Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.11 | Pale

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The area had been converted to a catacomb-like pit and warded away from Innocents in order to make the access to the Kims, their stuff, and the room as difficult as possible.  The equivalent of forcing someone to take a convoluted detour sixty floors down to the deep basement, and a convoluted detour back up, just to get to the first floor.

Except with threats and ambushes every step of the way.

Julette’s threat with the puzzle bracelet, which Verona had apparently brought up as an idea first, had ended that game fast.  Now they were leaving that space before someone worked out a way to safely use the puzzle bracelet.

Avery had dove in a long way to tackle Lenard, presumably to save Sheridan or do something else vital- Lucy hadn’t had an angle to clearly see.  Then Avery had dipped out.

Which, like, great, that was Avery being Avery, but the whole dynamic they’d established was that Lucy was meant to be Verona, Verona was playing at being Avery, and Avery was meant to be Lucy in role… frontline.

So they had the lesser Others coming from the sides- a lot of the combat practitioners from the sword moot, friendly goblins, and others were out there, doing their best to stem that tide and form a perimeter, staying far enough out that they weren’t visible to Innocents, but not so far out that the perimeter they were trying to defend got too wide.  Then they had the Others and practitioners evacuating from the catacomb-pit of the Kim house, in the dead center of things.

All that going on, and Lucy’s frontline had dashed off.

“Need some backup until Avery gets back!” Lucy called out, one hand at her earring, pitching her voice to be as audible as possible without reaching people out there.

Earring, fox mask, scarf, with her hat in reach.  Each offered a little something.  The weapon ring was a magic item, and worked while gainsaid.

“Hey,” Lucy said, pacing slowly to find the best position in the middle of the chaos, more to take information in than anything else.  To get closer to Julette.  “You okay?”

“Yes, but I feel heavy.  Ugh.”

“Yeah.  Kinda get that.”

The Storm wasn’t quite where they were at, surrounding the Titan, to the north, but the effects of it reached their way.  The diagrams on Lucy’s skin felt different.  Not hers, not tapping into her.  They were more like something she wore, heating up as they pushed back against the cold and the rain.

Some bogeymen had turned on the people below, when Avery had gone after Lenard, and that bought them a chance to step back and take stock.  But that was ending.  Because those Bogeymen, many slick with blood, were climbing up over the edge.

Horseman, unbound and healed from the wound in his neck, leaped forward as two hands reached up to grip a section of broken wall.  A knife in each hand, Horseman stabbed the man in the wrists.

The man pulled himself up, uncaring.  He wore a black suit with gold pinstripes, that swirled with that Abyssal darkness, fighting the bonds of the gold, and, as his head came over, it was clear he wore a golden mask.

It made Lucy think of the Aurum, and the snarls the Aurum might throw at them.  They had ideas on what they wanted to do here, but there were like, ten different vectors that they could get screwed up with.

The effing bird.  When the Carmine Contest had happened, the bird had snatched the ring.  The ring could’ve made the difference, could’ve given John an edge, against the Choir.

The man in the golden mask and suit was whispering.  “…bought a parcel of land, seven years ago…”

There was a distortion around him.  Straight lines going wavy, Abyssal taint touching shadows.

“Careful, Horseman!” Lucy called out.  “He’s doing something!”

“…and bought military surplus…”

“I know he’s doing something,” Horseman grunted.  “What I want him to do is stop doing one thing… holding onto this ledge!”

His elbows turned in as he twisted the knives, hauled one sideways, cutting into flesh.

The bogeyman let go with one hand.  The whispers didn’t stop or falter.  “…Guess where I bought the land?  Where I placed the M-18 claymore mines, years ago?”

“Explosives!” Lucy called out, lunging, catching Black’s arm, and kind of swinging her toward Horseman more than anything else.  “Everyone down!”

The Dog Tags had told Lucy that a lot of explosives weren’t like they were in the movies.

Black caught Horseman as he was rising up, pulling back, catching him in her arms.

These explosions felt a mite more Hollywood, actually.  It was three or four rapid-fire cracks of black smoke and orange fire, gunshot-like sounds, and then more damage done as metal balls tore into wood, flesh, and other materials.

Wards on Lucy helped keep most of that from getting her.  She felt the wards pushing back against the impact of the shockwave and the pattering of ice, snow, and concrete flecks more than she felt the shockwave itself.

Black was a Blast Dog, and Blast Dogs had ways of interacting with regular Dog Tags.  A Dog Tag group could be threatening on its own, with immortal soldiers prowling a battlefield, belonging to both sides at the same time, perpetuating war.  A Dog Tag group with a Blast Dog in it could wade through open flames and keep going past skull-rattling explosions.

So when Black grabbed Horseman and rolled off to one side with him, they ended up close to one of the claymores, Black with her back to it, and when it went off… she got back up with barely an issue, with Horseman right beside her, intact.

Horseman had been knocked clear of the bogeyman in the suit, though, and the man had climbed up over the edge, now, knives impaling the back of each wrist. He pulled them free, looked them over, and then tossed them out behind him, into the pit, before tugging his sleeves back up past the wounded parts.

“I prefer higher quality tools,” he said, before flicking out and flourishing a butterfly knife, plated in gold.

Others followed.  More bogeymen, coming from the middle of everything.  People who’d ducked down at Lucy’s warning were climbing to their feet, ones who hadn’t were reeling.  Some injured, some just shocked and disoriented.

Kims were on the far side of that pit, climbing up as well, keeping more of a distance from the bogeymen.

“The fact you were summoned and the summoner fucked up,” Lucy told the bogeyman.  “Good karma for you if you turn on them.”

“People like you don’t talk to people like me,” he whispered.  “People like you are bought by people like me, to keep in a cellar for when I want to practice my knife skills.

Lucy narrowed her eyes.

“Not because of skin, ideology, affiliation, or nationality, but because you’re so much lesser than I am.”

“You made a mistake,” she told him.  “That explosion?  Showing us that it won’t draw Innocent attention?  Means a whole lot more is on the table.  Is a shotgun blast lesser than you are?”

Grandfather wasn’t that far away.  He heard the cue, turned, and aimed the compact, military-grade shotgun.

Lucy covered one ear as the shotgun’s blast punched out.  The man with the golden mask was just big enough, just secured enough with that partially ruined wall behind him, that he didn’t topple over the edge.

He took a second, pressing a gloved hand to the bloody, torn suit, brought it away glistening with a darker-than-it-should’ve-been crimson, and then silently lunged forward.

Lucy’s instinct was to meet him, while he was off balance, less armed than she was.  She fought that instinct.

Horseman was the one who went to fight the gold-masked bogeyman, and the initial flurry of blows was fierce.  It was a weird image, for the bogeyman to be a pretty big guy -upper bounds of normal for a human- with a comparatively small knife, but he showed very quickly that he knew how to use it.

Horseman, pistol in one hand, a new knife in the other, traded blows with the Other, slicing when in reach, shooting when not.

The bogeyman sliced, opening Horseman’s forearm from wrist to elbow.  Sympathetic pain ran through Lucy, as she remembered being cut open in class by the member of the Wild Hunt.

“Black,” Lucy said, as Black passed by her.  “Was that okay?”

Black gave her a singular, sharp nod.

“Okay,” Lucy said.  Her instincts told her to help Horseman, but…  she backed away a step instead.

Julette was the one to jump forward, instead.

“Be careful.”

Three more bogeymen had surfaced.  Grandfather was facing down one with a ‘widow’ aesthetic, body too narrow, dress so tight the knees touched.  Of the two who remained, one had converted his body into rat cages, with most flesh, skin, and fat removed from stomach, arms, and neck, leaving only an outer encasement of chickenwire and metal framing, and the wrappings of chickenwire and other makeshift protection around nibbled-on, bound-up strands of muscle, veins, arteries, and organs, which were compressed down.  Rats of varying sizes teemed within the cages, rat screams overlapping, instead of them making any squeaking or other sounds.  He glared with unwavering eyes through a curtain of lank, greasy hair.

