Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.5 | Pale

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

The rain from the Storm didn’t fall down, but came from every direction with what felt like menace, and Lucy did her damndest to dance between the raindrops.  It moved at such speed and was so cold that a single droplet felt like a tiny stab wound.  Her coat was waterproof, but the Storm didn’t care about that.  It found ways past the fibers into flesh, and spread momentary numbness.  Too much of that at once and muscles seized up, she’d stumble, and she’d be left staggering toward cover.

Except ‘cover’ in a Storm was a place where rain stabbed in at her from two or three directions instead of eight.  Back to a corner, roof overhead, she could put her arms up to shield her face.  Out of that ‘cover’, she could be midway through a running footstep, and a droplet of rain could come upwards, hitting her ankle at an angle that sent it skidding up to the back of her knee, making it feel like frost crept along her skin in its wake.  Even with the protective runes she wore.

Too much of that and she’d need thirty seconds to a minute to recover enough to start moving with intention and not desperation.  This wasn’t a situation where those thirty seconds to a minute were something she could easily spare.  Every second counted.  Things moved in the darkness, across the flashes, and they struggled through the rain like she did.  Many were lesser creations Charles had allowed to come into being.  Some weren’t.

The street ran southeast to northwest, and had a t-junction in the middle of it.  Charles’ new throne was at the peninsula, the Kim manor was at the place the two roads met, and cabins sat between trees and road on either side.  Not that she could see very clearly in this weather.

The real danger was in the places beneath eaves and around the cabin-like houses.  Behind windows in unlit buildings, in shadowy doorways, and in the spaces between buildings.  St. Victors practitioners with those black branches.  Kims.  There were still four or so of the Carmine-allied Lords around.  The Dropped Call had gone off but had made a brief appearance as it had come back this way.  The White Rot was moving along telephone lines.  The Urgarotic Nether Serpent guarded the main building, covering avenues the Kims couldn’t.

But she couldn’t even spare them an easy glance.  Even blinking was something she had to take into account- her eyes remained wide open and unflinching when she was out of cover, peripheral vision on the rain, focus on the bogeymen, wraiths, and other things that stepped out of shadow, mist, and rain to try to put a knife in her.  Because she couldn’t spare a glance to anyone who might be lurking in the closest thing to shelter by one of the cabin-like buildings, she moved as if there were people in all of them.

Every dark corner she was dimly aware of was presumed to have a stupid kid from St. Victors with a black wand primed and ready to blow her arm off, or a Kim ready with a binding practice.  Her movements were quick, dodging threats that weren’t always there, stepping out of that ‘cover’ to zig-zag unpredictably, anticipating those oftentimes nonexistent threats, feinting and baiting.  Back into that ‘cover’.

Then she could spare a moment to blink.

So she danced.  A sequence of stances, a flow of movement that found the voids in the rain in the same way they’d once picked out the voids around the elemental shapes they’d wanted, in one of the first glamour tricks Maricica had given her.  She couldn’t dodge every droplet, so she controlled the damage, exposing one arm at a time, or letting it numb and wet one side of her face.

Her repaired weapon ring –thank you, Verona– let her create fans, and a sweeping strike of those could create a void she could follow with her body.  A wretched bogeything -not even a bogeyman, but some victim of the Abyss that had been spat out- came lunging at her, and she went low, avoiding meeting the ground with her body, because a slide through a puddle might end her.  Going low, she kicked upward, and put him above her, her elbow driving up at his ribs to help him on his way.

Another void created.

This was like all of Guilherme’s lessons being put to the test in the most intense way.  A test she was failing.  Too much rain in one moment cost, and earning her way to a new cabin, a new patch of cover, a range of three places that a dangerous practitioner could come at her from, it didn’t give her a chance to fully recuperate.  It didn’t fully refund what the earlier mistakes cost.

Guilherme would tell her how disappointed he was.

But Bubbleyum had taught her from another direction entirely.  Bubbleyum, who would rarely be the biggest or strongest goblin in any room she was fighting in.  Where Guilherme expected perfection, Bubbleyum expected failure.

Which folded neatly into Grandfather’s idea.  That there were no winners in war.  Only making the other guy hurt more.

Make as few mistakes as possible, and when a mistake was made, make it a useful, conscious one.  Force a lose-lose.

Drilled into her and folded into practice, faerie bullshit, and goblin nonsense.  Glamour and gunk had been like lubricant, easing her way into these lessons.

No glamour in the here and now.  No foxes, no tricks.  Avery walked her Paths, challenges with a reward at the end of them, and Lucy had her training, with the same, except it was in the form of techniques she had no right to have picked up as fast as she did.

Even with that, this was an impossible test.  One she would fail, because the rules, this environment, it wasn’t fair.  So she had to make the other guys lose more.

There was a greater strategy at hand in this, but for right now… she made her zig-zagging way to one cabin, aware of two bogeymen on her heels.  They didn’t love this rain, but they were hardy.

Her hand reached into a pocket and pulled out a deck of spell cards.  She folded the deck, one handed, to get to the right range of cards.  She knew the first ten or so were pre-prepared smoke cards, so she folded that to the bottom of the ‘deck’.  Running along the wall, she held the deck against it, so that the edge of the top card ran against wood and pulled free, sticking there by the basic spiritual connections.

A row of fire and explosion runes detonated one by one, as the spirits caught up to the papers.  It tore a hole into the side of the building, and started a fire.

Lucy treated that brief surge of flame the same way she was treating the rain.  Find the void, move with it.  The initial flames had barely receded when she whipped a dog tag inside through the hole in the exterior wall.

Delaying had its cost.  The two bogeymen on her heels caught up to her.  The gangly, starved looking one she’d tossed earlier was behind them, keeping its distance, head lowered.

Bogeymen came in types.  Trappers, stalkers, slashers, hunters, terrorizers, with a dozen more labels besides.  They had patterns of behavior that were reinforced with Abyss-granted powers, technique, or rules.

One proportioned like Verona’s dad, big.  Taller than average, overweight, with even the same stubble on his chin, cheeks, and neck fat that Verona’s dad would have on weekends, before he shaved to go get groceries or whatever.  He had overalls, a hard helmet that might’ve once been orange but was now black with bits of peeling, bleached yellow peeking through, and was so covered in burned grunge that it was hard to tell if the white poking through was a shirt he’d worn once, or if that was his skin.  He wore a harness, a puttering generator at his back, with wires running down his arms to where a circular saw was mounted at the back of one hand and wrist, and a heavy nail gun was gripped in the right hand.  Both looked like they’d been made from scratch.

The other was a beautiful woman, willowy, long-limbed, hair down to her waist.  She wore high-heeled, high boots that went up to the thigh, dissolving into criss-crossing straps, a black dress so short it came within a hair of exposing her, and heavy eyeliner and mascara that ran in the rain, to artistic effect.  Her eyes were accented by the eyeliner to look bigger, and were dead and empty.

The signs of a bogeymen weren’t all there.  The woman’s light brown skin was perfect, without a sign of cracks, staining, taint, or any of that.  The staining was limited to her dress, boots, hair, and the black circles of her irises and pupils.  Vein-like lines in the skin beneath the straps drew a glance from Lucy, but proved to be parts of the straps.  While she was looking at that, the running mascara and hair seemed to have the signs of taint.

