Author: Wildbow

Hard Pass – 22.7 | Pale

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Verona’s Demesne magic was enough to buy them a chance to get into the woods.  The trees weren’t doing as well in Kennet below as they were in Kennet above, and the snow was light gray at best and black at worst, especially where water ran off the branches, littered with dead and dying pine needles and branches.

Her earring caught small hands and feet scrabbling.  Not animals.  She looked for sources to the sounds and saw eyes gleaming in the dark.  They avoided her.  The whispers were insistent, lapsing into other languages, and what sounded like strings of swearing, so biting in tone that it came out short and strained.

“Pissgobble- choke a cock, shank ’em, shank bad.”

Scampering.

Not their goblins.  If they even were goblins.  Something in that ballpark, though.

“Watch out for traps,” Lucy warned the others.  “Goblins and people are guarding these woods.”

Verona’s eyes lit up, glowing lavender.

A spotlight swept through the woods ahead of them.

Lucy used her Sight, and was only just fast enough to see the last second or so of the beam.  Where the light touched, staining persisted.

“Whatever that is, it isn’t good.”

“What do you mean?” Verona asked.

“Lots of negativity in that light.  Like it leaves a stain.”

“Oh joy,” Oakham said.  “Do you recommend cold or hot water if I get it on my clothes?”

“Cold,” Lucy said, glancing over her shoulder at Oakham.  “Because it’ll be bloody, I bet.”

“Ooh, badass,” Oakham replied, like she wasn’t taking it seriously.

“I used to-” McCauleigh started.

Lucy heard movement, and motioned for the group to stop and get down.

The man looked like a citizen of Kennet below, heavily twisted.  Rolls of fat and loose skin made him look like a shar pei had made a human baby that had put on a good three hundred pounds in the course of growing up.  Dress the baby up in drab dark green parka, cheap sweater, stiff jeans, and rubber boots, give it a buzzed haircut that was uneven, almost bald in spots, a half inch long in other spots, and there was this guy.

He moved around in a way that looked painful, like his knees and elbows didn’t bend.  He didn’t seem to care about branches that ran up against his face.

A male teenager and two kids that were probably around ten or so were with him.  Lucy wasn’t sure on the ages though.  The boy and girl were as tall as her, and very heavy, and they had the same look as their dad, just with different hair – the boy had slicked up hair that was spiked right at the front, and the girl had dry blond hair.

“They’ve got something weird going on,” McCauleigh whispered, her eyes glowing.

“Do you think?” Oakham replied.

“Something protecting them.”

The spotlight swept over the forest.

“They know we’re in here, I guess,” Oakham said.  “Unless it’s this bad everywhere?”

“They saw us come in, and they’re just as capable as us of using phones,” Verona said.

“A few less phones down here, though,” Lucy pointed out.

“True.  But the key guys and team leaders have ’em, I figure.”

The wrinkled guy being so slow to move was a bit of a pain.  He had to pick up the entire right side of his body to get his right leg up and moving forward, plant it, do the same for his left side.

Just go, move on, get out of our way.

Right side picked up, foot planted, left side picked up, foot planted.

He was making a sound.  At first, she thought it was a device he was carrying, like something in his pocket with a whirring fan with a low pitch, but it was him.  A dull, muffled, constant hum.

“He’s groaning or humming or something.”

“Does it matter?” Oakham asked.

“Gotta know your enemy.”

The way the face-wrinkles settled, there were no visible eyes.  But as the spotlight swept over the area again, making it clear the ‘dad’ of the group had longer hair on the back of his neck than his head, in a very hairy-guy way, he brought one mitten of a hand up to his face, and pried skin above and below the eye apart.

The eyeball that pushed out of that fold was the size of Lucy’s whole face, bloodshot, and twitched.

He looked straight at Lucy.

“Damn,” she whispered.

The man let go of the skin around his eye, then raised his head, quite literally.  Chin raised up out of wrinkles that wreathed his neck, his mouth was exposed, and it opened wide, gnarly yellow teeth that were twice as long as any she’d seen on full display.  Like beaver incisors, but a mouthful.

That humming from before was revealed to be a full-volume scream, muffled before by the six to ten inches of folded skin around neck and mouth.  The sound of his ragged scream filled the forest.  His head was three times as tall as Lucy’s when fully extended up, wrinkles still around the eyes, his mouth open wide enough to stick her head inside.  Not that she would, with those teeth.

The scream brought the focus of the spotlight.  Its source began approaching, forming a backlight against the wrinkled man with the very long face extending up from his body.

The kids behind him extended arms and legs out to full length, like they’d been folded up in those wrinkled masses.  Maybe eight to twelve feet long, arms a bit longer than the legs.  Lucy was immediately put in mind of a spider, with a bulbous main body and then the spindly limbs extending out.

They moved fast, not caring as faces smashed into and scuffed against branches.

“Move!” Lucy ordered.

“Oh, oh, oh!” Verona said.

“Do you have an answer?”

“I know what they are!”

“Do you know how to stop them?”

“No, but I know what they are!”

“I don’t-”

Head pulled back into neck-wrinkles, the teenager allowed only teeth and the interior of his mouth to be visible from the loop, like some kind of fucking lamprey with human teeth and four spidery legs.

Shapeshifters or something.  The way they moved made her skin crawl.

“Did you read Two Sides, One Coin?” Verona asked.

“What are you even-?” Lucy grunted as she had to draw on the weapon ring and fend off one swing of a spidery limb.  Creepy, creepy, creepy.  The limb was almost broomstick thin, extended out from the teenager’s wrinkled body, but he’d picked up a rock and the swinging limb with the weight at the end acted like a sledgehammer with a twelve foot long handle.

Just a little more coordinated than most people would be with that sledgehammer.  Because it was his body.

Oakham held up her cane, and McCauleigh stepped forward too.  Lucy held out an ogre club – about two feet long, four-sided, with studs on each side, with fist-sized chunks missing from it.

Verona backed up, not really game to fight, and instead talked, “Two Sides, One Coin?  Sent you a link?”

“Is that luck magic?” McCauleigh asked.

“It’s undercity stuff.  Did you read it, Luce?”

“You send me something every night, Read this textbook, read this chapter.  I don’t know what’s important.”

“It’s all important!”

“And a lot of the time you send it at like, three or four in the morning, when I’m asleep!”  Lucy swung the bat at one limb.  It didn’t shatter or break.

The two kids had their legs out to full length, but the teenager had receded a bit, and now seemed like an awkwardly proportioned guy.  The light from that spotlight kept shining through the trees, getting brighter as it got closer.  Lucy felt her skin prickle, but she wasn’t sure if it was imagination.

And the ‘dad’ wrinkled guy was still screaming and hollering, pointing.

All of them, their side and these guys, fighting at night, in dead, leafless woods, to the tune of a high-pitched and ceaseless scream, lit by that one blinding spotlight that made Lucy have to squint even with her back to it, because it was still blinding as it reflected off other things.

She brought club into leg, and the shapeshifter girl screamed, face tearing out of the body to free the mouth enough for the ear-splitting sound to come out.  Lucy swung again, and the girl caught it, falling onto her side.  She clutched it with both hands.  Lucy turned club into a narrow blade then pulled it free, slicing the girl’s palms and fingers.  It caught where the blade was broken, and wobbled in a way that made her worry that the damage could get worse.

She put it away.  If she did use it, she’d have to use thicker, heavier tools that wouldn’t break.