The second of the two who remained was a man wearing a flat-top cap and long blue-grey uniform coat, that draped in such a way that it hid his arms.  Badge-like medallions on the brim, coat breast, and buckles of his calf-high boots gleamed an eerie silver-white that didn’t feel like it reflected much of anything.

“…bought bear traps too.”

Lucy’s head whipped to her right to look at the man with the golden mask.  In that same moment, the rat man dashed toward Lucy’s left, and the man with the coat began marching forward.

“Bullshit, you set anything!” Lucy called out, challenging it.

“When you have the money, you get to make the rules.”

Black intercepted the rat man.

“Bullshit,” she said.

It felt a bit like her words would’ve normally mattered, just a little, pushing back by calling something out.  They didn’t here.

The man with the coat was making a beeline right for her.  Lucy backed away.  Her concern was Horseman.  She looked, and saw that distortion, saw reality rewriting itself.

Not far from her, either.  There was a patch- she had to move a foot she was using to continue to back away, knee of her other leg bending to accommodate an awkward mis-step.

Toes of the foot she was moving behind her grazed snow and tapped the teeth of a bear trap.

Marker from pocket, she made a staff, and thrust it out toward one point of distortion, where Horseman’s foot was headed.  Similar deal?

Similar deal.  The bear trap closed around the end of the staff.  Horseman stepped on it, but only on the closed trap.  He fell, but with knife embedded in the bogeyman, one hand gripping sleeve, both feet operational, Horseman used the momentum of his backward fall to pull the gold-masked bogeyman after him, and then kick-throw him overhead.

Black had popped the pin on something incendiary, and set herself and the rat man on fire.

Leaving Lucy without a lot of immediate backup, the one in the gray coat marching toward her.

“Neat trick,” he said, with an accented voice.  “You must tell me how that works.”

The medallion on his hat caught light and glinted, a flash of white as fierce as any flashbang.

She’d faced something like this, with the night watchman or whatever he was.  She retaliated, creating a weapon and swinging.

Her weapon hit metal, and the bang echoed through empty space.

The night watchman had used light and momentary blindness to close the distance.  This was the opposite.

Lucy’s vision cleared, and she was in a long hallway, upper half a dingy blue-green of peeling paint, the lower half white tile that had gone brown-yellow, with drains at set intervals, with old blood that hadn’t been fully washed away settled in the grout and around the drains.

The doors on either side of the narrow hallway -one of which her blade had hit- were solitary confinement cells or something, metal bolted to metal, reinforced, rusting, with a drawer for food trays at the floor, and a slat for guards to peer through, at the top end.

“You must tell me.  Tell me everything,” the voice echoed through the hall.

Avery had gone to the Paths, Verona was preparing to draw some attention from the flanks, with Julette helping serve that role from another, more immediate angle, and Lucy was here.

Not great, when the end goal was for them to be at that door.

What had Avery said about the Paths?  Don’t move, take stock, unless there’s a reason to move?

She could hear footsteps.  People were moaning inarticulately on the other side of the doors.

A drawer at the base of a door clacked open, and a narrow, waif-thin arm thrust itself out, groping in the direction of her foot.

She saw the glint of the metal of the hat brim at the hallway’s end, the rest of the bogeyman hidden thoroughly by shadow.  Was the expectation that she’d go toward it?  Run away?

She remained where she was, ready to create a weapon at a moment’s notice.  Panic was the worst thing she could do here.

Expectations.  She had others, at least one for herself.  They’d talked about what they wanted to do in this fight.  Rook’s non-plan, what they’d need to do to enact their plan.  Lucy’s requests had been making sure she was armored in her personal wards, with at least one layer of glamour to fall back on.

She had a lot of her usual tools.  She was very aware she was missing a lot too.  The things that glamour and bullshittery would help gloss over, that let her fighting techniques work, spell cards, and that sort of thing.  She didn’t have the ability to manipulate her own glamour, so if this protective, become-a-fox layer broke, then she had to either do without, or hope they could get some Fae or fairy help to shore it up and replace it.

So.  Priority: not getting hurt or jostled so badly the glamour was shattered.

For right this minute, she was playing Avery’s role.  Dropped into a fucked up scenario and trying to find a way through.  She was playing a defensive role.

What angle would he choose to come after her?  She could guess at a few.  Trying to pressure her by marching her way, getting her to flee into trouble.  Opening all the doors.  Misleading her with that glint at the end of the hallway.  Throwing open a cell door to come at her from the side.

What moves could she make that were reasonably safe?  She had to account for him pulling out a new trick, too.

The hat-brim medallion or something like it caught the light at the hallway’s end.  It was bright.  Shield her eyes?

She didn’t.  She turned, pen becoming weapon, and thrust, sinking blade into the bogeyman’s lower belly.

The cost of turning her back wasn’t much different from the cost of having her back turned to the hallway behind her.  The cost of thrusting at empty space was negligible.  But if this was the ‘jumpscare’ moment, him grabbing her from behind when she’d covered her eyes or thought he was way down there at the opposite end of the hallway, then there were decent-enough odds he’d be there.

And he had.

She abandoned her pen because the cost of pulling it free was too high.

Reset, take stock, decide positions, make sure she was ready for the next go-around.  She had a marker on her pocket.  The copper one Jude had used to draw on her.

She didn’t give it a form yet.

The bogeyman straightened, hand at his bleeding stomach, smiled, and then banged the side of his fist on the door.

The doors all up and down the hallway began to fly open.  Lucy turned marker into staff, and let it extend horizontally, slamming the two doors on either side of her closed.

All up and down the hall, people stumbled out of locked rooms.  Spilled out, in some cases, where there was more than one prisoner.  People all with shaved heads, dressed in tunics that barely reached upper thigh, faces heavily scarred, often in the sense they had lips or lower faces carved away or pinned to the sides or upper parts of their heads, covered in scars and other body modification.

“You know how it works,” the bogeyman said.  “Hurt her or I hurt you.  Kill her and deny me the chance to work on her, and I’ll take what I was going to do to her and do it to you ten times over.”

Fear clearly motivated them.

Lucy, with the reprieve from the fact the doors closest to her were pinned shut, reached for her bag, grabbed a jar Verona had given her, and tossed it.

Smoke filled the corridor.

Stay measured, don’t panic.

Soreness from last night and the scraps she’d had earlier slowed her down, to the point she felt like she was moving in slow motion.  But her mask was set up to let her see through smoke, to let her breathe, her earring caught sounds.

The trick, then, became to not corner herself.  She couldn’t take someone down if she’d be tripping over their body.

Not destroying the glamour.  Kicking too hard, too brutally, it had the same effect on glamour as being kicked.

So she worked both sides, lunging, shoving someone sideways, into his friend, who had a meal tray in hand, letting them scuffle as a result, stepping back, hand still on the marker-staff keeping doors shut.

Ducking under the staff, planting foot on an open door, then push-kicking it so it swung into the faces of two coughing, half-blind prisoners coming her way.

“How the tables have turned,” the voice echoed.

It wasn’t the bogeyman.  A young voice, not a kid, not a woman.

“Kira-Lynn?” Lucy asked, her own voice echoing.

“No real power, all you’ve got are some magic items you picked up, and some awkward practice you were granted, and you’re fighting the underdogs who climbed their way up from a shitty, shitty position, who fought the establishment, and who earned their place.  I wonder if you’re capable of seeing where we were coming from, or if you’re that stupid and singleminded.”