She didn’t know these bogeymen, but her gut told her they were Lenard’s- ones he might’ve had around the Blue Heron when they’d been fending off the one attack.  Neither seemed like a direct attack type, like a slasher or cutthroat.  The big guy, maybe, but when he came her way, she could feel the intent, like air pressure being crushed between the two of them.

A Guilherme lesson.

He didn’t move fast enough, didn’t move like this was the way he always moved, and bogeymen tended to occupy grooves that made it so they almost always moved according to their patterns.  This guy ran at her like he barely knew how to run.  The rain and the frozen mud underfoot didn’t help him any, either.

He came at her first, the other one lingering behind, crouched, almost posing.

Lucy couldn’t spare the posing a thought, because a circular saw was swiped at her face, machinery roaring, spinning metal squealing.

Lucy’s feet slipped in mud.  She found balance by putting a hand against the house, and the nailgun in the big guy’s other hand was already there, swinging around.  Lucy’s fingers parted as she withdrew her hand, forming a ‘v’ shaped space between middle and ring finger.  The nailgun’s nozzle scraped the inside of each finger as it hit the space.

The nail boomed as it sank in.  Lucy had narrowly avoided having a hand nailed to the wall.

This guy… Lucy pegged him as an oubliette bogeyman.  Or a dungeon bogeyman.  The tools for building, the way he seemed most secure when standing, not moving… he was probably at his most effective once he’d had time to build an entire place around himself, rife with traps and false exits.

The one she’d read about had had been a schoolteacher who’d had an entire abandoned school in the countryside.  Succession bogeyman, terrorizer and oubliette.  Kidnap one popular boy, age twelve to seventeen, confound police, bait the kid’s frustrated, desperate friends toward the school with clues the police would discount, then trap them within, with each room being a special brand of hell, with hazards and barriers dropping in, meant to separate them.  He’d had special powers to mentally break them, he’d traumatize them until they couldn’t think straight, then kill them once he had them all together again, mentally broken.  Sometimes he died or got killed, but he always fucked up at least one kid enough that the kid would go on to repeat the pattern, becoming the next ‘reform teacher’, inheriting the powers, pattern, and history.

He backhanded the wooden exterior of the cabin with the circular saw, the saw caught on the layered wood siding, and it pulled him forward, in a sudden lunge faster than his feet alone would’ve been capable of.  He punched out toward her face with the nailgun.

She parried, kicking his belly, and barely budged him.  Instead, pushing foot against his belly, she created distance, one foot raised, the other touching ground, skidding on ground that was part mud- frozen ground thrashed into something mud-like by the rain, part puddle-covered ice.

So if she was right, and this guy was that, then he was a dungeon bogeyman without a dungeon.  If she was right and Lenard had summoned these, based on the fact that they were something greater than a lot of the chaff she’d seen getting into this place, then there should’ve been a logic.

Why not have the dungeon bogeyman take up residence in a cabin, setting up somewhere on the outskirts?

Was he like the schoolteacher, multiple gimmicks folded into one?

The nailgun, at least, didn’t seem to have a function that let him shoot it at range.  Or he was holding onto it.

Lightning flashed, and with that surge of power, some elementals flickered into existence all around them.  Gaunt, tall figures, with bodies like shattered dolls held together with rain or crackling electricity.  They flickered and faded out a moment later.  Like an engine trying and failing to start.

But getting there.

Lucy steadily backed away, turning her body slowly as she did, so her left arm wouldn’t be out too far from the cabin and overhanging roof, caught in the freezing rain.  The rain’s roar joined the chug of the generator at the bogeyman’s back, thunder rumbled without seeming to stop, and wind whistled.

Her earring picked up people fleeing the building she’d set on fire, heading out the front door, which exited the opposite side of the building.  She and the bogeymen were around back.  Cabin to her right, trees to her left, rain coming at her from two directions.

She could hear past all that- past machinery, rain, thunder, people, and barely audible, there were splashes.

Someone out in the woods.

The bogeyman rolled his right shoulder, cartilage crackling like a fistful of bubble wrap, and he kicked.  His steel toed boot chipped ice and sent a chunk toward her middle.  She wasn’t fully ready for it, her focus was elsewhere, and it caught her in the side.

He repeated what had worked before.  Circular saw to wall, giving him that forward momentum, as the Abyss-empowered machinery pulled him forward as surely as a motorcycle’s engine and tires could get vehicle and rider moving.  Nail gun ready.

But this was the diversion.  Those footsteps came running.

Lucy decided to play into it.  Backing off.  Leaving herself exposed.

The footsteps were light, and the person was skinny.  Fast, borderline feral, with the same aesthetic as the construction guy.  ‘Skinny’ was relative here, because she was skinny, and even if he was small and weedy for a guy, he was still a solid one hundred and fifty or so pounds, compared to her, who was only a few pounds past one hundred.

Except this guy carried two crowbars, hooked ends swinging.  One swung for the back of her neck.  It scraped wood as it came at her, and didn’t slow any in the process.

She ducked that, made space, intentionally choosing to make less space than necessary.

That swing had been hard enough that if it had connected full force, it would have pulverized her spine.  And with the bent end of the crowbar, if he hadn’t hit full force, he might still have caught her around the back of the neck and pulled her off balance, right in front of the big guy.

She was ready for him, though.  She’d anticipated this.  The big guy didn’t have control over his movements, the skinny guy was more reckless, and suffering for being out and exposed to the rain.  Together, they crowded toward her, predators after an apparent victim.

But she adjusted her posture, still crouched, gripped a lip at the low end of the cabin, and kicked the skinny guy in the chin.  The upward, awkward kick used muscles she hadn’t stretched, and she felt a pull at her inner thigh, the lightest of sprains.

She’d feel that ache later.

He went backwards, straight into the nailgun.  It was pressure activated, and automatically spat out a rusty nail, long enough it went into the right side of his forehead and poked through flesh at the left side.

The big guy roared as the skinny guy dropped.

Nail to brain dead.

Lucy exhaled slowly, measured, as the big guy’s eyes widened.

Okay.  Think.

They’re a pair.  So… Oubliette Duet?  The words made for an amusing juxtaposition with the rough and tough construction worker stuff.  She would have smiled a bit if she wasn’t in a life or death situation, in hell weather, with people counting on her.

Her body trembled, jittering against clothes that were wet and going stiff, and she wasn’t sure if it was cold or the fact she’d been so tense for so long that her body was starting to rebel.

Duet bogeymen were paired, working in concert together, in the same way Freak and Squeak might… just less intensely woven together.  When they popped out of the Abyss, they’d do it as a pair.  They could practically read each other’s minds.

One of them had a nail through the front of his mind, now.

When one died, the other tended to intensify.

Roaring, he tore at the pull-cord for the generator, tearing it out.  It doubled in strength.  Both nail gun and circular saw started jittering, bouncing around, working so hard they were threatening to come to pieces.

Back to Guilherme tactics, she thought.  A big part of his lessons had been on fighting enemies bigger than her.  Being calm, focused, making no mistakes when, in a lot of fighting, unlike Wallace’s games, a good hit from a weapon tended to be the end of the person hit.

