Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.12 | Pale

Next Chapter

How did Lucy do this?

Avery ran, getting the paper airplane out.  She ran to get the forward momentum, pants leg sticking to her leg with blood and healing potion, and then started gliding, hanging off the device.  A single bar up near the top let her pull herself up into a position to steer it, belly and pelvis resting against bars, the ugly lacrosse stick between her body and the setup below her.  By the time she was settled, the propeller had kicked into action.  Wind whipped past her.  An adjustment put the nose up, and the ground disappeared beneath her.  The overhead part of the paper airplane shielded some of the rain, but as she tilted skyward, water pelted her face.

She’d considered borrowing a Garrick pilot cap, but she’d second guessed herself.  This was her punishment.

Avery saw the Titan continuing to lash out, and it was some crazed loop, where he’d reacted to explosions and things before, turning around or changing direction, something Liberty and Avery had been trying to use a bit earlier to keep him going in circles, but now he was reacting by doing stuff that made explosions, which made him react.

He looked like if he was human height he might be Rowan’s age, but he was beefy, he had skin like hot brass and eyes that glowed, and frost and running water danced all over him, droplets and ice quivering before evaporating.

Everything he was doing was tearing down the scattering of trees, which were the only source of cover that was protecting the group.

Avery had thought she’d had a grip on what Lucy meant.  About Avery having to be the deer while also being frontline.  She’d picked up the paper airplane from Thea, she was doing more of what she’d always done, but amped up, to move faster, be in people’s faces more.  That had maybe been okay.  Except now this.

Bam, Titan agitated.

Bam, everyone vital was in danger.  Innocents and Aware she’d brought into this.  Her friends.  Their allies.

“Hey!” she roared, flying in a loop around the Titan.

It didn’t notice her.

She swerved in close, extricated the ugly lacrosse stick, and swatted him across the head in passing.

Again, nothing.  With the size of this guy, even with the latent magic, it was like flicking a toothpick at someone.

The intensity of the Storm made flying wobbly, and it only got worse as she got close.  Avery got out of there and dove lower to the ground before she caught a stray lightning strike.

It was Liberty, flying past, who dropped a goblin grenade that seemed to have an actual goblin as a part of it, who managed to pull the Titan’s attention away, buying the group a chance to scramble for better cover.  The uninjured helped the wounded.

Explosions, Avery thought.  The weirdness of some of Liberty and America Tedd’s goblin practices calling up goblins that existed for only a few happy, maniacal minutes or seconds was something for another day.  Explosions worked here.

If she had her spell cards and the ability to practice, this would be easier.

Avery swooped in between trees.  “I can’t do much here!”

“Retreat, move, deeper into the trees!” Julette urged people.  “Titan’s distracted-!”

“We can’t give up too much ground!” Lucy warned.

“Can you hold out?  I need to find people with the right things!”  Avery was already on her way out, forward momentum carrying her away.

“Go!” Lucy shouted after her, barely audible.

Avery cut through the trees, wincing as hard rain came with enough force that she went twenty feet toward the trees for every ten feet she went forward, when she was moving at a good velocity.

But the larger group had the Titan’s attention.

“Liberty!” Avery shouted.

The Storm was getting bad enough that she wasn’t being heard.  A gremlin riding assist on Liberty’s steamjunk flightpack seemed to hear, though, given it had ears nearly as big as the rest of it.  It yanked on Liberty’s hair, which got her attention.

Liberty swooped down in a collision course with Avery.

“Not fall-immune or crash immune!” Avery yelped, so close to the ground that her toe clipped a high mound of snow, with Liberty continuing to drop.

Liberty grabbed the front end of Avery’s paper airplane, and used that to match their flight speeds and trajectories.  Liberty was a little faster than Avery, so it amounted to her pulling Avery forward.

“What up!?”

“Got any more bombs!?  It responds to explosions!”

“Not prepped for my bomb queen thing I used on that one path, kinda didn’t want to, since I’ve already shown you that one!  Some bombs.”

“Fuck,” Avery muttered, before raising her voice.  “Gotta steer it away!  Gas!?  If we ignite it!?  Or fire, or…!”

“Cellmoan!” Liberty called up.  The gremlin with the big ears poked her head out forward, over the front end of Liberty’s right wing.  From her angle, Avery could just barely see the ear-tips.  “Giving you a mission!  Ride with Avery, mid-flight repair, help her set up anything she needs!  Pass on orders to other gremlins on the ground!”

The goblin grabbed the lip of LIberty’s wing, swung down, and landed atop Avery’s paper airplane, face perilously close to the propeller at the nose.

“I’ll bomb it, do what I can!” Liberty shouted.

“Will catch up!” Avery called out.  Liberty let go, and Avery threw in a, “Don’t get hit by lightning!”

Liberty shouted something that might have been ‘got it handled’.

Avery still had the ugly lacrosse stick in an awkward position, and went to fix it.  Snowdrop was with her, though, and briefly went human, her weight pressing down on Avery’s back, pushing stomach into metal bars.  It was a shift in weight that made the paper airplane shift, too, which was spooky when they were skimming the ground already.

That uncertainty, the recent healing potion, the pressure on her stomach, and the sanity-melting anxiety for her friends and crucial people all stirred up bad memories of everything that had followed being shot.

Like this was all some miserable fucking dream while she was still bleeding out, getting worse faster than Snowdrop could make trips between the Crash Course and the Promenade for refills on the healing potion.

If this is a coma, Avery thought, steering into rain, icy rainwater pelting her face, let’s pretend that me getting through all of this is what I’ve gotta do to wake up.

She didn’t have to go far, but she did have an issue.  She was too close to Innocents to draw attention, and she wanted to be sneaky.  Planes didn’t have brakes, and doing what she’d done before wouldn’t work.  No fancy maneuvers, with zig-zagging turns to eat momentum, no turning the nose skyward to stall out.

If she did anything fancy, heads would turn.

Still far enough back to be safe in the haze of rain and bad weather, Avery did a circle in the air over the trees to buy herself time and look for options.

The Titan was attacking the trees again.  What Liberty was doing annoyed it, got him to wave an arm, like she was a buzzing insect, dropping bombs that could flip cars, but it didn’t stop his trajectory.

A row of houses on each side of the street, which was hard to make out with the snowbanks that had been roughly plowed piled up another couple feet.

“Cellmoan!” Avery raised her voice.  She reached a hand up and forward.

The head poked down, massive pointed ears flapping in the wind.  The little gremlin smiled, showing off braces.

Avery reached for the gremlin, and the gremlin climbed on the underside of the wing until she was close enough to put a hand the span of a soda can in Avery’s.

Avery pulled Cellmoan down, and awkwardly tucked her into an armpit.

“Hold on, Snow!” Avery called out.  She would have communicated by familiar bond, but again, she was gainsaid.

Snowdrop clung to her.

When folded out, the paper airplane was some weird amalgamation between a wright brothers aircraft and a hang glider.  But that only lasted as long as she was touching it.  A second or two after contact was broken, it would become a normal paper airplane with lots of blueprint-y pencil marks on it, and it would try to find its way back to the last living rider’s hand.

So Avery aimed for the longest stretch of unbroken snow and let go, while still traveling forward at a pretty crazy clip.

The snowbank was cover.  The ground was icy snow and puddles.  Avery’s antler coat was nominally waterproof and she was warded up, so she had to hope that preserved the glamour she’d put on after the visit with the fairies, her entire body curving to be a sled.  She would have done a kneeling slide, but she wanted to keep low to the ground.

One bump too big and she’d be head over heels, still moving faster than a human could run.  One dip, and she might go down into snow, break something.

She was careful to catch the airplane, and the shift in angle helped her see a dip.  She moved her body to avoid plowing into it.  Water from a deeper puddle splashed up four feet as she cut through it.

Fuck.  My glamour.

Ghouls came out of the woods, keeping a similarly low profile, all moving in concert, on course to intercept her.  Echoes on the sidelines flocked toward them, but that did nothing except destroy the echoes, as they broke on the moving men and women like waves against the shore, only a few reforming.  Some elementals came in at the same time, and maybe the ghouls thought they were more echoes or something, maybe they were so intent on food or prey that they didn’t care, but they didn’t try to avoid it.  The group of nine ghouls became seven as two were dropped by violent, flickering contact with elementals.  A third was affected but not stopped.

They were different from Nibble and Chloe, wearing minimal clothing, with skin that looked like it was so heavy with fatty deposits and lumps that it was pulling away from the rest of them.  It made everything closest to the ground heavy, clawed fingertips and spike-studded bones visible where skin was stretched thin, closer to the top of them.  Their yellowed eyes and their teeth suggested the ghoul part.

