Wikipedia:Sandbox

Lucy had one wrist pressed against her left ear, but even with her right ear uncovered, earring protecting it, the noise defied her brain’s ability to put the sounds together.

She wasn’t sure if that was the gunshot, the modified firecrackers, the Storm acting up in that moment, or the defenses crumbling.

The sparks from the fireworks were cast out into the Storm, fire freezing and conducting electricity, in a brilliant red-orange-pure-white series of flashes. The elementals that had been throwing themselves uselessly at the wards outside the property found a new path of least resistance, and diverted course, lunging in from the side closest to Lucy, arcing around, or going over. They moved like people and animals who’d leaped from a speeding vehicle and somehow managed to run as they hit ground, hit, and exploded into waves of ice water, electricity, and ice shards.

One elemental, shards of something white joined together by electricity into the shape of something birdlike, was first in and swelled to five times the size, touching the walkway in front of the property and the third floor with wingtips as it struggled and failed to fly. Each point of floundering contact made lightning rip up concrete and parts of the stone wall.

Give an inch, this Storm takes a mile.

A hand at Lucy’s wrist made her startle. Grandfather.

His grip was painfully tight, but because of that tightness, she could force her arm down to help pull her body up. He put a hand at her back to support her on her way up to her feet.

Members of the Kim family had been scattered. If the firecrackers had bowled them over, the wave of elementals had either hit them when they were down or they’d blown them clear of the porch, into the active Storm.

A few who hadn’t been hit hard were defending the rest- or defending those who’d been on the porch who weren’t family members. An older woman slammed the webbing between fingers together, and her shoulders and collarbone expanded out to either side with equal speed and force, a webwork of armpit, shoulder, collarbone, that wreathed her head. Long, misproportioned limbs unfolded out from the edges.

Another one, a man, was crouched forward, barely visible in the midst of the attacking elementals. It looked like he was doing something to create a shield, sticks in two hands, while others unfolded to form the barrier.

He roared out words, and the Storm drowned it out in a mess of rain and thunder.

“Joel Richardson!”

Lucy looked. She’d told herself she wouldn’t, but when she’d taken her implement and named it the Eavesdropper’s Earring, she’d accepted that she’d hear things she wouldn’t want to, that would add to her stress and burdens. It had been part of the deal.

The Dragonslayer was staggering. Not that there was evidence he was a Dragonslayer- he apparently hunted big elementals, and took the moniker anyway. The other side’s biggest asset against the Storm, maybe.

Mouths opened up all across the practitioner’s body. “Joel!”

Joel made a stumbling way toward the porch.

“Richardson, Richardson, Richardson! Get protections up! Now!”

Joel raised his head. Lucy could see the mark at the side of his throat, partially covered by armor, covered more by the blurring effect of the Storm. A quarter-sized marking, that looked more black than red. There was no blood, but that might’ve been because there was so much water.

She used Sight, and she Saw the crimson pumping out of the wound and being washed away before blood could even flow, as he stood in the middle of the Storm. Crimson watercolor painted water that was spraying ice water in every direction, tinting it pink and red.

Joel turned around, his back to the porch, as if looking for something.

“Joel! Bloody hell!”

He had a matching exit wound doing the same thing on the other side.

The pink and red swiftly became black. Joel’s hand went up to his throat, but the snarly, twisted nature of his armor got in the way of his hand. He didn’t move his hand around the jutting bit of metal, but seemed to try to force his arm into the metal, as if he thought it was the arm being uncooperative, and not that there was an obstacle in the way.

Then, as if he’d pushed so hard that way that he lost his balance, Joel toppled.

Grandfather tugged Lucy away.

While she understood the sentiment, and what he didn’t want her to see, she wasn’t someone who liked being tugged, so she moved her arm to get it free of his hand.

She’d been glancing back as he drew her away, and she saw the Kims and Lenard Lily lying on the lawn, steps, and walkway.

A second glance back, and the Kims were standing, dressed in their high-fashion, modern variations on Victorian gothic clothing. No sign of injury, no issues, except for suffering in the rain and immediate proximity to the elementals.

Suffering attracted echoes. Blurring at the edges, they blended into the surroundings, filling them. At the front of the house, there wasn’t a spot Lucy couldn’t see that didn’t have either elemental or echo blending in with surroundings. Every wall seemed to have an echo of a face on it. The shimmers in the air were reaching limbs.

“Omri! Get the injured into the house and reinforce things from inside, organize everyone else to secure the manor and prepare for attack. Alpheus, Elisheba, with me! Priss, go get the alchemist, help him with whatever he needs.”

The man had to yell to be heard over the noise. A woman went inside. The man headed towards Joel’s fallen body. He looked like a high-fashion rendition of a reverend, with the cut of his long black coat that went heavy over the shoulders, narrow along the body to the ankles and the note of white at the collar, where he had a white lace- ascot tie? Lucy wasn’t sure. His hair looked like it had been parted, but was soaked in the rain.

He was accompanied by two others, who looked like older teens. The guy Lucy presumed was called Alpheus wore a similar coat, except with a hood, and had the front open, so it kind of billowed behind him as he strode forward, head down. Beneath he wore a silky vest, high collared white shirt, and what might’ve been black leather pants. He had black sticks like Helen did, but they were three feet long each, his arms out to either side, hands practically twisted in knots so he could hold the things fanned out.

“Uncle?”

Alpheus’s voice.

And Elish-

“Do it.”

Alpheus swiped an arm Lucy’s way before she could finish assessing them. The sticks moved as he did, clacking together in a way that was audible to her earring.

Lucy felt it grip her, reaching past clothes and skin like some magnet that worked on bones instead. Sticks slipped into their configuration that looked like three overlapping triangles held out in front of Alpheus, straining to the point they splintered.

That felt bad.

“Cover!” Lucy shouted to Grandfather. She twisted, dragging her toe across the ground as she made her pivot. Making a line. She half-pushed him to get him to change direction just that bit faster.

Toward one of the nearby cabins, so they could get out of sight.

Elisheba, who had needles driven beneath her fingernails, and many more held in her hands besides, formed her own configuration, a loop that she thrust her head through.

Her neck went long, flesh tearing, with faces matching her own forming in the tears.

Bad idea to stop running, but Lucy turned, matching her facing to the line, so she was part of its bracing. Hands out-

“No!” Lucy called out.

A line, whether chalk or a divot in mud, was maybe the most basic signal to spirits.

Elisheba’s face slammed into the barrier, frost having collected on it from crossing a hundred feet and going headlong into the Storm, frost and blood splattering against the loose protection. The elongated, snake-like neck shattered in twelve places, but momentum carried things forward, torn and broken flesh formed its own faces, and broken vertebrae became sharp teeth.