The swings came hard.  She ducked back, retreating, aware she was edging toward the corner of the cabin.  Past that point, she’d be in the full force of the Storm, and she’d be exposed to her right.  The people who’d left the building, burning at one end and slowly being overtaken by flame?  They were out there.  If they were standing out in the road, they’d see past the side of the building, see her step back, hands full of raging bogeyman, numb from the rain… and she’d have ten more things to worry about.

When your opponent is making mistakes, encourage him.

When he swung, she smacked and pushed on his arm, to help it on its way.  He reacted, reversing, trying to bum-rush her, getting in close enough she couldn’t get fancy with dodges.

The nail gun boomed, smoke hissing out of gaps in its housing, as it made brief contact with the wall.  When he pulled away, the machine shook with enough force that it fired of its own accord.

There it is.

Spitting out nails- two as projectiles, one spinning end over end.  She only had to deflect the middle one with her weapon-ring generated fan.  It still raked her temple.

He punched the wall with the hand that had the circular saw attached, swung in a wild, too-wide punch, and she was prepared to go in after the punch, to hit his arm, knocking it downward, when she saw the circular saw attachment break apart.

What had been a saw mounted on the back of his arm, possibly running partially into that arm, became more like a flail, a spinning, rubbery band stretching from a chugging, steaming housing on his wrist to a spinning wheel of rusted, Abyss-tainted metal.

She wasn’t quick enough to take advantage of it, especially not with the rain.  Still a pace away from the corner of the building, which did have one thing going for it, and so she dodged, stepping briefly out into the rain, turning her body to avoid the worst of it.

A backhand, upward  swing with the nailgun clipped her chin and knocked her off balance.

Rain from the Storm drenched her, numbing flesh.  Her ability to do small, detailed things was washed away in a moment.

The big guy could only keep the wheel from swinging back at him by keeping it in motion, swinging horizontally, a bit of a loop, then horizontally again.  She backed away, further into trees.

Lightning flashed, and elementals briefly appeared.  Heads turned her way, eyes glowing.

The Storm still wasn’t full-strength.  The elementals faded.

She tossed aside the blank papers, discarding the war fans, and drew a metal pen.  It became a pole, which she began spinning, deflecting some of the raindrops.  Leaving her lower body exposed.

The saw came at her at a diagonal.  Aiming for her lower body.

She caught one end of the staff, used momentum from the spinning, and whapped her weapon into the rubber band.  The saw’s wheel, still spinning, sparked as it grazed the pole.

But she’d successfully redirected it further down.  It met ground, found traction in frozen ground, and just as it had done with the cabin, it dragged the bogeyman forward.

He was pulled off balance, onto belly, and dragged into the ground.  Lucy stumbled over him, walking around the generator pack, and stepped onto the nail gun.

It had been given a loose trigger pull, and the impact of her weight landing on it made it start firing, five nails in quick succession.

An adjustment from the pole meant it fired three of the five nails into the bogeyman’s face.

On her way back, walking on the bogeyman because he was steadier ground than muddy ice, she tapped it hard with the pole, and let it fire another five rapid shots.  Pulverizing face and brain.

Stumbling forward, through cold rain she wasn’t in any shape to weave through, she crashed into the cabin wall, and leaned there, huffing for breath, shivering.

The willowy bogeyman in the short dress and heels was there, expression unreadable, dark eyes penetrating.  The roaring flames at the end of the building to the bogeyman’s left framed her in dark orange hues.

“Fuck,” Lucy swore, under her breath, between pants to get air into her lungs.

Lucy was bleeding at the temple.  One more scratch that might scar, she thought.  One more thing for her mother to fret over.

How unfair was it that a bogeyman got to be that pretty, while Lucy accumulated scars?

She could fix it, she knew.  Glamour, to patch things over, when taking a break after all this was over.  Before the scar had time to set or fix itself in anyone’s memory.

Except what was the point, right?  Bottom of the rankings in the Class RankR app.  Wallace had only liked her because she’d kissed him and she’d been available, interested.  The moment things had gotten hard, he’d bailed.

There were so many fucking movies where the actress-pretty kids had the reluctant dad and won them over, being cute and goofy and clever, and Lucy hadn’t.

Over and over, she hadn’t.

John hadn’t felt compelled to stay, when she’d raged, she’d cried.

Guilherme was leaving, or gone already.

Avery had girls throwing themselves at her, Verona had been able to do it all casually, and Lucy felt increasingly alone.

She shivered.

Injustice drove Lucy, Verona had said, once.  And what greater injustice was there than the cards dealt to her by genes?  A decision made when sperm met egg, that determined if she was someone who’d be wanted, by default.

Or if she’d be forced to fight some unjust, shitty game which was rigged against her.

“It’s okay.”

The bogeyman had moved closer.  Lucy startled, and backed away a few steps.

“It’s okay,” the bogeyman said, again.  She smiled sympathetically.

Lucy shivered, the shock having rattled her, re-awakening every part of her body that had been blocking out the cold, the soreness, the little aches and pains.  The cut at her neck, the back of her hand, the sprain at her thigh, the cut at her temple.

The ground that she’d unconsciously given wasn’t- she couldn’t regain it.  It was the mental and emotional equivalent of being on a muddy hill, every step she took to climb saw her slide down an equal measure.  Except thoughts, feelings, concessions.

To fight against the thoughts meant to be aware of them and being aware of them meant feeling them, and feeling them meant losing anything she regained.

“Stop that,” Lucy told the bogeyman.

“Shhhhhhh.”

“Don’t shush me!” Lucy raised her voice.  She swung her weapon, converting it into a hand-sledge.  It slammed into the already damaged wall.

“Shhh.”

The bogeyman reached out a hand.

Lucy raised an arm, ready to lash out.  She couldn’t-

Her arm was raised at a diagonal, partially blocking her face.  Once she was there, doing that, that mental slippery slope didn’t let her stop.

Hiding her own face.  Which she wasn’t okay with, didn’t feel good about, which didn’t compare to real beauty.

A frustrated tear rolled down Lucy’s face, to join the raindrops.  Her hot breath fogged in the cold, clouding around her face, with her arm close.

“I’ll put you out of your misery,” the bogeyman said.

Lucy dropped the pen, caught it in her other hand, and swung again.  Bigger hammer.  Bigger impact.  She could hear a rustling as things fell down inside.  “No.”

The small movements and wavers of her raised arm brought it closer to her face, until it was against her fox mask, wrist across one eyehole, hand at the top of her head.

It was hard to raise her head.

Was this how it went?  A steady, inexorable defeat, victims unable to fight back against this crushing sense of inferiority, loneliness, and feeling unwanted, until they were cringing, balled up, hands over head, sobbing, and the bogeyman…

“I’d normally ease someone into this over days and weeks,” the bogeyman told Lucy.  “But I want to get out of the cold.  To make it up to you, I’ll make your execution take only ten or twenty minutes, alright?”

Lucy shook her head.

“Do you want me to take the full hour?  Give you the full treatment?” the bogeyman asked, voice soft.  “Higher chance of being rescued, but…”

She let the ‘but’ be something loaded.

Lucy snorted hot air through her nostrils.  It fogged in the cold.

The bogeyman wasn’t flinching at the rain that got at them here.

Lucy, meanwhile, probably looked like a drowned rat.  Shivering, small, hair plastered to her head.