They were heavy enough that their weight very easily broke through the icy crust on the snow and made them sink armpit and arse deep as they moved on all fours.

Heavy, but they were also strong enough that the snow they were plowing through didn’t slow them.  Tanks.  Bulldog ghouls, almost.

Avery was slowing to a stop, puddles still splashing as she skidded through it.  She swung the ugly stick at an echo that veered her way, breaking it up enough it didn’t reform until she was out of its way.

“Cellmoan,” Avery said.  She freed the gremlin from her armpit.  She pushed Cellmoan in the direction of the cars.  “Siphon gas, don’t leave them stranded unless they’re a Kim.  I’ll want to augment it with something goblin later, so if you know names…”

“Need more gremlins!” Cellmoan said.

“What do you need for gremlins?”

“I need to break something techy!”

“That car was here before our Innocents got here, I think it belongs to a Kim,” Avery said, raising her voice at the end because she was already moving away.  She pointed with the Lacrosse stick, then didn’t even pull it back before swinging it at one of the ghouls.

She could see the effect as it rippled through flesh, like slapping a big gelatin thing.

But it hit pretty hard, still.  The ghoul fell over.

Others came at her.

There was no music, like in the movies.  There was no fanfare, nothing rousing.  She was cold, wet, pretty sure she’d fucked her glamour, which was supposed to be a lifeline, pretty sure she’d fucked a lot of people, bringing them into this.

She swatted one ghoul’s hand away, unable to do much more, because she had to reverse that swing direction to catch another across the legs as they reared up.

Fighting in the rain in a gloomy, gray place, while her friends were in danger, trying to do this faster when doing it uninterrupted would already be slow.

Snowdrop, hissed, teeth bared, moving to the side, maybe trying to be bait.

Which kind of worked, because it seemed for a second like it worked too well, and then she became human, and pulled out a paper bag, holding it by the bottom, and swung it.

Three or four pieces of fabric came out.  Avery didn’t count, and if there was a fourth, it disappeared into the gloom.  The fabric hit flesh, one even hitting a ghoul across the face.  Tighty whities.  Stained tighty whities, with four colors of stain, all bodily fluids.  That glued themselves to flesh on contact.

Avery managed to get a good hit in on a ghoul while he was trying to shake the fabric off his arm.  “I am so grossed out you’ve been carrying that while literally crawling on me, Snow!”

“It’s awful, especially doing this in the moment, sorry!”

“Came equipped?”

“I’ve got lots of stuff.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, swinging.  The smallest and least ghoul-y of the ghouls was nimble enough to avoid the swing.

“Got more when you lost your practice.”

“Yeah,” Avery said.  Lost could only hold onto so much.

“Cellmoan went quiet,” Snowdrop muttered.

Avery stole a glance over her shoulder.  Grabbing Snowdrop’s shoulder, she pulled her back a few paces, brandishing the ugly lacrosse stick with one hand.

“Warded!” Cellmoan shouted.  “It’s zappy!”

“Gremlins can’t handle zappy!” Snowdrop retorted.

“Not this zappy!  Not for me!  I make prank calls and find assholes and rack up phone bills they have to explain to people!  Spouses and bosses!”

Almost like Cellmoan was a half gremlin.  Damn.

“Snow?” Avery asked.

“What up?”

“Gonna need you here.”

“I’m a fighter.  Grr.  More bite than bark in this opossum, and I’m all full of bark.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, her voice soft.

No music.  Rain came down hard and uneven, in sheets and waves, almost.  Thunder rumbled in the background.  It didn’t even feel like her heart was hammering or she was excited, with the cold.

Three ghouls were still in fighting shape.  One had taken a heavy hit from the ugly lacrosse stick and was retreating back to the trees, another was hanging back, like… hungry but not willing to fight.

None of the three ghouls were wanting to be the first one in, which only delayed things.  Which meant Avery wasn’t helping her friends.

This was meant to be a quick pit stop to get a weapon.

It felt like playing on the ice, all those days ago.  Against Olivia and the strongest players of Avery’s old team before it had disintegrated.  Strongest except for Oakham.  A losing fight, everything gone wrong, it felt like it mattered, everything she’d been working toward…

There was a way of getting into the zone that came from trying, that came from aspiration, hard work, focus, and all the good stuff.  Working on skills, exercising regularly, strategizing, teamwork, and having everything come together in a way that felt like it made her more than the sum of her parts.

Then there was this.  That feeling from back then.  It felt wrong to say it came from not trying, or not caring.  It wasn’t the opposite.

It was like feeling defeated involved a whole bunch of processes shutting down.  Hope, effort, drive.  Sagging to the ground.  Letting the emotional walls down and crying.

The image of Mr. Flowers having his arm blown off ran through her mind’s eye.

The processes didn’t shut off all at once.  With a few of the switches flicked, the drive and focus were there but she managed to get out and away from her own spiraling thoughts.

She met the first ghoul halfway, sticking the club into its face.  Nose and top front teeth.

Another ghoul lunged, and Avery swung.  He reared up, showing how tall he was, and with the speed he raised his hands, the draping, water balloon-like groupings of fat were raised up and swung up and back, around his hands.

Avery backed away before he could bring that down like a sack of loose meat.  The third ghoul snapped at her.

Above all else, the part that made the connecting hits and successes feel more like she wanted to cry than they felt thrilling or victorious?  Nora.  Yes, there was a stupid, silly part of her that had come up with the Aware plan because she wanted to bring Nora in on some level, to slay that dragon, to get rid of that bad feeling and awkwardness between them, where Nora deserved honesty but could only get lies that kept her safe.

She wanted this to be a successful test run, wanted it to be a litmus test.  Not to awaken Nora anytime that soon, she wasn’t a love-crazy lunatic.

Nevermind that fantasy about being dropped face down in Ms. Hardy’s laundry basket and left there.

No, but it was a factor.  And everything going wrong hammered in the idea that maybe she couldn’t have that.  So a whole Build-Up style plastic-block tower in her head crumbled and was pushed out of the way and left room for clarity.

The feeling remained.  Wanting the Clems of the world to be safe.  Wanting people like Nora to be able to see the amazing little things, like a market with fairies and funny little goblins.  That was what hurt.

Two ghouls faced Avery from opposite directions.  It felt like time had slowed, her body was numb and still doing what she wanted it to.

The familiar bond was there, but the lines of communication were cut off.  This worked purely on understanding- that Avery wouldn’t haul on Snowdrop so hard that she faceplanted in the snow in the middle of a fight.  There was intention.  So Snowdrop went small.

Avery slinged Snowdrop down at or past the third ghoul was wading through, past the crawling woman’s front limbs, down to where her belly touched uneven, trampled-on snow.  The moving threat of the ugly lacrosse stick in Avery’s other hand made the ghoul too slow to follow up.

Snowdrop then went from opossum to human, and used the whole of her body to lift the woman’s lower body up into a forced handstand.

Avery swung with enough force the lacrosse stick cracked, ugly lacrosse stick doing its work.  The female ghoul flopped onto the snowbank, knees higher than her head.

Two ghouls left, a third on standby, hungry but hurting.

Avery swung, but it was to make space and buy time.  The female ghoul was getting up… and Avery was watching for a chance.

The swing, a sweeping upward slash, aimed for the chin, only clipped the woman’s arm, which was raised to block the incoming swing, then pulled back a fraction of a second later, arm flesh swinging like a pendulum.

Avery prodded her, tipping her over the snowbank.  She fell down the other side, and hit the car.

The runework lit up, there was a flash, and electricity crackled.  Avery could see the diagram work light up, then fizzle out.  One shot, spent.

It didn’t drop the female ghoul, but it did set off the car alarm and smash a window.  People further down the street who were clustered around one of the fire trucks noticed.

The ghouls made themselves scarce, three fleeing, the fourth being the woman, who moved slowly, fell as she tried to climb the snowbank, and then found a surge of vigor as she looked over one shoulder and looked back at the crowd.

Avery didn’t stop her from leaving.  She had other priorities.  Like handling this.  She hurried to reach for her bag.  She found a temporary tattoo, and pressed it to her neck.  She was cold, but she was also wet, and didn’t need a tap for the moisture to help this thing set.

This wasn’t part of the stock of higher quality temp tattoos Lucy had got her, with the little set of samplers she’d raided for the fairies.  This was something from Clem.

Avery gave Cellmoan a hand through one of the broken windows.  The gremlin disappeared into the dark car interior.  She held the lacrosse stick with the dangerous end down.

“You okay?” a woman asked.

Avery pointed at the retreating ghouls.