Lucy turned her weapon into a rapier, backing up as the doors came open, the two people inside tumbling out, fighting people who’d been running down the hallway in a case of smoke-blind mistaken identity and desperation.

“Talked to your parents, Kira-Lynn!” Lucy called out.

“Fuck you.”

“They love you and want you to come home.”

“Fuck that.”

“I looked at them with Sight, before I was gainsaid!  I didn’t see any taint-!” Lucy shouted.

Her voice was a way for the prisoners to find her.  Every response she gave was a signal for them to come get her.  She caught one at the shoulder and sleeve, swung him into another, and pushed the two of them through a door.  She slammed it shut.

A third got a grip on Lucy’s coat and sweatshirt, pulling them up her back.  She backed away as much as she could before she got caught in it, saw a wild kick coming up toward her face, and twisted to one side.  Still with fabric pulled backward over head and shoulders, she caught the back of the foot with one hand, turned her weapon into a short knife, and cut.

The prisoner screamed, her voice ragged.  She fell, kicking to try to get her leg away from the blade, and Lucy directed the fall.

The prisoner landed against the recently closed door.  Lucy fixed fabric, trying to get a sense of who was where, turning blade into rapier again.

The door was shoved open, but with the prisoner lying right against the base of it, the slat for food trays to get pushed under had a gap, and the gap ran over her hand, skinning the back of it, with hand becoming an inadvertent doorstop.

“Sorry,” Lucy murmured, heart pounding, panting for breath, dizzy, even with the mask providing a bubble of clean air.  “Didn’t see any real darkness in them with my Sight, Kira-Lynn!  Other St. Victor’s said your parents seemed fine!  You tell me they were abusive or something, I’ll help you some other way-!”

“You’ll help me?  I think you’re the one who needs help!”

“If it’s not them, then what’s your fucking issue, Kira-Lynn!?”

“It was fine, it was just fine!  Below average across the board!  Every guy I could’ve dated, below average.  Every prospect, everything I could’ve had in my life!  Does a girl from a small town get to be Prime Minister?  Does a girl like me get to meet celebrities?  Does a girl like me get to make any real lasting mark on the world?”

“What the hell kind of mark are you making now?  A shit stain?”

Kira-Lynn laughed, and the laugh echoed through dark, hallways with Abyss taint staining the wallpaper, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

“Get her and make it hurt,” Kira-Lynn said.

“That’s your retort?  Weren’t you supposed to be the brains of that group?” Lucy asked, even as her internal alarm bells went to 11, every sense pushed so far that it felt like she was getting false information, seeing faces in the smoke, hearing things that weren’t there.

It was a relief when the bogeyman came, clear in the midst of that, coat flapping behind him, the metal gleaming.

Lucy stabbed him as he approached, and he ignored it.  She backed away, pushed past some of the prisoners- she was getting further out of the smoke.  They saw her, but they saw the bogeyman too, and cringed, cowering down as low and close to the base of the wall as they could, or retreated into rooms.

This was a nightmare space, and he owned it.  The way he came for her, marching without slowing, a steam-train kind of momentum, hands hidden… anything short of running, and it felt like he’d catch up.  It felt like she could run, actually, and the moment she tired, he’d be closing the distance, catching her.  The medallion gleamed, but Lucy kept her focus half-turned elsewhere, keeping aware of this space.

She almost walked into a pillar in the center of the hallway.  That could’ve broken her glamour.  She circled around it.

Doors were open, a chain strung between them.  Lucy had to duck beneath to avoid getting clotheslined.

A pile of bodies in body bags, stacked up against the wall, some having fallen.  The bags matched the same grayish green-blue of the bogeyman’s coat and these hallways, almost camouflaged, if it wasn’t for the white tile.  Fatty fluids had leaked out, making parts of the bags shiny and slippery.  Parts of the floor, in shiny streaks pointing to the drains.

Lucy was in the middle of trying to navigate, trying to move fast enough, trying to keep track of any incoming attacks or maneuvers by the bogeyman, and not letting that light consume her and her vision, when she heard Kira-Lynn.

“Boo.”

It would’ve been more effective if Kira-Lynn hadn’t broadcast her position.  Lucy moved- narrowly avoiding the blast from one of the black wands.

It cost her momentum, though.  And with all the same factors still there, the bogeyman approaching, footing treacherous, the light, her own pace and momentum… he reached her.

She stabbed him.  He didn’t act like he cared.  He reached out, grabbing at the collar of sweatshirt and coat.  Lifting her off her feet.

Bubbleyum special, she thought.  Her hands gripped his wrist, one foot planted on his stomach, and she half-walked up his front, until her chest and stomach touched the underside of his arm.

Then she threw her upper body down, legs forming a cross-legged position, calves catching his bicep, then sliding up to elbow.

The kind of thing that only worked against someone bigger than her, with the strength to hold her up without staggering much.

It bent his arm and spoiled his grip on her.  She tumbled, her grip on his sleeve keeping her impact with the ground reasonably light, with no head-meeting-tile moment.

Weapon ring let her turn her weapon into a staff, butt end braced against her body, other end thrusting upward at an angle.  Very close to the wound she’d already put in his middle.  Slight adjustment- into the wound she’d already put there.

He staggered back, gut wound making a faint wet ‘pluck’ sound as it came away from the end of the staff.

But metal glinted and gleamed.  The hand she’d been holding onto had a chain, and the chain stretched from his hand to her wrist, where she’d been shackled.

He stomped on the slack of the chain, and she stumbled, pulled downward.  The gleaming metal at his boots, belt buckle, and at points all across his body shone so bright they blinded.  She wasn’t in a position to look away, so she closed her eyes.  It shone past eyelids.

When she looked up, a split-second later, the back of her head butted up against a metal headrest.

Her wrists jerked, and were inside shackles.

A metal chair in a closed room, sans padding, with restraints built in.  A bright flickering light shining in her face, hot enough her skin prickled.

“You’ll want to tell me everything,” the bogeyman said.  He pushed a metal cart that bounced and rattled as it went over the gaps between tiles.  Tools were laid out on top.  “Every secret, everything your side in this war is planning.  It won’t change what I do to you, but you’ll hold onto more of yourself for longer, reminding yourself of what you once knew to be true.”

“Not even the first time I’ve heard that kind of line today,” she told him.

“I suspect it will be the last,” he said.

Lucy heard a giggle.  She squinted past the light.

Kira-Lynn was in the corner by the door, arms folded, watching.

The coloration- white skin too white, shadows with faint swirls and shifting watercolor to them.  Kira-Lynn had taken in more Abyss stuff.  And she was carrying a lantern that really made that divide much starker- the light from the lantern very white, the metal very black and swirly.

Still wearing her St. Victor’s uniform and the coat that was sold through the same vendor the uniforms were ordered through, though not required.  It looked like she’d taken off the badge, with one or two threads left.

Lucy wasn’t sure why she was fixating on that, considering.  Her arm jerked against the shackle, testing it.

“Stronger individuals than you have been in my chair,” the bogeyman said.

“The magic item that lets her make weapons is the pokey little sword ring,” Kira-Lynn said.  “Take the finger off?”

“A little crude to start,” he said, picking up a handheld set of bolt cutters.  “Normally, there’s a sequence to these things.”

“Just do it?”

“I’m not saying no,” he told Kira-Lynn, patiently.  “But you must let me elaborate on how a proper interrogation is done.”

“Won’t complain about learning from a master,” she said.

“Really?” Lucy asked.  “This is who you are?”

“I was something else.  A goddess backed me.  Answered when I called.”

“She was a child, basically, among Fae.”

“A goddess answered when I called.  Looked me in the eyes.  Saw something in me.  Favored me.  A goddess.”

“Is she answering you now?  Looking you in the eye now?” Lucy asked.  “If you really cared you’d be confronting the Wild Hunt.”