Bleeding, scarred, unwanted, alone.

“It’s hard.  Your hairline never looks right.  The way shadows fall on your upper lip.  Your ears, sticking out to the sides.  It makes you want to let your hair down, but you never quite have the guts, do you?  It never falls right, doesn’t look good when you catch a glimpse of your reflection, a few hours later.  So you chicken out, tie it back into a ponytail.  Pimple scar at your cheekbone, corner of your nose…” the bogeyman rattled off the things Lucy had noticed about herself.  “Resting bitch face.”

“Stop.”

“Scar at the side of your neck, that will bother you once it sets.  You don’t relax your shoulders often enough.  It shows in your neck.  I can tell that much.”

“Stop!” Lucy raised her voice.  She started to swing her weapon at the bogeyman.

“Really?” the bogeyman asked.  A rebuke, the tone conveying everything in a ‘someone like you, hitting someone like me?’ sort of way.

And Lucy couldn’t swing.  Couldn’t lower her arm, which covered her mouth.

Fucking unfair.  This.  All of that.  Every detail being pointed out.

“No hips.  No tits.  I mean, I’m hardly one to say anything, except you’re concave, honey.  At your age?  I’d be surprised if you could keep a boyfriend.”

“I said stop,” Lucy said.  This time, when she kicked out one leg, she didn’t do it to hit the bogeyman.  Only to get close.

It seemed to startle the bogeyman, that she could.  And the bogeyman did stop.

“The way it stops,” the bogeyman told her.  She didn’t finish the sentence, because a shotgun fired from within the building, through the exterior wall of the cabin.

The circular saw had cut through the panels.  Her hammer had broken them some.  She hadn’t gotten through and hadn’t been able to really go a third time without risking tipping off the bogeyman.

So she’d trusted that with a few heavy hits and a raised voice, the Dog Tag she’d tossed into the building would be able to pick up on the signals.

Maybe peer through a window, get a sense of things, then follow the cues.  A rustling as he’d pried drywall away.  Until he could peek through the crack, with interior wall pried away and siding torn down.

Shotgun, to open the hole wider.  The bogeyman barely took any damage.  Her skin was hard, like a shell.

“I might have resting bitch face, but you’re an actual bitch,” Lucy told the bogeyman.  Trusting Ribs to follow through on the statement.

He did.  Not another shotgun blast, but his homemade flamethrower.  Nozzle pushed out the hole the shotgun had opened wider, and a stream of liquid fire, to ignite the woman.

The bogeyman shrieked as she went up in flames.

The lesser Abyssal wretch watched for a moment longer, then ran off, disappearing into darkness.

Maybe to report back to someone.  Not here to attack, but to scout, relay information?

She let him go.

She stood there, hating the bogeyman with an intensity that felt like it should have made the flames burn higher and hotter.

Maybe that was a practice she could learn.  For special people.

Lucy turned, marching away, finally feeling herself able to push the feelings down and away.  Toward the corner of the building.

She had to assume there was trouble, so she took a second to compose herself, made herself stop trembling from the cold, and found her center.

She was still pissed, still raw.

Keeping one eye on the woman as she lay there, unmoving and burning, Lucy gave herself a grace period to recover.  Breathing.  Blinking.  Watching the bogeyman to make sure she didn’t scream and lunge to her feet, enraged like the construction guy had been.  It wouldn’t be surprising, given what she was.

But that cut both ways.  If what she did made her like a walking curse, then the fact Lucy had counted this kind of coup against her meant Lucy would be able to lash out, count hits, hurt the woman.

Maybe it was easier to lie still, die, go to the Abyss like this, and recover, than to try to go for Lucy in a rage, go to some deeper part of the Abyss, and have to spend so much energy surviving that she couldn’t become beautiful again, couldn’t regain that power she had.

Lucy waited, figuring that if a minute passed, the whole ‘hot rage’ thing from having her beauty marred wouldn’t be hot enough.

In that minute, the rain came down harder.  Tree branches began falling.  Raindrops striking too many times in the same places chipped at bark, and sheets of frozen bark slid off the trees.  The features on the buildings blurred, drilled into by rain, then frozen, the frozen parts sometimes sliding away in the same way the bark had.

Lightning struck, and in the flash, some elementals appeared.

These ones didn’t fade away.  They started moving.  Broken silhouettes joined together by water running through air like water down a window, or by electricity, by mud puddles, by ice.

Elementals in animal shapes sprinted off.

The trick with these things, according to Deb, was to not be the path of least resistance.  Water flowed downhill, lightning wanted to ground itself, fire went to the nearest thing it could consume.

These elementals were simple, largely mindless, and their goal would be to feed and perpetuate the Storm.

Lucy focused on angling herself away from the rain and the cold.  She measured her breathing, and she stayed quiet.

Seven out of eight of the elementals had wandered off, run off, or marched in a direction with a target in mind.  She was preparing to move the second the last one left, but then another flash struck, and more appeared.

Echoes moved through the woods, following, Lucy presumed, Ann’s orders.

Nothing had come after her.  It was a bit too quiet.

When she started running again, she resumed that ‘dance through raindrops’ motion.  Imperfect, especially since the rain was more intense, but she could try, could cut down on the damage.

Move evasively, anticipating an enemy at the front of the building, waiting for her.

Every shadow could be assumed to have someone ready to strike.  Every porch.  Every doorway.

In the process, she stopped in her tracks, reversing direction, as a bolt of black lightning struck the side of the building, cascading off of it, cracking air.  It arced toward her, like it wanted to hit her, and she scrambled back.

The kid stopped, shaking his hand, and switched the wand to his left hand.

She found her footing, lunged into that space, as the darkness cleared, and made it to cover before the wand wielding St. Victor’s student could fire the second shot.  A whole chunk of the cabin peeled away.  An elemental beast threw itself at the damaged section, breaking up into a splash of mud and disintegrating earth, more of the wood broke away, splashing into a puddle at the building’s base, and the elemental reformed itself out of the dreck, slightly larger than before.

Lucy shifted her feet to more solid, dry, frozen ground.

She could hear the student call out an order.  After a brief urging for the elemental beast to leave, there were more orders.

She heard footsteps, clambering on the roof.

Heard the wind and patter of the rain change as something moved through it without touching ground.

She reached for her inner coat pocket.  Practitioners often carried a lot of little odds and ends, and Lucy had some from a while back, when Chloe’s attack on her had been recent in her mind.  Salt packets.

There was a hint of strategy in how they came at her.  A wraith jumpscared her, materializing in her face, or it tried to jumpscare her.  With her weapon ring on, the salt packets became another joined pair of combat fans, crusted with pure white salt at the ends.  She cut its throat, ending it.

The others were already moving in.  They were organized, in a rough way.  The kind of way that came from an order like “go at her all at once”, with a threat to one’s life on the line.

Goblin, coming down off the roof.  Something else, human-ish, she didn’t recognize.  Something undead, where the ‘dead’ had clearly been bloody, because it was coated in so much blood that even this rain couldn’t wash it off.

She’d had the corners of buildings in mind for a bit, and she used it now.  The time-slowing watch wrapped around her hand, she backhanded the water that overflowed from the gutter, creating the needed spray.  Slowing time for a few seconds.