Broken neck and faces piled up against the basic barrier like gory string from a can, straining it. The Storm was chewing up pretty much everything, and the line on the ground was part of it.

Lucy moved, abandoning the barrier as it looked like the pile-up was leaning away from her, going more sideways and back- and around the short line. Her boots slipped on ice and mud.

Barrier gone.

Lucy could sense the change in air pressure as she caught up to Grandfather, running for that cover.

Lucy felt that bone-magnet feeling, a resistance or invisible connection held in the very air.

The gory mess was gone. Elisheba was standing by the side of what had been the barrier. She had long black hair, high boots, wore one of those high fashion dresses that looked like pristine white rags layered artistically over one another, bound to her body with a corset and belt, cleavage on show, with needles sticking up from where tit met corset. Her ‘coat’ was barely that, more of a cloak- white with black fur lining. No gore, no string-in-a-can pile-up, maybe only some blood spatter in snow.

No cover from Alpheus, who was still there, marching forward, triangles of long sticks held together and in front of him, bowing with the strain with which he bent them against one another. Lucy could feel it.

The sticks shattered from that strain. With them, Lucy felt her back wrench and pull apart from itself, tearing flesh as part of her spine went a foot one way, part went a foot the other. Ribs at her back, near the spine, snapped with a sensation that felt and sounded like a series of gunshots, halfway through the process, before the shattering of her spine met the back and base of her neck.

The pain, startling in how intense it was, was followed by a cold quiet numbness.

Lucy crashed hard into snow and icy puddles.

“Lucy!”

Grandfather started shooting.

Grandfather shouted something else, but the roar of blood in Lucy’s ears, the Storm, and the gunfire? No. She didn’t hear.

It felt like her bones were bugs. Sensations returned, but inconsistent, tracing through her without logic, pulverized bone moving, stopping. Moving, stopping.

Lucy saw Grandfather shift his footing. Heard more gunshots.

Then she was okay. Bones in place, sensation flooding in. Her heart fluttered back into animation.

She made an inarticulate sound, gloves getting soaked as she pushed herself to a standing position.

Elisheba was crouched, picking up her sticks. Alpheus had been shot, and lay in the snow, sticks no longer broken, scattered around him.

“Don’t waste your bullets!” Elisheba called out. “You-!”

Grandfather shot her. Bullet to upper chest. It did enough damage to the cloak, causing it to come undone. The heavy, sodden material blew hard in the wind, cloak flapping, attached to only one shoulder now. Elisheba crashed to the ground.

Lucy winced, hand going to the side of her head.

“You okay?”

“My ear- that was loud.”

“I meant your back.”

“I- yeah. Illusory or self-reversing. I don’t know. Did you see how it works?”

“He held the broken sticks out. Moment I made him stop-”

“Shooting him?”

“Yeah. You were fine after.”

“Okay.”

“Where’s the other one?” Grandfather asked. “There were three, at least.”

Lucy listened. She could hear the footsteps, heavy, on the roof of- not this cabin, but one further down the street and approaching steadily. “Roof, over that way. Walking, not running.”

“Stone’s throw away or-?”

Grandfather had a grenade or something approximate on his belt. He wasn’t planning to throw a rock.

“Further, I’d guess. Thirty paces?”

“Right. Keep me in the know?”

Lucy nodded.

She glanced back, and saw Elisheba crouched down, hands covered in mud. She’d collected most of her fallen needles. No bloodstain. Cloak done up.

There were handprints in the ice, snow, and mud for thirty feet around the woman, filling up with muddy rainwater. Hunched over, the woman stared Lucy down.

“Fuck me. These guys…”

“Guy might be up. Got him good, but I guess that doesn’t count?”

“Yeah,” Lucy replied.

“Fall back to our guys?”

Lucy nodded. She’d done what she wanted. A hard press of her group against their group threatened to screw them up. Even if she went by her best gauge of how far away the conflict had been pre-nap and post-nap, the people on their side weren’t making a ton of headway.

The Carmine faction had too many random Others and other hassles. There might’ve even been a steady stream of them incoming. It was too easy to get bogged down, getting weaker, getting distracted, letting the powerful and connected like Lenard, the Kims, and Joel hang back and wait.

There’d be no way to get anything done, it’d bog them down, and they’d be a mess when it came time for an actual confrontation.

So Lucy had gone on her own.

“You’re alright?”

“Bullet wound. I’m fine.”

“You have your tools?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alpheus?”

“Almost had her. I was a hair shy of shattering the Dog’s trigger finger.”

“If you’re saying almost, then I imagine you got closer against them than the simpering incompetents who make up half our side. Which one was it?”

“The fox.”

“Let’s make your second attempt a success. The family stands to gain so much from this. Power vested in an entire region. Let’s do our best. Adjust what you’re doing, make it work. I’ll- blasted echoes. I’ll fold the region.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pep talk to the two. They’re functional again,” Lucy said. “He stopped to talk to them from the edge of the one roof, I think.”

“When we shoot them, they don’t die.”

“Avery said that when she looked down on things from the Promenade, before she went after Maricica, she saw they had body doubles. Maybe that factors in. Only one of them’s really alive? I’m picturing something like a main body with the heart and vitals, and they extend hands into one realm and out another, with the ends of the hands looking like people. Puppeteers with the strings threaded through the spirit world or something.”

“Strings you can cut?”

Lucy thought for a second, then shook her head. “No. I don’t know if I’m right, I don’t know what realm.”

Lucy and Grandfather were having to slow down to navigate. An elemental stood, face raised, letting the runoff from a gutter splash down over her, drinking in the storm and flows. There were echoes standing in the road and shadows, some moving very fast from one point to another, before stopping to twitch and blur, broadcasting stuff.

She was mostly okay on that front. Whatever Ann was doing to corral them, it meant they weren’t nearly as much a problem as the elementals.

“Something you read in a book? To get that idea? Have you read anything about that?”

“Guessing. There’s this issue with Horrors, their practice, where they’re not super common, the texts focus on how to not become one, and occasionally how to deal with one. There weren’t many books about them at the Blue Heron, I don’t know if Ray taught classes on it, I- dunno.”

“We’re in the-”

“Gortyna, L’empire de la Mort, Longleat.”

“-dark, then.”

Lucy heard something tink.

“Practice incoming,” Lucy warned, turning around, pointing.

“That’s-”

The walls around them exploded. Lucy and Grandfather were bowled over. Her stomach lurched.

No- not exploding. The walls multiplied. Every wall of every cabin around them became four, or six, or ten. Variations multiplied across them, but the variations had weirdness. Not that Lucy was in much position to keep track.

Street peeled up, the piled up snow, puddles, and bits of debris on either side of the road boiled up, geysers spilling up and out, multiplying them in size.

