and… don’t move your arms, okay?  Don’t move your legs.”

Her eyes watered.

“Don’t blink.  Your eyes might burn but I promise you, the cost of quenching that irritation might be- don’t blink.”

Her eyes weren’t watering because of the lack of blinking.

“I’m so, so sorry,” he told her.  He turned, looking out at the infinities.  “I’ve been there.  More or less.  I think.  I don’t remember much.  I don’t think I was ever a man, but there was one there, when I came into being.  I was something else, I got pushed into the space that was left when he was twisted away into something else.  I left the memories of that…”

He reached out, pointing at a distant infinity.

“Somewhere over there.”

“Possible help is on the way.  I’ll keep you company,” he told her, quiet.  “Focus your eyes on a single point.”

She did.  Him.  There was very little else that wasn’t constantly shifting and expanding out toward infinity, across time and space and overlapping versions of the same world.

From stagnancy to paralysis.

“Can I hold your hand?  I think I can do that without breaking you.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond.

“If you really, absolutely need to, for your sanity, or to make something clear, you can try talking as you exhale, don’t move your lips or tongue too much.  But if you do, there might be consequences.  If they can undo this, the fact you spoke now, tonight, might mean speech issues and hard-to-fix problems later.”

She wasn’t sure it could be undone.

The power Helen had talked about calling on… those had been Lords.  The ones even Musser hadn’t really been able to budge.

“Hold my hand,” she breathed.

He took up a position, sitting beside her, nearly on her, and moved her hand gently to his knee, where he pressed it between both of his.  He stared out at the ugly infinity.

“See this golden light?  She’s a friend.  This is her equivalent of putting a hand on my shoulder.  She’s getting help.”

“More than… friend?” Gillian asked.

“Shouldn’t talk,” he said.  “If you’ll let me monologue, I can fill the silence.”

She thought for a long while about that.  About staying still and staying silent.  About her life leading up to this point, and what that meant.

She’d lose her mind if there was silence.  Or just him talking.  She’d be swallowed up.

“Need… talk.”

“Okay,” he replied.  He nodded, eyes still on the distance.  “I told you the risks.  I will try to enjoy whatever it is you have to say.  It is nice, not having everything scrambled by some filter.”

“Gold… Bugge?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Pretty.”

“Very.  A nice golden light, isn’t it?” he asked, indicating the faint gleam that came from nowhere near here, that traced one side of his body.

“Go for it,” she urged him.

He laughed.

“I love… love,” she said.  “So lame.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful.  What good taste you have.”

He managed to not sound condescending, one arm hooked around a knee, tailbone nearly touching her, facing away.

She’d let her eyes move.  She locked them to a position again.

She took too deep a breath and she felt pain in her ribs.

“Will it hurt?”

“Yeah.  Oh yeah.  Unless you want me to lie?”

“It hurts.”

She heard the universe squealing and grinding against itself as it perpetually folded and unfolded.  Time scraped against space and it made her bones hurt.

“Does that noise stop?”

“Changes.  Never stops.  Just… equally different flavors of awful.”

“What do I do?”

“You… live.  Endure.  You find cool people in reality, and you interact with them through a filter, a curtain.  Past a few hundred thousand twists and alterations in reality and its various layers.  You… maybe one day run into someone else on the threshold, who’s managed to stay still enough to be mostly the same on this side as they are on that side, unfolded.  Then you…”

He stopped.

“What?”

“You want to weep for joy at the company at the same time you desperately want to save them, and you can’t really have the two at the same time.  You’ll find it very conflicting, if you find yourself in that position.  Then you do your best to keep them from doing too much harm to themselves, with your limited knowledge.”

His hand was very warm.

Her chest felt weird.

“My heart.”

“Emotions?”

“Yeah.”

“Turmoil.  That’ll twist too.  Try not to feel too much.  Try not to think too deep either, or too repetitively.  Or too loosely.”

“Talking helps.”