The bogeyman stepped to one side, placing his tall form between Lucy and Kira-Lynn.  “She’s baiting you.”

“You failed her and you’re failing her more by being here, being this inelegant!  A shitty bogeyman redundant with like, two others I’ve fought, is having to keep telling you that you’re fucking up!  Inelegant!”

“What the fuck is this inelegance-?”

Kira-Lynn stopped short as the bogeyman grabbed her.

“Fuck,” Kira-Lynn said.  “The ring.”

The bogeyman turned around, brandishing the bolt cutters, which were all surgical steel, albeit with some Abyss-staining at the grips.  He reached for her hand with the ring around one finger.

Lucy lifted her butt off the chair seat, moving her pocket to where her hand was.  Pens and markers were in a row along the pocket’s edge.  She grabbed one.

Similar deal as before, but accuracy mattered.  Pen became a fighting staff.  Except accuracy mattered more than when she’d pinned the doors shut, earlier.  She let the one end hit the armrest with built-in restraints, and aimed the other one.

No, aim was hard.  She made the weapon a trident with two prongs, to give herself more leeway.  The weapon flowed out to full length, pressing at either armrest, pushing them out.

Her knees and thighs  pushed outward too, against where armrests went down to be attached to the seat, just before the bogeyman could grab for the weapon’s shaft.

Something came loose. and she threw her entire body and all of her arm’s strength into pushing at the armrest.

Him pulling the bident away didn’t hurt any, since it was more strength and more pressure put on the armrest.  She heard a bolt straining and popping, leaned hard into it…

The armrest came free.  Still attached to her wrist, but free of chair back and chair seat.

She released the marker, and turned the armrest into a weapon.  A mallet.

She smacked the bolt cutters from his hand, then caught his face on the backswing.

He swiped the weapon from her hand.  The armrest and shackle clattered to the ground, not far from Kira-Lynn.

For a moment, Lucy was at a loss for what to do.  Then she remembered Verona manipulating the cloak… and a modification she’d made to her own mask, in the past.

She touched the mask, and opened the fox’s jaws.  As the bogeyman reached for her arm, she sank teeth into his head.

After a moment of pressure, teeth crunched, and the jaw closed a bit.

It didn’t stop him.  Of course it wouldn’t stop him.

She was still mindful of glamour, and not wanting any huge impacts, so she put feet on him and pushed him back and away.

Leaving one arm bound and Kira-Lynn as a problem.  Kira-Lynn drew a wand.

Teeth sank into the other armrest, and Lucy tumbled from the chair as it broke, avoiding the first blast of the wand.  It looked like Kira-Lynn’s arm was in pretty bad shape.  Damage from firing the black branch thing.

She took two steps toward Kira-Lynn, and rather than aim the branch again, Kira-Lynn raised the lantern to her mouth and blew.

Lucy was back on the battlefield, silver-white smoke rolling off of her.  Glamour had cracked and broken up a bit where the shackle had pulled, and around the base of her foot.

Don’t make a big deal of it, let it naturally smoosh back together, she thought, hand gripping her wrist.

The bogeyman had the head injury from being chewed on, and the wound at his gut.

Kira-Lynn was on the far side of the pit, holding the lantern that had the black part intact, but no light within, silver-white or otherwise.  She was calling out to one of the bogeymen.  The rat one, who’d been badly burned.

Lucy backed away from the injured interrogator bogeyman, reminding herself of who was where, and what was going on.  It looked like more bogeymen had come up over the edge, including a girl with a book with a bleeding gash on the cover that was losing pages, the pages forming a storm around her, and a shirtless man, gaunt, who looked like he’d had a brass animal head molded and cast over his head, neck, and shoulders while it was still hot, with melted and scarred flesh mingling with the edges of the molten brass.  A calf.

If the bogeymen had turned on the Kims, they’d brokered a loose deal, maybe.  Some had still suffered in the back and forth, and Lucy could see one skirmish further down the pit, but the Kims were climbing up at one end, the bogeymen at another.

Lucy shook her head and returned her mask to normal.  Wood creaked and crackled as it settled back into its original shape, without a slavering maw and rows of fangs.

We didn’t exchange masks, Lucy thought.  We’re still us.  Our wording was bad.  My job isn’t to be Verona.  Avery’s job isn’t to be me.

I am a fox.  So what’s a fox approach to Verona’s ‘fuck you of ace up my sleeve’?

Before the bogeyman had ensnared her, she’d been thinking about the Blast Dogs.  Synergy.

Black Dogs, which encompassed famine, sickness, and a bunch of other types, were a part of that synergy.

I don’t think I can be a replacement black dog.

But it was a direction to start thinking.

“Black,” Lucy said.  “Mrs. Flowers.”

Mrs. Flowers was one of the parents of one of the kids.  She held an improvised weapon, a piece of the manor that had burned and broken off, maybe gutter, and held it like a bat, looking spooked.

“You want to help?” Lucy asked.

“I want to get to my daughter.”

“Come on.  Let’s try to get you closer to your daughter, then.”

“My husband’s hurt.”

“I know.  But he’s being looked after.  I don’t know if we can fix what’s broken, but magic is real, and… maybe.”

“Then my daughter.”

Lucy led them to one side, to where a portion of the manor’s exterior wall still stood.  It put them close to the perimeter, but the battle lines seemed to be holding there.  Bluntmunch was tossing people around, and a gremlin had Zed’s radio, which was broadcasting its weirdo messages, and spitting out staticky ghosts.

“Switch coats,” Lucy said.  “Give Mrs. Flowers your mask.”

Black nodded, and began pulling off her fireproof coat with its military branding.

It and the full-face gas and smoke mask were mostly for show, as Lucy understood it.

Mrs. Flowers hesitated, then obeyed, pulling the fireproof coat to her lap, then undoing her own coat.  “Cold.”

“Sorry,” Lucy said, before peeking.

The connection blockers seemed to be holding, which was a bit of a nuisance, because the Titan was there.  When explosions had gone off or guns had been shot, the Titan had drawn closer, which strained things further.

Kira-Lynn was holding out the lantern.  The rat man bogeyman was kissing it… kindling a light inside.  It was the dull and spotty orange of an old burned lightbulb, but cast light like it was orders of magnitude larger.  Snow was tinted, and the spots that were cast out as shadows swirled with Abyss taint.

“Midas!” Lucy called out.

Her voice was nearly lost in the wind, rain, and the overlapping shouts of the battlefield.  The Titan being as close as he was was an issue too.

But Midas saw her.  She tried her best to mime a lantern.

Really trying to play at being Verona now, playing charades.

The Rat Bogeyman sprinted off.  Midas seemed to get Lucy’s meaning, and turned, aiming.

Lucy peeked.  Kira-Lynn turned just as the gunshot went off.  No luck.

She looked back the other way, and saw the connection blocks getting shaky.

“Okay!” she called out.  “Nice attempt!  But hold off, connection blocks are failing!”

That might’ve been because of the state of the fight.  The Kims were mortal and powerless, except for the weapons they were packing, and so was Lucy.  Key players had been removed, and the whole Titan situation was a mess.

Verona could probably whip up some crazy diagram or practice to handle the Titan situation.  She already kind of had thrown a wrench in the works of the other side.  But Lucy wasn’t that.

Big moves from a distance, she thought.

Circling around the pit, the rat man glowed with inner light, now, eyes ablaze with that dull orange luminescence.  He’d healed some.

Foggy was out there with Pipes.  Two big Dog Tags, one dopey, the other loud.

As the bogeyman drew closer to them, there was a lens flare effect, that same dull, burned-lightbulb orange, that stuck in the center of Lucy’s vision, as if she’d stared into the sun.