And the world tilted in five directions at once. Different things reacted to gravity in different ways. Some of the puddles with water boiling up from them started streaming up, or sideways. Snow and ice began breaking away from a snowbank to float up, turn a right angle, and then form a new snowbank to the side. Walls that had fanned out all dropped left, right, up, and down, slamming down into new configurations.

The enclosure began to block off outside light and the Storm.

“While we’re at it… Holmes. Brizendine. Winchester.”

Lucy reversed direction. She hurled a spell card.

The moment her hand was out past one wall, she could feel the ‘magnet’. The pull at her bones and her body’s fundamental structure. She pulled back.

“I saw her.”

The spell card detonated.

Lucy would’ve wanted to try something to follow that up, but she didn’t want to get broken to pieces again. She knew that technically her body was fine, the effect had been undone, and according to the rebound effect, she might even be resistant, now. She still felt wobbly, like her body didn’t trust it was okay.

She hoped the hypothermia wasn’t getting its teeth into her again.

“Guard me for a moment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You carry on around.”

“Sir.”

“Fuck,” Lucy swore.

“Can’t shoot this,” Grandfather said, turning to take it all in.

“He’s working on something else. I managed to interrupt it.” Elemental blast to get in the way of his claim to the payment. “He throws down some currency or payment at the end, I’m figuring,” Lucy murmured. The lack of Storm was feeling weird. Droplets still hit her from multiple directions, but that was because she was in an Escher painting, now.

“I don’t know much about this stuff. Tell me if you need to me to do anything different.”

“I don’t know enough about it either. Wish I could’ve gone in and stole it out of the air. I think I gotta let this one go. Be ready.”

“Something as big as this, y’think?”

“Don’t know.”

Grandfather made a low grumbling sound in his throat.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s not you. But this isn’t my thing.”

“Mine either. Let’s move toward the perimeter? Same general direction? One’s on the other side of this building, whatever that means now. I think it’s Alpheus. Hood guy.”

Walls had rotated ninety degrees. Some had kept their connection to adjoining walls, floor, or ceiling. Others hadn’t.

“Winchester, Holmes, Brizendine.”

Spell card- she had the curse deck with a few miscellaneous practices in them.

“Arena!” Lucy shouted, gripping the duelist rune in her left hand. A partially healed cut on the back of her hand ached with the fierceness of the grip, but she figured that counted for something.

The circle expanded out around her. Her hair billowed out, colors changed, bringing out bright pinks, light blues for snow, red for the cabin walls.

The sound that followed wasn’t the same ‘tink’ as before. But she heard the payment hit something solid. Maybe snow.

And the arena tore.

It flickered out as the explosion happened again – sudden movement of everything, making her stumble and fall.

“Fuck,” she swore.

The sudden shift of the walls separated her from Grandfather.

The world around her had been rendered into a labyrinth, in that first casting.

The second one made it a living labyrinth. Walls continually shifted, the ground changed, and flows of gravity altered between areas.

It wasn’t all clean. She’d noticed weirdness before, and there was a heavy propensity for duplication and reduplication of bones, flesh, and physical features. Branches at the edges had broken and splintered and made claw-like shapes. There were shifts in the grain of wood that could be interpreted to be faces.

Most of all, where she could see the insides of walls and things, she saw flesh and bone packed within.

No echoes or anything here. Those faces and that flesh was purely their thing, she figured.

Lucy paused, to take stock and catch her breath, watching her surroundings like Avery had warned her to do when visiting a Path.

Hand raised, she felt the air. Guilherme had taught her to sense power levels. She couldn’t sense one very easily here. But she could feel the other two practitioners start moving.

This place had a menace. Not just alive and continually adjusting, but malicious.

The separation of her and Grandfather.

She’d told him the direction to move. She trusted he’d move that way.

She did her best too. She passed a hallway and could see down a kaleidoscopic shifting of walls to where she was running, an overhead view.

Passing by one alley, she felt that magnetic pull on her Self again. Alpheus was out there and had his sticks arranged. He just needed to get a lock on her for a moment.

This won’t do, Lucy thought.

If she was seeing herself, then this place was potentially infinite. Everything looped so she could run forward forever and not get out. Get to one end and she’d reappear at some corresponding, key point of this labyrinth.

A wall came down like a guillotine.

Lucy managed to sidestep it.

Her anklet ticked, wooden bead rotating.

She didn’t feel the magnetic pull, so it was either the boss or the girl, Elisheba. Lucy pulled back, back to a wall, to take stock and minimize how much of herself could be seen or tracked.

“Theta-gamma to gamma-psi prime, hard sweep.”

The voice came from two places at once.

The landscape shifted. The wall Lucy was on moved, fast enough she couldn’t push away or get her feet under her- she came dangerously close to having her foot catch on snow underfoot and wrench as it was twisted one way.

Instead, she was pushed to the brink of a cliff.

Past that brink, what had been her ‘forward’ became ‘down’. Lucy twisted around, weapon ring already on. Her free hand had the useless duelist rune still in it, and she dropped that. Instead, she grabbed at her earring, the first available thing.

She cast it out, a chain whip with a crystal weight at the end, and the whip pierced the wood of the cabin wall above her.

She dangled.

“Theta facing, centered at Chi-digamma, sink bonewise.”

The space below Lucy fell away, becoming a pit.

“Sink. Sink again.”

Antlers that had been mounted on walls or above doors multiplied themselves below her. It wasn’t meant to be a drop into oblivion or anything simple. The walls of the pits were icy stairs at bad angles, with antlers sprouting from them, antlers sprouting from antlers. They moved, stairs sliding against one another, some going clockwise, some going counter-clockwise, some poking out and then sinking back into the shifting mass.

It was a meat grinder.

She wished she had more glamour, to turn into a bird. She’d burned through too much supply. But flying here would be hell, anyway.

She heard movement.

Elisheba, standing around the corner, out of sight.

Needles clicked.

And Elisheba’s head, neck, and arms extended, multiplying, flesh tearing, fingers grabbing at the wounds from the inside to try to pry them open wider. The black-haired, pale-faced woman’s head did a u-turn in the air, spotting Lucy.

Lucy could hear the practitioner’s bones cracking against one another.

She saw flesh shifting, too.

She’d fought the Family Man a few times. He had that same sort of flesh thing going on beneath skin. Not that she’d had a great view of it, the last fight.

But she knew what to expect.

So she dropped before Elisheba could do a viper-strike lunge for her with some extended limb or neck.

It seemed to catch Elisheba off guard. The older teenager didn’t seem to have expected that, or be prepared for that. Her neck snapped in five places, muscles tearing, as she moved her head to track Lucy’s drop.