“It gets better when things settle.  When the magical effect gets removed and put aside, or the broken ritual ended, or the Other stops twisting you… you don’t need to worry about moving and talking anymore.  Or breathing.  You have other concerns.”

The patter of his faintly accented voice was hypnotic.  She let it lull her, trusting him to hold her thoughts and heart in the same way he held her hand.  It was all scary but it was true and she wanted true things and knowable things more than she wanted the less scary things.

“What happens… heart?”

“Emotionally?  Some twists and turns will be there that weren’t before.  It isn’t always worse.  Sometimes it’s just different.”

She had a feeling and she didn’t want to sit on it too long, or it wouldn’t be a lulled, easy, hypnotic thing.  It’d be a thing that weighed on her and twisted.

“Time is different here.”

“It is.”

“How long?”

“Until help comes?  I don’t know.”

She didn’t speak.

“How long have we been here, you mean?  Just under two seconds,” he said, “by my best guess.”

Feelings of panic began to nudge in around the edges.  Something felt like it snapped like an old guitar string as her breath hitched in a hiccup-y way.

“Easy,” he said.  “I’d offer to carry you forward, but that’s dangerous.  It’s so hard to move you.  I’d be worried you’d come apart in my arms.”

“Come… apart… if… stay,” she told him.

“That might well be true,” he said.  “Okay.  Try to be limp.  You are a rag doll, I can move you in ways that won’t break things, I think.  But if you twitch or if my hand slips and you jerk or…”

She stared at that one point in space.

He knelt, facing her now, and put a hand under her neck and shoulders, two fingers at the back of her head, and one arm under her knees.

Then he smoothly lifted her, standing at the same time, and sighed.

She moved her head to his shoulder, instinctively, and she felt a whole row of snapping guitar strings.

“Forward,” he said.  If he’d noticed, he didn’t mention it.  He adjusted so her head was more comfortable there.  “To the future.  To the first sign of possible rescue?”

“Past?” she asked.

“I wish.  But that current, loud as it is, isn’t one we’re strong enough to swim.  You have to pull against the weight of every event that would be impacted by you being there.”

He carried her forward, into the most violently moving part of the storm of ugly infinity, the loud noise roaring through her, until she thought it would change by a mere decibel or tenth of a wavelength and then splatter all flesh from her bone and paint a length of eternity with it, leaving this stranger with his arms around noise-painted bone.

“I’ll- I’ll help filter.  It’s like holding a door open, I think,” the man said.

The fractal reality ahead of them opened.  That red-black burned-ness pushed out, moving scenes and signs aside.  Wresting things into order.  It felt like she was seeing it all from the bottom of a well.

The Belangers.  Tanner, Chase, Nicolette, the Witch, and Nicolette’s friend Zed.

“Gillian!” Nicolette raised her voice, rushing forward.

“Don’t touch,” the man in the suit said.

“Don’t touch,” the Turtle Queen said.

Nicolette stopped shy.  “What-?”

She adjusted her glasses.

“Oh god.”

“What is it?”

“It’s… the horror lady we heard about.  An intentional horror-ing.”

“She took the consequences she was due and is trying to force it on someone else as a curse.  It’s working,” the Turtle Queen said.

“Making her a horror?”

“She’s doing a good job,” the man in the suit said.

“She’s doing a good job of not moving in a way that might break something,” the Turtle Queen said.

“What’s the red thing?” Chase asked.

“Montague.  He’s with her now.”

“It’s the thing that helped them turn the tables on Reid.  Got Reid killed,” Tanner said.

“Fuck,” Chase muttered.

“You know about this stuff, right?” Nicolette asked, her voice pitched.  “Zed?”

“Some.  I- most of it’s preventative.  A- yeah, there wasn’t much at all about what to do if something really bad happens.”

“Isn’t that like telling a lifeguard not to let people drown but not teaching them CPR?”

“More like if someone’s in this situation they’re usually considered too far gone.”