Foggy and Pipes dropped, torn up in a hundred different ways, with holes in them an arm could be stuck through, teeming rats crawling out and through, tearing at flesh as they did.

The bogeyman had a shattered jaw, and, Lucy had to twist around to look over her other shoulder, back to a damaged wall, to see.  Kira-Lynn was panting for breath, covered in a light blood mist.

Lucy waited until Julette was moving in the right direction, and flagged her down.  Julette came over, with some foundlings behind her, panting for breath.

“Doing okay?  I know you don’t like running,” Lucy said.

Julette groaned and sank down to a sitting position beside Lucy.

“Do the Avery thing in a Cat way, okay?”

“Okay.  Whatever that means.”

“I need help, and I’m worried if I go out there I’m going to get stuck in another fight.  Especially since Kira-Lynn’s pissed at me.”

“Help?” Julette panted.

“I need a strike force.  Nobody that’s tied up with other stuff, but like, Grandfather, maybe, maybe a couple others.  Uh, one of Pesch’s…”

“I’m an errand runner?”

“Any help you can give me.”

“What else?”

“Doglick.  Any other decent goblins.”

“Big ask.  If we’re pulling that many away, should we shift our guys?  Shift everyone?”

Lucy considered.  “If we can?  But I feel like there’d be stragglers, people caught up in fights.”

“Yeah, okay.  Will see.  And Avery?”

“Is she here?”

“Popped back up, she’s getting her leg healed.  Snowdrop’s rallying goblins.”

“Could use you both.”

The fact they had a huddle had drawn a couple people from the outer perimeter over to help defend them from the Others that were coming through the woods, so the battle lines were thicker, but then that in itself seemed to be pulling people away too.

Oakham thunked herself down, Bracken following at a crouch-run.

“Not sure you want in on this,” Lucy said.  “Might be a lot.”

“I had friends die last night.  Anything I can do?”

“Jockey?” Julette asked, looking at Lucy.  She was panting less.  “If some of the hosts are getting tired or panicky?”

“Maybe,” Lucy said.  “Did say I wanted one.  And hey?  Best friend?”

She moved her foot over, and pressed it down over top of Oakham’s, as Oakham frowned slightly.

“What?” Julette asked.

“I hate to say it, but you might actually be getting in shape.  You’re recuperating faster than normal.”

“Could be alchemy, could be bullshit,” Julette said, rubbing at her hand.

Lucy nodded.  She reached past Julette’s head to where Alexanderp was sitting in her hood, butt resting on the top of the backpack beneath with the hood and scarf in between as a cushion, body flopped forward, no energy.

“How’s he doing?”

Lucy shook her head.

“Yeah, figured.”

She had to hope Julette got that warning, and that the warning wasn’t something that tipped off Seth and Cameron.  A heads up about augury tied to a warning about the little tells about Julette recovering too fast from running around.

Seth wasn’t that bright, but still.

The Kims were using black branches, seemingly without any care about the drawbacks, where the black branches caused damage to their arms.

Lucy took a second, while Julette ran off, wincing as a Kim shot a blast of Abyssal energy at the wall.  They’d been aiming for Julette’s running form, but the shot arced sideways, judging by the angle the woman was standing.

She got her bag off and grabbed a jar of alchemical smoke.  “Smoke cover.”

“I have canisters,” Black said.  She’d pulled off her mask, and her face, wide-eyed with hair plastered to head from sweat and the humidity in her mask, stared at Lucy, surprisingly young, skin the lightest of browns, black hair a bit shaggy, with eyelashes so dense and moist with that humidity it looked like she had mascara on.

Lucy always found it funny and disconcerting, when Black went unmasked, voice unmuffled, revealing her face.

“Cool.  Would love to use those.”

“Want to carry them?  I’m not sure how much kit I want to carry with, if I’m-”

“Posing,” Lucy said.  “If they send people after Innocents, as I think they’re doing, I’d rather it’s someone immortal like you.  Mrs. Flowers can use the mask, too.

“Sounds good.”  Black disconnected the belt and passed it to Lucy.

Lucy winced at the noise as something hit the wall again.

The Storm was creeping back in, the rain coming down harder, limiting visibility.  The Titan glowed, massive, a young man, looming dangerously close to the settlement and other Innocents.

There were two things they could do- play defense or go on the offense.

Something was keeping the Titan from trampling the Kims, and they looked wary but not anxious.  That made Lucy think there was a scheme at play.

Doglick yipped, and came running over.

“Hey,” Oakham said.

Lucy put out hands and clapped.  Doglick barked, leaped, and became a crossbow.

Lucy almost hit the trigger as she awkwardly caught it, with the trigger pointed in Oakham’s general direction.

At least there wasn’t anything loaded.  It would’ve been a weird tonguing and a yank at worst.

“Hey what?” Lucy asked.

“There’s an eye in the snow.”

Lucy shifted her grip on the crossbow, with no good weapons to use the weapon ring on, and punched, instead, for the area Oakham was pointing at before she’d even seen.

She saw only a glimpse of it, her hand moving to it It was snow, sculpted into an eyeball with lids, the pupil a slight depression, iris etched in frost, roving as it looked.

It closed and ceased to be before her gloved fist connected with wet snow.

“Punch weird eyes, got it,” Oakham said.

“Probably enemy augurs.  Any idea how long it was there?”

Oakham shook her head.

“Then they know, I guess,” Lucy said.  She craned around, looking past Oakham, and saw Avery and Julette running over.

There was barely enough wall for all of them, so they formed a huddle.  Avery panted for breath.

“You okay?” Lucy asked.

“Poured healing potion on my jeans, probably wrecked ’em, but I already got ’em bloody anyway.  Hey, hi.”

“Hey.”

“Got you an Avery, got your guys running over, didn’t have any volunteer-”

Lucy held a finger to her mouth.

“Augurs,” Oakham whispered.

“Right.  Well, we’re assuming we’re listened to most of the time.”

Lucy checked on Alexanderp again, poking at Julette’s hood.  Deflated and exhausted.

“Not doing so hot,” Lucy observed.

“Would be nice if he held on, I can get him back to the House on Half Street, sustain him a bit there.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, shifting position.  Without there being much wall, she leaned in sideways, finding a chance to rest against the wall with just one shoulder and the side of her head.  “Sheridan’s a Loser now.  Opposite of a Finder, professional sender of things to the Paths.  Got Lenard.  There’s complications tied to that, but that’s a tomorrow problem.”

“Blankshanks had a working mindset on tomorrow problems,” Julette said.

“Yeah,” Avery said.  “Hmm.  Pauline Dishman and the jockey riding her got Helen, we’re hoping.”

“Let’s hope,” Lucy said.  “I didn’t have a good angle to see.  Good to know.”

“According to Florin, that particular sub-type of Jockey should be able to steer Pauline’s natural ability to get them to some nice, deep, out of the way sub-realm.”

“I tried to get a jockey who’d ride this lady,” Julette said.  “But they’re pretty cozy.  The people they’re riding are kinda happy being passive observers, with powers, and-”

Deafening, ripping, tearing noise surrounded them.  The entire wall shifted, which was alarming when it was basically what lay between them and tipping into the pit.  Like having a chair pulled out from under her, but it was ground and wall.

“What was that?” Mrs. Flowers asked, voice muffled by the mask.

“I think they just shot something like ten black branches in this direction,” Lucy said.  The wall faintly creaked.  She looked at Avery.  “Good to go?”

“I’m not a frontline combatant.”

“I was saying before, basically, I’m not a cat, I’m a fox.  You’re not a deer, you’re a cat.”

“What does that even mean, though?” Avery asked.  “I’m not a fox, I’m a deer?”

“Change of roles, still, but do what’s comfortable and natural.”

“You need me in the thick of it?”

“As much as I was, before.”

“I had ideas.”