Lucy twisted in the air, applying many of the same lessons she’d brought into the Storm. Working with the air, moving through the voids in the air…

Eyes on those antlers.

She felt Alpheus’s practice trying to get ahold of her again.

Not now.

At the side of her bag, she had a gift from Avery. A down-to-earth baseball. Finder’s knot.

A dose of reality.

She spiked the side of the pit and antlers she was about to fall into.

It shattered the landscape, destroyed stairs and antlers, and let Storm and light inside from the world beyond. The rain came through like a beam, falling in the opposite direction Lucy was traveling.

Lucy backhanded the incoming water, to slow her fall. She grabbed an antler on her way down, swung her way over to grab the edge of this labyrinth reality, and adjusted the direction of her fall, so she could land on hands and knees at a less than terminal velocity.

Elisheba’s head followed immediately after her, mouth opening wide, to reveal more mouths, more teeth.

Echoes crashed into Elisheba’s face. They exploded into sentiment, emotion-

Putting her slightly off course.

Lucy turned her earring into a rapier and stabbed Elisheba in the underside of the chin before she could recover.

Flesh split, skull cracked from chin to the center of the forehead, fingers reached out of the crack to pry it open, and the head and the neck behind it folded out of existence, blood spattering.

Elisheba was saying something. Too far away for Lucy to catch it all.

But she caught that Elisheba was talking to Alpheus.

Sending Alpheus Lucy’s way.

The two of them had some shorthand they used to ask for changes to the shape of the horrified space. Alpheus was giving himself a clear path.

Lucy wanted nothing more than to lie there for a few seconds. Even with the Storm coming at her from every direction but the ground itself. Aches and pains sang across her body.

The effect was like a bubble, maybe three hundred feet across, encompassing maybe seven cabins, some road, and trees on either side. It shifted continually, with a faint mechanical-ish sound, and sounds Lucy recognized as being… around the edges, she supposed, with Montague’s stuff, in his nightmare and when he was most active. It even had a look like that, where she could see the backside and ‘bad sides’ of walls and the interior parts of things, moving and shifting, flicking, and adjusting.

Grandfather.

He was still in there.

She heard a scrape, and looked up. She was lying on the ground, so it meant she got an upside-down view of some gnarly little Other coming at her, getting set to swing an axe bigger than it was at her head.

She rolled. The axe dinged off of icy pavement.

She kicked the creature -some goblin-cousin thing- in the face. It fell over. With her boots, she caught the handle and pulled the axe her way. She caught it, straightened, and used her foot to help move the handle to her right hand.

Too heavy.

Damn.

There was a whole pack of Others lurking beneath one of the cabins, which had a raised structure, a gap beneath for water to flow, or something. Fifteen assorted, lesser Others.

“Cabin five, cabin three.”

Lucy turned.

The bubble had a giant eye sticking out of a particularly fleshy part, and a mouth had formed out of a gap, blood running thick from between teeth.

“All attack.”

Lucy threw a spell card at the eye. It disappeared, withdrawing, before the card could make contact and burn it.

That’d be the reverend-ish guy, Lucy took mental note. More pressing was the fact that there were Others under this cabin and its neighbor. They’d been given the order to attack her.

So they flooded into the street, into Storm.

Nine out of ten of them spent about one second in the Storm before visibly weakening, slowing, or losing heart.

Of the remaining one out of ten, maybe half were scattered by the echoes.

Lucy hit and cut the bravest ones.

They weren’t fit for the Storm. Many were moving because other Others were already going. Pride, group consciousness, the fact they were new and immature as Others went, and that made them more prone to follow?

It meant that Lucy could drop five in the time it took them to recuperate- another two right at the end, as she let the watch at the back of her hand catch a splash as a ghoul fell into a puddle, and slowed time.

Seven downed out of maybe forty.

But the remainder, hunched over and crouching in the Storm, flinching at echoes and glimpses of elementals, paused.

The one second pause became three, then ten seconds.

A goblin-like thing shrieked and lunged, and Lucy dispatched it. Two more came at her from behind, more human-like, but with eyes like Fae, and she cut them deep enough to wound, if not to kill.

Thirty-three remaining out of the original forty? Now it was thirty out of forty.

“Agree to be good,” she told them. Water streamed down her. The runes at her neck and shoulders were hot, and, she suspected, failing again. “You don’t have to cooperate with me, you just have to agree and leave. I don’t want to kill you. I have shit to do.”

They prowled, looking for a weak spot. She could have given them one, a feint, but she didn’t want to do this.

“Lucy.”

It was Ann Wint, surrounded by echoes. She held a Japanese-style sword, too broad to be a Katana, that, along its edges, blurred like echoes did.

Matthew was much further back – a few houses down, his attention off to one side. Two people floated near him.

A lot of the lesser Others scattered as Ann drew closer.

“Alpheus Kim is on his way out,” Lucy reported. The fact she was reporting movements like she had to Grandfather reminded her that she needed to be in there. “He’ll break you with that practice he has ready.”

“One of the novices from your town tried that on me. I don’t break easy,” Ann told Lucy. “I can take you back to the rest. That was you, who hit their back line?”

“Not going back yet, and yes, it was.”

“Thought it might be the Oni boys, but that seemed ambitious.”

“I don’t suppose you can teach me that thing, how not to get broken by this shitty horror practice?”

“I could. We can barter,” Ann said. “Come to my place at any time, if we get through all of this. We’ll discuss a trade of practices.”

“I meant like… in the next two minutes.”

“Oh.”

“Can you?”

“No.”

“Fuck.”

Lucy swallowed hard. “I don’t suppose you’d back me up, going in there?”

“No. I’d be cut off from what I’m doing to help manage out here. The echoes and wraiths would attack our own.”

She thought about bailing, going to the others, who weren’t far away, and going to get more help to bring to Grandfather. All three of the practitioners were dangerous. If she trusted Grandfather to handle himself…

But on the other hand, he’d just helped her out, he’d just referenced the bond they could have.

“If I don’t come back out, let my friends and family know where I went?”

“I didn’t think anyone was with you.”

“Grandfather. One of the Dog Tags.”

“I don’t know how you can prioritize an Other like that, but you’re strong enough you can do any nonsense you like and make it so,” Ann said. Her eyes tracked Others who were lurking beneath the cabin, rather than look at Lucy.

“Thanks, I guess? Just… say you will?”

“I will, if I must and if I can.”

“Sure.”

Lucy paused, looking down and at the side, at the axe that was still partially embedded in the road.

It had been too heavy, in a way that made her think the little Other had had some kind of special quality that let it handle weapons like that.

She could hear Alpheus.

“Incoming. Buy me a moment?”

“Very well. If you’ll come learn a practice from me, and do me the grace of a generous dealing, when you do.”

Lucy nodded.