“Three Carmine Lords worth of power have been invested in this.  She wanted it to stick,” the Turtle Queen said.

“Wye,” Gillian breathed.

“Wye Belanger?” the Turtle Queen asked.

Tanner replied, “Not here.  The rationale is someone needs to stay behind.  For business and to act as mission control.  And he’s the target that Seth would probably most like to go after, so it was strategically prudent for him to not hand Seth the opportunity.  Spoil potential plans before they can be put into action.”

“He remained behind,” Nicolette translated.  “He’s still with us.  Watching and listening in.”

The Turtle Queen leaned in, studying Gillian.

“What do we do?” Chase asked.

“Wye’s getting books.  The Kennet practitioners and Jen are coming,” Nicolette said.

“The effect on her isn’t set,” the Turtle Queen said.

“Can you take it over?” Nicolette asked.

“I could.  But the effect would be that she’s becoming a horror of my style and tropes,” the Turtle Queen replied.  “And in the effort, the movement of things would set hooks deeper and break pieces of her.”

“So… you can’t,” Nicolette said.

“I can.  I said I could.  That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  The effect could be moved.”

“Returned to sender?” Nicolette asked, a note of hope in her voice.

“Too heavy.  Too much power pressing it down.  The transition wouldn’t be gentle.  It requires a talent with practice, power and a good hand, and the effects would be the same as if she’d faced it herself, but delivered fast and hard.  Failure on any count means both suffer just as much as the one would alone.”

Gillian lay there.  She allowed her eyes to move to Tanner.  Something inside her eyes stretched.  As if maybe instead of having nearsightedness or farsightedness she’d have farsightedness and further-sightedness.

But she had her eyes on him.  His pretty face.  His blonde hair.

Nicolette looked down at Gillian, then raised her phone to her ear.  “Yeah.  I know there’s some books in the library.  Run.  This… this looks really fragile.  I don’t- Wye.  No.  That’s-”

She stopped.

“I’m not going to say it,” Nicolette said.  “If you want to pull that shit, be here.”

It was so hard to keep her emotions as level as she needed to be.  She was failing, and with this matrix of energy around her, any failure meant damage.

Chase’s phone rang.  He picked up.  He listened, then nodded.  “Bitter Street Witch?”

“Hmm?  This is him asking what you refused to say?” the Witch asked, turning around.

“Yeah, think so,” Nicolette replied.

“I’m not weak.  Words won’t break me.”

“If it’s down to us trying to transfer what’s on Gillian to someone else… you have less to lose.”

“Ignore him,” Nicolette said.

The Witch nodded, and then she stepped forward.  Walking toward Gillian.

“We could pay the ransom,” Tanner said.  “Do we know the price?”

“Wye said it’s everything the Belangers have and are,” Nicolette said.  “What a petty, ugly trap, Seth.”

“Is it?” Chase asked.  “How?”

“Because doing this like this… it means if the Belangers pay, they lose everything they are, and if they don’t pay, that’s the kind of decision that means you’ve lost something vital anyway.  The family’s soul.”

“Do you think the Belangers have one at this point?” Tanner asked.

Nicolette looked frustrated.  “Hang in there, Gilly.  I know this has to be hard.  Yes, Tanner, I think the family has a soul.  A tired, broken one, but… there’s definitely something here, still, that the family stands to lose.”

The Witch reached Gillian.  She nodded, as if to herself.

“Witch?” Nicolette asked.

“Broken body, what’s a bit of horror business?  Extra arms, eyes, flesh flowing like water, is that right?” the Witch asked.

“About right,” Tanner said.

“There are other consequences,” Nicolette said.  “Mental.  Emotional.  Some horrors are fine.  A lot aren’t.”

“Metaphysical,” Montague added.  “Self, Soul…”

“Other, deeper things,” the Turtle Queen translated as he kept talking, her voice overlapping his.  “Self, Soul, your relationship to the Universe, becoming a horror means losing your practice.”

“Figured,” the Witch said.  “Yeah.”