The effect came in hard.  Slower than usual.  She was able to sidestep the lunge from the undead, and cut it at the back of the knees with a sweep of the salted fan.  She went to shove the goblin and other person’s face into the wall from behind, fans collapsing to effectively become sticks that she could use to push them forward.  Goblins had tricks, and she didn’t know what the human was.

The fold where the back of the person’s head met his neck opened wide, sharp teeth gnashing.

She let it have the fan, the full salt packet.  It doubled over, spitting.  She raised a foot to kick at it, knocking it away, and another mouth opened up between neck and shoulder.

The ripped knees of his jeans had teeth.  Some kind of shapeshifter?

Spell card, then.  It didn’t seem to like the cold, so she went for a card- only barely remembering she’d reordered the deck earlier.

Turning what was wet into something frozen and hard that required strength to break.  She caught both it and the goblin.

It bit through, struggled forward, burdened down by crusted ice, and so she hit it with another.

The undead crawled her way.

“Stop.  Prove you can be cool, tell me you won’t hurt people-”

It screeched at her.

So she cut it at the base of the neck with the remaining salted fan.  The salt cut through the undead’s flesh with ease.

She felt numb.  She traced fingers along the face of the watch she’d wrapped around her hand.  Elemental tool working better in an elemental Storm?  Made sense.

Wish I’d used that sooner.

She was still feeling the effect of the bogeyman from earlier, not helped by being as cold and wet as she was.

The recent arguments with her mom rang through her head.  Bitter arguments.  They were even more bitter when this wasn’t something Lucy wanted, really.  She didn’t like fighting.  She didn’t want to hurt things that looked this human.  She hated being in danger and accumulating scratches, injuries, and scars.

But the cost of not doing this was too high.  Charles had proved, starting with the summer, that he couldn’t be trusted to run this, fix what was broken, or any of this.  When he’d remained silent about the Hungry Choir, when he’d used it for power.  Killing John.  Being okay with Edith poisoning Matthew.  Forming that temporary truce with Musser.

Now the world stage was supporting him.  They were handing him power to do whatever the hell he wanted, conditional on him stopping here, leaving them and their friends alone.

Was he working some fancy-ass wish, that would undo all the wrongs, walk things back, restore the people eaten by the Choir, revive John, undo the harm of the betrayal to Matthew?  Turning Kennet into a utopia, everything preserved?  Right all the wrongs, protect the children, remove the worst elements from the oldest and most entrenched families in the region?

If he was, Lucy didn’t trust it.  Because Charles’ underlying behavior and beliefs were way too messed up.  He had no family.  His friends, his colleagues, hadn’t talked to him in years.  Alexander had betrayed him, Ray hadn’t visited, Durocher had ignored him.  When all the chips were down and he had less than nothing, it had been the Kennet Others that had provided some support, token kindness, and other things.

They’d asked him to host a curse or something every year, when they couldn’t handle things, and there were parts of that that were shitty, when he was that vulnerable, barely in a position to say no, but… John had been patrolling, risking his existence.  Miss risked an eternity of enslavement when she went to deflect dangerous practitioners.  Everyone had had their jobs and roles.

Shitty, though.  She didn’t love it.

Still, they’d been the closest things he had to friends and he’d done horrible things to them.  If the end goal had been this potential wish, then he hadn’t communicated, hadn’t worked with them.  Every risk he’d taken, every day that had passed, he was chancing that he’d get removed, and every bit of damage he’d done would stick.

If the wish was possible, she didn’t trust him to make it and see it all the way to a good result.

Thing was, she didn’t really believe he was crafting a wish to make everything perfect.  She doubted it was possible, to make things perfect and walk things back.

She might have fought to stop him from the benevolent wish, to seize that wish, to give it to a better custodian, maybe.

But she was sure he was doing something worse than a wish.

Whenever he had power, he abused it.  Whenever he had lots of power, he crossed lines.  Things went wrong.  Damage was done.

So she had to be here.

‘Here’ was standing in the rain, a St. Victor’s practitioner around the corner, holding a lethal weapon, trying to decide how she’d deal with him.

“What’s your name!?” Lucy called out.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Have your parents been trying to call?”

“That’s fucked, you know!?” he asked, voice angrier.

He shot another bolt of darkness her way, clipping the building’s edge.

I’ll take that as a yes.

“There’s a chance to walk away from this!” she called out.  “Charles wins, you pick up where you left off, may he’s disappointed in you, but you carry on.  We win, you do something like community service, work with us-”

“Fuck you!”

“Or work with others, doesn’t matter.”

“Fuck you and your friends!”

That deal they’d signed.  Did it block off options like being sent to some other family that wasn’t affiliated with them?  Did it block off accepting surrender?

“Then maybe I subdue you, put you to sleep, and when you next wake up, your family’s there, and we go back to the options from before.  Charles being disappointed, or community service.

“If that’s a hint that you want me to give up and surrender in everything but name-”

Lucy whistled, like Grandfather had taught her.

He’d stopped at the whistle.  He didn’t start again.

Lucy checked the coast was mostly clear, then rounded the corner, backhanding the runoff from the frozen-over gutter, moving evasively, until she was halfway between the buildings.

Ribs had snuck up, and had the flamethrower pressed to the back of the kid’s hood.

The guy glared at her.

“Wallet?” she asked.

He didn’t reply.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to search you,” she replied.

He didn’t answer, so she pat him down, unzipped his coat, then found it in an inside pocket.  His phone was on the other side, earbuds going up to his neck, where a cord helped hold them in place.

“Xavier Powell.  Okay.  Thank you, by the way, Ribs.”

“We’d all feel better if you were with the rest.”

“I’ll reunite with them.  But I wanted to push forward, get set up.  Do like Bubbleyum described doing, earning some points and ownership over all of this by leading the way.”

The rain soaked her.  Elementals were starting to appear with more frequency.  One was related to frost or cold, and started toward them.  Because they were wet, and that was his vector.  Puddles froze as he walked on them.

Lucy quickly wrote down a spell card for an ‘insulation from cold’ rune, and held it out.

The elemental gave her the closest thing a thing with no eyeballs could really give in the way of a side-eye, before moving on.

Lucy checked the spell card, and saw the permanent marker running.  The card lasted about ten seconds before it melted completely.

“Do me a favor, Ribs?” she asked.  She walked around, turned her back to him, and pulled her collar down at the back.  “My runes?”

“On the skin?”

“Yeah.”

“Blotches.  Nothing there.”

“Fuck.  Okay.  That explains why I’m so cold.”

“Serves you right, doing this shit,” Xavier said.

“You’re so mad, and I doubt you know the full story,” she said.  “Switch sides, Ribs?”

He walked around Xavier, keeping the flamethrower in position.  Lucy kept at an angle where the splash wouldn’t catch her, and where she wouldn’t get hit if Ribs pulled the trigger and Xavier ducked.

“Keep that flame- that pilot light or whatever, away from my chin?” he asked.

Lucy had been clipped in the chin.  It’d probably scab.

She tied Xavier’s hands, then used one of the practice-blockers from her deck of spell cards to tie around the knot.  She wasn’t sure how well that would hold, but she moved around and added one to Xavier’s forehead in permanent marker, for good measure.