With a gloved hand cupped to shield her face from rain, the woman squinted.  “Are those bear cubs?”

“Yes,” Snowdrop replied, matter-of-factly.

“They’re something,” Avery said.

“Whose family are you with?  These new people are crazy and cultish, I’m not sure you want to be on your own here.”

“Especially with bears,” a man said.

“My family was around here earlier, they left.”

“Well, that’s irresponsible.  I’ll give you a ride back later?  I’d say to call, but there’s no service.”

“Maybe,” Avery said.  “We had an issue, I was kind of hoping we could get gas.”

“There’s some cans in the fire truck,” a fireman said.

“We need a lot.  I can pay, I was given money.”

Feels like I’m Verona.

Also still feels a bit like I’m in the zone.

“Let’s look and get you set.  With all this garbage going on, us flightless snowbirds are going to need to stick together more than ever.”

“Flightless snowbirds,” Avery said, smiling.  Made sense.

“You’re soaking wet, both of you.”

They headed toward the fire truck.

“We got away, good job,” Snowdrop murmured.

“Man.  You can’t give me good news?” Avery murmured back.

Winged goblins.  Wraiths, maybe.  They lurked at treetops and at places far enough back their true natures were obscured.

They didn’t approach, though.  Innocence was a deterrent.  Anthem had gone elsewhere, but there were people here, still, on the fringes, ready to fight.  Mr. Mele, Natasha Scobie.

It looked like the smallest fire truck was loaded with stuff for rescue- to get cars towed from the road, blankets folded and strapped together with seatbelt-like bands, first aid stuff in larger quantities.

Gas, set in further back, rectangular-ish black jugs with red caps, inset in a reinforced section.

“There should be cans in there, let’s see- how are we getting them to you- hold on,” a man said.

Avery stepped up onto the bumper, peering in, and the moment the coast seemed clear enough, she black roped further into the truck, lifted one of the jugs with both hands, and, awkwardly, lifting a leg and one foot to help stabilize it so she had her left hand free to use the black rope, moved herself to snow and snowbank, way further down the road.

Creatures took flight from the trees.

“Gremlins!” Avery called out.

An Innocent on the road heard her and turned their head.  Avery ducked lower.

It kept the fliers at bay.

Avery pushed the canister toward some of the gremlins that had come out of the black car.  Bangnut was among them.  The jug slid on ice, gremlins and goblins caught it, turned it, and started pushing it.

“Store it, hold onto it.  Watch for trouble,” Avery said.

She eyed the truck, waiting for an opportunity, saw people looking for her.

Black roped back in.  Hefted the second jug, trying not to make noise.

Then back to where gremlins and goblins were waiting.

She repeated the process until she was caught lifting the fourth jug out.

“Is that it?” a man with a firefighter’s coat and a poncho on asked her.  “I thought we had more.”

“Just this in here,” she replied, dragging it.

“Okay, ummm, do we know where your parents are?  Where are we taking this?” he asked.

Avery took a step, punching her fist forward, and black roped out, leaving the can behind for the sake of tight timing.  It’d be a weird moment for the guy, seeing her disappear, but as far as pushing Innocence went, this wasn’t that bad.

No, this was a little bad.

She crouched, pulled her wallet out, and got a spell card from the opposite pocket.  Cold rain spattered the card as she wrote in fine-point marker.

Took some gas for off-books thing.  Sorry for the inconvenience.
-A

She dipped in, dropped that off at the back, and then stepped out.

The cold was getting to her.  The mission kept her focused.

“What are we doing with this, now?” a voice croaked.

Toadswallow.  Avery smiled.

“The Titan seems to respond to fire and explosions and other elemental stuff,” Avery said.  Her wooden bead bracelet was going crazy as Others accumulated at the treetops.  “If it responds, that’s kind of like a dialogue, right?  Saying something, getting a response?”

“Talking in fire and explosions?” Toadswallow asked.

“Can we make it an insult?  Something it can’t ignore?  Pollute the explosion?  Augment it with something bomb-ish?”

Toadswallow looked down at Bangnut, who nodded.

“We very much can.”

“Okay,” Avery said.  She turned around, then turned around again, looking at the accruing Others.  She felt paralyzed by the things that were getting in her way.  Losing the ‘zone’.  “This has to be fast.  They’re organizing, feels like they’re tightening the nuts and bolts, lining up Others to come after us at key points, slowing us down.  The Titan attacking… Lucy said it was Augurs.”

“Could well be.  There may be something for that as well.  I sold something to a certain goblin in the market, when I was offering the discounts, and I do know he’s around…”

“Anything that helps.  Are they okay?  Our guys with the Titan?”

“As far as I know.  But they’re being driven further into the trees, they’ll be getting cold, wet, and injured,” Toadswallow said.  “Less of our own on the field here, more constantly coming.  It’s not good.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll need a minute to get you what you need.”

Avery nodded.  She looked around, grabbed Snowdrop, then used the black rope, taking her around behind a cabin on the far side of the street.

It put her face to face with an echo-

No.  Wraith.  Something darker, not just ethereal at the edges, but with a core that made it blaze or burn, like a wind was pushing out from the center to make the frayed and splash-y edges waver and bleed off more intensely.

To add to that, there were more flying Others in the trees on this side, too.

Avery bolted.

Time for valor, time for getting shit done, and she had a goal.  Saving her friends, Titan, and being a Lucy, confronting what needed confronting.  Right now she was more Verona, trying to figure out a play, but that had to change.

Which meant going for the augurs.

The wraith detonated into a scene, and Avery did her damndest to outrun it.

A girl, watching from behind cover as she saw her father packing a car.  Kids were making a lot of noise.

Avery ran harder.

The heartbreak and darkness chased her.  The daughter realizing her dad had a second family.  Watching him love them more in a few seconds than he’d shown her in years.  The inability to understand, and how that wound went straight to the center of her.  Because she was fat, she was harder to like, she was lesser.  Ugly.

The anger, the darkness that wanted to get its hooks in her, elaborating on the base blueprint with something extreme.

It wanted to get inside her, to possess her.

I’m going to do something about it.  About them.  Make them uglier.

Still running, Avery tripped over the edge of the snowbank and fell a solid five feet to the road.  The Stuck-in-Place boon helped the impact not shatter her shoulder, she guessed.

But that would hurt later.  Like a lot of things from earlier were adding up to hurt her now.

“You scared me.  Are you okay?”

The jarring impact and presence of Innocents had helped cast the Wraith away, unlatching its hooks.

Avery had come over here to talk to someone and here she was.  Clem.

“I’m okay, I think.”

“How?” Clem asked.

Avery shook her head and shrugged.  “I-”

She shook her head, not sure what to say.

“Are you local?” Clementine asked.

“What?”

“I mean, like, did you originally live here or-?”

It seemed to dawn on Clem the same time it dawned on Avery.  Avery touched the temporary tattoo at her neck, and then peeled it away.

“Weird, being on the other side of that.  Weird being on both sides of it.”

“I hear you,” Avery said.

Clem was with the guy, Harold, who had predicted there being Others at the Dead Tim’s.  He looked a little confused.

“I don’t remember everything you have.  But… fire, ice, electricity or lightning, water?” Avery asked Clem.

“I have this matchbox,” Clem said, fishing in a coat pocket.  She held it up.  “Which worried me when I found it, because I’d given it to you not that long ago.  I know I’ve wavered some on working with you, and the day I found this, I was skeptical.  Now you’re reminding me… I’d like an explanation.”

“Time’s tight.”

Clementine didn’t budge.

“It was given as a gift to someone who’s always been responsible, who I trusted to take care of it.  Bought an in with some of the people helping tonight,” Avery said.  “But these things can have a mind of their own, they… wander.  It might have escaped.”

“You said you’d handle it.  People weren’t supposed to get their hands on it.”

Avery nodded, wincing a bit.  Because being called out like that was a gainsaying.  Which was potentially extending how long Avery wouldn’t have her practice.  “I did handle it.  I think what happened was it got un-handled after.”

The Lord of Thunder Bay gave it to Deb or someone, who got sloppy.  Fuck.

“It’s serious,” Clementine said.  “The trouble it could cause… that it caused me, just having it with me?”

“I know.  For sure, absolutely.  But people you know and I know are in danger, and this is just the tool.”

Clementine hesitated, then said, “You return this to me tonight.  With the puzzle bracelet.”

“I promise.”

Clementine didn’t hand it over.  Avery felt antsy, standing still in the rain here.

“My word- promises mean something.”

“I’ve heard that much,” Clementine said.  “Okay.”

“You’ve got me curious, you two,” Harold said.  “I’m guessing… special agent device that’s not supposed to be in circulation, match in the bottom corner has a trick to it when you lift up the end?”