She stabbed her stick firmly in snow, then used it to ease herself down until she sat by Gillian.  Much like Montague had earlier, but with a much more bent posture.

Montague continued to hold her in one angle of existence, while she lay there in another, feeling colder by the second.

“I didn’t like you at first,” the Witch told Gillian.  “But we’ve spent some time together.  Would you believe that I wanted to steal your body and force you out of it, to be normal again?  Or that I seriously thought about meddling in spirits, to drain your qualities and enhance my own?  Dark practices, both of those.  Don’t make you many friends.”

“I would’ve kicked you out at the first sign of actual trouble,” Nicolette said.

“Things change,” the Witch said, to Gillian, who stared into space.  She used a finger to move hair off Gillian’s face and around to the back of her head.  The Witch’s fingerbones broke with the effect of reaching into and past that energy and touching the hair.  Crackling like popcorn at its most active period.

“The world turns.  We connect.  We meet people,” the Witch said.  “We grow as people.  We get involved in growth, community.  I started out somewhere brutish and dark and now it’s something else.”

She used her good hand to straighten the breaks as best she could, she cradled the bad hand in her good one, sitting over Gillian.

“I still hate you.  That’s not me shading anything nicer that’s about to come out of my mouth.  I hate you, and I don’t want your body or skin anymore.  My Sight isn’t very good and it looks pretty fucked, kid.”

“Yeah,” Gillian whispered.

“Why the fuck would I take the fall?  Because I’m already partially broken?” the Witch asked.  “I got a shitty hand and now I gotta play it out, take all the fucking worm-infested shit the universe has got to hand out and eat it with joy in some big heroic fucking sacrifice?  Fuck you, Chase, and fuck you, Wye.  Fuck off.  Get your skinny asses over here and you take the fall.  You’re in charge.  You lead.”

“Okay, Witch,” Nicolette said.  “Valid but…”

“Get over here, Wye.  Take ownership.  These are your people.  You want someone to handle this?  You do it.  You let this happen.  You had the chance to do better by your cousin, and you have another chance now.”

“He said he’s going to read over some books on horrors.  He hung up,” Chase said.

“Of course,” the Witch said.  “Chase?”

He looked down at Gillian.  “It requires power?  And a skilled hand?”

“You’re not that bad,” Nicolette said.

“You want someone to take the bullet, try to absorb the horror-ifying curse yourself.”

Nicolette nodded, breath fogging as she sighed.

“Would I be strong enough?” Chase asked.

“Dunno.  I think the situation is designed- they want to hurt the circle.  They’d want to make it possible for you to say yes.  I think so,” Nicolette said.

Chase fell silent, eyes on the ground.

“I didn’t think so,” the Witch said.  “Tanner?”

Tanner.  Beautiful Tanner.  Being able to look at his face was one bright point in an ugly sort of darkness that Gillian was only barely letting herself comprehend.

The others were coming.  Her mother.  The Kennet practitioners.

“Oh my god,” her mother said, as she came closer.

“Stay back,” Nicolette warned.

“Why do I have to stay back if that thing is there?”

“She’s okay breaking bones by being close.”

“Tanner,” the Witch said, again.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You’re strong.  You’re good at practice.  And at the end of the year, you’re meant to be engaged to be married to her,” the Witch said.  “Long engagement, she has to graduate university first, according to Wye, but it still counts for something.  Doesn’t it?”

At the end of the year?  The big council meeting?

It had been discussed?

Her mother wasn’t saying no.  It looked like she’d even accepted it.

It was all Gillian could do to avoid reacting.  Her heart leaped, metaphorically, and she felt it take a new literal place in her chest as a result.  The dawning realization that she’d gotten herself into this mess, at least in small part, because she’d been so dejected over him marrying someone else…

“In sickness and in health?” the Witch asked.

“Shut up,” Tanner said.