“Did you actually call my mom and dad or did you call my aunt?”

“Aunt.  Your mom and dad are alcoholics, right?”

“Yeah.  Gave me up because they’d rather drink than have me.  My aunt isn’t much better.”

“Drinking?”

“Nah,” Xavier muttered.  “Fuck you so much.  This was my way out.  Holy fuck is this rain cold.”

“Do I need to worry about giving you over to the care of your aunt?”

“She took me in because my parents suck.  But she’s got her kids and she’s got me, and it’s obvious I’ll never rate.  They got ten Christmas presents each.  I got six, and two of those things were things I needed.”

“Not feeling wanted,” Lucy murmured.

“What?”

She shook her head.

She looked over at the woman bogeyman, who lay there, charred, in the rain and snow, which were quickly burying her.

The construction guy and his skinny buddy were gone.

Pretty standard bogeyman stuff.  It was a coin flip as to whether they were up and still in the fight, somehow, or if they’d gone down to the Abyss, to gather strength to return for a sequel appearance.

Ann would be the one to talk to about putting them down and keeping them down.

“Our guys are catching up,” Ribs said.

Lucy could hear them.  She could hear a black wand tearing its way through air and surroundings.

She finished searching Xavier, who now had his hands tied behind his back.

“Didn’t think you’d get this far this fast,” he said.  “Or if you did, it’d be the Finder.”

“Yeah, well, here I am,” she murmured.

She could hear Bubbleyum’s whoop.  Tromping footsteps.

“We should put out the fires.”

“You, basic barriers, right there.  Let’s get some protection against the elementals.”

“Basic barriers will erode.”

That was Joel.

Lucy felt a wave of nausea.  She didn’t feel like it was anything practice-based.

She used Sight, searching, and didn’t detect any weirdness.

“What’s the plan?” Ribs asked.

“Gotta stow this guy, get him to the others.  I really wanted to count some proper coup, but this is a lot to wade through.  They’ve got defenses, random Others, they’ve got guys like this.  Joel is a tricky one.  He’ll be best equipped to deal with the Storm, I figure.  But the real plan, we’ve gotta provoke the Kims.  And you set fires.”

“I’m good at that.”

She winced at that nausea again.

“You alright?”

Xavier was frowning.

“Stomach’s feeling wobbly.”

“Get concussed?  You’ve got a ding on your chin.”

“Don’t remind me.  I don’t think-”

Rib’s hand went to her forehead.  It was warm.  Which made the nausea feel worse, weirdly.

“You’re cold as shit, Luce,” Ribs said, his voice a drawl with the way he had one wide-open cheek.  “Get yourself warm and dry.”

“I gotta…” she trailed off, feeling lightheaded.

“First off, before I say anything, you, kid?  Xavier?”

Xavier nodded.

“I’m taking you with me, I can be nice about it, I can be mean about it, so think hard before you interrupt me while I’m talking, yeah?  The snark won’t get you anything except dragged through puddles.  Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you,” Ribs stabbed a finger her way, other hand holding the long-handled flamethrower nozzle straight.  “You don’t have to prove shit, you know that?  You’ve been proving shit for a long time, if anyone doesn’t believe it, I don’t think you’re going to convince them by getting so intense with all this you destroy yourself.”

“I kind of need to, to give what I’m doing enough weight,” she said.  “Something Bubbleyum taught me.”

“You gotta?  Huh?”

“If I’m going up against Kims and Charles?  I brought so many people here.  If I lose out now, without making a mark, will I be able to do it next time?  Will I keep the people who’d normally be on the fence on our side, instead?”

“Fine,” he said.  “You say that?  I trust you.  But I don’t like you doing this to yourself.  So I’m going to take this brat back with me.  You’re going to use one of your dog tags, call Grandfather so he can talk to you.”

“He wants to talk to me?”

“Yeah.”

“You should’ve said it sooner.”

“Saying it now.  Get yourself sorted, recoup.  We’ll do what we can on our end.  If you need to push forward, Grandfather’s a good one to have with.  He was our recon, our eyes.  Spotter for our snipers.”

Lucy nodded.

“Call him.”

Lucy bit back more nausea, then turned.  She had to take a deep breath, trying to push back a bit of that feeling with a heavy inhalation.

“Grandfather,” she finally said, tossing the tag down.  Her boots crunched ice and splashed in puddles.

His boots followed.

Ribs had leaned over, catching him at one shoulder, and leaned in.  He looked at Lucy.  “Take that earring off?”

“Why?” she asked, wary.  “Are you going to tell Grandfather to hold me down and stop me from going forward?”

“No.  I’m not.  Earring?  I think it’s only right if you take it off when asked.”

“What’s this?” Grandfather asked.

Ribs eyed Lucy.

She paused, then nodded, frowning.  She walked a bit away, until she was out of earshot, pulling the earring off, turning her hand so Ribs could see.  She thought about trying to throw up, to get rid of this feeling, but when she started to lean forward, she felt unsteady.

Elementals stared her down.  Echoes flowed through the woods.  The rain came down hard enough that if she’d been completely dry, she’d be completely soaked in a few seconds.  It battered her, pushing her down.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for Ribs to say what he needed to say.  Grandfather caught up with her.  She put the earring back.

“I’ll burn some places along the way,” Ribs said, holding Xavier in one hand.

“Tell them there’s an abbatoir bogeyman with a construction theme, he was around, so I’d guess at least one house is a nightmare of booby traps.”

“Got it.  Good luck.”

“You too.”

They walked separate ways.  Ribs and Xavier.  Lucy and Grandfather.

“Ribs said you wanted to talk to me?  Info?”

“What?” Grandfather asked.  “I didn’t tell him anything like that.  Not recently.”

“Oh,” she replied.

It was hard to not have a small part of herself take that as a rejection.

“What did he say?”

“Doing his best to tell me where you’re at.  Didn’t want you feeling bad.  Some bogeyman badmouthed you or something?”

“Not exactly,” she replied.  She wasn’t keen to bring that shit back up.

A moment of silence passed.  She felt obligated to say something.  So she told him, “I want to hit the Kim house.  But, uh, might need a guard while I sit for a second.  Bit too cold, tired.”

“You don’t look so hot.”

“Yeah.  Maybe.”

“Back in the day, you would’ve been little, or not even born yet.  I lose track.  We were on both sides of that fight, when we’d walk the line of being everyone’s enemy, and being a nasty enemy at that.”

“Yeah?  You sound like an old man, Grandfather, talking about the old days.”

He let out one half-chuckle.  “H’yeah.  I’m not really that old.  But you know, being around Yalda?  Saw a lot of people of all complexions get green around the gills, stomachs twisting up.”

“Yeah?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah.”

“We think that’s part of how my dad died.  He got sick and they couldn’t tell as easily, because jaundice shows up differently on black skin.  So he went undiagnosed or whatever.”

“I’m sorry.  Extra sorry if I’m jamming my finger into a wound, accident or no.”

“No.  It’s okay.”

“And you know what’ll make me even more sorry?”

“If I die?”

“If I have to go and tell your mom you keeled over for the exact same reason her husband did, because nobody respected the fact you were sick.”

She let out a half-laugh.  It felt a bit more like she was filled with cold air instead of meat.