“Hmm,” Avery said, glancing at Clementine, then the box   “Kinda?”

Avery felt the wraith’s presence behind her.  A push from behind.

“Either way, gotta go.  Thank you, Clementine.  Be safe, it’s getting intense.”

Clementine didn’t respond.  Avery could only see the look in Clementine’s good eye, the other eye half-lidded.  The expectations that Avery was not meeting.

Avery scrambled up the nearest snowbank, which was not the most climbable snowbank nearby- more of a vertical walk.  Snowdrop ran up Avery’s arm, climbed over, became human, and offered a hand.

The goblins were waiting for her.  Bubbleyum had come from the flanks to stand by Toadswallow.

Matchbook obtained, gas canisters modified.

Toadswallow held up a glossy piece of paper that was… blank?  Avery reached for it.

Bubbleyum seized Avery’s wrist before she could turn it over.  “No.”

“You don’t want to look at the photo.”

“What is it?”

“Your mom,” Toadswallow croaked.

“In a compromising position, from an angle that doesn’t look good, and what she’s doing…?  Tier six.”

“Tier five is stuff like milk, and hugs, and cuddles under blankets,” Snowdrop said, matter-of-factly.  “Tier four is double that, tier six is half.”

“How- oh.  Changes based on the viewer?”

Snowdrop ducked her head under, peeking.  She winced.  “No.  That’s your mom, Avery.  Sorry.”

“Messes with their heads.  Throws them off their game.”

“Got it,” Avery said.  She paused, hesitating.

“Would have got it to you sooner, but you lot had the smirking little alchemy nugget, and the way it was meant to work, this lot would pull out the neat things they bought to show off, get their moments in the sun.  The taintwicket that bought this went and forgot about it.  Take it, flash it at them, it’ll get the job done.”

Avery reached for it, then closed her fist.  “No.”

“Hm?” Toadswallow grunted.

“Not this.  Thank you for the idea, but no.  It’s too much.”

The augurs were Seth, and Avery didn’t have much love for Seth, didn’t like him, and might not mind some mental scarring.  But Cameron?

Avery had a stark mental image of Cameron Merson’s mom, lost and scared in that parking lot behind the Arena.  If that was where Cameron started, and this picture would take that and twist it?  What would it even show Cameron?

“Too much?” Bubbleyum asked.

“Goes too low.”

“They are attempting to murder us, my dear.  We’ve had cherished friends die,” Toadswallow said.

“And I’ll hit, I’ll wound, I’ll maybe even kill.  But not this.  Not for- not when I know how it might land, what it might do.  I think I can make peace with killing, whether we win or lose here, but not that.”

“When the boys and girls you’re sparing are ones who enslaved and controlled our Dog Tags?  Our Butty McButtbutt?  Ramjam?  Liberty’s Lewdtube?  When they didn’t even flinch as their boss killed Verona’s friends?” Toadswallow asked.

“Yep,” Avery replied.  “So I’m going to need-”

“I thought I taught you better,” Toadswallow said.

“Will you stop us if we do it?” Bubbleyum asked.

“No.  But I’ll be disappointed,” Avery said.  “Knowing what we know… I think that’s a no.”

“I don’t trust Avery,” Snowdrop said.  “So do it behind her back, it’s okay.”

“Even you?” Toadswallow asked.

“I know I’m not at the point of being a spiritual guide, yet…”

“I think your spirit has got a bit too much Avery in it, little opossum,” Toadswallow said.

“You opened this box of chocolates, you didn’t know what you were going to get,” Snowdrop told him.

“True that.  Alright.”

“Anything else, up to a limit I think you already know is there, sure,” Avery said.  “But no ‘mom’ stuff.  Not with the Augurs.”

“Except if it’s contrarian and funny,” Snowdrop added.  “Then it’s okay.”

“So can we focus?” Avery asked.  “Because…”

She looked.

Augurs were anticipating what she’d do and were organizing obstacles.  Flying Others.  Maybe elementals too.  Hanging back because Innocence was a bubble, and they couldn’t be sure they’d wipe out the Innocents if they attacked.  Though it was looking more likely.

She was supposed to be the frontline, and right now she wasn’t.  Even now, in this moment, she could feel some of the pressure Lucy had put on herself, wanting to get things set now, so she could be where she needed to be.  She could see how Lucy had fallen into that role and then only had it hammered in once she was there.

She wanted to find her zone again.  Needed to, to thread this needle.

She was a deer, and what was a deer in the frontlines?

Prongs out and forward, head of the herd.

She needed a herd.

“I need help.  So I need some of you goblins as messengers.”

The crows that came down out of the sky were the ‘go’ signal.  They resembled echoes, but had a denser core, with more of the fraying and bleeding at the edges, spilling out around them.

Avery had already delayed way too much.  She’d taken the time it took to get the messengers out to rig the paper airplane, lashing the canisters to it.

A message had gone out to Nicolette.  Nicolette had sent the crows from her other specialty.  She wasn’t just an augur.

When Avery started running, Snowdrop clinging to her, the little gremlin Cellmoan already perched near the nose with a lightning-powered boombox lashed to her.  Bangnut was up there too, managing a goblin fire extinguisher.  The ‘crows’ took off as she ran through them, beaks opening like they were cawing, but they were silent.

Avery’s feet left ground, and she steered away from the Innocents and settlement.  It did put her closer to trees.

The first Others to come her way were wraiths, echoes, and elementals.  Wraith and echo either teleported or latched onto her and moved as she did, quickly closing the distance like they’d attached a cord to her and were reeling it in, fifty feet a second.  The elementals were just very mobile when they wanted to be.

The first echo grazed Avery.  Some kid had mostly blinded his brother.

Some echoes put the audience into the scene as them.  Others acted out their actions, target swapped out.  The wraith earlier had put Avery in its spot.  This one, like the animal and child abuser Verona had described dealing with, was targeting Avery.  So it took her eyes with a fierce burning sensation.

The Wolf on the Forest Ribbon Trail had blinded Avery.  She really didn’t like being blind.  Difference was, on the Forest Ribbon Trail, she’d been alone, up until Miss had come in to back her up.

Here, she had Snowdrop to hug the back of her head, paws on either side, leaning left, pushing on the right side of Avery’s head.

Avery laughed and turned left.

The laughter helped, maybe, because her vision cleared up.

The crows were a type of omen, somewhat associated with augury.  Nicolette had explained it a long time ago, but they were common in the Ruins, their silent presence and flight warning of trouble, but helping that trouble to come to pass.  Walk into a place and a bunch of crows take off?  There were about to be issues.

As the Others with more physical means of flight came in, the crows veered their way.  Each crow carried a little something extra.  Types of trouble- disaster, toil, pain, strife.

Breaking that first, most eager wave of fliers was vital, because the ones that came after were more independent than a flock.  Some were scary enough the others avoided them.

Avery hadn’t just asked for Nicolette, though.

Nicole Scobie helped turn the wind, a boost for Avery, and a much-appreciated surge of warm air, as the cold was pulled aside.  Avery could see the texture of the moisture in the air change, as it fractalized, forming fine ice-crystals, clearing up closest to her, ice crystals joining together in a rolling mist to either side.  Moisture and ice became ice crust and for a few winged Others, that sent them toward the ground, flapping madly to slow their fall.

Avery made a beeline for the Titan.

Another echo.  Or a wraith- it was above Avery, so she didn’t see.

Avery was mostly paralyzed across ninety percent of her body, every arm movement and leg movement a marathon undertaking.  With both arms she moved a leg from the footrest of her wheelchair to the floor, tension thrumming through her, her body uncooperative.

No home health aide.  Hers had quit.  Her unemployed cousin had promised to help in exchange for staying without paying rent.  Today, she’d fucked off with a boyfriend with a choking fetish.  The same boyfriend had choked Avery, not for a rude reason, but to show Avery he had that power.  Her cousin had watched without doing anything.

That was the danger.  That her cousin would return, boyfriend in tow, and something like that could happen again.  Or maybe he’d strangle her cousin a bit too much, the cousin wouldn’t come back, and Avery would be left here.

So she had to move.  She had a goal.  She’d been able to do this six months ago, without assistance.  Door locked, moving herself onto the toilet, feet to ground, hands gripping the pole that had been established there-

So she wouldn’t mess herself, which would infuriate the boyfriend.  And because once on the toilet, that phone that was built into the wall would be in reach.  Placed there because the landline doubled as an intercom system, for calling the home health aide.

She could call out.

Except her hands slipped on the pole.  She sank, the seat of the chair scraping her lower back.  She didn’t have the strength to stand back up, or pull herself up.