The girl withdrew head and arms into her body.  Then she came charging at Lucy in that awkward, short-limbed movement.  A ten year old -Lucy was guessing- as tall as Lucy was, but maybe ten times as heavy and not at all slowed down by that weight.  Moving awkwardly, yes, but not slowed down.

Lucy sidestepped and gave her a light push, trying to get her out of the way before the teenager swung that makeshift sledgehammer at her again, and only narrowly missed that the girl’s stubby, three-quarter inch fingers on stubbier hands were just as retractable.  Long, slender fingers pushed out of the stubs, fingernails scratching at the sleeve of Lucy’s Dog Tag coat.  No damage to the material.

“When you have a knotted place, it’s not ever evenly knotted, and you can have fluid areas and hard areas, high-energy areas and there’s a whole bunch of sub-classifications.”

“Ronnie!” Lucy groaned.  “Get to the point!”

“They’re fluid, it’s like how some people will get weird in Kennet below, like the Bitter Street Witch, but these guys ride that hard, they’re always in flux!  Super cool.”

“Give me something workable!”

“You really should read the stuff I recommend.  I recommend it for a reason.”

“You recommend too much, at the wrong times!” Lucy grunted.

“This is how you guys function?” McCauleigh asked.  “You go up against Musser and shit, and behind the scenes it’s all… this?”

The teenager lunged, arms and legs helping to bring his lamprey face down toward her.  Oakham took the opportunity provided by his body dipping to swat out with her cane, catching him in the gonads.

Minimal effect.  Lucy could almost see the skin around the wrinkled body rippling.  It did make him pause to pay attention to whoever was beneath him, and Lucy took that moment to reach into a pocket and pop a goblin spitsucker and stickstucker into his mouth, going by feel.  Candies.

The girl and the youngest boy both started reaching for Oakham.  She stumbled a bit through the snow, but used the length of her cane to fend off one kick from a spidery limb.  “Oh shit, oh shit, thought that would make them all pause, shit, wait-”

Lucy did her best to distract the girl, who was closest to her.  McCauleigh physically pulled on the boy’s leg, hauling him back away from Oakham.

“-this stuff the big guy in the cave teaches actually works!”

Which seemed to be the moment the universe went, ‘yeah,you had your moment, but you just jinxed it’, because the overlong limb with the rock held in the end came down for Oakham.  Lucy pulled Oakham back, which mostly just pulled the two of them over.  Oakham didn’t get her head caved in, but they lost all momentum.

These extra-long limbs… it was like each arm and leg was a singular individual that they had to fight.  Connected, but also not.  McCauleigh could pull on one leg, but it barely hampered the other leg and other two arms.

And they could do some damage, there were a few limps here and there, but everything vital was buried in wrinkles.

Guilherme had taught Lucy about grace, stance, and footing.  These guys weren’t that.  Which went back to something she’d talked about with Bubble, and she’d hoped to practice it, but then Bubble had had to leave.

There was a kind of anti-grace.  Anti-stance.  Bubble had talked about drunken fighting and goblins who went hard and reckless into a fight and came through it okay.  There were different types and styles of this, just like there were different types of graceful fae movements, like emphasizing allowing yourself to be hurt in the right ways, or pushing in instead of pulling away.

Moving your forehead into an incoming punch, to hurt the hand.  Let a knife get stuck in you.

The teenager was choking and hacking.

Realistically, that was one down.  One of the stalls at Toadswallow’s market had sold a variety of candies.  Some lady goblin down in the warrens made the things, sending her goblin sons and daughters out into the world, leaving candy out for stupid and greedy kids to eat.  The named candies had things they did, while the crappy, lowest-quality failed ones picked out of successful batches, like popcorn kernels that hadn’t popped yet, they just sold for pennies in the warrens, as things goblins sometimes liked.  Toadswallow included.

Lucy had bought a bunch to stick in her goblin foxes, for when she was fighting something that might try to eat her whole.  They tended to pair and link up.  The vendor had said it was like goblins that way.  Keeping the qualities of each.

Allegedly, they couldn’t ever kill a kid.  They’d pass out or leave stuff behind, the goblins would steal lunch money, nice coats, shoes, or other odds and ends of clothing, especially phones.  But killing a kid made autopsies happen and that revealed the candies.  No-go, they said.

Then she had to consider how the vendor had told Lucy about how they were fucking with a literal ‘trails of candy to my gingerbread house’ Blackforest hag, who’d spent the last eight years wondering why kids weren’t coming to her door.  Goblin candies dropped along that trail intercepted that whole deal, goblins still stole lunch money and phones parents gave their eight year olds or whatever, but like… yeah.  If Lucy was going to support anyone in the goblin markets, she’d support that, she supposed.

The spitsucker had been described as a thin coating of candy that would melt quickly on the tongue and on melting, would release a payload of salt, sand, crystallized pee and ‘goblin spices’, aimed at drying up every trace of spit the victim had.

The stickstucker was like a pill that really needed to be drunk with water, or else it got stuck in the throat but it didn’t care about the water.  It got stuck in the throat regardless, with a foul taste, burning sensation, or other treat attached.

Put together, pretty nasty combination.

She could hear goblins in the periphery, and the people they’d left behind were forging their way through the woods.  Taking their time.

“Did you do something to hold the others back?  Near your Demesne?”

“Yeah,” Verona replied.

“Handy.”

“Kinda wish we were back there though, on my turf.”

“Yeah.”

“Bait them toward me.  Watch your step.”

Verona’s voice, a whisper.

Lucy avoided looking at her.

The girl was extending her limbs again.  They were like really skinny, super tall people curled up inside dense, wrinkled skin bodies.  Except there was more to it, like if they exposed one eye, it was so large it took up seventy-five percent of their face, but then exposing their mouth and fucked up teeth instead, that took up seventy-five percent of their face, so how big were they, really, inside all that?

The boy and the girl being so close together, four arms, four legs, the bulbous bodies brushing against one another… it made her think of a spider again.  The girl was having trouble moving because her hands had been sliced open, so she stood on her legs and used forearms to brace against trees for balance.  Blood came out in goopy streams from her palms and fingers.

Climbing back to her feet, weapon held out, Lucy squinted as the light moved, shining between trees to blind her.

It was at eye level.  Was it shining out of someone’s eyes?

It was a figure, tall and thin.

“Trouble incoming.”

“Oh, is it not already here in the form of weird weirdness?” Oakham asked.  “Great.”

“Weird weirdness?” Verona asked.

“Shut up.”

“Get them over here.”

I know, Lucy thought.  I’m trying to wrap my head around the clusterfuckery that’s closing in on us from all sides.

She needed to bait.  To do that…

Her mind ran through options.  As a shortcut, she categorized things into three tracks.  Essentially… what would Bubble have her do?  What would Guilherme have her do?  And what would Grandfather have her do?

Guilherme, taunt, no.  She didn’t know her enemy well enough.

Bubble, graceless provocation, no, she didn’t want to risk getting hurt.

Grandfather?

Keep it simple.

She pulled out a spell card, tossing it.  It missed, hitting a tree, but made a fire that almost caught the edge of the boy’s clothing.  He seemed to put pride into his appearance, and the fire near his clothes worked at provoking him.

He reached out, and she deflected the reaching hand with her forearm, turned to put her back toward him, and grabbed his hand, using her weight and the two-handed grip to force it to carry forward and past her.

It smacked into the dirt.

“Foot to the right.”

Lucy met Verona’s eyes, which were behind the mask.  Verona shrugged.