“You’re going to take her as a wife, you’ll fuck her, you’ll think about kids with her, you’ll frame your entire life around hers, but you won’t take the bullet?  You won’t even consider it?  You don’t want to be the white knight in shining armor, riding in to the rescue?”

The Witch’s tone was mocking, even, but it felt like the worst of the mocking fell on Gillian.

The look on Tanner’s face…

The fact he wasn’t saying yes…

It was unfair to ask him to say yes.

But she’d hoped he would, Gillian realized.

“There was mention of ransom,” Gillian’s mother said.  “A cure?”

“They have the ability, apparently,” Nicolette said.

“Not perfect, I think,” Gillian whispered.

“Imperfect fix.  Damage done is damage done.  She might be able to put wrong things away, but there’ll be-”

“Dents.  Dings.  Scars,” Verona supplied.

Tanner wasn’t helping her.

“Where’s Wye?” Lucy asked.

“Such a good question,” Gillian’s mother said.  “Yet I knew the answer before I got here.”

So did Gillian.

She could remember how Wye had talked about children.  And she wasn’t a child and he knew her, but… in a pinch, she could imagine him putting her in that bucket.  Treating her the same way.

A scam.  Like it was all transactional.

“We have favors to call in,” Lucy said.  “With Wye.”

“I don’t think becoming a horror is going to be a good call-in.  He’ll say no and he’ll be justified in saying no,” Verona replied.

Wye and Tanner weren’t helping.

“So let me do this,” Gillian’s mother said.  “Let me step in, let me… do whatever it is I have to do, to take this burden off my daughter.”

“You’re not strong enough,” the Turtle Queen replied.

“No, I- I can find strength.  I’ll borrow it, I’ll-”

The Turtle Queen was already shaking her head.

“Don’t give me that response.  Don’t tell me no,” Gillian’s mother said.

“It’s the design of the trap,” Nicolette said.  She walked a bit closer, looking troubled.  “If it was easy enough for an older Belanger to take the bullet, they would’ve done something else, or given it more trajectory.  They want it to be a major Belanger, or they want to take everything else.”

“Maxwell won’t,” Gillian’s mother said.

“I know,” Nicolette said.

“Wye won’t.”

“Even if we can take back what he takes?” Verona asked.

“They won’t,” Jen replied.  “I’ve known Maxwell from the day I was born.  I’ve known Wye from the day he was born.”

Her mom couldn’t save her.  Tanner and Wye wouldn’t.  Old Maxwell wouldn’t.

Gillian couldn’t see the crow or the spider or the wolf or the butterflies or the hawk.

It felt like they’d crawled inside her.  And all the odd feelings like things weren’t lining up as she breathed too deep, forgetting to keep her breath shallow because she was focused on keeping emotional responses back, they felt like the animals were fighting over pieces of her.  Fighting inside her.

“At the end of the year, Belangers are supposed to meet,” Nicolette said.  “Maxwell retires, Wye gets charge of the family, barring extraordinary event.”

“This might fucking count,” Gillian’s mom said, angry, her eyes dark and wet and already bloodshot with how much she was pawing at them to get rid of tears.

“Might,” Nicolette said.  “It’s a bit of a referendum, isn’t it?  Asking what the family’s about.  The direction it’s going to take.  If it’s going to change anything key.  If that’s the metaphorical final exam, this might be the shittiest pop quiz ever.  And we’re failing hard.”

“Don’t joke,” Gillian’s mom said.  “You’re better than that.”

“It’s an important question.  And I think- Tanner, what are you doing?”

“I’m useless here,” Tanner said.  He’d turned away.  Now he glanced back at Gillian.  He looked away.  “There’s enough to do around the area.  Cleanup, checking on people, looking for traps.”

“Not as important,” Nicolette said.

Tanner shook his head, then turned like he was going to go.

“Tanner,” Zed raised his voice, deeper, angry.

Tanner stopped.

“You’re important to her.  She loves you.  You know it.  You don’t have to take it on yourself.  That’s scary as shit, I don’t think anyone wants to do it, I’ve read about horrors, it’s tough.  But stay.  Give her that comfort.  Be man enough to do that.”