She had to dig into her bag to sort things out.

In a hard-cover binder that had once held schoolwork, the rigidity protecting the more delicate contents, she had some twigs and twine in specific arrangements, mimicking shrines back at Kennet.

They weren’t very near here, but she could invoke through them, drawing together some composite.

Enginehead.

Lucy placed it on the ground, one eye on the Others that were prowling, one eye on the opening she’d made in the outside layer of the labyrinth with the baseball.

Quick outline, using salt. Triangles to draw in. A diamond to impart quality…

Then a marker to direct it toward herself.

She didn’t want to host. She did want a boost.

Lucy had dealt with combat practitioners who could say some words and gain a boost in strength and speed. Musser had known quite a few. Lucy hadn’t picked that one up just yet. In a lot of ways, she hadn’t needed to. Guilherme had taught her how to fight stronger, bigger enemies. Bubbleyum had the same sorts of ideas in mind.

So this was a crude approximation.

Drawing in power, drawing in strength.

“For Kennet,” Lucy whispered.

The diagram lit up. The sticks and twine lifted up, and shuddered as they pulled in energy.

Maybe not that strong here, because we’re far from civilization.

But it was something.

Lucy didn’t waste any time. She hurried over to where some wood had fallen from a cabin exterior, and picked up the biggest chunk.

The weapon ring let her transform something she held in her hands into something small, so she created a club. Dense, heavy, very inelegant, as Guilherme would’ve said.

Alpheus had emerged, and faced with Ann Wint, Destroyer and Chainer, he tried to break her.

She hadn’t been lying, that she was resistant. She stepped back, stumbling, and bent down, but she didn’t fall to her knees or topple.

Echoes, meanwhile, were flocking toward Alpheus. He swatted at them, endured them-

Lucy, using trace glamour, her practice cemented as one of her trademarks with Winter glamour, making it very cost effective, became three foxes. Goblin, Fae, and Dog. The Dog carried the weapon she’d made in its teeth.

Once she wasn’t human, she was a lot harder to break. Alpheus turned her way, then immediately abandoned his efforts to shatter her.

She bum-rushed him. Two coming from the sides, one directly for him. He used another practice, multiplying his arms, while extending them with enough force that they shattered on hitting the ground. Bloody pulp with bone shards.

His fingers of his other hand danced, moving the sticks in a rotation, passing the long sticks from pinky to thumb to index finger, with the rotation working with six cane-length -if narrower- sticks at a time

The bone shards of the pulped horror-flesh began to move, like a ground made of meat and chainsaws.

Ann plunged her blade into that mass. Echoes came from what looked like a mile away, passing through Storm, agitating elementals, and plunged in toward that point of contact.

Lucy bit with the goblin-mouth for those cane sticks, and got kicked for her trouble.

The Fae fox was caught off guard when Alpheus twisted, punching more of his hand into the chainsaw-meat dreck, and splattering more of it around her. That splatter was as dangerous as any of it and the Fae fox lost two of her feet on the left side. It toppled, and was immediately chewed up.

Let’s try this, then.

The two remaining foxes, behind Alpheus, moved in concert.

The goblin fox went for his left side, drawing his attention. Mischief and malice in equal measure.

The Dog fox became Lucy.

She swung her weapon, and at the last moment, let it become a section of building again.

A length of wood that required augmented strength to heft.

The cabins here were framed with lengths of wood that were basically halved tree trunks, cut to interlink.

Half a tree trunk, stripped of branches and bark, minus roots and upper branches. Maybe five to seven thousand pounds?

Cost- way too much Self.

Lucy keeled over more than he did, and he’d been swiped with five to seven thousand pounds moving with the speed of a swung baseball bat.

Others were counting on her.

Lucy leaned on the section of trunk to work her way to her feet. She waited until she was stable, bent over, both hands on the wood, before she straightened and stood under her own power.

Couldn’t do that anytime soon. Fuck. She’d really hoped it would be reproducible.

Alpheus lay there, lower half a bloody smear, hands groping for the long sticks that had been knocked too far away for him to grab.

Ann kicked some away.

“They don’t die!” Lucy shouted, to be heard over the wind and rain. She looked down at the teenager. “Don’t stay dead. Can tie them up, freeze them, bury them, they come back the moment you turn your back. It might be that they have multiple bodies, only one’s valid, the rest are slippery or something.”

“It’s a puzzle,” Ann said, looking down at the boy with derision. She nudged his face with her boot-toe.

“Do me a favor!? Keep an eye on him!?”

“You keep asking for favors!”

“Do you want me to stop asking and start demanding!?” Lucy asked, voice raised to be heard.

“A demanding personality has its charm! Confidence is key!”

“Just do it, Ann!?” Lucy asked. Her patience was short and she knew a part of that was that her Self had taken a knock, spending on that weapon transformation.

Others were heading their way. Enemies were retreating from their prior position, and moving toward the manor, circling around he back of cabins that were encapsulated by the bubble. The trees were their cover.

On this side of the bubble, Anthem was coming over. Mr. Mele, the battle puppeteer, had two puppets taller than he was, with razor wire stretching from his fingers to them. Bluntmunch was freed from his prison and cooperating, immediately going over to the space below the cabin to root out the lesser Others.

The Storm roared all around them.

Echoes and elementals kept on gathering. Two elementals stood tall.

Lucy had been considering a dive into that realm, but the more she dwelt on it, the more it felt like a trap.

She went for her bag, and got twine.

“Avery’s at the outskirts, she’s delaying. People are reacting to the storm, debating how flooded the streets are.”

“What’s the hold up here?”

“Labyrinth, pocket world. Plicate space. One of the Others is in there. She insists on saving it.”

Mr. Mele brought his hands together in a way that was reminiscent of how the old lady had smashed her own hands together. Except Mr. Mele was tugging on razor wire, which flashed and revealed itself in the dim light that came from the perpetual lightning strikes around the Storm. Pulling his right hand to the left and vice versa, he pulled on cords that extended way off to the side. The puppets in front of him were hauled off in those directions.

It was like he had a cord that extended from the fingers of his left hand to the trees way off to the left, then back to the puppet, and by moving it, he pulled the puppet away from himself.

It skimmed the ground, toes barely making contact with ice and snow, and the blades at its arms raked through snow, cutting something that was lurking beneath.

“Damn it!” Lucy swore, as gloved fingers fumbled with twine.

“What are you trying to do?” Anthem asked.

“Earth rune! Like Avery’s balls!” Lucy looked for and found the ball with the twine around it. It had come loose, but Lucy could pull it taut and make the intent mostly clear.

“A grounding rune. ‘Earth’, mundanity!” Ann turned her head.

“I just learned it!” Ann’s daughter told the group. “Better used from the Ruins or Spirit World than the Abyss!”