Lucy glanced at the flows of the snow, twisted, and threw her weight against the arm.  There was a bit of a slope, so it skidded more than it usually would’ve.

“Well now you fucked up my diagram.”

“Ronnie, fuck!” Lucy swore.

“Give me a second.”

“We’ve got enemies coming,” Lucy told them.  Her back was still to the guy, and she felt his weight shift, felt the air, and shifted her footing, ducking her head.  A bit of fae magic, riding the flows of the air, being a fucking snowflake in the wind, dodging the other reaching hand and all that bullshit.

“Nice,” McCauleigh remarked.  “Blind fighting?  My tutors tried so hard to get me to do that.”

“Help?” Lucy asked, with a note of emotion in her voice, feeling the pressure.  The whole spider similarities were not helping matters, and they were surrounded, there was that spotlight thing which felt real bad, and-

Oakham scrambled over, to be closer to Verona, stumbling a bit.  Maybe testing that ankle too much, running in snow without a cane.

McCauleigh did help some, moving up to fight side by side with Lucy.

“Okay, fixed it.  Try again?”

Spell card.  Water.  Ice.

The water splashed, the ice froze some of it.  It crusted on the shoulder of the boy.

Not really as much as she’d hoped for.

But it got his attention.  Again.

This time, she really didn’t have to pull on his arm to get it to land near where Verona was talking about.  She wasn’t sure exactly where Verona was wanting things, and she hadn’t looked because she had more than enough to deal with.

It was Oakham who joined in, using cane and body weight to direct the hand that was jabbing forward.  So Lucy baited it and dodged, Oakham made an adjustment, and the hand smacked into snow where a diagram had been painted in- in juice?

The lines lit up.  It was McCauleigh who lunged past Lucy, holding a club-like branch, and then, holding it at either end, hit the leg with the middle of it.

This time the leg broke, where even a hit from an iron ogre club hadn’t, before.

The boy, most of his weight forward, using that arm, collapsed onto his belly.

“Sorry to steal your thunder, when you’re doing most of the work,” McCauleigh said.

“I really don’t care about that,” Lucy said.  “Let’s focus on getting through this first.  We’re getting mobbed.”

Verona looked up.  “Edith and the barrier ward are focused on us again.  We’ve been able to dodge things because Charles and Maricica are busy…”

The light shone brighter.

“…but this is the worst case scenario we were talking about.  The tar pit.”

The source of the light was a man, with a face like the angel they’d seen outside Verona’s, upper half covered by a hat with a headlamp, body wrapped in a long coat with belts securing it around scarred, gray, Abyss-stained flesh.  His teeth were very white, in a rictus grin.  He held a fistful of shackles in one hand and a keychain with a knife built into it in the other.

The wrinkled man stopped screaming, drawing his head back in, and began extending his limbs.  Longer than his kids.  Thin fingers that extended out from the rolls of fat around the stumpy ‘fingers’ of his mitt-like hands were as long as Lucy’s forearm.  Arms extended out to either side.

“Is the bogeyman Angel-made?” Verona asked, quiet.

His head jerked to a sudden, specific angle, and the light shone in their faces.

Lucy shifted stance, and when she was partway through the shifting, she could feel the air move, like a door had swung closed in her face.

She leaned in, reaching to her bag behind her, and pulled a knife from the bag’s underside, where there was a sweatshirt-like pouch on the very bottom of the bag.

“Booker’s flame!”

The knife heated up.

Bright light became darkness as she dipped her head, bringing the knife around.  Her eyes had to adjust away from light and into darkness, and the way she’d rigged up the diagram on the back half of her mask was more focused on glowing eyes that illuminated darkness and being able to see and breathe in smoke.

So she remained blind, even without the light in her face.

She cut, swinging left while throwing herself to the right.

An arm caught her in the same moment the knife made contact.

Did I fuck up?  Did I just use a flaming knife to stab or slice someone who’d catch me?

The thought crossed her mind, and then the arm crushed closed around her.

Nope.  It was the bogeyman, and he had his grip on her, now, hugging her body against his side, her right arm with the knife now awkwardly crushed between them.

“Tonight is a good night,” he rasped, speaking without lips.

It seemed like he blinded people with the headlamp and then moved or teleported when they weren’t looking.

He had the keychain with the knife built in in the other hand.  She caught his wrist before he could bring it home.  It was Oakham who put her cane out, hooking his wrist with the handle.  McCauleigh whispered something in a different language, and then smacked him with the makeshift club.  Knocking that hat with the headlamp off.

He was strong and he wasn’t suffering for being bashed, even with a magically augmented hit, and even, Lucy saw, with a deep stab in his throat, knife wobbling whenever he moved, like the knife was set in a hole too big for it, and it could fall out with the right angle.  When he breathed, blood bubbled and frothed around the wound.

“My watch-” he rasped, standing taller, blood spitting out of the wound with the words, “-must continue.”

He found more strength in that, and won out in pushing that knife closer to Lucy, even though she had her arm kind of braced with her elbow near her stomach, hand at his wrist.  He pushed until her elbow was driving so hard into her stomach that she had to move it, even knowing the knife would get closer.

“Here!” Verona called out.

And she threw sand in Lucy’s face.

Not sand.  Glamour.  And there was some loose guidance to it.  As he pulled back, trying to loosen her grip so he could drive the keychain blade home, it looked like a box cutter with a big ring of keys on the end, she pulled her own hand back, twisting, making shapes she was used to making.

Glamouring herself up as a fox.  Slipping out from beneath his arm.  She twisted, pivoted, and as he came for her, stabbing, she kept shaping the glamour, going around him, onto his back.

Shucking off glamour, her back pressing against his as she rolled over him, she caught the knife and slapped a goblin candy into the wound.

The wrinkly spider dad grabbed her a moment later.

At least there, McCauleigh was on top of it, helping to fend him off, smashing one leg with the club, breaking that grip.

Six people were coming, joining things.  They weren’t friendly.  The group from outside the house, backed by the angel.

Was the entire way to the church going to be like this?  No, Lis had helped a bit.  Then they’d ducked into the woods.  Maybe Lis would clear a way?  Or maybe Lis would set them up for a trap.  Like this, but without snow and trees limiting their enemies.

Three paths, she thought.  A shorthand, a way to force herself to not just have one plan that could be predictable.  A straightforward fight to make space for retreat wasn’t working.  Brute forcing it wouldn’t work either.

The watchman bogeyman bent down to pick up his hat, and McCauleigh kicked it deeper into the woods, avoiding being grabbed by him as he lashed out at her.

He was foaming at the mouth, with more foam coming out of the wound in his neck.  The soapscummy gummy candy had been described to her as a ‘more fun’ play on the whole thing where nearly a hundred kids had died eating detergent.  The foaming started off at an alarming level and then got much worse as it progressed.  Then it would taper off, and stop.

If they were lucky, they’d hide out for the next three or so days, because the candy would sit low in their gut, and during the next one to three days, if they got flushed, it would kick off again, but this time pushing the contents out of the imbiber’s back end.  Embarrassed from calling the teacher mom?  Talking to the cute boy in class you had your first crush on?  Yeahhh.

Don’t eat random candy you find, kids, Lucy thought.

The Bogeyman probably didn’t care much about that second part, or even for that first part.  He did slip on the soapy froth that was coming out of his mouth, though, as he went for his hat.

Verona lobbed some spell cards at him, but it sure looked like he didn’t care about the water and being cold… he didn’t seem to care much about a gaping hole in the side of his neck, for that matter, frothing detergent or no.