Snowdrop bit Avery’s neck, and pushed something into Avery.

Avery came to, and the effect was jarring, because she’d felt like she was dreaming, and then waking up, a part of her expected to be in bed.  Instead, a part of her and about a hundred pounds of flying machine were on an arcing trajectory toward ground.

She was slipping from the bar of the paper airplane, not helped by the fact that ‘gravity is down’ wasn’t necessarily pushing her body down against the bar to secure her, anymore.  Her body had been paralyzed, her head occupied.

She steered out of that sloping sideways descent, straightening.

The bar was wet and her hands were sweaty inside her gloves.  It felt like at any second, her hands would slip out like wet soap slipping out of her grip.  Every inch she pulled herself back up felt like a struggle, her heart hammering, the ground moving beneath her in ways that made it feel less real, like it was some uneven, computer-generated recreation of snowy ground and trees, put together without any order or organization.

The Titan was in clear view.  Avery could hear distant pops-

Could see the out-of-sync effect, where Others were dropping out of the sky, each followed by an echoing popping sound so delayed it sounded like it was marking them hitting ground, not the source of the shot.

Avery had put in a message to Anthem Tedd.  So he was down there too, somewhere in the settlement, protecting the bulk of the Innocent.  Gun in hand, he shot the threats out of the sky, starting from the most threatening to the least.

If there was an opportunity, he’d help with the Titan.  He’d have to have the practice for it.

Avery’s course had been cleared, more or less.  The Others that did get to her were smaller and more insignificant.  A gargoyle-like ghoul.

She shifted the ugly lacrosse stick, slightly cracked in the shaft, to her grip, and held it parallel to the bar beneath it, gripping it and the bar at the same time.

The ghoul dipped closer, Avery shifted course, and the ghoul saw an angle.

Avery was able to move the stick free and swing it out as the ghoul got close, serrated claws striking the side of one of the bars Avery was clinging to.

A different sort of thing when flight and maneuvering were so key- wings made a big target and disabling a wing with the ugly lacrosse stick basically took it out of the sky.

The ugly lacrosse stick was on its way to being a regular ugly stick again, with the damage to the shaft.

More of the omen-birds blocked some of the small fry.  Anthem shot another of the bigger Others.

Avery could see the details on the Titan’s face, now.

Some of the people from further down the perimeter had erected a bit of a barrier, with some heroic spirits or close equivalents summoned- archers in a glowing white with echo-ish silhouettes.  The arrows were the same glowing white, and stuck in the Titan.  They seemed to annoy him- as did Liberty and a few of the airborne goblins with her.

Avery got into the right ballpark.  “Do it, little arsonist.”

Snowdrop, with the goblin matchbook, lit the first one, to light the fuse on the canister.

Trees nearby ignited, at the same time.  The purpose of the matchbook.  The fires got the Titan to turn its head, surprised.

If I imagine the language it speaks is elemental devastation and explosions, that was a ‘boo!’, Avery thought.

Avery undid the tie and let the canister go.

The moment it came free, the heavy adjustment to the weight distribution on the paper airplane pulled her into a sharp left turn.  She undid a second tie, and the middle canister came partially untied.  It was rigged with two ropes, and with the first rope untied, it dropped from the center and swung to hang from the right instead.  A semblance of balance.

The first canister bounced off the Titan’s shoulder.  It was near the small of the Titan’s back when it detonated.

The fire from the explosion came out brown-black, venting out of the opening of the bottle with a sound like a raspberry, or a very wet fart.  It roared out, burned the air, stained snow that brown-black, and painted the back of the Titan’s naked buttocks and legs.

The Titan stumbled, turning, trying to get a good look at the back of his legs.

Supposedly a single turd from a greater goblin had been dropped in there with the gas, for this one.

The moment it all seemed over, the last wisp of fire to go out came out orange, instead of brown-black, brighter than it seemed it should be, but that might’ve been the dark haze in the air and the recent brown-black fire creating contrast.

That orange was a flicker that ignited that haze in the air.  It happened in stages, starting from the lightest concentration, then rolling on down through a whole set concentration of crap in the air, then caught the next level and so on, spiraling around the Titan, chasing that mess on the back of his legs, which it ignited with a final ripping sound in the air, burning out the brown-black.

That’s one of three, Avery thought.

The Titan had noticed her.

Her maneuverability wasn’t great, with the two weights hanging off her.  She could see the Titan stomping after her- finally leaving the others alone.  A few birds flew into its face, but it barely cared.

It moved an arm, and Avery felt the wind go to hell, ice and rain mixing and coming from wild directions.

She steered as best as she could through that.

It moved again, and this time it controlled lightning.

Avery had asked gremlins to prep something- even something minor.  Anything that would keep her from being knocked out of the sky.

The boom box was a modification to an existing goblin item.  It made music, whatever you wanted, which was usually intentionally annoying music.  But even good music was skewed by the boombox to be awful to listen to for bystanders.  Tinny, weird acoustics, attention-grabbing.

With the original device, the idea had been that any attempt to damage it, especially bashing it, would only make it play louder, refusing to turn off.  That had been combined with a goblin lightning rod, the dashboard radio from the Kim car, and a car battery from the same, changed so it drew power from electricity and lightning, instead.

The lightning strike was caught by the machine.  It flared to life, and started blaring the music.

The second strike doubled the volume.

Snowdrop hissed, pulling on Avery’s head.

Avery took that cue, moving out of the way.

It was subtler- arm moving at a place Avery couldn’t see without turning around.  The ice crystals went flying through the air into trees.  Only one hit a tree, but it was the size of a human being and on impact, felled the tree entirely.

The Titan slowed.

Maybe because it hadn’t had any success at all, it assumed this was impossible, or because it hadn’t produced the devastation that also provoked it in its endless loop, it had lost interest.

It was going to go back to the others.

Avery turned, and managed to time turning around for when the Titan turned to go back after the group.

There were fairy and Fae curses where the victim grew hair endlessly, a foot every few seconds, even, requiring a lifetime of hacking it back.  The goblin version of the same affected pubes, sometimes evergrowing, from inconvenient places for some extra insult to the… insult, Avery supposed.  Other times it was triggered by a lusty moment or, like this particular case, contact with moisture.

So, with cursed hair filling the next canister, Avery shifted it to an angle, uncapped it, and let the contents start to come out in an uneven, stringy pulp of gas-soaked pube.

“Light a fire, Snow!  Stick the match in here if you can!”

Avery moved the head of the ugly stick closer.  There was room to wedge a match in, and once it was wedged in, she could touch the stream-

Avery didn’t even see or hear Snowdrop lighting the match.  What she saw was an abrupt flash, as the soaked pubes ignited, three quarters of the way up the stream that was pouring down and out of the canister.

Avery had to turn sharply, using the shift of weight and slopping contents of the jug to help things pour out, and buy herself enough space that the fire wouldn’t climb up faster than the liquid poured down, until it reached the canister and set Avery on fire.

“Go, go, go,” Snowdrop called out, turning human, hugging Avery from behind.  “Get away from him, go, we can leave a trail.  He’ll be so confused when he eventually realizes we left a whole trail behind his back, and he’ll follow purely out of curiosity!”

“I’m not following you, Snow-”

“Behind his head!”

“Goblins are a bad influence on you, Snow!”

“We don’t want his attention, so leave!” Snow shouted, over wind and booming music.

Avery steered the flying machine toward the Titan, contents still pumping out of the jug.  Avery wasn’t sure if they were naturally flammable, if the gas had just distributed really well, or if the gas-soaked goblin pube hair that multiplied when in contact with moisture was picking up the ‘gas’ as one of the things it multiplied.

But she was getting enough quantity.

She timed her turn to coincide with her running up against the Titan.

Steam rolled off of it.  His face was contorted, scrunched up.

Goblin pube hair smelled bad when it burned.

It was worse when she aimed her flight to go past the Titan’s head, and she let the burning goblin pube hair slap across his face as it poured out.

“No!” Snowdrop shrieked.  “Oh no!”

It got the Titan’s attention again.

Her goal was simple.  To lead it away from people.

Which was only half of it.

The other half being that she was leading it into the other group.  Toward Augur.  Toward St. Victor’s practitioner, toward Griffin, toward Josef, toward the Allaire forsworn.

They’d pulled back, for the most part, leaving mostly Kims behind, backed by the rank and file Others.

So she’d meet them.  Prongs out.  Birds in formation, Anthem a sniper with a handgun in his hand.

A Titan immediately behind her.