“I’m…” Tanner trailed off.  He wouldn’t look at Gillian.  “I’m more useful elsewhere, right?”

“Don’t ask me that,” Nicolette said.  “I’m going to say no.  Stay.”

“You’re not,” Zed said.  “If you walk away now, you’re going to be diminished, less, for the rest of your life.  Not facing down the hard situation.  This is what counts.”

Tanner swayed on his feet.

“Stay,” Gillian whispered.

“She wants you to stay,” the Turtle Queen said.

Tanner swayed more.

“Fuck!” he swore.  And then he stormed out.  Pushing past a tree branch.  Leaving.

The moment passed, nobody filling the disappointed silence with words.  Instead of staring in his general direction, Gillian had her gaze focused on a point where his face had once been.

“I’ve got a friend looking for a book,” Verona said.  “Don’t judge the actual book or its contents.  And I can’t vouch for how good the practice stuff in it is.”

“A book with a fix?”

“I really, really doubt it,” Verona replied.  “But I remember a few little things.”

“Good,” Lucy murmured.  “God, this is ugly.  This is ugly.  Them doing it this way.  Holding people ransom, but leaving us with the mess like this?”

Tanner was gone in what might be the last time she saw him.  Wye hadn’t showed up in the first place.  Chase was Chase.

A tear rolled down from the corner of Gillian’s eye.

Maybe it would be okay to become a horror if she could just tear into this.  In an uglier and more brutal way than even Seth had been doing.

Her mom paced, staring into Gillian’s eyes, and found the spot Tanner had vacated.  Where Gillian was staring.  The look on her face and everything about her posture was an ‘I told you so’.

That the Belanger circle… it only went so far.

To not even be here.  To not even stay and look her in the eye.

She understood why Seth was mad.

“Have you offered yourself up?” Gillian’s mom asked Nicolette.

“The horror stuff affects the mind, not just the body.  I can’t- what I’ve experienced, what I’ve come from, I can’t.  I can’t,” Nicolette said.  Each ‘can’t’ was a little more emotional than the last.  “Call it a phobia, call it something else, I can’t.”

So that was it.

That was everyone.

“We could hunt the horror practitioner.  Force her to do something,” Verona said.

“Truce, remember?” Lucy asked.

“And we don’t have time.  This gets harder,” Montague said.

“There’s no time for that,” the Turtle Queen translated.

“Even with Avery’s practice?  Big time ambush, bring her here, get a fast acceptance?  On penalty of being dropped off on a Path or something?” Verona asked.

“Even with,” the Turtle Queen replied.

The voices and the people who were talking in a hundred different ways about how every option was closed off was getting to be worse than the sound of the universe grating against itself.

“Whatever happens,” the Bitter Street Witch told Gillian, voice low, not really meant for anyone nearby.  “There’s a ski town above Lake Superior, and it’s three kinds of magical.  The Others there are kind.  Nicer than me.  There’s possibility.  Maybe until the new year.  Maybe it’ll be fleeting.  But if we fight, it lasts forever.  You can come.”

Gillian allowed herself to blink.  Moisture was squeezed out.  Her eyelids felt different after.

“I still dislike you.  Hate you.  Don’t like your face,” the Witch said.  “And it’s about to be a much stranger face, unless something changes.  Stretched out.  But we can stay out of each other’s way.”

There were voices overlapping and she listened to all of them and none of them.  They were saying the same thing.

“With the phone camera.  Include the thing in the corner,” Verona was saying.  “Yes it’s important.  I don’t care if it’s a stupid flourish, it’s an important flourish.  On a scale of one to ten it’s a pretty solid eight.  I don’t care if it looks like a four at best, it’s what’s keeping that practice you’re putting on my phone from becoming a technomancy horror sex thing reaching across the internet and out of my phone.”

“What?” Lucy asked.