Had to find another way.  What would he do, and how could she handle that while also thinking a step ahead?

Lucy tossed out spell cards.  Smoke.  “McCauleigh!”

McCauleigh was dealing with the dad and the girl, with her attention partially on the dad.  The boy had three broken limbs, and Oakham was fending off the one remaining limb.  McCauleigh glanced over.  “What?”

“Do you have protections against battlefield crap?”

“Smoke?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Verona started scribbling down a spell card.  Lucy threw more cards down.

The light shone, but the smoke blocked a lot of it.

It also made the group coming from the house slow down, coughing.

The angel kept coming though.

Yeah.  The net was closing.  Lucy slapped her mask down onto Oakham’s face, and held it firm when Oakham tried to adjust, because she needed to keep her forearm close to her own mouth.  Maybe some of the mask would communicate down her arm, protecting her.

Verona slapped a piece of paper against Lucy’s arm.

“What is this?”

“Same as I drew on the snow.  Quality of earth and a light binding.”

“I thought you were protecting yourself.”

“I’ll deal.  We need to handle them.”

Smoke rolled, making the already claustrophobic situation worse.  But it was her element.

“You’re right.  Why earth?  Quality of earth makes things harder… and heavier?”

“Heavier, yeah.  With spindly limbs like that?  But also… it makes things inflexible.  Harder doesn’t always mean stronger.”

Harder doesn’t always mean stronger.

She’d tried to be ‘hard’ in the face of a lot of bullshit, for a while.

“Go, get out of the woods.  It doesn’t work to get out of the way of everyone on the streets if they’re homing in on us,” Lucy said.

She let go of Oakham.  Lucy could deal with a little smoke.

The light was shining, coming closer, and the wrinkled dad and girl were making their way through the smoke, positioned high on spindly limbs, so they’d be furthest from the origin points- the papers that were smouldering, runes and diagrams glowing on their surface.

The girl reached for Lucy, and Lucy used her forearm as a shield, paper fluttering.  The wrinkled girl made contact with the diagram, and it flared.  The girl jerked back, but her hand was stuck to the paper and the paper was stuck to Lucy.  Lucy was nearly pulled off her feet.

Going by his silhouette, and the way he jumped aside, the watchman narrowly avoided having the wrinkly spider girl collapse on top of him as the effect took hold.  The only reason Lucy wasn’t being hauled into the air was that the wrinkly girl’s legs were breaking, too brittle in their hardness now, her body too heavy.

Lucy hurried to catch up to the others, clearing her throat where she’d inhaled trace amounts of smoke.  Verona and Oakham were slow-ish, so it wasn’t hard.

They had to stop as a group moved ahead of them.  Running past them, not able to see through smoke.

Which did let the watchman make progress.

All over, she could hear footsteps.  She could hear goblins navigating branches, coughing.

They were blocks from the church.

She used the pause to scribble out the smoke protection rune on paper, and then pressed the paper to the side of her face, the top of the paper just below her eye, pressing it down until it crumpled.  Paper stuck, crumpling and bending to accommodate the curve of her jaw and the side of her neck.  Like a large, badly applied bandage.  On impulse, with a pinch of residual glamour from the fox form, she turned white to brown, then smudged away the outline, leaving only the runework.  The crumpled bit stopped feeling so crumply and awkward.

And she could breathe and see more easily.

On another rune, because visibility was important, she drew out the gate of horn.  Then she made a copy and handed it to Verona.

“We should do this more often,” Verona murmured, taking it.  She’d done her own smoke protection work, on the outside of her cat mask.  She had other stuff on the inside, for augmenting Sight.

The light swept through the smoke.  He wasn’t far.

“We need to find a way to break for it,” Lucy said.

“I’m almost out of glamour,” Verona said.  “Or I’d suggest that.”

“I think you going for glamour as a go-to solution is why you’re almost out.”

“I wonder if I should’ve killed my plants.  Like, Avery had the high summer rose, and there’s always the option she crumples that up and gets a big burst of glamour.  I could do that.  But it feels fucky, with Avery…”

“Yeah.”

The wrinkled dad was working with the watchman.  Lucy saw him move, wrinkled face turning this way and that.

“Heads up,” McCauleigh muttered.

The wrinkled dad was prying at his face again, arm hooked over a tree branch, pulling the heavy skin folds away from his eye, to expose it.  Eyeball big enough to take up seventy-five percent of his face.

He spotted them, two hundred feet away, through the haze of smoke and tree branches.

He pointed, and the Watchman’s beam shone up to his face and pointing arm, then shone in their direction.

“Fucking pain in the ass,” Lucy swore.

“So is this like a Tuesday for you guys?” Oakham asked, as she got to her feet again.  She’d lost a lot of weight, but it still took a bit of doing, especially with her ankle.

“More like a Friday,” Lucy replied.  “Like, holy shit, I’m fucking ready to be done.”

“But there’s some bullshit amount of homework over the weekend so we can’t even have that to look forward to,” Verona added.

The bogeyman was making good time.  He was visible enough she could see the fountain of dull yellow froth coming out of his mouth, covering his front.

And behind him, a cat dropped out of the tree above the wrinkle dad.  A goblin gripping its neck, riding it like a jockey would ride a horse.

The wrinkly spider dad was acting as the scout, pointing them out, so he’d remained where he was, and the cat landed partially on his head, before slipping off.  Or maybe intentionally sliding off.  It was a slow fall, and skin moved beneath her, adding traction.

Putting her at a good level to slice the giant eyeball with cat claws on her way down.

Lucy couldn’t pay attention to the fallout.  She threw more smoke cards, and put herself in between the bogeyman and the rest of the group.

Light shone, and it did succeed in blinding her.  She felt him move, and moved to counter, deeper into smoke.

That whole deal seemed to be his primary tool.  She ducked as he tossed out chains and shackles, but one had a hook the size of her hand attached to it, and it caught on her coat.  Pulling her closer.

She leaned into that, going on the offensive.  She had the knife she’d enchanted with a fire rune when still learning, one she’d put aside for a long time because she didn’t want to be a ‘knife’ person, and it was a nice knife that Booker had given her as a gift.

But this was a knife-y sort of situation.  They had to cut their way through.

The exchange between them was brief, and vicious.  He managed to cut the back of her hand, and whipped out shackles, one shackle snapping closed a finger’s span from her wrist as he ‘snapped’ the whip.  If she’d been a bit closer, he would’ve had her.

She cut him four times, igniting the knife on the fourth.  One jab for the headlamp on his hat failed utterly, because he was that much taller than her, so she retreated quickly, into smoke.

He didn’t follow her in, instead pacing around it.

Verona wasn’t far, so Lucy reached up and touched the gate of Horn.  “Let me see what she sees.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them.

She saw the world in Verona’s sketchy Sight, from a side perspective.  Verona had a better view of the watchman bogeyman, so Lucy could use that to move through the smoke, around to a position where she could flank him.

She turned her head, checking the position of the wrinkled dad.  Teenager was on the ground, choking and sputtering.  The boy had three broken limbs, the girl had sliced hands and one broken leg, and the dad had a sliced eyeball.

Turning her head sharply, the paper fluttered.

Lucy stared forward, at an evening night’s sky.  A dark, ominous shape loomed in the distance, standing askew, surrounded by an ocean of junk metal.

“Lucy!”