“Ideas are good,” Lucy said.  She lightly thunked a fist against Avery’s shoulder.

“We need to scram,” Julette said.  “Before they do that again.”

“We’ve got people?” Lucy asked, checking.  There were a few huddled around the corner.  Grandfather included.

And one of the jockeys, dressed up as an Innocent woman.

“Before we go, question,” Black said.

The question didn’t have a question mark at the end.  It was a statement, made with an object.

Black’s usual setup included a whole mess of explosives, incendiary and smoke grenades, an outfit that layered something fire resistant over what might’ve been the outfit for a foreign bomb disposal squad, a gas mask, and this.  An oxygen tank.

“Different when it’s you wearing it.”

“Could use it,” Black said.

“Can you rig something?” Lucy asked.

Black gave Lucy a ‘get serious’ look.

“Disrupting the Kims.”

“I’ll carry it then.”

Lucy hurled the jar of alchemical smoke.

Some black branches fired, trying to hit it, maybe.  Or to counter whatever she was doing.  They struck areas all over the place, but the jar shattered, and smoke billowed out.

“Go.  Give cover where you can,” Lucy urged.

Then she had to almost climb over Oakham to go around to the other end of the wall, closer to the place the battle was still being fought, people staggering a retreat their way, to this end of things, where they were huddled between manor and treeline, and got into position.

Let the others be a distraction.  Let Avery handle being frontline.  Lucy wanted to problem solve.

“Pull this off, Doglick, and any day you come to me for a head scratch in the next year, I’ll give you one.  And I’ll tell other goblins how awesome you are.”

She could feel the happiness in the crossbow.  She loaded two of the skewers that were strapped to the side of the stretched-tongue-and-scrap wood crossbow into the top.

“Fetch: Kira-Lynn, her lantern, or both.”

She fired.

Tongue stretched out over a good hundred feet, trailing loosely and unevenly behind the twin metal skewers.

Kira-Lynn moved out of the way, almost without seeming to care.  She turned to look Lucy’s way, and flipped her middle finger, before whistling twice.  The lantern flared.

The rats-in-a-cage bogeyman broke away from the fight with Horseman to start sprinting Lucy’s way.

Magic lantern, connected to a bogeyman, empowered them, and granted this weird lens flare bullshit.  Going by what had happened to Piper and Foggy, who were only barely starting to move again, it was some thing where it would stop time, pull both target and bogeyman into an Abyssal place where there’d be traps and hazards, they’d fight, and then they’d resume previous places, with however much damage they’d taken.

“Ha, ha,” Doglick panted.

The tongue was slowly feeding out, still.

Lucy held position, back to the wall, letting Doglick do his work.  The rat man closed in-

And a bombardment rained down on the bogeyman.  Goblin weapons, like gas and sticky stuff.

But Liberty was up there too.

Avery was airborne, holding onto something legitimately steampunk, a kind of hanglider with a propeller.  Snowdrop was with her.

She dropped out of the sky, the hanglider folding up into a paper airplane, and swung her lacrosse stick twice at the ratcage bogeyman.

“Now, boy,” Lucy whispered, bracing herself, one foot against the base of the wall, just in case.  Kira-Lynn turned her head to look over, then down.

Doglick’s projectiles had missed the mark, but the tongue had been left stretched semi-slack across the top of the pit, over to snow, over in Kira-Lynn’s direction.

The tongue reeled in, lashing out as it did, and caught Kira-Lynn by the ankle, dragging her.

She saw that coming.  She just wasn’t sure what it was going to be.

Augurs, again.

Lucy grunted as the slack in the line went taut.  Kira-Lynn was dragged toward the pit.

Kira-Lynn tipping over meant that she lost some of whatever she was doing with the lantern.  The light guttered, maybe, or the Abyss lost trust in her.  Lucy couldn’t see the lantern well enough, but she could see Avery dealing with the rat bogeyman.  She could see the light in the rat bogeyman dim, and a lunge he’d been preparing for went too short, became a stumble.

Avery cracked him across the head with the lacrosse stick, knocking him over.

Lucy was forced to take a moment to weigh what she was doing.  On being pulled into the pit, Kira-Lynn would fall.  She’d swing, presumably with Doglick’s grip being tight enough, from the top end of the far side to about fifty or sixty feet down on this side.  It could be a hard fall, a hard crash if she swung the breadth of the pit, which was the breadth of the manor grounds, basically three houses across, and hit a wall.

But she was Abyss-tainted and hardier,  Lucy told herself, asserting her grip.

How much hardier?

Kira-Lynn was trying to pull the tongue free, which was hard when she went up and down as she hit rises and dips in the ground, being dragged.  From ice to snow to puddle.

Would Kira-Lynn be in fighting shape?  Probably not.

Hospitalized?  A coma?  Not out of the question?

Dead?  Maybe?

How okay or not okay am I with that? Lucy thought, her entire body taut, ready to catch Kira-Lynn’s weight if it came down to it.  Kira-Lynn was exceptional among the St. Victor’s kids in that she’d gone over the edge.  She was, Lucy worried, genuinely evil.  Even without the Abyss stuff.

She was spared the hard decision by a shot of black energy from a black wand.  An older Kim, of similar age and stature to Desmond Kim, the one who’d argued with the judges.  It severed the tongue.

“You okay?” Lucy asked, bracing herself as the tongue came back with elastic force, reeling in at lightning speed now that the tension was gone.

The tongue swatted the side of Lucy’s head before it finished reeling in.

The crossbow jumped in her arms, not in a bad way.  Excited.

Good enough.

Avery swung the stick at the bogeyman, who hadn’t quite recovered, and knocked him into the pit.

“When I stopped to heal, Thea was there,” Avery said, coming to Lucy’s side, helping Lucy to a standing position.  “She had the flying things from the Ornithopter’s realm, that Verona and I saw.”

“Don’t fly so high the connection blockers don’t touch you.”

“They’re covering the Titan, and he’s like, fifty feet tall, so…”

“Point,” Lucy grunted.

She caught a glimpse of Kira-Lynn, who was with Teddy and a few of the new St. Victor’s students.  They’d tried to connect to the students, to have parents reach out.  The ones who’d remained were the ones who’d bought in all the way.

“Good attempt,” Grandfather said, as Avery and Lucy headed back around the wall at the corner and toward the tail end of their group.  The air was still smokey.

“Huh?” Lucy grunted.

Grandfather put a hand at her shoulder and moved her a few feet to the right, moving around her to be on her left, so that he was between her and, presumably, any incoming fire.  “With Doglick.”

“He’s a good boy,” Lucy said, panting from running, and from creeping, full-body exhaustion.  “Some of the time.”

The faint praise seemed to make crossbow-Doglick happier than straight praise would’ve.

“Go on.  Was worth a shot,” Lucy said, tossing Doglick away.  He became a dog, tumbled, and lay there, belly up, hoping for a belly rub, until they passed by.  Lucy would’ve, but she was honestly so tired that she didn’t want to, and they were crossing no-man’s land, where a stray shot from a black branch could arc past Grandfather to kill her.

And, honestly, her read on Doglick put the belly rub in the same bucket as the compliment.  The perverse goblin parts of him were probably happier to offer a ‘wholesome’ belly rub and be rejected than to get one.

Some scattered trees offered cover.

“Black,” Lucy said.

It felt weird addressing the Dog Tag when Black was dressed up in an Innocent’s coat, with no obvious getup.  Mrs. Flowers, who was dressed up as Black, was just as disconcerting, hanging off to the side, looking anxious.  It touched two neural wires in Lucy’s head that read ‘bomb expert’ and ‘anxious’ and connected them in a way that naturally felt weird.

“Setting up… simple stuff,” Black mumbled.  She mumbled a lot while working.  “Where do we want her?”