“Mal being Mal,” Verona replied.  “No, Mal.  That’s not an incentive to do it.  Not when I’m serious.  I’m incapable of lying.  I’ll explain it later and maybe we’ll even do a fun little demonstration under controlled conditions, but this is a shit situation.  Do what I’m saying.”

“What are you on about?” Lucy asked.  Half the conversation had died.

“Book about sex with horrors, never written, got it in my bookstore,” Verona sighed.  “There are horrors that constantly change and iterate through phases and there’s a practice the book recommends for locking that shit down, so you’re deep dicking or vag-swabbing a horror in one configuration or phase, and not something that changes before you can get sexy with it.”

“I’m tempted to murder the next person who won’t treat this seriously,” Jen said.

“This is how Verona treats things seriously,” Lucy said.  “Ronnie?”

“It’s a stabilizer.  I see it as a blast cage, except the blast is the body, the form.  We can limit the damage, I figure.”

“Let me see?” Zed asked.

She brought her phone to him.

“Can’t stop it,” Zed murmured.  It’s like trying to time a camera flash, to catch the very moment a firework breaks apart.  You get one shot.  Timing matters a lot.”

“But it could be two extra arms instead of twenty, or a hundred?” Verona asked.  “And anything we do to constrain… pretty big, right?”

“She’d still be Other,” Zed said.

“But… Other that can get by?” Verona suggested.  “And if the practitioner has the ability, we can possibly reverse the damage?”

Zed nodded.  “It’s sound.  I have no idea where you got this book or how you even thought of this and connected that idea to this, but… it’s something.  I want a copy for my records.  For managing bad situations.”

“For sure,” Verona said.  “Glad to help.”

“Thank her,” Nicolette said, arms folded, head bowed, leaning toward Gillian’s mom.

“Thank you.  That sounds… helpful,” Gillian’s mom said.

She looked at Gillian, sadder than Gillian had ever seen her.

“Then are we doing this?  Nobody’s stepping in from the Belanger side?” Lucy asked.

“I would, I can’t.  Tanner won’t, Wye won’t,” Gillian’s mom said.  “Nicolette won’t.”

Every mention of Tanner’s name hurt.

“Not technically a Belanger, in that sense,” Nicolette muttered.  “But I get your meaning.”

As the group turned toward Gillian, books and tablets and phones in hand, Chase turned too, and then he took an extra step forward.  Until he was a bit closer to her than most.

The Bitter Street Witch tilted her head.

“Fernanda’s about her age.  I imagine her in that position.  We just got attacked,” he said.  “I’m supposed to be in charge.  I failed them.  I…”

Everyone present was dead silent.

Chase sighed.

Nobody interrupted this, even as he took his time.  Even when time was limited.

“I’m not a good family head.  I’m a good augur, I find people.  But I’ve barely been doing that.  I’m a shitty brother.  My sister doesn’t love me.  She didn’t call me after everything.  I think with my dick, I’m probably an alcoholic and I’m not even legal drinking age.  All the shit I’m shit at, I don’t think I can turn away from this like Tanner just did, I can’t be shit at this one last thing too.  Gillian’s cool.  Let’s…”

He gestured, unable to finish the little speech with anything big.

“Fuck your shit up?” Verona asked.

“Ronnie,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” Chase said.  “Let’s fuck my shit up, then.”

“Can’t be the reason,” Lucy said.

“What?”

“Self-hatred, unrealized potential.  It can’t be why you do this.”

“I don’t see why not,” Chase replied.

“I don’t either,” Gillian’s mom said.

“At the very least, you need to be strong to wield this tricky transference.  Right?” Lucy asked, turning to the Turtle Queen.

The Turtle Queen nodded.

“It’s not about the self hatred.  I mean, that’s a factor,” Chase said.  “But I feel responsible.  Big brother instincts from someone who was never a good big brother.  I failed once already, I know for a fact that bridge can’t be mended.  I failed with Seth.  Whatever he’s become, I had a part in it.  He got forsworn, he’s right, we didn’t do enough for him.  I don’t know what I’m doing.  I actually want to help and it’s weird, thinking it might be one of the few times that feeling’s been inside me and been genuine at the same time.”