It stomped after her, lightning striking when its feet came down.  One strike had what looked like fifty lesser sub-bolts of lightning arcing out from it, to everything that could theoretically be a point of contact.  Including Avery.

The boom box ate it, and the music increased in volume.

There, Avery thought.

One house at the end of that cluster, very close to where Charles had primed the Crucible.

Close-ish to the action, windows giving a good vantage point.  Not quite a part of the whole Allaire setup, where they had their own thing going on, a little less combative.

Let’s flush you out, scare you.  There’s no way you don’t have an emergency way of dealing with the Titan.

Avery checked the Titan was still following.  It swiped at the burning pubes.  A few flecks went everywhere.

Bangnut put out one small fire on the wing of the paper airplane by hitting it with the butt end of the little fire extinguisher.

An Other swooped in and had a bunch of the omen-crows flock to it, pecking at its face.

Stray lightning from the Titan knocked it out of the air a second later.

Then if I loop back, let these guys handle this Titan, hopefully to keep it or get rid of the headache entirely, I can organize with-

The impact was sudden, jarring, and was followed with Avery’s stomach doing a sudden 1080-degree spin in her abdomen.

Something had caught her wing.  A harpoon, that had unfolded with three broad hooks.

It limited how far she could go, pulling her into a quarter-circle turn, tearing at the wing.

Cellmoan unhooked something from the boombox setup, which felt dangerous in itself, and attached it to the grappling hook.

Avery could see the jolt- the arcs dancing between gaps, in those moments there was any slack between links in the chain, she could follow the origin of the chain to where an Other was crouched, saw the crossbow-artillery type thing getting the electricity and starting to smoke.

Barely mattered.  Because when the machine exploded, it turned out the very tail end of the chain was tied to a tree.

Which gave Avery two options.  To keep going, and let the chain get tangled up in tree branches, or to try to turn, reverse… and be flying straight at the Titan.

Bangnut used the fire extinguisher, aiming it at the hook, and the gout of flame superheated it, in a very alarming way, not far from Avery.

But it melted enough to lose its grip.

Leaving Avery with a flying machine with one functional wing and one broken one.

“Guys!” Avery hollered.  “Ditch the gear!  Dump weight, come to me!”

They did.  The boombox tumbled and fell- it was mostly useless anyway.  The fire extinguisher got dumped.

The goblins clambered down to her.  Bangnut was evacuating the thirty pounds of tools that were jammed into his little overalls, in ways that made the pinching and puncturing of anatomy a near-certainty.

Avery got a grip on them, made sure she had Snowdrop, and then let go of the paper airplane.

Let it go from flying machine to a piece of paper in the wind, little canisters drawn on the corners.  Avery, Snowdrop, and her goblins were a couple hundred feet up in the air.

Liberty wouldn’t catch up in time.

They dropped, tumbling.

There was that zone again.

She went spread-eagled, to control her fall.  With the residual Storm rolling off of the Titan, it didn’t work.  Wind pushed at her, knocking her sideways.  She drew arms and knees close in, then thrust them out the moment her belly was close to facing ground again.

The paper airplane found her hand.  She threw it down, hand out, and caught the bar.

Except it expanded out to be a flying machine again, still with a hole in one wing, smaller but still enough it wouldn’t fly right.

It let her change her trajectory from ‘straight down’ to ‘down at an angle’, wind resistance doing a lot more to slow her, though the wind came from every direction, sometimes making her feel like it was going to spike her straight down, sometimes like it was going to throw her sideways, other times like it might lift her up.

The Titan was watching, and her wooden bead bracelet clicked, making that much clear.  Someone else watched from the house.  She was still trailing burning hair gunk.

“Eyes closed!” she shouted.  The plane caught the wind, and flipped upside-down.  The edge of the wing slapped her, but it caught her from beneath, briefly pushing her up, the paper flexible enough it didn’t shatter her bones.  She waited for her moment, paper in place-

No, the wind whispered.

Beads clicked in a profound way.

An eye opened in the overcast sky above, wind whispering inarticulately as it changed.  Darkness in clouds gave definition, the sunlight straining to press through the gray-black cloud cover giving it a startling light.

Augury let people see from a distance, and there was often a sign that someone was looking.

This was one big sign.  To not let her out of sight, or to let her use black rope.

She steered the struggling plane in a half-circle, trying to slow down and failing, before the wind caught it, the hole in the one wing gave too much leeway and not enough resistance, and it flipped again.  The gas-soaked hair slapped her side, thankfully not on fire.

Is this what I get, then? Avery wondered.  For going easy on them?

Didn’t matter.

She was at a bad, break ten to fifty bones velocity, not quite terminal, because the paper airplane was helping to provide wind resistance, when it wasn’t flipping around or coming apart.

Didn’t matter.

She needed that focus.

She steered things, as much as that was possible when her options were basically hurtling down and sharply to the left and hurtling down and slightly to the left.

Toward trees.  Putting paper airplane between herself and the eye, herself and the Titan.  She put a foot on the bar, almost up by her armpit, preparing to jump, in a vain effort to push herself the other way at the same time she black roped.

They were already in trees, positioned and waiting.  They came flying out.  Tore at paper.  She couldn’t tell what Other they were, it didn’t matter.

Two mostly nonfunctional wings, now.

She needed cover.  Focus failed her.  She reached for something brighter, steering vainly to get the nose up with two broken wings.

Bangnut squirmed out of her grip and shucked off his overalls and threw himself sideways, almost doing a jump-rope maneuver over his own clothing as he leaped toward the hole.

He landed flat against the paper, overalls in one hand, the fabric slapping out against the medium-size claw-gouge hole in the one wing.  Pins, nails, and safety pins caught on paper.  So he was there, plastered against the surface by air pressure from below, naked as the day he was pulled out of Warren-muck, holding onto overalls that were serving as an emergency patch job, a dong that would have been oversized on an adult man, probably, flapping madly in the whipping wind.

Cellmoan tried to do the same thing, but with her ears, and went straight through the hole, left behind in an instant.

“Gotta-!” Avery strained, her entire body working against air pressure and descent to try to get the nose up.  Her foot was still propped on the bar, her entire body was pushing up on the upper half of the air craft.  She managed, got upward trajectory to buy herself more seconds, but had too many eyes on her to black rope.  The wind pulled sharply, and they started to fall again.  Only the fact that she’d wedged herself in so thoroughly kept her from being thrown off.

Grim focus wasn’t working.  Was there a brighter focus?

Fun.  Candy.

Brighter days.  Lighter days.

She thought of the day they’d first awoken.  The nervousness, the hope.  Having friends again for the first time in what felt like forever, sitting in the back of a pickup truck, on the way to their stop at a campground, after which they’d see things that were basically lesser gods.

Not really, but…

Brighter, more innocent days.

Hat and cloak.

The Build-up boon maybe helped her in grabbing them from her bag.  A lifeline of cloth when falling.

Avery pushed off the bar, jumping, her entire body straining for that push, that would get her moving at least a little in a direction that wasn’t terminally down-ish.

Her foot slipped instead of giving her that leap.

It slipped a half-foot, found the corner before the bar bent to go up toward the upper half of the craft, and found leverage there.  She jumped, cloak in one hand, hat in the other, knees coming up hard as she swept them around herself.  The movement with the hat in her left hand was also a punch with the black rope.

Snowdrop held onto her, Bangnut held onto Snowdrop, and the little gremlin was smart enough to take Snowdrop’s cue and screw his eyes shut.

Avery black roped to ground.

She hadn’t realized she was moving sideways as much as she was, and when she hit, she hit awkwardly.  Snow formed a brutal plume, she tumbled, one of her bag’s straps broke.  Snowdrop and Bangnut came free of her grip.

She came to a stop, lying on wet snow.

The eye in the sky snapped over to look straight at her.  It narrowed.

“You-” the wind whistled.

“-Bitch,” Cameron finished, stepping outside.

Seth followed her, gesturing.  Flying Others came swooping down.

“Bitch?” Avery asked.

“Avery is such a bitch, you know it,” Snowdrop said, lying on her back, spread eagled, trying to catch her breath.  It looked like the wind had been knocked out of her.

“Don’t fucking pity me,” Cameron said.

They were all here.  The ones who remained.  A handful of St. Victor’s kids.  Nectar’s cousin was among them.  Cameron, Teddy, Kira-Lynn.  Dony wasn’t around.

The teachers.  Seth, Griffin, Josef.

“Call in the grotesques and ghāla,” Griffin said.  “Tear her limb from limb before her friends get here.”

Seth motioned.

“You asked for this,” Cameron said.  She still had traces of Abyss-ness in her.  All three of the veteran St. Victor’s kids did.