She felt the air move more than she saw anything.  Dodging, she got out of the way of the bogeyman’s charge.  As she did, the image disappeared, smudging out of existence.  Verona’s sight made it hard to coordinate, so she pulled the paper away, scrambling to get out of the way of the swinging blade.

Advantage lost, but also- what?

She fended off the worst of the attack.  It was really McCauleigh who jumped in to help while her concentration was broken.  McCauleigh didn’t like fighting, she’d said, but she knew enough to put up a decent showing.

They backed off together, and the bogeyman stood there, smiling his rictus grin, barely visible with the way he blinded everyone in front of him.  He still frothed at the mouth, and it ran down his front and pooled at his feet.  He barely seemed to care.

Julette prowled behind her, in human form now, wearing a white duffel coat with black toggles and a white cat mask.  She glanced at Verona, nodding.

Lucy lunged, to seize his full attention.  She flicked snow up with the toe of her boot, toward his face, then stabbed.  He had more reach, with longer arms and the keychain knife, and she let him ‘win’, fending her off.

The paper flew through the air, glowing brighter as it flew.  It touched ground, and a jutting of rock pushed out of the ground beneath the snow, about three feet long and a foot high.  It worked to knock his feet out from under him, and with the soap, he fell.  Lucy stepped on his hand, and kicked his hat off.  He pushed her away.

Julette was ready, grabbing Peckersnot from her shoulder, letting him become his snot-shooting water gun, and shot the bogeyman as he put hands on the rock and nearby tree.

He was stuck, and they were free to move on.  Finally.  Julette grabbed the flat hat with the lamp set above the brim, putting it on, but then Verona tossed it aside.

“Not good for stealth.  And he might be linked to it.”

“I could stay in cat form.  My clothes go away in cat form.”

“Where were you?” McCauleigh asked.

“Scouting.  Peckersnot came to find me.”

Peckersnot peeped.

Lucy quietly reeled.  What had she seen?

What was she supposed to do with it?

Questions and flashbacks to that brief, two-second scene ran through her mind as they navigated the woods.  She could hear patrols as they walked, but there were a lot of them.  She took them a ways right, then forward, then a ways left, circling one group that lurked in the woods.  Others were moving through the trees, in lazy patrols, or for piss breaks.  Twice, they had to stop because some jackass was unzipping their fly and they had to wait until he was done.

They reached the edge of the downtown area.  She could hear more talk, more people passing on orders, and a lot of chatter.

That vision.

She almost called out.  Except she had a growing feeling it would be utterly pointless.

She almost reached for the scrap of paper in her palm to put it back, then stopped herself.  What were the odds that they were being watched?  Listened to?

There was one road that ran parallel to the road at the top end of downtown where the church was, and they had a mostly clear path down it.  Lucy led the way, thinking.

“You’re acting funny,” Verona said.

Lucy shook her head.  “I dunno.”

“Your hand okay?”

Lucy looked at the cut.  “I’ll deal.”

Verona rubbed at her palm.  “Was it that light?  You got the most exposure, you said it was bad, or-?”

“It was- he channeled himself through it.  He was some kind of screwed up old-fashioned watchman, spotlight on his head, catch you in the spotlight, immediately he’s there to slice you up or shackle you.”

“Or both,” McCauleigh said.

“I’m really weirded out that like, sure, that guy was weird and creepy and intense,” Oakham said, “but we’re glossing over the weird ass scrunchy family?”

“Scrunchy family,” McCauleigh said, scoffing.

“I dunno what to call ’em!  Scrunchies are all compressed and folded up but they can stretch out!”

“We figured them out, mostly,” Verona said.  “They’re like… halfway between Mal and, uh, trying to think of who you’ve met.”

“What the fuck is up with Mal then?  The tattoos are weird, but-”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Do I need to like, be careful what I say or do around her?”

“I said don’t worry.”

“But-”

Verona brushed her hand down Oakham’s face, forehead to chin.  “Don’t worry.”

“Wow.  That makes me-”

Julette, reaching from behind, did the same thing.  “Shhh.”

Oakham wheeled on her, murder in her eyes.

“What did you do to him, that had him barfing like that?” Verona asked Lucy.

“Candy.”

“Ohhh.”

“What the fuck candy are you buying?” Oakham asked.

“Candy that was… it was sold here.”

Weird, and disappointing, and kind of gutting.  That downtown had become this.  That this area had been a vibrant and slightly problematic market, mixing Kennet below with goblin stuff, and other vendors besides.  There had been ways to get up to Kennet above, to the much more mundane downtown, and over to Kennet found, where there was more market, weird but not as problematic.  Fairy stuff that couldn’t be sold elsewhere, Lost stuff, and more.  Add in the midnight market stuff, and it was this… like a biosphere, that Mr. Lai had talked about last year.  Except not sealed in.  A set of individual slices of diffrent realms all in a sustainable little area.

“I get a bad vibe,” McCauleigh said.

“How’s that?”

“It’s too quiet.”

Lucy shifted her focus, listening.  There were still murmurs, still conversations happening around corners and inside buildings, and on rooftops.  She did her best to mentally map it all.

“Ambush?”  Verona asked.

“I feel like if it was an ambush, they’d be looking out for us, and the chatter would die out as we got close enough for them to see,” Lucy said.

“Trap?” Verona asked.

“What’s the difference?” Oakham asked.

“Dunno.  You know how you read a word and you can’t define it, but you can drop it into a sentence?  Replace ‘sentence’ with ‘circumstance’ and I’m dropping trap in and it feels like it could fit where ambush doesn’t.”

“Maybe,” McCauleigh said.

There was a set of huge scraping sounds.  Lucy reached over and pulled back on McCauleigh’s shoulder.

Arrangements of corrugated metal, fencing, plywood, baking trays with holes drilled in them and segments of car had been lashed together, arranged at the sides of a building.  As they walked in front of that building, those segments had been released, swinging down like massive cleavers.  They crashed into road, forming a barrier ahead of them and a barrier behind them.  With the building on the one side and the building across the street, they were boxed in.

“Trap,” Verona said, pointing.

Segments had broken, lashings coming undone, but there were people rushing in now.  They had more pieces, and worked in teams of four or five, pushing up against the barrier, quickly making fixes and lashing on panels where there were gaps.

“Welcome!” a woman greeted them, eerie and unsteady.  She stood on the nearest, lowest rooftop, just above the top edge of the barrier there.

Bogeyman, by the looks of it.  She might’ve been treated by the angels to be this, flesh all up and down her body flensed, leaving cut-out portions depicting roses and vines.  A lot of what she wore was thorny wreaths and barbed wire.

“My contestants!  I am the gardener, and you are my new contestants, in my garden of Abyssal traps.  There are four rounds for five of you-”

“Six,” Verona called out.  She jerked a thumb at Peckersnot.  “Goblin dude.”

“Only one of you shall leave, if you’re clever enough!”

“Are there four rounds or five?” Verona asked.

“But, you may ask, if I am a gardener, where is my garden?  You, my flowers, will be my prize pieces, but…”

She had a remote, and pressed a button.

Windows broke, and boxes with plants growing out of them began to slide across the power lines that strung between the buildings.  Each broke at a strategic point, and the boxes swung down, slapping down into place on the street.

“We won’t be entirely without.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Lucy told the other members of the group.  Verona and Julette nodded.

The woman laughed, unhinged.  “Are you ready for round one?”

There was a crowd forming around them.

“Time to see if you’re for real,” Lucy murmured.  “Lis, Lis, Lis.”