Lucy nodded.

“Tell me it’ll be better.  Merge the families.  Work on the bullshit.  Don’t let any Whitt-Belanger alliance become the worst of both sides.  It’d be so easy.”

“I’ll try to keep an eye out,” Nicolette said.

Chase nodded.  He looked down at Gillian.  She wanted to meet his eyes, but didn’t.  To be safe, especially now there was a chance she’d be okay.  “Gillian’s got some little bits of weirdness going on.  Is she- can she practice, if I take the hit?”

“Honestly?” Zed asked.  “I don’t know.  Don’t think so.  Fifty-fifty at best, but-”

“Let’s say fifty-fifty.  Do I get to stay at least partially sane?  Keep my memories?”

“I don’t know,” Zed said.  “Up to you.  Strength of will, focus.  Making the key decisions in key moments.”

“Christ.  You couldn’t have said scarier shit than ‘up to you’.”

“Talking yourself out of it?” Nicolette asked.

Chase shook his head.  He paused.  “Belangers… kind of owe me?  Owe the Whitts?”

“Sure,” Nicolette said.

“I’ll let them know they do,” Gillian’s mom said.

“If I can’t keep helping by working with the circle, a stipend, bit of money, I dunno.  Would be nice.  Send it to Fernanda.  Maybe I’ll be okay and I can do something, maybe…”

He gestured lamely again.

“Okay.”

“And fuck Seth up?”

“Okay.”

“Walk me through this?  The limiting diagram and the work we’re doing for transference?” Chase asked, breath fogging in the air.

“It’s going to take time to do the chalkwork,” Verona remarked.  “Easier if I can point to the parts, for the limiting diagram.”

“Alright.  Same for the other thing?  The transference of the horror-ifying effect itself?”

“Better to cover it closer to the moment of,” Zed said.

“If it’s what I think it is, it’s the equivalent of trying to move the insides of an active, working clock into a new home.  Fingers on gears that are moving.  Can’t drop or knock off a piece.  Except it’s practice,” Zed explained.

Chase swallowed hard.  He glanced down at Gillian.

She wanted to smile but couldn’t.

Paralyzed.  Stagnant.

No way could she do anything but give her all, if someone was giving her this chance.  She couldn’t sit still after.  She’d have to make it worth it.

That was scary.

Chase sighed, looking like he didn’t know what to do with himself.  Looking scared, too.  He looked down at Gillian.

“I’m going to call my sister,” he said.

He didn’t walk out of sight.  But he walked out of earshot.  Fires burned in parts of the settlement, and smoke rolled, and it was an eerie effect in combination with the winter weather.

Chase found a seat on a stump, phone to his ear.

The rest of them worked.

“You good?” Lucy asked.

“You asking me?” the Bitter Street Witch asked.

Lucy pointed at Gillian.

Who couldn’t really answer.  Not here, not with her actual mouth, on this level of reality.

“Yes,” she whispered, on the other side of a hundred thousand folds in reality, on the other side of a time differential that made the clockwork gears of the universe scrape against each other instead of meshing, in a middle layer of reality.

Montague the plicate horror heard, and he relayed it, nodding.  The Turtle Queen, a mess of symbols and coincidences in a human shape, viral and dangerous, saw the nod, and passed it on, saying a simple, “Yes.  She’s okay for now.”

Lucy nodded, not appreciating the scale of that little message, where it came from, and what it meant, that it could be communicated.  She got to work.

“Just think,” Verona murmured, clearing snow aside to make more room.  “We’re going to have to look them in the eye.”

“Them?” Lucy asked.

“Edith’s spirit surgery.  We’re crashing it.  Edith wanted us to.  And some of them will be there, and we’ll have to look at them and talk to them, knowing… this is how far they’re willing to go.”