She looked like she was doing a little worse with the Storm than Ann was, but was putting on a brave, shivering face.

“It’s more Avery’s thing! The big practice stuff is more Verona’s!”

“They’re doing their work!” Anthem called out.

“Rather than the ball, I was thinking of having a very big bat!”

“You barely swung your ‘bat’ the once and you suffered!” Ann called out, more than a little accusatory.

“Yeah, well… we want to knock this localized space down!”

Others were catching up. Matthew and his group were with Brie.

“What’s the rest of their group doing?” Anthem asked.

“Getting the alchemist, regrouping! Preparing for a retaliation!” Lucy replied. “We’ve got one guy, was giving orders, who made this thing, quick and powerful incantation! This guy, who sure likes to temporarily shatter bones, and someone called Elisheba Kim, who seems to specialize in rapid self-horrification! Main guy was peeking out of this bubble, earlier, and giving orders with a mouth he made!”

“A shame Theodora isn’t here, she’d be a good brain to pick,” Deb said, as she joined the group.

Deb had shucked off her coat, and her scars and eyes were glowing. Her hair was soaked and she seemed to wear it comfortably that way. She moved with confidence when even Anthem seemed he was suffering a little in all of this.

“If he peeks, we poke his eye!” Anthem hollered, pacing a bit, like a restless animal. He held up a throwing knife, then threw it. It embedded in the outside surface. “Should work!”

“Actually…!” Lucy paused. “If we can carve into the exterior, can we carve a grounding rune into that!? Earth sign!? I don’t know how well it works without Finder stuff backing it!”

“It tends to work better if you’re removed from things. You have more distance,” Ann said. Her arm touched Lucy’s as she got close enough to communicate without yelling.

“Damn it!”

“I’ll do you one better,” Anthem said. He drew another knife from his belt, then scratched something into the handle. “Now?”

“Please! Grandfather is in there!”

He threw it. It hit the other knife, and shattered it. The shattered pieces cut their grooves- drawing out the grounding-Earth rune. The gouges in the wood bled.

“It may be less effective, but if we want to collapse this, may I suggest you lend it a bit of power, Deborah!?” Anthem asked, putting power into his voice to be heard. “Channeling the Storm into it!?”

“I see your intent. I-!”

Brie said something through grit teeth.

“I can.”

“What was that!?”

“She can!” Lucy called out.

“I’ll conserve my strength, then,” Deb said. “We’ll see how you do.”

Lucy knew that well enough. Brie had markings decorating the outside of her sleeves, and it looked like she’d absorbed a lot, because the markings were practically crackling with electricity.

Brie leaned back, ready to exhale what had to be a dozen elementals.

The bubble broke down, before Brie could even act. The exterior folded back and in toward the center of the effect, revealing the nested and ‘plicate’ walls, which moved through the air as they self-sorted, ready to fold back into reality.

The Storm, gravity, and other forces all went wonky in the wake of it.

Which was the moment that the lesser Others chose to try to attack. Matthew was toward the back, so his group was both targeted and on the alert, first to act or be acted against. Anthem twisted around, throwing a knife that divided into ten mid-air, each finding a target.

Brie turned and, pushing one of the hosts of the shrine spirits aside, opened her mouth. Lightning and rain elementals came out in a torrent, and tore up ground, blasted things, and drove the mob back.

Echoes that Ann had attuned to the Storm were drawn in toward the shock and fear like moths to a flame. They came from multiple directions, following every dramatic action with a bombardment, like a barrage of ghostly rocket launchers or homing artillery shots.

Lucy might’ve watched Wallace play a few too many of his games.

Mr. Mele brought his puppets down, so the more feral Others wouldn’t be attacking anyone living if they attacked the first thing they saw.

Deb and Ann moved closer to the center of the unfolding bubble.

After a moment, Lucy did too.

Did they decide it wasn’t worth taking the effect head-on? They knew it would collapse? Or something else?

“They’re there!” Ann called out.

Deb turned into an elemental, zig-zagging past and around walls.

Lucy navigated through the walls, letting them slide past her. As much as the bogeyman had taunted her for being flat-chested and skinny, she was glad for the ability to hold her body up, standing on tip-toes, as two walls with barely any space between them slid past her front and back.

It meant she could get in closer.

Grandfather was there near the center, held up by a dozen narrow hands. Hands were wrapped around and connected to walls that hadn’t started moving yet.

Lucy chopped through three with one heavy swing.

A retaliatory attack hit Deb, shoving her back, but she found footing, gripping wrists, and channeling electricity up the length of the arms, before joining it, a humanoid figure made of lightning, halfway down Elisheba’s extended limbs in one eyeblink, and smashing into Elisheba in the next, while the afterimage was still bright in Lucy’s eyes.

Lucy pulled Grandfather down before the walls could separate and pull each limb apart.

No sign of the other guy. He might’ve controlled the way things went back to normal, to shield himself behind the collapsing effect, or he might’ve moved into the interior of any cabin…

Lucy scanned with her Sight. She finished by looking at Grandfather. “You okay?”

“I’ll mend.”

“Sorry. I thought it was best to get out and break the effect from the outside, or regroup and go back in.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he said. He grunted as he took her help in standing. It looked like he was hurt. “Focus on the mission. I’ll let you know when I’m hurt in a way I won’t take a few minutes to heal from.”

“If Deb is here, does that mean Verona’s group has caught up!?” Lucy called out the question.

“They’re on their way. I can move faster than they can,” Deb replied. Her voice cut past the wind. She didn’t have to be as loud.

“Okay!” Lucy replied. She took that in. Their group was consolidating. Those who’d been at the fringes -like the Dog Tags- were filtering in, still watching the perimeter. “Any issues?”

“Nothing major! The Dropped Call swept in! The White Rot is out there too! We think it may be working with the Aurum!”

“And the Aurum!?”

“Intercepted Avery,” Brie said, drawing closer to Lucy so she could say what she needed to say through grit teeth. The inside of her mouth had light shining from down her throat, toward the back of her teeth. “I talked to Zed.”

“Then, if we keep to the plan-!”

There was a crack of thunder that coincided with the biggest lightning strike yet.

“That wasn’t elemental!” Deb told people.

Every head that could afford to turn did so- only the people on the fringes who were keeping an eye out for encroaching Others kept focused on defense.

The ‘lightning bolt’ had conducted between sky and ground at the far end of this encampment, and remained vaguely visible through the Storm. Except it wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was solid, unmoving.

To Lucy’s Sight, it was a black, forking, jagged line, bleeding out watercolor into the sky around it.

It looked like the sky itself had cracked.

“Abyssal!?” Ann’s daughter asked, hunkered down against the rain, now. She hadn’t been able to keep up that brave face.