There was a faint scraping sound.  Lucy glanced over.

Sure enough, the road was widening.  The makeshift barriers were only so long, and as the road widened, there was opportunity.  A possibility for a gap, between barrier and building.

But they were surrounded by people.

“I think we need a change in lighting,” the gardener declared.  She gestured to a section of the crowd below her.  One person had climbed partially up the far side of the barrier, and, head, shoulders, torso and waist extended above, brought three fingers to his lips.  The crowd rapidly cleared the area around him.

“Oh no,” Verona said.

“Blowing a kiss?” Oakham asked.

He was claimed by the Abyss, pulled down as if by a giant hand, with a plume of darkness roaring out from the point where he touched ground.  Lucy could see him being lifted up by that darkness.  Stained by it.

The bogeywoman was laughing.  Gesturing at another corner.

A woman, tall enough to look over the barrier, unwilling to raise her eyes, brought fingers to lips.

The darkness was already creeping in, taking up two-thirds of this sectioned off bit of street.

As that explosion of darkness happened, they turned, all moving as a group toward the gap Lis had provided, but there was a crowd there.  Lucy glanced over her shoulder, to see if there were less at the other corner, and saw a little boy pressing three fingers to his lips.

A flaming knife did a lot to scare people off, but there was a press of bodies, and people who backed off quickly ran into the people behind them who weren’t as willing to budge.

McCauleigh snatched the flaming knife from Lucy’s hand and screamed.  The scream coincided with the third explosion.

She threw herself into the crowd, stepping onto a section of the barrier before leaping up, walking on someone’s shoulder, knife leaving a glowing streak and licks of flame behind as it slashed through the air.

People grabbed at McCauleigh, but she was quick, nimble, and stayed out of the way of most of it.  Stepping onto a face, pushing off it to hurl herself sideways, knee striking someone in the face.  Someone stabbed a knife at her, and she grabbed it, throwing it skyward.

It wasn’t enough.  They needed to drive a damn car through this, and-

Darkness cornered them. The entire ‘arena’ behind them was stained dark.  Lucy couldn’t even step back three steps without being in the thick of the Abyssal crap.  Where the different zones overlapped, there was a thicker, deeper darkness, and the ground sagged, breaking up.

A giant pothole, more city visible beneath it, like this was a multi-level parking garage.  The wooden boxes of plants were swelling, plant growth creeping out, along with pieces of that fucked up game dangling on strings- hooks, segments of a table saw, and syringes.

Ahead of them, there was one man, who looked dirty and malnourished, with a stain on his shirt, winter jacket with a torn zipper hanging open.  He smiled, and reached to press fingers to his mouth.  Lucy reached forward, grabbing his fingers, and four people on either side of her grabbed at her.

Lucy held on as best as she could, until McCauleigh was there, moving through the crowd with the ease a fish could move through water.  Knife came down, severing the three fingers Lucy was holding at their base.  Lucy quickly dropped them.

It was Oakham and Verona who pulled Lucy back and away, away from the people holding her.  Runes on Lucy’s arm glowed beneath her sleeve, and the knife skidded over her coat’s material without cutting it.  Probably a combination of runework and material.

She hated doing this, especially when Dog Tags were on guard against vital things elsewhere, but…

She tossed her tags down.

Grandfather.  Doe.

Grandfather assessed the situation, stepping back, saw the Abyssal dreck, and decided the thing to do was to fire a gun into the air.

Which scared the crowd some, at least.

Lucy glanced up as an orange light shone overhead.  Fire?  Ready to drop down on top of them?  She moved aside, trying to think of how they could fight past all of this.

“I might have to shoot them,” Grandfather said.

They were people.  People in desperate, scared circumstances.  They were people who’d bought into what Maricica was selling, or maybe some who’d been coerced.

But if they didn’t shoot, if they couldn’t break through?

What could they do?

McCauleigh backed out of the crowd, no longer screaming, not even panting for breath.  She passed Lucy the knife back.  “Too many.”

“Yeah.”

The really fucked up thing?

That this had been their best shot.  They had to get to that church.  The key players were out of action or not taking action, there was a weak point here, a chance to free key people and get a victory for their side.  But they had to wade through all of this to get there.

And it might be the only chance they really had.  Because if they waited, if Maricica consolidated and came back, if she got more forces, this would only get harder.

“We’re winning,” Doe said.

“What?” Lucy asked.

She could see the crowd now.  There was some infighting, maybe.

Some of the biggest people in that group were pulling others away, punching them.  A head was smashed into brick.

Doe raised her gun, and people tried to get out of the way.  One of them right into one of the big guys that was messing with them.

“Fucked up definition of ‘win’, holy fuck,” Oakham said.

McCauleigh screamed again, jumping into the fray.

“I didn’t want her to have to do that again,” Verona said.  “She said it wasn’t the practice as much as it was the lines they wanted her to cross, but…”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  She was glad they had someone who could do something here, at least.

She saw the man with the stained shirt in the middle of it all, who had found one bloody finger.  He held it in his right hand, tucked between palm and thumb, and held his hand up, three fingers extended.

Like slow motion, but without the benefit of the watch.

She reached for a spell card.  Didn’t care which.  Didn’t care if she grabbed three.  She held the deck down inside her pocket with her left hand and pulled out a card with her right, whipping it out toward him, holding a finger out, pointing at the gap between shifting bodies in the crowd.

Fire.  It hit him in the face.  He fell down, skin scorched, and kissed the fingers, lying on his back, feet trampling him.

“It’s the Bitter Street Witch,” Verona said, looking up.  “And Mal.”

At the window above them, that fire- it was like a flame in a bowl, hanging from chains, and the hand that held the chain was the Bitter Street Witch’s.

The man with the stained shirt kissed his fingers again, repeatedly, the orange flame from above reflecting the moisture in his eyes.

“She’s got something warding off the Abyssal thingamajig,” Verona said.

Did you get that from the Blue Heron?  Nicolette?  Lucy thought.  They’d know the Bitter Street Witch was fighting here, but on the back foot.

She had her brothers, at least.  And a small group of allied people from downtown, who might’ve been from the market.  They were the ones who were at the back of the crowd, beating up the crowd.

Threat of a gun, Grandfather, McCauleigh and now Lucy on the one side, Bitter Street Witch’s gang on the other.  A crowd of thirty people panicking and breaking ranks in the middle.

They broke through the gap and made their way through to the other side.  They reached the street on the far side of the barrier, far side of the crowd.  The Bitter Street Witch pointed a crooked arm, and one of her older brothers went with them.

“Patches are smaller,” Verona said.

“What?” Lucy asked.

“The patches of the Abyssal stuff are smaller.  I think that might be a tell that Maricica’s further away.”

“Okay, well… good?” Lucy asked.

The Gardener screamed, and Lucy turned to see her dragging fingernails through the finely cut patterns of flowers into skin, where it had been flensed away in fine detail to leave patches of petals and things behind.  She ruined it, howling.

With Sight, Lucy could see the dark staining swelling around her, as bad as if someone was dipping into the Abyss.

“She’s getting stronger?”

“She’s like a type B Petitioner,” Verona said.

“A what now?”

“Oh god, I remember one of the guest teachers tried to test us on that,” McCauleigh said.  “Who give tests at the Blue Heron?”

“You guys and your nonsense sentences,” Oakham said.  “What does it matter?”