“Get yourself inside, you little idiot,” Grandfather told her.  “Or you’ll be useless to anyone, yourself included, and your mom’ll be mad at me.”

She indicated the next cabin down the line.

“And tell me your titles while you’re at it.”

“It’s-”

She saw some elementals approaching.  Out in the open, there was so much rain that a silhouette made of rain was barely visible, except for the eyes.  She fell silent and went still, letting them pass.

“My titles?” she asked.

“Say ’em.”

“Lucy Ellingson, first witch of Kennet, trifold duelist, bearer of fang and smoke.”

“You’re speaking clearly enough.  Grab my hand?”

She reached out and squeezed.

“Bit weak.”

“Yeah.”

They reached the back of the cabin.  There was a door leading out, and apparently it connected to a path, because there were fences by the trees and there was an opening in the fence lined up with the back door.

It felt very natural.

“I’m guessing it’s early stage hypothermia.”

“I don’t hear anyone, but that doesn’t mean nobody’s inside,” she said.

“Let me go in first.  Don’t spend any of your Self unless you have to.”

“‘Kay.”

He tried the door, then let her put a spell card there and scribble down an entry mark- something they’d seen on paper when they’d used the ratfink key.

The lock wasn’t anything fancy, and a lot of these cabins had been thrown together, so that helped.

There were no rooms- no interior walls.  It was, except for the fact there were four walls and a roof, little different from the old wild west movies, where they’d have just the front of the building and nothing else.

There was dust, muddled with the rainwater that was leaking in.  It gave the water a shimmer, like oil on a puddle, except it kept to certain shades.

She leaned her back against a wall, halfway convinced it’d break or bend under her weight.

Houses made of glamour, partially washed away.  Something to reinforce… she took note of it all.

“Sit.  Rest,” he said.  He pulled off his jacket, bundling it up to offer it as a pillow.  “I’d tell you to change clothes, but I’d also tell you you’re an idiot if you brought a full change.”

“I can dry this…” she said.  “Spending a little Self, but it should be worth,” she said.  She created a circle around herself.  Leech out moisture.

While she was bent over, striking chalk against ground, one eye on windows, Grandfather seated himself.

“Connection block,” she said.  “More Self…”

He reached forward.  “You say ‘for Kennet’ right?”

“Yeah.”

“From Kennet,” he said, fingertip grazing the diagram.  “From me.  Take what you need.”

She hesitated, then finished the line.  “For Kennet.  I’ll take what you offer.”

The lines lit up with a faint glow.

“Then, um, anti-Augury mark.  Won’t do much good if they’re already watching, but I’m kind of hoping I’ve made Seth and Cameron gunshy about that stuff.  But since I have a bit of glamour, thanks to the market, let’s… Nettlewisp, Nettlewisp, Nettlewisp, keep watch over me before and after sleep, pierce the eyes of any voyeuristic creeps, barbed needles stand ready and primed, do me the favor of buying me some time.”

“Hm,” Grandfather grunted.  He watched as the plant grew.  “Haven’t seen that one.”

“Didn’t use it much when we were against Marcy.  Can’t guarantee she didn’t teach the augur something, but… I should set up other stuff.”

“Should you?” he asked.  “This costs, right?”

“Alarm, for when the chalk marks break,” she said.  “I think I have a bell in my bag.”

Grandfather reached up, put a hand at her shoulder, and forced her to sit.  “I’ll be your alarm.  I watch the chalk, right?”

She nodded.  It was awkward, because he sat close.  He occupied the circle too, in a way that made her wish she’d drawn it larger.  Ass in the circle, back against the wall.

Except then he touched her shoulder.  He didn’t force her, but he pulled on her.

Until her back was to his front.

“Body heat,” Grandfather said.  “Get you warmer faster.  I bounce back from the cold just about as fast as I do from bullets.  There’s enough bad weather as a part of war, killer of soldiers, it factors in.  So I’m pretty close to regular.  If that’s okay?”

“Yeah.”

He was warmer.  It made her cold skin prickle.

He put one hand forward, with a gun in it, pointed at the door.  “You rest.  I’ll stand watch.  I’m going to put my hand at your throat.  Alright?’

She nodded.

His hand went up.  The side of his thumb pressed in.

“Taking your pulse.  I’ll keep taking it until we’re out of the woods.  Cold as you are, I don’t want to feel your pulse or breathing slowing down any.”

“I wanted to do something more useful,” she said.

“I know.  But last I heard, Avery’s group wasn’t moving yet, and our guys aren’t exactly singing and dancing their way through this muck.  We’ve got enough time for a catnap, at the very least.  I hear anything that sounds important, anyone comes, I’ll wake you up.”

She nodded, then turned her head to rest it against his chest.

“I’d do this for Doe, Angel, even Fubar.  And the way I figure it, if I’m going to be your familiar, this shouldn’t spook you or me, right?  Finger on your pulse at all times, sharing vitality, keeping watch, looking after you, letting you look after me before, in the future?”

Talking about it like it was a thing that was going to happen.

“Yeah,” she replied, soft.

“You want to do more in this fight?  We’ll see about making that happen.  But you’ve got to be in fighting shape.  You’re doing better than most, so trust that.  They can’t rest much easier than you can, so trust that.”

“Avery’s coming though.”

“I know.”

Lucy didn’t voice the thoughts.

“I don’t like a lot of our allies,” Lucy said.  “I’m glad they’re cooperating but they aren’t great people.”

“That’s going to happen.  That part of why you went ahead?”

She nodded.  She could feel his thumb against her artery.  She could feel her own pulse.

She’d told John it would be easier to sleep.  That was what this felt like, except turned around.

“Ribs said you needed a hug and I needed to let you know where I was at, after that bogeyman came at you.  Got to you or something?”

“Magic fucked with my head.  Brought up real stuff.”

“Mmm.”

His voice was very growly.

This felt different than Wallace had felt.  In a way she was glad for, because she’d given Avery a lot of shit over the crush on Ms. Hardy, last year.  This wasn’t that.

Water wicked its way off her, hit the floor, and the diagram dragged droplets across the floorboards.  The moment they hit the chalk, they were sent skidding to the far ends of the room.

“I don’t want you to feel obligated,” she said.  “I know I pushed, came in hard, after John.”

“We’ve talked that through.  Don’t sweat it.”

“I sweat it.”

“I’m done with obligations, Lucy,” Grandfather said.  “Alright?  Pretty close to being an oath, that.  I’m not doing anything I don’t want to.  I want to be here, I want to be with my buddies.  I want to get Horseman and Black back.  Midas too, I guess.”

She smiled at that last bit.

“I wish I was done too,” she admitted.

He heaved out a sigh, the movement of his chest lifting her head up and then lowering it again.  “Yeah.”

“Hurt a lot of people this morning.  Some of the perimeter guards-”

“Saw the aftermath of that when we got that far.  Looked like you.”

“Some goblins, some bogeymen, a tag team of a wraith, goblin, undead, shapeshifter, I think.  Then holding some dumb hurting kid hostage, having Ribs cart him away through the rain.”

“Yeah.”

“But they all looked human-ish.  And the goblins and the undead and the wraith and the shapeshifter might’ve all been people… just haven’t had the chance to be, you know?  And I hurt them.  The fucking bogeymen… Ribs and I did the kind of damage you- to people that look human,” Lucy said, her tone insistent.  She lifted up her head.