Lucy looked over in the direction of the Titan.  It looked frustrated.  “Kims, mainly.”

“They’re basically immortal.”

“Still.”

“Okay.  Will be ready soon.”

“We’ve got a problem with Augurs,” Lucy said.  “I think… my read on this, is the smaller their numbers get, the narrower the Augur’s focus gets.”

“They’re going to focus a lot on themselves too, I figure.  Self preservation?  So as we get closer to them?”

“Are we closer to them?” Julette asked.

“They evacuated,” Lucy confirmed.  “They’re at the back of the group.  I’m figuring they’re halfway to wherever you met the Allaires, and they’re calling key people with warnings.  Maybe direct lines to earbuds or headphones or whatever.  Kira-Lynn’s got some powerful Abyssal lantern that empowers bogeymen.  Foggy and Pipes got on the wrong side of that thing.”

“And goblins, and two of the hosts,” Grandfather said.

“Fuck,” Lucy muttered.  “They okay?”

“Not in good shape.”

The tree took a direct hit from an arc of black lightning.  Cracks spread from the impact site, partially splitting the tree vertically.  Black smoke poured out, and taint spread from the ‘wound’.

“I should warn you then,” Grandfather said.  “Horseman said one of the kids has these bracelets.  Was like she threw a concrete wall at them.”

“Good to know,” Lucy said.  “Magic items from the Blue Heron, I guess.  Would be nice if we could contact original owners, get them to call dibs or whatever.  Call their items back.”

“Not that easy, I don’t think,” Julette said.  “It’s theirs.”

Lucy nodded, glad Julette was chiming in.

“I’m set,” Black said.  “I think, in case this goes wrong, you should all move on.  Leave me with this.  I’ll catch up if I can.”

“Keep Midas with,” Grandfather said.

“And don’t catch up- reinforce the guys who hung back, keeping the bogeymen under control,” Lucy said.  “And escort them back and away.  They’ve played their part.  We don’t want them at risk.”

Black glanced at Grandfather, then nodded.

That group included Scobie, goblins, Mr. Mele, Anthem, and a bunch of others.

Avery started running, got out the paper airplane, and then threw it, keeping her arm outstretched.  Paper unfolded and then unfolded again, turning into a powered hanglider, or an old fashioned airplane.

Avery caught it and let it lift her up, legs kicking for a couple seconds as she tried to get a last push up off the ground.

They kept going, further north, circling around.  The Kims clearly knew what they were doing, and some black branches fired.  One shot came from a dragonslayer wand, and it produced some violent fireworks, that weren’t at all harmless.  Licks of what could be best described as molten lava spiraled out from the spinning metal projectile one gun fired.

It set trees on fire, which made the Titan turn its head.

Yeah.  Figured.

They were moving toward an area where there just wasn’t that much good cover.  No cabins, no walls, sparse trees.  A dead end, in a manner of speaking.  They could go into the woods, but then Lucy risked facing that endless tide of lesser ghouls, goblins, and stuff that had bogged her down.

No.  She moved toward cover, urged others to do the same…

She could make out Black taking action.  Striking at the top end of the oxygen tank, where the nozzle, connector, gauge and everything else stuck out the top.

The sudden release of oxygen through a narrow hole turned it into a crude missile.

The missile had explosives strapped to it.

The detonation was fierce, it was dramatic, and it happened in the back ranks of the Kim group, when many of them were facing the other direction, aiming their black branches over the pit where the manor had been, and toward the group south of the manor.

It pitched some into the hole.  Others just took it hard, when they weren’t expecting it.  Fire roared and spread dramatically for the first few instances.

Some Kims didn’t get caught in the effect.  Ones who’d been sent to give chase.

One went for Black, not seeming to realize she’d set the bomb.  A shot from a black branch direct to the chest killed her.

Three more came running, only for Avery to swoop down past a plume of smoke and land between them, striking out with the lacrosse stick that had the ugly stick attached.

“Midas,” Lucy said, as she stopped taking in the aftermath and reunited with the group.  Julette was out there to assist Avery in getting out once she’d gotten into the thick of it.  Lucy’s focus was on hanging back coordinating forces.  And the forces she was most comfortable with were Dog Tags.

So if she needed a big ‘fuck you’ move?  Not necessarily a practice?  Putting Black on the task of setting up an explosion worked.  If she needed something more surgical?

Midas was looking at her.

“The lantern.  It’s a problem.  If you get a shot?”

“I’ll watch for it,” he said, gruff.  “She holds it close, now.  Means if I want to shoot it, I gotta know the bullet might go right through it and into that kid.”

Teenager, not kid, Lucy thought, except that thought felt like a weird way of assigning responsibility, like charging someone as an adult for a severe crime.  It meant you could get away with harsher punishments.

“Find a way,” she said, before amending.  “Don’t kill her unless absolutely necessary.”

“Yeah.”

The explosion had really done something.  The Titan waded into the spot where all the Kims had been.  With him, he brought lightning cracking down, the increased wind, the rain, the frost.

The Kims who hadn’t been knocked on their asses were scattered.  Lucy could track a good few of them, even if some were blocked from view by the Titan or the rain and other obscuring effects the Titan brought with it.  Debris in the air, constantly settling.

The Augurs warned them again, Lucy thought.  Except it wasn’t an all-around warning.

St. Victor’s students, Kira-Lynn included, had started running before there was even a glimpse of the ‘missile’.

The Kim who had blasted Black seemed to take her for dead, which cost him when she rose up behind him and closed the distance to knife him in the back.

Avery dive-bombed in, took a few swings, to deftly disable a couple people, then caught a ride out.  Sometimes that was her hangglider.  Sometimes it was an assist from Liberty.  The Titan was as much a problem for the other side as it was theirs.  It wasn’t hostile to their side, but it was in the way, a threat they had to run from, that kept them from getting settled behind cover, now, as it investigated the site of the explosion.

That had been partially intentional, on Lucy’s part.  She’d hoped it would be more agitated, and would bother them.

All of that?  That was the good.

The bad was that they’d reached an awkward position, where the perimeter of their side warding incoming Others away from the trees was thinner, where there was less cover.

The Titan went from investigating flames to looking at their group with blazing eyes that shed tears that created complex webworks of frost in their wake.  Lucy felt colder, wetter, skin tingling, just from his gaze.

Kira-Lynn had gotten away, again.  The Augurs were more coordinated, and had found a niche they could operate in- if Alexanderp and Nettlewisps scared them, they could turn their focus to allies, and keeping allies out of danger.

Lucy doubted she’d be able to ring up Nicolette and get an easy counter to that.  They’d contacted the wider Belanger family in hopes of getting Chase and Gillian to help, but that hadn’t panned out too well.

The Kims who were still coming after them found their own cover.  One had a gun, not a black branch.

He aimed right for Lucy, firing.  The noise of the shot was more of a bother than the bullet, which veered off course, leaving runes on Lucy’s body hot, while her earring absorbed the worst of the sound.

“Here I thought you didn’t have practice!” the young man yelled.  Booker’s age.

“No comment.”

“Surrender.  This can end here,” the guy called out.

“You surrender,” Julette called out.

He extended an arm.  Lucy followed the line of his aim.  It pointed at an Innocent who’d straggled.

The Kims were getting back up.  Too many were fully recovering after an explosion like that.  Lucy’s skin crawled for some reason.  The eerieness of it.

Avery came flying on back, dropping in, and put the paper airplane away.

“They had augurs to warn them, but didn’t share the info, looks like!” Lucy called out, to the young-ish Kim practitioner.

“We have things we don’t tell them,” was the response.  Unflinching and level.

Lucy looked over her shoulder, double checking.  The innocent woman wasn’t the Blast Dog Black.  But she wasn’t normal either.