“No!” Ann replied. “But I don’t fault you much for thinking in that direction! Horror, and something more!”

“They’re tapping into the Storm’s energy. Turning it to their ends,” Deb said. “They’re good.”

Could have told you that, Lucy thought.

“We wanted to provoke them,” Anthem said. “It seems we’ve started down that road.”

That ‘lightning’ struck again.

Lightning, as much as it appeared as a two dimensional thing against the sky, was traveling its three dimensional arc. Another darkness lanced its forking path skyward. The spaces between the two different branches, forks, and stretches of that ‘lightning’ became something solid.

The resulting shape looked something like a conch shell or butterfly chrysalis. It was transparent, a red-black, dangerous sort of sunrise coloration. It hung there, in the sky, taking up more real estate than fifty suns could, a slash across the most overcast sky Lucy had ever seen, which blocked out the morning sun.

“They’re hands!” Anthem informed the group, shouting over the wind and drumming rain.

“What?” Lucy asked.

“The solid lightning strike! The flash was real, but after it passed, hands filled the space, each arm and attached hand sprouting out of the palms of the others! They have something in each hand! Fluid!”

“Alchemy, has to be!” Ann decided.

The lightning flexed and moved. The redness remained.

“Keep to the plan,” Lucy murmured, as much to herself as the others. It was hard to be heard over the rain.

She couldn’t see that well at this distance, through the heavy rain, which turned everything into a blur past ten paces anyway. This thing was too big, too sharp, too important to be diminished, though, so parts of the image stood out, or could be filled in with imagination.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of hands were reaching up toward the sky, with some kind of panel or barrier stretched between them. Each held something fluid, container and contents multiplying and dividing as each hand had. Each emptied the fluids into that solid shape.

It was filling fast.

“He’s been experimenting on replicating types of Other!” Lucy warned the others. Rain came down hard around all of them. “I think he almost created an angel once!”

There was already a shape in the container, as hard to make out as the afterimage of Deb’s lightning movement had been to focus on, during or after. A baby in the fetal position, wreathed in a magic circle that looked diagram-ish, but made of veins, naked and so light-skinned that blue and black veins stretched out across it. Four more spongey, still-developing things were floating in the fluid around it, at specific distances from the main body. One over the left shoulder, one over the right, then two more for the bottom corners.

“That’s not an angel,” Ann said.

“It might be a Tit-” Deb started.

Lucy heard the sound in two different ways. With her earring, it was instant, timed appropriately. With her other ear, the sound took more time to travel than the bullet did.

Deb had been shot in the back.

Then more bullets came. Lucy moved quickly, getting clear.

The Dog Tags had returned. Several were not on their side. Horseman was there, striding forward, opening fire on their group.

Rifle shots from another direction, that distant?

Lucy pegged that as Midas. He had the ‘golden touch’ with a gun. Or the bullet, depending on how one looked at it.

“Is the Storm going to dissipate early!?” Lucy called out.

“No!” Ann replied. She turned to her daughter. “Go with the Hosts! Return to the rear group, you’re not ready for this!”

The daughter didn’t argue, sprinting right for Matthew.

Matthew looked at Lucy and nodded.

The Storm was still going. Wilder. Harsher, even, not dissipating.

Fuck.

“Do we need Deb to turn this off!?” Lucy asked.

“Very likely!” was Ann’s response. Couched in practitioner uncertainties. Ann crouched by Deb, who was coughing. When she coughed, blood came out the bullet hole in her back.

“Fall back!” Anthem shouted. “Back! Back!”

“Not forward!?” Ann asked.

Anthem crouched by Deb and hauled her up.

A rifle shot made him stagger back, dropping her partway into the process. A rune from inside his coat now glowed fiercely enough it was making the material burn, the runework standing out in hot orange.

There was a distant scream, coming from the direction of the Kim manor. Lucy could see where damage the elementals had done to the structure had torn up walls and torn down other lesser fixtures. The room that Charles and the others were supposedly in was protected, and stood out from the damaged parts of the top floor, like some steel vault suspended a hundred feet off the ground by a collapsing tower of driftwood.

Except it was a room, not a vault, and it had been a nice looking place, possibly.

Lucy hunkered down, Grandfather beside her. The Storm was soaking her through, the runes only half as effective as they’d been – not as ineffectual as they’d been when the hypothermia had set in, but heading that way fast, now.

Horseman and Midas had opened fire across their group. People had been shot.

Ann. Deb. Anthem’s protections were holding up. Lucy’s were not.

Matthew’s group had been retreating with Ann’s kid in tow when the Dog Tags had fired their way. Lucy couldn’t tell how bad the damage was, but they were hunkered down by a stretch of fence, and Lucy could hear heavy, strained breathing.

Mr. Mele recalled one of his puppets, pulling on strings with a haul of one arm.

“Careful!” Grandfather shouted.

“Hey!” Lucy raised her voice, when Mr. Mele didn’t react. “Mr. Mele!”

“What!? I’m trying not to get shot!”

“Don’t get blown up either!” Grandfather called out. “One of the Dog Tags their side bound- she works in explosives and incendiaries!”

“I don’t know what you want me to do with that!”

A bullet from the upper floor of one of the cabins stopped in mid-air, pressing against an intersection of two threads that formed a cross-shape, the threads flashing as they caught the light.

The bullet divided into four, splitting up with each section going to either side, above, or to the feet of Mr. Mele. Steam trails marked the bullet’s path, hot metal reacting to meeting the supernaturally cold-but-not-frozen rain. Mr. Mele looked back toward where the quarters had hit, and then informed them, “That safeguard of mine doesn’t hold up for much longer! I want to end this soon!”

“If she ran into it, she could’ve put a bomb on it!” Grandfather shouted. He winced at pain. “She’s done something similar before. With summons!”

“Fuck.”

“They’re hostile,” Lucy said.

“I was hoping killing the Dragonslayer would fix it,” Grandfather said. “Be careful. If they’ve been ordered to use the knowledge they have to do the most damage, you could have Horseman dropping on you.”

Lucy thought about how Horseman had held his own against the Black Scalpel as well as he had. She wasn’t sure how well she’d do. She remembered being semi-confident after training with Guilherme during the summer, sparring with John, and losing.

“Keep falling back,” she told Grandfather, leaning in closer to be heard. Verona and Avery. We regroup.”

“Yeah.”

Keep to the plan, prepare…

“Yhpl vof pobzvat lobhe jonl, noccebonpuvat sebaz labhe fvok.”

It was a voice coming in from a radio, garbled, distorted.

It felt weird, feeling that voice in her earring.

“Heard a Dog Tag that way,” she told Grandfather.

He nudged her, steering her a bit back the way they’d come.