“It matters because she’s like… there are Others who quiz you or give riddles or whatever, and you can ignore them, avoid them, just don’t give the wrong answer.  But then there’s ones like, if you don’t have the right answer, or if you skip the riddle or try to be clever, they get righteous strength to smack you down with.  Sometimes they get to automatically eat you.  Like the original Sphinx.”

“So what, we don’t play her death game, she-”

“Gets powered up until she can force us to play, or punish us for skipping out,” Verona said.

The woman leaped from the one roof top to the next, then jumped down to the street, effectively crossing the barrier she’d dropped by them.

Grandfather aimed and shot her.  Leg.

The woman fell.

“Bullets don’t tend to work great on Others,” Lucy said.

“So people keep saying.”

The woman began to pick herself up, smiling, blood flowing openly from the gouges she’d dug into her own face.  “You’ll get an extra lap around my trapped garden for that.”

Grandfather shot her again.  She reacted to the impact of it, but only barely.

“Move,” Lucy said.

They ran.  Grandfather and Doe used their guns here and there, but the woman was reacting more like she was being punched than hit with a bullet from a handgun.

Lucy heard popping, crackling, and scraping, and reached ahead to McCauleigh, who was getting ahead of the group.

Further ahead, at the corner of a building, Lucy could see the edges of another barrier, like the one that had been dropped ahead and behind them, earlier.  With her Sight, she could see staining.

Just pulling that shit into this reality, now.

At the very end of the street, not far from the town center, a row of Others stood.  Three bogeymen, one angel, and two regular people who might’ve been Abyssally tainted.

“What do we do?” Oakham asked.

“Church,” Lucy said.  She pointed.

They went between two buildings.

All around them, more crackling and scraping marked the Abyss-ness bleeding into things.

More bogeymen and soldiers blocked the end of the alley.  The soldiers cringed and flinched as pieces of metal began dropping down around and behind them, building up the obstacle course.

Two denizens of Kennet below stepped out to block the other end, with more, from the sounds of footsteps, incoming.

The Gardener, Lucy heard, was going up.  To have her stage.

Grandfather reloaded his gun.

“Lis?” Verona asked, out loud.  “If you’re really on our side, if you’re changing your mind, this is the time to show it.”

The street shifted, like a conveyer belt, and they, standing in the alley, felt the row of buildings they were in shifting in the opposite direction.  Barriers that were standing up, leaning against the corners of buildings with only trash cans and cars for support, lost some of that support, and crashed to the ground.  Fallen barriers and the people at the end of the alley were left behind.

Lucy began running, the others following.  Doe was quick on her feet so she matched pace, running just a bit ahead and to the side of Lucy, like she was ready to catch a bullet if she had to.

They reached the end of the alley as it moved to be in line with the church.  Verona put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder as Lucy paused to take stock, looking for more traps or potential ambushes.  A cat-form Julette and Peckersnot perched on Verona’s own shoulder.

The coast was clear?  A few guards outside, but they were Undercity goons with improvised clubs and things.

Lucy stepped out, starting the run across the street, and she saw a figure out of the corner of her eye.  She slowed, holding the burning knife out toward the goons.

Helen Kim stood in the middle of the road, alone.

A goon inched closer.

“We made it this far, past bogeymen and worse,” Lucy said, to the goon.  “Think twice.”

He stopped inching forward, but he didn’t get out of the way.

“Here you are,” Helen said, voice raised to be heard.  She had the black sticks Gillian had described in her hand.  She hadn’t had those earlier.

“You’re free.”

“I’m free.  Your two soldiers aren’t doing so well.”

Lucy’s expression twisted for a moment.  If she asked, she’d buy into Helen’s game, or rhythm, asking what had happened.  Guilherme had hammered it into her often enough, that conversations were every bit like a sparring match.  Advantage, disadvantage, stances, the cutting strokes…

Bubbleyum had told her about how you couldn’t show weakness, even in conversation.  Weaknesses were for the most trusted confidantes, Bubbleyum said, not enemies.

Grandfather-

Lucy glanced sideways.  Pipes and Black.

“What did you do to them?”

Helen winked, sticks clacking in her hand as she toyed with them.  “Broke them.  I tried to break them badly enough they wouldn’t be coming back like they do, at least not before this… all of this is done.”

“Sorry,” Lucy whispered, for Grandfather.  “Should’ve set more of a guard.”

“No.  She’s the one that should apologize,” he murmured.

“I wondered where you got off to,” Helen said.  “I tried tracing your path.  Stopped by your house, Miss Hayward.”

“Yeah?”  Verona asked.

“Fire trucks were called in from Swanson and Tripoli, it was pretty good luck for you that they happened to be coming by when they got the call about the fire.  If they hadn’t, your house might’ve been in third or fourth place for getting any help at all.”

“You set it on fire?” Verona asked.

Helen nodded.  “I think your daddy might have to live out of a hotel, even if the fire trucks were relatively fast.  I wonder how that works when there’s plenty of people in Kennet in a similar situation.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lucy asked.

“So, so many things,” Helen said.  She glanced at the church.  “Back at the sword moot, I wasn’t there, but I got the information after.  Churches are a protected space.”

Lucy nodded slowly.

“And that’s a church.”

“Yeah,” Lucy replied.

“That’s a brain-bender right there,” Helen said.

Lucy stared her down.

Helen clicked her tongue.  “What.  A.  Shame.”

“Can I go in?” Oakham asked.  “Or is it protected against me too?”

“Sure was an oversight,” Helen went on.

“Because I’m like, ordinary, usual stuff doesn’t apply to me?” Oakham asked.

“You should be able to,” Lucy said.

Doe aimed her gun at the goon by the door.  He backed off, hands raised.

“Don’t move,” Helen said, holding out the fistful of sticks.

Oakham stopped in her tracks.  “I- should I listen?  Missing context.  So much context.  What does she do?”

“You know how your ankle was fucked?” Verona asked.

“Yes.  I know how my ankle was fucked.”

“She can make all of you more fucked than your ankle was.”

“Okay, sure.  Fun.  You know if we get through this, I’m totally going to get stupidly drunk, mix medications, then convince myself it was all a drunken fever dream?”

“Good idea,” Lucy said.  “But let’s focus on the right now, right now.”

“Put that thing away,” Helen said.  Stick clacked against stick.  She put her hand out, sticks in a fixed arrangement, held against one another and between fingers.

Doe’s arm broke.  She dropped her gun, grunting, and fell to her knees, one hand at the break.

Sticks clacked, and the arm went back the right way again.

“I’ll have nightmares about that bit, booze or no booze,” Oakham said, quiet.  “Too close to home.”

“Yeah,” McCauleigh said.  “Sorry.”

“Don’t let her do that to me?”

She can do so much worse.

Others were coming.  The group that had been at the end of the street had moved up a block and now they were at the end of this street, walking up from behind Helen.  Others were coming through alleys or from the far end of the street.  The Gardener was on a rooftop.  Oldbodies were near her.

No Bitter Street Witch here.  She didn’t have the forces.  She’d be outnumbered, if that group they’d seen before was all she could muster.

This wasn’t everyone.  Verona had done the initial legwork, but Lucy had been involved with the market, coming and going to talk to and train with Bubbleyum, and to coordinate stuff.  Lucy had a sense of who was local.

Maybe thirty percent were on the side of Maricica and her church.  Maybe fifteen percent were with the Bitter Street Witch, a bit beaten down, a bit worse for wear, being outnumbered for days of bitter fighting against a much stronger force.