Threatened at gunpoint, she bolted.  Running straight for the Kim.

He shot, hit home, and it didn’t matter.  The woman tackled him, the two of them falling to the ground, and the woman retched out a goblin that was sixty percent arm and thirty-nine percent leg, way too big to fit down a throat.  A knot of limbs with some facial features near the center.  Too big to fit in a microwave, probably.

The Kim fought, struggling, but the Other shoved itself down his throat.  The bullet wound on the woman became a wound on the Jockey.

The woman who’d been hosting the Jockey, gasping, panting, backed away.

“Here!” Lucy called out to her.

The Booker-aged guy from the Kim family thrashed, until the moment the last limb of the hairy knot of limbs disappeared down his throat.

He immediately began dissolving into a mess of limbs, body parts, and semi-melted flesh, expanding in size.

“Fuunnnn!” he drew out the sound, as if his voice distorted as much as his fractally unfolding limbs.

“They can’t use practice, though?” Julette asked.

“I think that’s just… an always thing,” Avery said.  “Like my boons.  Or Lucy’s training, maybe?”

“Training is semi-always.  Basic lessons stick, but I can’t weave through a mob like I’m dodging raindrops.”

The Titan, who’d locked his focus onto them earlier, moved.

It came down as a series of maybe twenty lightning strikes, one after another, first in a line, then in a cluster.

Trees fell, burning.  One had been hollowed out, and burned from within.

Their group was forced to retreat further into the woods.  Members of their group, primarily Dog Tags and Doglick, moved out to form a perimeter, ready in case any goblins came at them.

“Hya!” Oakham grunted.  She stabbed a tree with her cane.

“Hya?” Avery asked.

Oakham pointed.

Sure enough, there was a knot in the tree that was bleeding clear liquid.

“Augur?”

“Sure hope that wasn’t Nicolette,” Avery said.

“Wrong eye shape,” Oakham said, with total confidence.  “It was the girl who stole from the bake sale or whatever.  Cameron.”

“Okay.  Memorized eye shapes?  Good, I guess.  Good work.  Weird,” Lucy said.

“You don’t?  Anyway, figured with the explosion, if they have to talk, pass on a message asking for the augur to figure out what’s going on, warn them if another one of those is coming-?”

“They’d be peeking?” Lucy asked.

“Yes.  Tell me I did a good job,” Oakham said, to Bracken.

“Like you’re a dog?” he asked.

“Uh, sure?  Let’s not understate how degenerate I can be,” Oakham said.

“I don’t want to do it like you’re a dog,” he said.  He put a hand on her cheek and kissed her.  Then, face a couple inches from hers, he said, “Good.  Keep it up.”

“Well if you do that, I’m going to melt into a useless puddle for the rest of the night.”

He turned away, and started to walk off toward the woods and the perimeter.  “Then I won’t do it again.”

“I’m not-” she grabbed at his arm, hanging on it.  “Not saying that.  Hey, not saying that.”

“I’m going around that tree to piss while there’s still a chance, so you know.  So don’t hang off of me, maybe.  Or you’ll get a show.”

“Have we not just established how degenerate I am?” Oakham asked.

The exchange continued as the two walked off around the tree.

Lucy looked at Julette.  “Your friend, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Somehow not a native of Kennet below.”

“Came by it honestly.”

“Yeah.”

The one Kim who’d been jockeyed was pulling some Horror bullshit, somehow, and was the size of a one-car garage, throwing things around, moving clumsily.  Other Kims weren’t doing the same back.  Maybe they couldn’t.

Always on, was that the secret, then?  They used black wands and destroyed their arms, but it was okay, the damage diffused out across thirty arms?  They got hurt and bounced back?

Okay.  It at least meant they were preoccupied.

The Titan lashed out again.  It was a cold wind, wet.  Ice came through trees and left icicles sticking sideways, at a slightly upward angle, clustering around the trunks.

Branches fell.

“Has to be the alchemist guiding the Titan at this point,” Lucy muttered, backing up to be part of the rest of the group.  “Our choices are to run away, try to regroup-”

“Again?” Avery asked.  She shook her head.  “I’m worried if we do…”

“They regroup too,” Julette finished.

Avery nodded, smiling a bit, not happy, but acknowledging Julette.

“They started this meeting yesterday evening,” Lucy said.  “We regrouped, had our meeting, started late morning… not that it feels like it.”

The sky was dark as midnight, with the heavy cloud cover and effects of the nearby Storm.

“It’s been hours,” Avery said.  “My phone’s in bad shape, or I’d check.”

Lucy checked for her.  “Couple of hours.  But this isn’t going to be a fight until then.  This is… we gotta deal with them.  Miller controlling the Titan, maybe, Seth, Cameron, Kira-Lynn, Teddy, the other St. Victor’s kids who stayed.  Your kid, Mrs. Flowers.”

“Please,” the woman replied, voice muffled.

The Titan struck out again.  He’d closed the distance by a few paces.

Trees were knocked over.  Previously frozen trees shattered.

“We can retreat, call it quits here, like I said, or we push hard, try to get to them before that Titan and whoever’s assisting it gets to us.  Charles’ core group.  His last real allies, that aren’t half-formed bogeymen and ghouls, aren’t a loosely allied practitioner family.  We take them, I don’t think the Kims are positioned to keep us from where we want to be.  Not strong enough right now, not in a good place, few allies.”

“Yeah,”

“Sounds like that’s it,” Grandfather said, gun raised, ready to fire if he saw anything in the woods.  Some things scampered by, but didn’t look like direct enough threats.  “Pushing hard.”

Another of the Dragonslayer weapons fired.  Similar to the thing that shot a little spinning magma wheel that would send flecks out in every direction, but this was more of a dart.

It detonated on hitting a tree, with a circular flash that disintegrated a rough sphere of tree, and lit fires at its edges.

The tree toppled.

More problematically, the Titan noticed.  It could, Lucy figured, see the flows of elements and power as clearly as Lucy saw regular objects.  So to it, this was a flare in the dark, maybe.

A thing to grab its attention, stir it up.  The way it so neatly happened, the shot coming out of nowhere, from an angle they weren’t set up to protect, the Titan’s response, it felt deliberate.

The Augurs, again.

The Titan attacked once more, but with more confidence than the last few go-arounds.  A blast of cold that had lightning associated with it.

It cut curving, swirling paths, carrying crystal shards along their courses, that were like tornado had handed one off to another tornado, rotating the opposite direction, and so on, to the point trajectories were impossible to navigate.

The shards hit their group like a barrage of bullets.  Wards against cold and sharp things went hot, and with a Titan backing this onslaught, the shards won out over the wards.

Lucy felt the spikes of ice sink into shoulder, forearm, the side of her hand, her stomach, her legs.  Many sank in an inch deep.  Each crackled with electricity, that made her muscles twitch.

Not falling straight over onto her face was all she could do.  She moved in a wooden way, fighting pain, and toppled.

He’d leveled half their group, that casually.

The Titan roared, triumphant.

Get past the Titan, get to Charles’ remaining supporters, negotiate with or stop them.

Lucy fought past pain.  She was aware her glamour was largely fucked.  Partially intact, with dark red fur sticking out of the impact sites, where they mingled with freezing blood, but fucked, too.

Avery was hurt too.  Julette… mostly okay.  Good.

“Get to the main group, stop ’em.  Move.  If you can’t move, get carried.”

An impossible situation, when leaving the other side free to act meant their plan to strike out at Charles couldn’t work.  It’d be risking another effing bird.  But now, chasing, they were too far out, too far from Innocence.  The Titan could act.

And act it did.  The Titan struck out again, having advanced closer, pushing trees down.

“Move!” Avery hollered, before the crash of fifty lightning strikes drowned out all voices.

Next Chapter