“Clarify when?” Avery asked, grunting as she got to a standing position.  She kept her hands out, fingers splayed out.

“Pity?” Cameron asked.  “Fuck you.  I’d rather you try to psychologically destroy me.  Not that it would’ve.”

Was that a gainsaying opportunity?  What did that even get Avery, except execution by everyone else here?

“I didn’t try and psychologically destroy you because if I did it’d psychologically destroy me!”

“Bull!” Cameron retorted, without room for an eyeblink’s pause between Avery finishing and her response.

“Go,” Seth said.

“I have shit I want to say!” Cameron cut in.

“Too bad,” Kira-Lynn said, pointing.

The flying Others came swooping down.  Avery was able to get out of the way of the fastest one, which looked ghoul-ish.

Not so much the second.  Claws dragged into skin near elbow, came down, and caught her side too.

She kicked and made some distance between herself and it.  Gargoyle-ish, squat, with dark green skin with moss on it.

“You’re only rushing this because you let Lucy go when you had her cornered,” Teddy remarked.

“Have to work with the constraints of the bogeyman I’m paired with,” Kira-Lynn said.  “He takes his time.”

“He could’ve taken his time without letting her go,” Teddy said.

Avery took five quick, uneven steps back, stumbling, to avoid the two Others with claws.

“The opossum!” Seth called out.

Snowdrop struck a match from the goblin matchbox.

It lit, and Snowdrop ignited the end of her own hair.

Which also ignited a nearby tree, setting it on fire with a rush of flame from root to treetop.

The tree wasn’t close enough to be anything useful, but it was a startling flare of orange from the sidelines, and the ghoul was so rushed in getting away from it that it got in the grotesque’s way.

Avery ripped off her mask and swiped it.  One antler was intact.

Dead wood.  If you are a ghoul, or some close cousin…

It raked flesh.  The ghoul recoiled.

“Get the opossum before she lights more fires.”

“Get Avery Kelly.”

Contradictory orders and the ghoul-thing wasn’t attacking.  The grotesque turned toward Snowdrop, paused, and turned toward Avery.

“Fly!” Seth called out.

Avery could see in the background as more flying others took to the air.

Liberty had been making an approach, but it looked like the flying Others were intercepting her.  Keeping her from getting close.

The Titan was a whole other obstacle for Liberty, surrounded by pouring rain, a trail of burning hair slowly extinguishing in the wet- multiplying in size and scale as it absorbed the moisture.

Avery was bleeding where the claws had got her.  She pressed her hand to the injury site, wincing.

Voices overlapped for a second before Kira-Lynn bodily shoved Cameron sideways, brandishing a black branch at Snowdrop, who scrambled to the side.  Kira-Lynn had to walk around Cameron to not shoot her while keeping Snowdrop in her sights.  If a branch had sights.

“Don’t fucking shove me!” Cameron raised her voice.

Snowdrop found the chance to light another match.

This one caught the third canister from the aircraft.  The one Avery hadn’t gotten to yet.

The detonation kicked off.  This was actually the first one Avery had meant to use, because it was simple.  Goblin firecracker materials mixed in with gas.

The explosions came in clusters that caused more explosions.

The Titan turned.

“Miller.”

“Handled,” the alchemist said.  He pulled bells out of his pocket and rang them.

Avery wanted so badly to interrupt and gainsay him on the ‘handled’ part.

Except it was vague, except a lot of things.

Avery had lost the ugly lacrosse stick in the descent.  She was unarmed here, pretty much.  No practice.

She moved back out of the way of the grotesque.

“Two more!” Seth signaled, gesturing at the trees.  “Two air, two ground.  And another two pairs for the opossum.”

The Others came out of the woods.  Further back, some homunculi had come out of the dark, and were moving from the trees on one side of the road to the trees on the other.  All were near-identical.  Human-sized figures, neckless, with shoulders merging into ears, expressions stretched into rictus looks, lower lips pulled so tight against and past front teeth that it looked like they wouldn’t ever retract, lower lips pulled down past gumline.  They were dark brown, light brown in face, with irridescent royal purple clusters dotting their scalps and back that looked like tumors, or dense, rose-like flowers, or some mixture of both.  All were naked, genitals stretched out wide like their lips were.

Avery could see the faint purple dust being shed from those clusters.

She saw the Titan pause, then turn.

Liberty was fighting like crazy to get free enough of the flying Others to get out of the Titan’s way.

No, Avery thought, holding a hand to a wound.  Go, go, go.

Get out of there.

Too slow…

There was a distant explosion as a part of Liberty’s flight pack was pried free with clawed hands.

It had to be some kind of limiter, because Liberty’s speed doubled, her flying more erratic than before.  She pulled free of the mob, and then flew, taking a wide angle, to fly toward Avery.

Seth was gesturing to more Others.  His eyes flashed as he watched them, flashed again as he looked at Liberty.

Then the Titan.

“Miller,” Seth said, to the alchemist.  “Slight change, if you could.  Can you ramp up aggression?”

“Can.  Bell ring away.”

“Do it.”

Avery threw up her arms in an ‘x’ shape, which she could barely afford to do, because the additional Others Seth had called in were swooping in on her.

Every wound she had was making itself felt.  New ones too.  And the claw wounds hurt like a bitch.

But Liberty flew away.

“Noble,” Seth said, turning his head.  “Stupid, but noble, I guess.”

Avery’s breath came out like a shuddering, tearless sob.  No tears, just glares.

When the Others came snatching at her with claws, she roared, clawing back with fingertips, fingers of her other hand wrapped around the edge of her mask, swinging it to use it as shield, antler as a raking weapon.  More claw marks dug into her forearms as payment for that flimsy attempt.

Snowdrop was being attacked by three or four Others, and Snowdrop was not a fighter.

So Avery went for it.  She ran, past raking claws, past snapping jaws.  Straight for her opossum.

Maybe speed helped.  She wasn’t as fast as she should be, but she remained fast.  Claws hooked on her coat, so she abandoned it.

Bag, abandoned too.

To get to Snowdrop, catch one winged other by the wing, and pull on it, pulling sideways, maybe even snapping it.

Grabbing hair, to pull Others away, buying space-

More scratches.  Lighter this time.

Mostly, the Others dogpiled her.  When her momentum was broken, they could get more of a hold on her, or bully her into stumbling, which became them bullying her into falling halfway onto the ground.  She escaped being pinned between a man with a sword and a dead look in his eyes and the road.

A gunshot sound cut past the sound of grunts and frantic struggle.  Avery saw the effect catch a lot of the Others who were trying to pile onto her and Snowdrop.  Pellets.

A naked Bangnut with a makeshift sawed-off shotgun, spraying the crowd of Others.

“Snow, the match Harold-”

“The Aware with weird visions!” Cameron called out.  “Stop her!”

Kira-Lynn used the black branch.  She didn’t really aim for Avery or Snowdrop so much as she blasted the whole dogpile of Others who were crowding in on them.  Cracking and tainting flesh, splitting it, exploding it.  A push from behind, that pushed the dogpile toward them.  Doing far more damage than the shotgun had.

But Snowdrop and Avery were bowled over.  The matchbook fell.

“My fingernails are too long, they’re getting in the way, I don’t bite them enough,” Snowdrop said, groping for it.  Her voice cracked as she raised it, “I’m too chiiill!”

An Other pinned her.

“You think I have long fingernails?” Avery asked.  “I play sports.”

She grabbed Snowdrop by the scruff of the neck, legs raised- foot pressing against one Other’s stomach to keep it from getting at her.

Another Other lunged for the length of Avery’s leg-  and she pushed, buying a moment, before she could withdraw her leg, letting the lunge hit the Other she’d been holding back.

Snowdrop went small, and Avery swung her, sliding her toward the matchbook.

Rather than be human, Snowdrop remained small, using her opossum fingers to dig for the matchstick that Harold had mentioned.

Kira-Lynn blasted again, running now, to get out and around to the side.

One set near the back and bottom was special?

Maybe even a trap, for the unwitting regular user of the matchbox.  If the entire thing was meant to cause random fires nearby, every time a match was used to ignite something, then the last one-?”

Snowdrop pried it free.

Like pulling a trigger on a detonator.

The cabin they were near exploded in rolling fire.  That explosion was followed soon after by another explosion that reminded Avery of the firecracker effect.

Alchemy lab? Avery thought.

It wasn’t a game changer.  But it was a big pause on everything, putting everyone standing onto the ground.  Turning the Titan’s head.  Others who’d been on the offensive, attacking even as they were goaded and blasted from behind were stunned and startled, made even more disorganized.