That still left a good half or so who were peering through windows, who were just trying to live their lives.  People who didn’t want to fight.  Who were free and weird and dark and boundary-testing.

“I was pissed, before, you were taking so long to get Bracken,” Oakham said.  “Kind of getting why you were putting it off.”

This was a window of opportunity.  But us against a thousand plus people, bogeymen, whatever those angels are, twisted up people, and more… that’s what a window of opportunity looks like, here.

Lucy paced, and she made eye contact with Grandfather as she walked in front of him.

“No secret messages passed on through eye glances, please,” Helen called out.  “I will break you.”

“Okay,” Lucy said.  Won’t be secret, then.  “Shoot-”

Grandfather had already discreetly put hand to gun when Lucy was blocking Helen’s view.

“Her.”

And he fired.  Lucy’s earring insulated her against the noise.  Helen’s fingers were moving sticks, but the time it took her to find a configuration was longer than the time it took Grandfather to aim and shoot.

He was probably aiming for her hand and those sticks, but he caught the heel of her hand, and some of her wrist.  Sticks clattered to the ground.

“Might’ve been better to shoot her to kill,” McCauleigh said.  She’s-”

Grandfather fired.  As Helen was bent down, collecting sticks with her one intact hand, a bullet went through her head.

Lucy closed her eyes, a vision of Alexander meeting the same fate flashing through her mind.

“-Crazy,” McCauleigh finished.

Others were reacting.  Closing in.

“Run!” Lucy shouted.

“Where!?” Oakham asked.

But Lucy was already moving, pushing Oakham.

Toward the church, a protected space.

Past the doors- Doe had picked up her gun and was aiming it at the guards.

They pushed their way inside.  Inside, where the lights were blood red.

More soldiers were within, ready.  The captives and kidnapped were arranged inside- people from Kennet above, brought here tonight, maybe, people from Kennet below, who weren’t siding with Maricica.  And foundlings, their masks taken away.

They were all sitting in the pews.  In the aisles and around the building, Abyssal soldiers stood on guard.  The lightbulbs had been painted with some red ink, and the light they shone was a step darker than usual, mottled where ink had been inconsistently applied.  The spaces directly below the lights were darkest.

The Family Man stood at the altar, wearing a gauzy blindfold with bloodstains on it, hair longer, body much thinner, but still with muscles in weird places.

“Get-” the Family Man started.

“I declare sanctuary!” Lucy called out.  She turned to her friends.  “Say it.”

“I declare sanctuary and all that jazz,” Verona said.

The others repeated her.

The Family Man smiled, dipping his head.

“All of you,” Lucy called out, to the crowd.  “Say it.”

“Why?” a woman asked, near Lucy.  Maybe a very confused person from Kennet above.

“I declare sanctuary in this church!” Bracken raised his voice.  Lucy finally spotted him, at the edge of one pew, toward the front.  It was like the Family Man had made him sit up close.

“And all related protections,” Lucy told him.  You added the ‘in this church, which limits things a bit.

“I declare sanctuary in this church and all related protections,” Bracken said.

A big step up from him fighting her every little step of the way.

“They shouldn’t be able to hurt you if you say the words,” Lucy said.

The crowd of captives, held hostage, sitting in pews, began to say the words.  Some unsure.

“How far ahead were you thinking, when you set it as a rule?” Helen asked.

Lucy, frowning, turned.

Helen, bloodstain at her collar, still with blood on her forehead, but no visible bullet wound, her hand fixed, but with the sleeve torn where the bullet had passed through, stepped out to stand in the doorway.  She stepped through, dipping her head, and said, “I declare sanctuary.”

“As is your right,” Lucy replied.

“Were you thinking you might do this, get access to Maricica’s church this way?” Helen asked.  “Limit what she can do?  No sacrifices on the altar, as long as they know they can ask for the protections?”

“Yeah,” Lucy replied.  “That’s the gist of it.”

“Such an oversight.  But I suppose the apprentices don’t know enough, yet, and Charles was never that big on sanctuaries.  He did build the perimeter, but…”

“Might’ve skipped the chapter where the rules on sanctuary get spelled out.  Not quite relevant to Kennet,” Verona said.

Helen sighed.

“It’s our right to leave unmolested,” Lucy said.  “Theirs too.”

“Ah, but there’s precedent, isn’t there?” Helen asked.  “Plenty of stories of people taking sanctuary in a church, a mob just outside the doors, ready to tear them limb from limb.”

“Sure,” Lucy said.  “Except when we did the whole thing at the sword moot?  We included councils there.  And there’s more recent conventions about all of that.  Can’t have neutral grounds for families to bicker at each other in council meetings if they’re going to murder each other two steps outside the door.  That can carry over.”

“I guess we could ask the Alabaster Assembly,” Verona said.  “I wonder who she’ll side with.  Us, or the people who want to murder, torture, or abuse a crowd of Ontario’s people and Others, here?”

Oakham had circled around pews and limped around to where Bracken was sitting, Bag by his side.  It looked like her ankle was acting up.  She put a hand on Bracken’s shoulder.

A woman was crying, out of confusion, or from feeling the stress.

“I think this is the part where we mosey on out,” Verona said.  “Take our people to safety… spread the word about sanctuary.”

“Further,” Lucy said.

“You told others?”

“A few, before,” Lucy said.  “Told them to spread it around.  Can’t stop some of the issues, but it opens up some doors.  Like people going to church, protected there, and calling out bullshit.  No captives, no easy targets for those freaky dark angels, hopefully.”

“Or Family Men,” Bracken said, from the sidelines.

Lucy glanced at the man.  He didn’t look strong, leaning on the altar.  But he still looked scary in his own way.

“For anyone who’s confused?” Oakham asked.  “Just roll with it, go home, get drunk, write this off as a nightmare.”

“Or find another way to write it off,” Lucy said.  Glancing at some of the kids who were even more underage than Melissa.  “Easier than you’d think.”

“We can go home?” Someone asked.

“That remains up for debate,” Helen said.  The sticks clacked as she played with them.  “Right?”

She was asking the Family Man.

“Seems like it.”

Helen smiled.  “We could go to the Alabaster Assembly, you’re right.  Or we could ask someone else.”

“This is about sanctuary.  Carmine doesn’t have jurisdiction,” Lucy said.

“True!  Yes.  You’re right.  But she does.”

The lights all went out.

Maricica’s laughter filled the church, loud, like it was playing through speakers.  But it wasn’t.  She was big, and glutted with power.

She was back.

Lucy felt her heart sink.  Her throat closed up, dry, like she’d choked down some of those candies.

The window of opportunity had closed.  The Blue Heron hadn’t been able to hold out and distract.  Maybe they hadn’t even really tried.

“What do you think?” Helen asked.

She wasn’t asking the group of them.

Oakham still had Lucy’s mask, which had the runes around the eyes for seeing in the dark, with bonus ominous glowing eyes.  But Oakham wasn’t close, and getting to her would be hard.  Lucy wished she still had the gate of horn, to borrow Verona’s ability to see in the dark.

It made her think of other things.  The way this all fit together.  The things that hadn’t added up.

“You got the Blue Heron?  Belangers?” Helen asked.

“You know we did.”

Helen made an amused sound.  In the dark, her sticks faintly clacked.

“So crowded tonight.  I think this church has served its purpose,” Maricica said.  “I abdicate it.  We’ll set up another somewhere else.”

“What a good idea,” Helen said.  “And if it’s no longer a church…”

She left the rest unsaid.

It’s no longer a sanctuary.

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