“Punatorq quoverpogvoba. Zobivat nebhaq gob lobhe guerro b’poybopox.”

The distorted voice came over the radio.

Seth’s voice? Lucy hadn’t heard it a lot, but when she ran down the list of possibilities, deduction said it fit. There was a bit of an Alexander quality to the cadence.

She stopped.

“Uboyque bah.”

“They’re using Seth to guide the Dog Tags. Be careful!” Lucy raised her voice.

She wasn’t sure how many heard.

Augur augmented tactics for a dangerous squad.

Lucy couldn’t hear Horseman. Or Foggy, or Midas, Mark, or Black.

“They’re stalking us, I think. Independent of Seth’s orders, maybe. Or they were very good at being quiet, holding the positions they’d had before.

Everyone else was falling back as well. They were disorganized, that disorganization made worse by the lack of visibility, the threat of the Dog Tags, and the fact they had to watch their backs at every step.

At the very least, enough of them were good enough that they could handle themselves and one or two stragglers, too.

The borderline fetal baby from before was hatching from its chrysalis-conch, mouth opening in a silent scream that vented fluid from its mouth. It was framed at the four corners by the tumor-like growths that were instead solidifying into objects.

Like a living argumentative diagram. Symbols keying in like some grand password.

No fucking idea what that is.

Lucy fended off a ghoulish looking dog, protecting Brie, who was mostly focused on holding onto elemental energy, saving up a few good shots.

Toward the relay point. To Verona, who was good at puzzling things out. To Avery, who was liable to be the best at navigating this space, coordinating people.

Vaguely angelic. Cherubic. But other motifs weren’t there and most angels didn’t hold shapes like that. The motifs felt like they moved things in that direction, but-

“It’s a higher power.”

Brie, speaking through clenched teeth.

“A god or goddess?” Lucy asked. “A replacement for Maricica?”

Grandfather pushed Lucy down, leaning on her to squish her down, to minimize her profile.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a straight god or goddess,” Brie said. She got down, laying belly-down in mud, face near Lucy’s, to be heard. “Higher power. In the same way the Judges are higher powers.”

“A replacement for the Alabaster?”

“Or something. I don’t know. Durocher walked me through a lot of this. How some of these things work. Incarnate forces, gods, judges, lawmakers. The keying- the marks at the corners of the living diagram. Makes me think of tutelaries, of-”

A bullet blew past a fence a foot over Lucy’s head, as she lay on the ground.

“I’ve read up on those,” Lucy said. “Thought about-”

Bullet, it hit ground and went in, shattering ice that had layered over top of a puddle, close to Lucy.

“Zach. The hot girl totemist,” Lucy said.

“Yeah. Good recall.”

Zach, who made the totems that supposedly drew in romantic prospects. There were a whole host of Law-based Others and things, like stone lions and tutelary spirits, who’d adjust flows of karma and spirit through an area. Lucy had thought about setting up something like that for Kennet. A well carved statue in the right place could alter the fortunes of a family’s house or some warded ground.

“Or it’s something that helps the Allaires with whatever they’re doing. The wish or the whatever.”

“Or a weapon,” Grandfather said. “That’s one angry baby.”

It was screwing its face up, veins standing out in the forehead, fists balled in anger. The symbols at the corner were agitated, quickly cycling through combinations.

“Or all of the above,” Lucy said.

A karmic authority that set the tone of things and dictated the rules. Help for the Allaires. A credible threat to the Alabaster Assembly. A weapon.

There were some flashes of Horror practices- arms reaching up and branching out, before dropping down out of sight. Some stayed high. Claiming the sky against the Storm, with more solid, branching limb structures.

Bullets flew from Horseman’s general area. A rune at Lucy’s shoulder went hot, activating, and made the bullet curve in the air. Lucy stared at that steam-trail that hung in the air before the rain slashed it to pieces, a few seconds later.

An echo traced its way along the bullet’s trajectory, and for a moment, Lucy worried it would react like the Storm was doing, and be indiscriminate because Ann was down.

But it didn’t. It paused at the end, before veering off, to become the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile, except loaded with pain, panic, or other sentiments.

Horseman would be resistant but not immune.

She could hear his boots tromping, before he moved to snow, and she could believe it was a taunt, a misdirect, knowing his footsteps were loud there, before becoming silent and taking a different route.

Lucy became the foxes, three, to protect herself.

She knew Horseman knew her, though. All the Dog Tags did. Strengths and weaknesses both.

He was stalking her.

Did he know that being watched and judged for any openings and weaknesses was something that’d drive her morale down faster than any Storm?

Fuck. Fuck this.

“I want to save him.”

“So do I,” Grandfather growled the words.

“I don’t want to fight him.”

“Neither do I.”

Anthem landed a shot on one or two of the Dog Tags, aiming at the outside corner of one cabin. Lucy heard the bodies drop.

She also heard Seth. Giving orders, his voice encrypted by some practice.

Moving pieces against them.

Rain, cold, worry, fear, the pressures of having enemies like this. Being under the weight of the baby thing.

It was misery.

Verona’s group was waiting, laying out wards and rituals. Mr. Driscoll was doing some of the big stuff. Melody and Corbin Kierstaad were accenting it.

Verona’s hug as Lucy went from fox form to human form again was a balm for the soul. Lucy guided Verona toward safer cover.

“You couldn’t stay a fox, let me hug wet dog?” Verona asked.

“Not a dog.”

“Stay a fox more, okay?” Verona asked. She gave that a kind of emphasis.

Stay a fox more.

“That way I know you’re safe.”

“Okay. You be safe too.”

“Yep.”

They couldn’t talk about their strategy. If they did, Seth would possibly catch it. But they’d finished phase one.

Provoke them. Raise them up…

Taking out Joel. Organizing enough they had to muster force against them. Knocking out the bubble so they couldn’t keep practices under wraps.

“Alright,” Verona said. “Remember how we set challenges for ourselves, before the Aurum thing?”

“Avery nearly dying kind of ruined it.”

“It’s not ruined, I don’t think. It’s how we operate,” Verona said.

The rain poured down around them, came up at angles, twisting in the air. Rain turned into frost in contact with things, leaving long trails that didn’t look natural. Lucy’s eyes watched for the bound Dog Tags.

“Sure. How we operate,” Lucy said.

“Figure you gave me a pretty good one,” Verona said. Almost giving away that she was handling the next phase. “Justice for the pain in the ass challenge I gave you, huh?”

Verona broke the hug, and Lucy grabbed Verona’s hand, holding it firm between them.

“I trust you,” Lucy said. “Stay safe.”

Read from a distance, it was a friendly gesture, halfway between high-five and handshake.

To Lucy, though, it was another message.

Tagging you in.