“Why did you have to call her?” Cameron asked.  A shimmering bubble was breaking down around her.  The sigil on one of a series of bracelets she wore glowed.  She was one of the only ones who hadn’t been rocked by the explosion.  “Why did you bring her in front of people?”

“Your mom?” Avery asked.

“Who else do you fucking thing I’m talking about!?” Cameron shouted.

“Fucking whiny-” Kira-Lynn said, tilting her head.  She had lantern in one hand, which was starting to glow, and a blank branch she aimed at Avery.

“Fuck off!” Cameron retorted, touching a bracelet.

The transparent bubble exploded out from around her, diagram work traced on the surface.  It shoved everything near her away.  Avery hit the snowbank and went up for a scary second before falling, hard.  Snowdrop did the same.  Kira-Lynn was knocked aside, black branch knocked from her hand.

“You had your shot.  They brought my family into this.  My mom.  I get a turn.”

“What did you think you were doing, burning Verona’s house down?” Avery asked, groaning.  Falling like she had just now had really hurt.  It took work to get into a position where she could stand up.

Cameron just shook her head.  She said something that might’ve been, “wasn’t me.”

“Your perfect, fancy mom, queen of the school PTA, huh?” Kira-Lynn asked.  “Is she disappointed?”

Cameron stared Avery down, as if daring her to say something.  “Kira-Lynn?  I’ve got three charges I can use on these bracelets, and I’ve got a black branch for when I run out.  If you’re good and quiet, you can watch me use them at increasingly close ranges until her bones are pulverized.  If you reach for that black branch or say more dumb shit, I’m using at least one on you.”

“Homunculi aren’t liking the smoke from the burning lab,” Miller said.  “And without them, the Titan’s got no push coming from behind it.”

“Sink it into the Crucible?” Griffin suggested.

“If we have to.”

Cameron climbed up the snowbank.  Avery got to her feet.

And Cameron used the bracelet.  The last one had been from maybe twenty or thirty feet away.  This was more like ten.

Avery was thrown back by the bubble-shockwave.  There was only snow behind her, and the Path boon from the Stuck-in-Place was at least partially effective behind the gainsaying, but she still managed to wrench her shoulder.

Blood from bleeding claw wounds left crimson pools in snow.

“Her friends are on their way.  Titan might slow them down,” Seth said.  He had a bleeding abrasion at the side of his forehead, but was otherwise okay, standing in the road, not far from Kira-Lynn.  “Wrap it up?”

“Is this really you?” Avery asked, “Pulverizing bones?  Being around people like that?”

Cameron met Avery’s eyes.  Everything in her agonized expression said no.  The arm remained raised, hand ready to tap the next bracelet.  “I’m going to do it.”

Like she’d admitted no, but then had to say she’d do it anyway.

“Why?  You can back out.  If you pull back, surrender, agree not to do anything more, it’s our policy.  We have a really good-”

Avery grunted, ribs hurting.

“-policy, we’ve accepted lots of people who do that.”

“You’re not better than me.”

“What?” Avery asked.

“You’re not a better person.  So I’m going to break you.  To make it clear.”

“Cameron?” Seth called out.  “She’s better than you.”

Cameron wheeled on him, wounded.

“She’s talented, powerful, even gainsaid she has a lot of tools.  Save the charges on the powerful defensive magic item, use the-”

“You’d say that to your girlfriend?” Cameron asked.

“You’re on the backswing from the Abyss, I can See it.  You’re tired.  You’re acting crazy.”

“You don’t-”  She put her hand on the black branch.  Anger gave way to something wounded.  “Don’t say that to me.  You know why you don’t say that to me.”

Avery could see something dawning on Kira-Lynn, by her expression.

“I’m saying it.  You’re being stupid and crazy.  Black branch now!”

She pulled it free as he barked out the words, and Avery was certain she was going to blast Seth.

But the wand whipped in Avery’s direction.

And the bubble from one of the bracelets expanded, pausing as three more bullets hit it, for four in total, all aimed in the region of her hand and the black wand.

That pause gave Avery a moment to pivot, turning-

The bubble resumed expanding, and hurled her.  It kept Cameron from having her hand blasted into chunks, maybe with more damage if it had blown up the Abyss-ness in the wand, but it threw off her aim, made Kira-Lynn and Seth have to duck and cover.

Avery scrambled, running.  Snowdrop followed- she hadn’t been in position to get pushed as much.  Bangnut was running another direction.

The Allaires and the Musser familiars were there, outside, watching, uninvolved.  Behind them was the Crucible, a heat-blur in the air, masked by pouring rain.

Avery ran, some snaking strikes of the black wands landing all around her.  Until she was back with the others.  She collapsed, more or less, into Lucy and Julette’s arms.

“Good,” Lucy said.  “Whatever you did, good.”

“My glamour’s fucked, washed off.”

“Okay.  Fixable-ish.  Mine’s not great, but I think it’ll hold to buy me a second chance when and if I need it.  And we know when I might need it.”

“Yeah.  No idea what happened to Liberty’s gremlin.”

“No idea either.”

“I might be mostly done.  Not up for much running or fighting or, hmm… front-lining,” Avery said.  Her voice wavered on that last word.

“Okay.”

Some Dog Tags were following Lucy, guns raised.  Midas kept a gun trained in the direction of that group.  Grandfather was watching the Titan warily.

“Could use your brain,” Lucy said.

“Can give you ditzy tired, shaken-up brain.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve been thinking, what goes wrong?”

“It’s not super duper super,” Avery said.

“It’s steps forward.  It’s-”

A sound of a gun clicking made Lucy turn her head.  Avery too.

Midas aimed a gun at his forehead.

“I surrender.  Can’t do anything else.  I won’t agree to any terms except I’m not doing anything to you again tonight, no tricks, traps, or secrecy, and I can give you information.  So sworn.”

“Fucking- what?” Lucy asked.

“I’m not a fighter.  Homunculi are toast, my leverage over the Titan’s not great.  I can tell you how to get the incoming Others to quit, in exchange, I get to walk away free and clear.  Fastest, best route to me getting what I want.  The Carmine knows who I am, he’ll understand.  Whoever wins, I get to continue my work.”

“Or we shoot you,” Midas said.

“Then you don’t get to hear what I know.”

“Just take that asshole, hold him at gunpoint,” Lucy said.

Midas obliged, forcing Miller to drop to his knees.

Lucy grabbed Avery’s shoulder, steering her away.

Avery still felt shaky. The intensity of the last bit was hitting her like waves against her sand castle self, and it wasn’t even over.

Snowdrop hugged her tight from the side, face smushed up against gouged ribs in a way that really hurt, but Avery didn’t protest.

“The Belangers.  Gillian,” Avery said.  She wrinkled her nose.  “Even Chase.”

“I know,” Lucy said.  “I’ll- I’ll figure out if we can tackle this without me losing my glamour too.  I’ll figure out something with Miller.  If you trust me to-”

“Yeah,” Avery said, with no hesitation.

“Your brain, while my concentration’s elsewhere.  I think we have another ephing bird.  Like the one that stole Yalda’s ring, kept us from giving it to John.  Preparing to steal something out from under us, cheat us out of a win.”

Avery nodded slowly.

“The Aurum.”

“Okay,” Avery said, taking that in.  “Can see it.”

“So that’s your job,” Lucy said.  “You’re good?”

Avery grunted out an unsure note.

“And we’ll figure out this, I guess,” Lucy said, indicating Julette, and the exploded house.

“My brains, your brawn,” Julette said.

“I’m not that brainless and you’re not that brawnless,” Lucy told Julette.

“Whoever said that you had to be brainless to be brawny?  The more complete way of saying it would be my brain, your brawn, and your brawn and my brain, whole package, baby.”

“You’re annoying.”

“Part of my brainyness.”

“They’re fighting a lot,” Avery interrupted the back and forth.

“They were fighting a lot at the start.  First time I saw ’em together,” Lucy said.

“Close to killing each other.”

“Okay, good to know,” Lucy murmured.  “But you know, hard as this is-”

“Aurum, remaining practitioners.”

“And everything we’ve done up until now, scrapping,” Lucy said.  She looked at Julette.  “Not nearly as scary as Verona’s job.”

Julette nodded.

“Yep,” Avery agreed.

“I’m so damn worried,” Lucy said, under her breath.

“Trust,” Julette said, thumping her chest.

“Last time we were saying ‘trust’ like that?” Lucy asked, weighing the words, clearly trying not to give away the game to prying ears, while still saying what she needed to get off her chest.  “We were really scared one of our own was dead or dying.”

Lucy’s eyes fell on Avery as she said it.

“That’s fair,” Julette replied.  Then she smirked.  “Trust.”

Next Chapter