He pushed it back down.

“I hear you,” Grandfather said.  “I get it.  You can ask me about romance and I’m only guessing, using traces of fragments of memory that War didn’t care that much if I kept.  Some of us have fragments of married men who enlisted, but overall, it’s hard to answer.  But you want someone to speak on the topic of shooting things that look human?  Or are human?  How that wears on the soul, maybe?”

She nodded.

It felt like there was a follow-up.  She heard a smack, like he’d parted his lips to say something.

No words followed.

She closed her eyes to the sound of distant fighting.

“Wake,” Grandfather said, voice low.

She did.  Her eyes flicked open.  She started to sit up, and he stopped her.

People passed by the window.

The sky- the world, it felt like it was screaming, outside this place.

The walls were leaking water in a way that made it look like watercolor.

Grandfather moved his hand when the people had passed.

She stood, checked the connection block.  Barely there.

She nodded.

Had probably kept someone from turning their head her way.

She felt all the aches and pains.  “How long?”

“Ten minutes.  Our guys are drawing them in and getting them more active.  How’s your head?”

“It’s… I can think.”

The difference in clarity with warmth and a brief nap kind of scared her.

“Coherent enough to recite all of Percival the second’s titles?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

“I couldn’t if I tried on my best day, unless I had them on a sheet of paper in front of me.”

“Nah, I want to hear you do it without paper,” Grandfather said, gruff, straightening.

“I think maybe Verona could.  Her head sort of works that way.  She’ll forget to eat, but she can cover the weird stuff.”

“Dry?” he asked.

She checked.  She was.

“Get sorted?  And then we go.  I think our guys have pulled their attention.”

Lucy re-sorted her spell cards, got things organized, drew new insulation against rain, cold, and lightning, and then reinforced that.  She moved the watch to her hand, strapping it around her palm, re-laced her boots, and got her bag ready, and tried to package the Nettlewisp in a plastic bag so she could try and preserve it.

She looked at Grandfather and nodded.

The door opened for about one second before the wind blew it closed.

Grandfather tried again, full-strength, and the resulting slam was so forceful it broke the frame.

A few seconds later, and the door came free of one hinge.

The world outside looked like it was a reflection of the world in a puddle, with a bit of watercolor to it, hammered by the heaviest rain.  There were no straight lines, only the sharp zig-zags of a distorted image, every solid shape giving off spray in every direction.  Water and needles of ice.  Leaves fell, bark melted, and the house exteriors were bleeding, roof shingles being hammered into a pulp that was coming free of nails.

Lucy pulled her hood up, fixed her fox mask into place, clipping the earring to the ear.

Grandfather gave her a quick nod.

Throwing herself out into this rain felt like diving into a pool that had an electric current running through it.

The way she figured it, being out in the Storm before had been the first test of the runework.  Maybe a circle hadn’t been fully closed, or a line didn’t quite meet the point it was meant to, creating a gap.  The rain coming down had found an opening, making it lopsided, and then the entire setup had crumbled like a house of cards.

Now she was putting it under the full test.  Every step was a labor.  Her hat and cape blew hard.

I make them rise, Verona sets things up, Avery makes them fall.

A tall echo appeared before her, eyes wide, face an inch from hers.

“I’m with Ann,” Lucy said.

It was gone a second later.

Grandfather’s instincts were right.  They’d baited the defending forces away.  The Storm had done a number on pretty much everything weaker than, say, the two bogeymen that had come after Lucy.  They hadn’t even tried to get inside, if they were even allowed.

One face of a small cabin was getting hit so hard by rain that the individual panels were blending into one another.  The window frame had gone ajar.

Whatever they’d done to secure it and make it sturdy, it wasn’t holding up.

Lucy marched her way forward, with Grandfather’s steadying hand at her back, saving her from losing ground when the wind pushed her away.

This was hell.  This was actually the sort of thing people had once imagined, when they’d imagined hell.  Pandemonium.

The elementals seized on her, reaching out.  One of them was doing something to make her runes go cold, letting the weather in enough to eat through her protections again.

She hit it with a stick she created using her weapon ring, to make it stop.

She’d reached the Kim house.  The back lines of Charles’s group.  Excepting the people who were in the room with Charles, they were the top members of his faction.  She’d gotten this far.

The Kim house was under siege.  Lucy could see elementals going at it from every direction.  The wards drew them in.  The wards reacted to contact with an elemental by folding it, dividing it, turning it into something plicate, horrored.

They were fluid, though, they lived lifespans of a few minutes, sometimes, so when it came to the question of getting to grips with their new shapes, they were quick.  They didn’t care.  They just went in again.

The first and second layers of wards had collapsed.  The third was under siege.

The idea wasn’t to bring the house down.  The Ottawa council was in there, so that would be a terminal mistake, earning Kennet big enemies.  But everything they could to do distract bought them a chance.

Grandfather tapped her shoulder.

She looked.  She Saw.

The watercolor effect was even more intense with her Sight.  Joel’s figure was more recognizable by the ember-like flares of watercolor that bled off of him, by his girth- he was wearing armor of twisted metal.  By the fact this weather didn’t make him bend or suffer, when everyone else seemed to be.

She could also see, past the crumbled wall, that a bunch of Kims stood at the ready on the porch.  Seth and Cameron were with them.

They didn’t have to worry about the elementals.  Not yet.

“I think I can get the Kims.  Throw them into chaos, make them deal with the elementals,” Lucy said, moving closer to the wall.”

“I can get him.  Their group’s best help against the Storm, right?”

“Right.  Um.  But will the bullet work?  Lots of war practitioners get security against them.”

“Should.  I put in a special ask at the goblin market, before it collapsed.  Didn’t intend it for that guy, but, your plan changed.”

“Right.”

“I won’t ask you to give me permission.”

And I won’t give it, but I’m not saying no, and I know from before, what that means.

But this time I won’t let it poison things.

She kind of understood where her mom was coming from.  What she’d been afraid of.  Because here she was.

“We do it at the same time?” he asked.  “I’ll give you cover fire after.”

“Give me a minute to get ready.”

He nodded.

Provoking the Kims.  She edged in past the wall, eyeing the wards.

The elementals ignored her.  They had juicier targets.

She got her things ready.  One ward she’d break, disrupting protections at the porch, they’d be plunged into the Storm.  All hell would break loose in this environment that already felt hellish enough.

She’d be provoking the next closest things to demons.

Nicolette had talked about Augurs and what they could See in different realms.  The fact Seth and Cameron hadn’t reacted or called out an alert suggested this wasn’t an easy realm to See in.

She laid out the goblin firecrackers between her belly and the wet ground,each with a spell card on the underside.

Kicking the hornet’s nest.  She met Grandfather’s eyes.  Even with ten feet between them, he looked like a distorted picture on an old antenna TV like Barbie and Ran had once had.

I make them rise, Verona sets things up, Avery makes them fall.  That’s the plan.

They’ve got their own plan.  We’ll see what that is.

She lit the firecrackers.

The firecrackers took to the air with a series of whistles, Lucy rolled over to take cover by the wall, and Grandfather’s gun flashed, the sound of it following a second later.

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter