S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 11

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nineteen, Pt. 1

Salem, MA; September, 2016.

Frank had told them that the Belgian’s team probably planned to attack during the funeral. The Belgian’s crew had set up numerous spell matrices in the area, as had the Malleus crew, and as soon as Jill and her found family left the house, someone would active one or another of them. Frank didn’t seem to know which matrix did what, or even what his coven expected the material outcome of their various spells to look like.

Zoe hadn’t believed him. But whatever the dreamer had shown him, it had left him shivering and unresponsive for hours after he awoke. Even when he started moving again, he spent the rest of the day showering under increasingly-cold water.

So they’d improvised.

They took four vehicles to the funeral. Zoe took guardianship over Darnell and Clarissa Tims-Briar, driving a black sedan two car-lengths behind Darnell’s. Omar followed the SUV carrying Karen, Jill, and the other three children.

Everything en route to the cemetery looked vaguely familiar to Zoe. The whole of Salem shivered with deja vu.

As they drew closer, Darnell slowed down. He swerved onto a road shoulder, parked, unparked, and pulled away. Zoe felt it, too, though even her finely honed sixth sense paled in comparison to a psychic’s. All the deja vu familiarity crystallized into actual recognition. Her sixth sense shrieked warnings, her lizard brain screeched and thrashed.

She didn’t just feel familiarity—she knew this place. She knew it well.

She’d surveilled it.

(two cemeteries backed up against an arc of parkland)

“Something’s happening here,” Zoe told her headset.

“We’ll be there in five,” Omar replied through an earbud.

She felt energy in the air. It was the sort of sensation normal people rarely but occasionally experienced, the instinctive sense of an oncoming storm, of something rippling through electro-magnetic fields, detectable but only unconsciously. The breeze blowing through the dashboard vents carried a faint, real-and-not-real scent of heating ozone.

Darnell hovered around the speed limit, brake lights flashing more often than seemed necessary. Or just as often. Who knew?

Ozone heated and burnt. The scent clung inside her nostrils. All the small hairs on her body straightened. A ripple of instinct anxiety crawled coolly down her spine. With a gloved hand she unclasped her sidearm holster. She moved the submachine gun from the passenger seat to her lap, keeping the heavy navy blanket over it as a form of half-assed camouflage. Something was happening. But what?

The attack. But how?

(once you’re sure that magic exists you can’t be sure of anything else ever)

“Guys?” Zoe asked.

“Two minutes, gaining.”

They approached a tangled knot of intersection and she saw them. Standing on the sidewalk, Lacey and two other members of the Belgian’s crew scanned the area. Zoe saw them see Darnell’s car as it rolled forward, obeying the speed limit.

Someone in a heavy four-wheel drive box didn’t see their light turn red. They didn’t obey the speed limit.

The four-wheel hammered Darnell’s sedan from the passenger side and sent the thing spinning. Another car shrieked rubber too late to make a difference—the brakes dipped the hood and slammed it under Darnell’s. The car flipped and rolled. More cars swerved and banked, one more colliding with Darnell’s and two more colliding with each other. Ozone and rubber stink filled the intersection. Horns howled, steel crunched, glass shattered. Zoe yanked up on her emergency brake, barely avoiding the pile-up. In the moments after the accident, everything went silent. The strewn vehicles wore streaks of blood. Nothing moved behind the airbags.

(when is a car crash just a car crash after all and when is it the result of)

(in modern parlance a ‘death curse’ was just a curse that altered probability fields until)

(Zo’…there are people following my husband)

People started screaming. Some screamed into phones, some at each other, some at the very idea that what had just happened had happened.

Through the screaming bystanders, Zoe saw them: Lacey and the Belgian’s crew. Their jaws hung agape, lips trying for words that didn’t come out. Even they hadn’t expected something this bad. Lacey stumbled backwards, fingers at her mouth. Zoe couldn’t read lips but could imagine the sorts of pleas she muttered.

But when a black SUV pulled around the disaster and stopped in front of them, they all got inside anyway.

Zoe released the emergency brake, threw the car in drive, and hit the gas.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eighteen, Pt. 3

Salem, MA; September, 2016.

After the monster attack, Zoe and Omar held up in the Malleus safehouse outside of town. They traveled into Salem proper to work on disrupting and sabotaging the vast apparatus of magical and mundane surveillance pointed at Jill’s school but otherwise remained subterranean. With minimal handiwork, they’d converted one of the bunks into a larger holding cell for Frank. In just over eighty square feet, Frank had access to two bunk beds, two shower stalls, and two toilet stalls. They’d left him with canned goods, bottled water, and cheap, garbage snacks as subsistence.

Wandering the State Forest outside the safehouse two mornings after her call with Shoshanna, Zoe told Jill the plan.

“Six days?” Jill asked.

“Six,” Zoe confirmed. “And in the meantime, keep everyone inside.”

“We’re having a funeral,” Jill said.

“If you leave the house—”

“Altan stayed in the house!” Jill snapped. “That’s all the fuck we’ve done!”

“You’ll be exposed.”

“To what? More psychic magic? Some fucked up illusion? The things Darnell’s been feeling—seeing, even—”

“He’s still having visions?” Zoe interrupted.

“Of course he is! Everyone knows this isn’t over. There’s more coming. Worse.”

“Listen to me, just…just wait. We can have a memorial later.”

“When? When do we take a moment to stop being terrified and bury our boy?”

“Karen’s—”

“We’re under the same roof!” Jill shouted, all volume and upset. “We’re the same family!”

Zoe hesitated. (five people)—she glanced around, expecting…something. Shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re having the service.”

“Then I need to set up some kind of security.”

“I’m already working on wards. I was always good with wards.”

“I meant…you know.”

“Guns? What, you think they’ll come at us with guns? They don’t need to.”

Zoe winced, lips pursing. She looked at the forest floor. “It won’t hurt to have a couple field pros setting up a perimeter. And neither of us are the best at wards, but we’re not the worst either. Just in case.”

“Just in case,” Jill echoed, conceding. She sighed. “I’m—I’m sorry. I know you’re doing everything you can. We’re just…it’s hard to see a way out. The cops say nobody’s watching us. They already ruled Altan’s death a suicide.”

“I’ll get you out.”

“So we can spend the rest of our lives hiding?”

Zoe peered through the dim, post-dawn woods whence she came. Birds flitted between branches, singing romance. The sun filtered down in drifts and slashes. She wished she could enjoy it. “Maybe,” she admitted.

“What about the kids?” Jill asked, suddenly whispering.

“You’ll all be outfitted with some kind of witness protection shield.”

“And then what?”

“You live normal lives.”

“These kids aren’t normal.”

“So you’ll pretend,” Zoe felt steel in her voice and tried to soften it. “It’s the best way to keep you together.”

“I just wish there was another choice.”

“Me, too.”

She thought about Leo’s terms, about Jill and Darnell going through processing and living in custody forever, about the kids processed with some insane NDA curse and released to pretend mundanity. She didn’t mention it. “I’m sorry.”

“The funeral’s in two days. I’ll send the details encrypted.”

“Thanks. See you soon. And I love you.”

“Love you, too. And thanks, again. For everything.”

Disconnecting the call, Zoe turned back toward the safehouse and started walking.

###############

“You sure about this?” Omar asked, sitting on one of the cots in the underground bunk that hadn’t been transformed into a jail cell.

“I’m not sure about anything, anymore,” Zoe replied. “But I think you were right that this is the only option we have left.”

Omar nodded. “Smash and grab it is.”

“Right after we get Frank to tell us what the next step is.”

“Besides the tracking and the hexes and the curses and the scrying and all that?”

“He handed us a list of every spell his coven had going, sure, but he didn’t give us a good answer as to why they’d selected those spells, or what they hope their matrices will actually accomplish.”

“He showed us all where all the tools were but he didn’t hand us the blueprints.”

“Exactly.”

Omar stood up. He wore a gray hoodie over forest combat BDUs, his dreadlocks wrapped on top of his head. “He doesn’t buy into the roleplay, anymore. It might be hard to get anything else out of him.”

“So this time when I tell you to ‘bring the dreamer,’ really do it.”

Omar frowned for a fraction of a second. Flattened it out. “Alright, then. If you say so.”

At the other end of the safehouse, Omar and Zoe unlatched the five deadbolts holding the door shut from the outside. They wore submachine guns strapped cross-body, sidearms in buttoned-up holsters. Zoe turned the handle while Omar provided cover. She flung the door open while Omar provided cover. Seeing Frank with his hands up in the center of the room, she signaled Omar to stop providing cover.

“Long time no see,” she said, stepping into Frank’s holding cell.

Frank scalpeled his gaze, examining her.

“Give a man some food and water and suddenly he feels confident.” She smirked.

“Who are you?” Frank asked.

“We’ve been over this a million times—”

“No,” he interrupted, still holding up his hands, “I mean it. I don’t think you’re Winters. Not really.”

“Wow. Big brain.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out why you’d be here. Why show up to the middle of a kill zone and try to save the only people guaranteed to die?”

Zoe thumbed the safety lever of her submachine gun.

Omar stepped into the room. “We don’t answer questions, here, Frank. We just ask.”

Zoe eased off. Stepped back. “Did you know Altan would kill himself?”

“Who?”

“Buddy, you do not want to get under her skin right now.”

Frank glanced at Omar and Omar stared back.

Zoe hoisted up the submachine gun, braced the stock against her shoulder, and pointed the barrel at Frank’s waist. “Did you know Altan Woeser was going to kill himself?”

“No,” Frank said. “I didn’t. Can I lower my hands?”

“Back against the wall, then yeah.”

Frank backed up into the wall and lowered his arms. He shook himself off, wriggling pins-and-needles fingers. “Goddamn,” he muttered to himself. Then, to Zoe: “We didn’t have a specific target for all the psychic magic and hallucinations. We set the matrix to target everyone who wasn’t Gillian Briar. Christ, it’s not like magic can force someone to kill themselves.”

“Be cool,” Omar said.

“‘Be cool?’” Zoe echoed, remembering.

“Come on.”

“Omar, bring the dreamer.”

“Zoe, you—” Omar froze. His face shivered with realization, it crawled with frustration and disappointment.

Frank knew their names.

He’d seen their faces and now he knew their names. And because Omar had stopped himself, because he’d fallen for Zoe’s subtle little trick, he’d also done the job of confirming their names. Zoe felt a plunge of cold guilt slide through her organs at the sight of his expression. But it was already too late. “I’ll be right back,” Omar said, glaring.

“Things will get loud,” she replied.

Frank glanced frantically between them. “What—what are you going to—”

She jerked the barrel just-slightly and squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst shattered the air. Frank’s index finger shredded into red splash and white chunks, part of his palm calving with it. Frank fell, screaming. Blood spurted and drooled from the ragged tear of savaged meat. He clutched the wound uselessly, screams turning to shouts turning to hard breaths and a long stare.

“I want to take your word, Frankie, I do,” Zoe said, all humor heated out of her voice. “But I think I have to find out for myself what magic can and can’t make a person do.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eighteen, Pt. 2

Wilmington, NC; September, 1997.

Zoe hadn’t told Jill or Sung-ho about the clove. They’d gone too far to turn back.

So, almost two days after the single drag she’d taken in violation of the ritual’s rules, they performed the Confrontation anyway.

So much energy bristled around them that it gave the air weight, humidity—the ritual space felt like a steam room somehow without steam. A sheath of cloud cover obscured the moon from the skylight and dozens of candles and candelabra danced in the dimness. A resonant hum vibrated through the floor, a sensation tingling more in their sixth senses than in their bones.

They’d finished most of the Confrontation already. They’d summoned, bound, and banished a score of entities—most metaphorical, but not all—and they’d reinforced the wards and invocations wired through their bodies and the architecture around them. They’d laid out the intricate matrix of sigils, glyphs, and spellcraft illustrated in the grimoire and, as the book had suggested, they’d additionally prepared for the situation to go hideously awry.

Zoe and Sung-ho wore light, combat-ready armor over their everyday clothes. Jill wore a bullet- and knife-resistant vest over a once-white, sweat-yellowed robe. Zoe and Sung-ho carried their gig kits and wore their sidearms in holsters. Jill had a collection of pouches filled with ingredients for relatively quick magic. None of them had been born with natural aptitude, so even the shortest spell took twenty or thirty seconds they might not get if things went wrong—but what else could they do?

“I am not the person I was,” Jill panted from inside a nest of concentric salt circles, wards, and seals. A half-empty, liter water bottle waited next to her, one of her skeletal hands wrapped around it. Sweat greased her skin. “I reforged myself through the fire of my failures. I resurrect myself as a conscious choice, a decision, a deed. I dedicate myself to transfiguration, to restoring myself through amends and good works. As above, so below.”

“As above, so below,” Zoe and Sung-ho chorused.

Over the next several minutes, Jill recounted the harms she’d caused and committed throughout the year 1995 as best as she could recall them. As she spoke, the shadows dancing with the candle flames shivered and grew. They gained some kind of mass or material, the light no longer strong enough to siphon them away. Beneath the floorboards, a host of whispers arose.

“I am not the person I was,” Jill repeated, voice slowed by concern. She uncapped the water bottle and took a gulp. Swallowed. “I reforged myself…” she peered from the twisting shadows over to Zoe. Zoe nodded and Jill continued the incantation. “As above, so below,” she finished.

“As above, so below,” Zoe and Sung-ho chorused.

The whispers under the floor blurred into a hiss. The air crackled around them. A shower of taps and scratches drummed in from the walls, a noise like an endless army of clawed somethings scaling and scaling the house but somehow never reaching the roof.

Jill took a shaky breath and began reciting the account of her harms throughout the year 1996. It was neither her best year nor her worst.

According to the grimoire, few practitioners had ever died during the ritual—but many had come quite close. Had any of them suffered for some unknown moment of weakness? Had any of them died after taking a lone drag of an unreal smoke?

“As above, so below,” Jill repeated.

“As above, so below.”

The room’s dimness darkened. Shadows reached from the walls as if trying to peel themselves free. Static tearing scored the air, joining with the hissing choir to create a sizzling symphony. The whole ritual space sizzled.

“At—at the beginning of the year 1997, this year, I—” Jill stopped, gagging. “I—excuse me.” She coughed, cleared her throat, coughed again, and spat. She took a gulp from the water bottle. “At the beginning of the year 1997, I—” the gag hit her again. “I—I—I—”

Jill’s body arched and spasmed. A gush of bubbling, brown-yellow fluid burst out of her mouth. A second flue followed. Jill lurched forward on hands-and-knees, spine rounding, and flexed through a third rush of vomit. The viscous gross rolled over circles of Kosher salt and pooled across the floor. Jill seized a fourth time, spewing.

Zoe and Sung-ho leapt to their feet. They glanced at each other, at Jill, at each other again. The grimoire hadn’t mentioned anything like this. It reminded Zoe, again, of what they’d taught her about possession during training. Her hand resting on the butt of her sidearm, Zoe watched Jill for a signal to act. Jill stared back with bulging, bloodshot eyes, tears streaking her cheeks, ejecta clinging to her nostrils.

“I’m sorry,” Jill rasped.

A fifth bout of vomit spilled out of her.

And an arm jolted up from the viscous pool as if breaching the surface of a lake. A second arm followed. Clawed and five-fingered, draped in garlands of puke and froth and skinned in heroin residue, they braced themselves against the floor, and some terrible thing began to pull itself out of the sick and into their world.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eighteen, Pt. 1

Salem, MA; September, 2016.

Everything slowed down after the suicide.

At least, everything seemed to slow down. But Zoe knew better. The withdrawal of immediate surveillance and on-site operatives from Jill’s school and neighborhood was little better than a lampshade. The White Ravens charter forbade murder and so all active aggressors had to make a show of recoiling at the results of their ongoing campaigns. Even the Belgian had to pretend contrition out of etiquette.

Nobody wanted to look like they were having a parade over a corpse. Even when they were.

The reality was that Altan Woeser’s suicide was proof that the campaign was working. All the psychic magic, dream magic, illusions magic, all the pressure of late night phone calls, of surveillance both obvious and occulted—nobody had ever planned to storm the school with guns and handcuffs. The plan had looked like this all along.

Nobody needed to kill Earnest Hemingway. They just needed to not follow him.

(they didn’t follow him right up until he—)

So while Malleus and the Belgian reined in their more visible and aggressive efforts, they doubled down on everything else. They only tucked away the things that might grab attention from a White Ravens’ grigori or an everyday detective.

“…considering everything that’s happened,” Leo was saying, Zoe using yet-another burner phone in a treehouse she’d found in the woods, “I was able to make some leeway with the Board regarding their proposal.”

“The terms of surrender,” Zoe corrected bitterly.

Leo sighed. “Maybe it is, but what else is there?”

“Hum me the tune.”

A few scattered beer bottles and crumpled up bags of chips sat in the strew of dead leaves and dust. Zoe sat on the floor, a series of boards slabbed between boughs and branches. Judging from the cobwebs and mold, nobody had used the place in months. Maybe years.

“Jill and Darnell will remain together in Malleus custody while their children are processed and released into the foster system.”

Zoe shook her head. “No way.”

“You know the Board can’t let them walk away free.”

“So they stay together.”

“If the children enter our custody, they’ll remain there for life. At least this way, after processing, they can…”

“What?” Zoe barked. “What can they do?”

“Live.”

“And what about Karen?”

“That will be up to the Belgian, I’m afraid.”

Zoe closed her eyes and banged the back of her head against a wall. Dust fell all over her. She took a deep breath. “This isn’t a deal, this is…I don’t even know what this is.”

“It’s the best option we’ve got.”

She opened her eyes. Stared at the ceiling.

Leo continued: “Zoe…I think it might be best to take the deal.”

She blinked. “Let me get back to you.”

“Zoe—”

She hung up, turned off the phone, stared up for a while, and sighed. Taking out a second phone, she dialed a number. She rolled her neck, small pops breaking the night silence. The line trilled. Someone connected on the other side. A pause followed.

“Hello?” Zoe asked.

“I heard about what happened,” Shoshanna said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well. I need that evac we talked about.”

“I can still only take five people.”

“I figured it all out.”

“I see.” A soft sigh fuzzed over the line. “They told me he hanged himself.”

“I—I don’t have all the details,” Zoe replied.

“Hanging can be so sudden if it’s done right. Even if someone found him in the act, he could’ve snapped his neck in a split second.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“If he’d cut his wrists, someone could’ve used healing magic. If he’d taken an overdose, someone could’ve rushed him to the hospital. But he hanged himself.”

“So?”

“With all the psychic and dream magic pointed at that house, I wonder if he really thought of it, himself. I wonder if the things that pierced Jill’s wards planted the idea in his head, embedded in a dream or tingling his earlobe during some storm of angst and depression.”

“They planted it,” Zoe said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Can we ever be sure?”

“They sent a distraction. They knew he was doing it, or planning to.”

“How do you know it was a distraction and not an assassin?”

“Maybe it was both. When can you have an evac team ready?”

“How soon do you need them?”

Zoe thought through a tangle of timelines and mathematics. She estimated how many days it would take her and Omar to weaken all the spells tracking and spying on Jill and her found family, how long it might take to perform an actual extraction, how long it might take to lose any tails or combatants… “Six days? Seven?”

“I can do that.”

“We can meet—”

“We shouldn’t discuss that, yet,” Shoshanna interrupted. “That should be a decision we make the day before. Just in case.”

“Right.”

“I’ll call you back in three days for the final timeline. I’ll have everything ready.”

“Thanks. Talk then.”

They echoed each other their goodbyes and Zoe hung up. Collecting her backpack and kit, she climbed down the rope ladder to the forest floor and started back toward the safehouse where Omar and Frank awaited her. She tried to figure out how to tell Omar what she’d just done. Maybe he’d feel satisfied with the truth: that either they fell back to the Smash and Grab plan or they lost.

And hopefully Shoshanna Winters had space for a second Malleus defector.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 4

Salem, MA; September, 2016.

The roof bent when the monster landed on it. Zoe jerked back, hand around nothing, and braced herself. Rubber wailed as Omar slammed the brakes. The creature tumbled off the roof, sable-furred, gray-skinned, not mammal nor insect. It rolled along the asphalt losing tufts of fur and skin, gray-white blood streaking behind it. Without losing speed, it flung itself back up on all six legs and—

—vanished, joining the darkness as if already a shadow, itself.

“Go, go, go,” Zoe said. “Go, now. Go.”

Omar hit the gas. The car lurched forward, complaining, and the creature burst out of nowhere to crash into the side of the trunk again. The sedan spun, Zoe’s phone glowing against a tangled-up submachine gun. The screen went black again, the second call missed. Omar spun the wheel and pushed the accelerator down and the monster hit them again from the opposite side. The car whirled, tires balding, rubber burning…

“I can’t get speed,” Omar said.

He pulled some stunt Zoe didn’t have a name for—smoke billowed up from under them, the engine snarled barely-harnessed rage, and the vehicle pivoted around. It jolted forward whiplash-fast and surged into the night.

The creature landed on the hood. From where? Zoe couldn’t tell.

Zoe switched off the safety, got the stock in as good position as she could in her seat, and opened fire. The invocations affecting their hearing turned the chattering thunder into quieter chattering thunder. The windshield exploded. A series of meaty thnk sounds told Zoe that some percentage of the quickly-emptied magazine blew through the monster.

One of its six limbs blew through another piece of windscreen and clawed at Omar’s chest. The blow didn’t draw blood but peeled fabric from his vest. “I can’t see!” he shouted. “Zoe! Brace!”

He slammed on the brakes.

Zoe had lost herself in reloading, in some adrenal overwhelm. Her body jerked forward. She hit the passenger side dashboard gun-first. The airbag erupted, flinging her back. Omar shouted something she couldn’t understand anymore. Tires screamed. A monster ripped something important-sounding from the body of the car. It snarled. The airbag bloated. Zoe fumbled with the door handle, aware that the car was slowly-slowinnnggg…

“Zo’, tell me you’re up!”

“I’m up,” she managed, not quite telling the truth. She got the door unlocked. Something was buzzing somewhere but she couldn’t figure out why that was important.

“I need you out there now!”

“Wha—?”

Omar pushed through whatever wreck the driver’s side had become and tumbled into the street. “Hey, motherfucker!” he shouted, armed with a combat knife. “Hey, over here, that’s right!”

Zoe got the handle to move and kicked the door open. She fell face-first to the asphalt and spat bile. Luckily she wore the gun strap cross-body. Grabbing the submachine gun, she stumbled around the hood of the car, wavering her way back onto two legs. Behind her, the airbag hissed. The buzzing stopped.

The creature blurred past Omar and took most of the man’s kevlar vest with it. What remained twisted and warped, essentially useless. Omar spun and sliced air with his knife, missing. Trickles of viscous gray-white glistened where the thing had traveled.

“Zoe…”

She threw her submachine gun at him and he dropped his blade to catch it.

As the world stopped spinning, she noticed her sixth sense prickling along her skin. The monster, some summoned aberration from a world or even a cosmos bifurcated from humankind, vibrated with so much mystical energy it brought her supernatural sense to the fore, unignorable. She hoped Omar felt the same way.

She spun back toward the passenger side door and almost tripped getting back. Under the airbag, she grabbed the other submachine gun. She saw a phone buzzing out of the corner of her eye but didn’t stop to check the screen. A burst of shot blasted the air. The creature hissed, vanishing as Zoe came back around the hood of the vehicle.

Shallow but bloody scratches sliced along Omar’s left arm and chest. He spun in circles, searching.

Sharp alarm sliced her consciousness, her sixth sense screaming.

“Now!” she shouted.

Omar darted and banked, the creature erupting from the ether to miss him by inches.

They both followed its path through the air. When it landed, they opened fire simultaneously. Series of three- and four-round bursts, only breath separating one trigger-pull from the next. Gouts of gray-white gore erupted from the monster’s sable fur, its scaly skin. It stumbled and tripped, its opalescent essence drooling from its mouth. It shuddered forward and vanished. Zoe still had rounds in the mag. Between four and six of them, at least.

Besides, she’d already used her spare.

The creature reappeared, lurching from darkness. Slops of viscous gray-white poured out of it. It slumped, coiled, and reared up on four legs. Staggering, it swung one of its forelimbs at Omar. The strike came slow and wide and Omar easily backpedaled from it. Landing on all six of its wobbling appendages, it turned toward Zoe and—

Zoe emptied her last few rounds into its arachno-lupine face.

It shivered and managed one more stride forward before collapsing. It started unraveling immediately, mystic anima melting and evaporating. Soon, all that would remain of the monster was whatever mass of animal sacrifice the conjurer had used to stabilize the magic.

Zoe rushed for the passenger seat, submachine gun going over her shoulder by its strap, body banging on her back. She snatched the phone from under the dashboard. Bringing the screen to life, she saw she had six missed calls.

In the not-so-distant distance, sirens hackled up their warcries.

“This place is full of shells,” Omar said.

Zoe stared at the phone, somehow frozen. She had to call back. She had to run. She had to call back. She had to run.

“Fuck it, mundanity will fix it.” Omar grabbed Zoe’s arm and jerked her back into motion. “We gotta go.”

“You’re bleeding,” she noticed.

“We gotta go,” he stressed, already pulling her across the street.

The sirens sped closer.

Zoe shoved the phone back into her kit and zipped it closed. They hit a copse of trees—not real wilderness but blueprinted foliage, suburban green—and kept running. Zoe ignored the buzzing in her kit as they ran. The submachine gun kept banging against her spine, the strap too loose. Her legs ached, naked from the mid-thigh because the attack had happened so suddenly. She shook.

They headed toward Salem Woods, a large enough expanse of forestry to lose themselves in. And if they cut through it the right way, it let them out close to Jill’s house…

They ran through a strip mall. A lifetime of smoking burned in Zoe’s lungs. The phone buzzed. Somewhere, CCTV cameras captured blurry silhouettes, their identities smeared and smudged by a weave of spells into bare vagaries. They kept up the pace until they hit the tree line of the woods. Even with their daily nightsight invocations, the difference between suburban light pollution and under-canopy dark slowed them down.

They jog-walked through the woods toward the northeast. Bugs buzzed and hummed. Zoe opened the kit and took out the phone. “It’s been long enough.”

Omar squinted back behind them, sirens inaudible after the two mile run. “Do it.”

Before she could call, Zoe started coughing. The fit went on for less than a minute, a series of deepening hacks that brought up more and more phlegm. She swallowed and spat and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Goddammit.”

“I told you those things would kill you.”

“Not the time.”

Omar pursed his lips, his agreement and apology both living in his eyes.

Zoe put the phone to her ear. Jill answered almost immediately. “J—”

“He’s dead,” Jill cried. “He’s dead, oh my god…”

“Who? What happened?”

Another woman wailed in the background. Karen Woeser?

“Karen’s s—her—our—Altan. Our son. He—he—he—oh my god…”

“The ambulance is on its way!” Darnell shouted in the chaos background. “There has to be a spell—”

“I tried the fucking spell! No, no, no…” Karen’s shouts descended to low moans.

“I found him,” Jill muttered. “I…”

“What happened?” Zoe repeated, quieter. But something in Karen Woeser’s strained shriek scoring the background already gave her the answer. Something about Jill’s senselessness, her sudden inability to make a sentence through the panic and grief and shock worming through her words…

“Not again,” Jill whispered, half-dissociated. “Not again, not again, please, please…oh my god…”

Zoe slouched against a tree and fell. She dropped the phone.

“What happened?” Omar asked.

“Karen Woeser’s son just killed himself.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 3

Wilmington, NC; September, 1997.

They pushed through.

After Jill’s ‘vision’—or ‘incident’—she started presenting symptoms of withdrawal again. So far out from her last binge and even further from her last long-term burn-out, the recurrence seemed impossible. Medically, at least. But sometimes magic looked like that. Sometimes magic looked like sallow-sick pallor and hollowed cheeks, like shivers and quakes and hours of rollercoaster nausea. Jill did her best to fight through her daily labors, anyway.

Three days after the incident and only two before the Confrontation proper, Zoe heard muffled moans and shuffling scrapes from Jill’s room. Creeping out of bed, she padded down the hall to Jill’s door. “Jill?” she asked, knuckles poised to knock but hesitant.

“Zoe?” came the weak reply.

“Are you…are you okay in there?”

“I really need help.”

“May I come in?”

“Yes, please, yes…”

The ward sealing the lock released and Zoe pushed her way into the room. A skeleton splayed the floor by the bed, surrounded by notebooks and hardbacks. It took a moment for Zoe to recognize Jill through the crawling, bone-white skin, the sweat-crusted hair, coarse and thin, angling from her scalp like broken stalks.

Zoe rushed over to her. “What happened?”

“Had to throw up,” Jill rolled her head vaguely. Zoe saw a glistening spew of yellow bile and clear fluid pooled by the bedside table. Seeing it made her notice the sharp, sour stink of it. “And I fell over.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Zo’…”

“Let me help you up.”

“I can’t do this. Look at me. You know I can’t.”

“I know you can.”

“I’m dying!” Jill snapped. “Fuck. Look at me.”

“And I’m here for you.”

“You can’t be. Not all the time.”

“Two days. Please, please, can you do two days?”

“I’m throwing up nothing. It’s over.”

“No.”

“Please,” Jill whispered. “I don’t want to fight. Please just help me get back in bed.”

Zoe cradled her sister, a collection of sharp angles and hardened corners, as best she could. She pursed her lips, nodded. “I can help. I’ll stay up tonight and stitch together some invocations and wards, what little healing magic I know…I can prop you up until it’s over.”

Jill fluttered her eyelids. Blinked. “You’d do that?”

Zoe forced a chuckle through her throat. In her arms, Jill felt like bone and paper. “I’m pretty sure I literally swore to something like that just a week ago.”

“Has it only been a week?” The haze clouding Jill’s gaze suggested legitimate confusion.

Zoe could’ve cried, but she didn’t. She smiled. “Well…nine days. Including the Gateway.”

“Time crawls,” Jill said, joking and not.

Jill groaned like withered steel as Zoe helped her stand. Buttressed, she moaned and creaked her way to the bed. Beneath the blankets she looked even narrower. Curled up, she shivered. Zoe thought she almost heard Jill’s bones clacking together. Still, six minutes later, Jill’s breath steadied and her shaking stopped.

Zoe crept back to her own bedroom to gather her supplies. She began the spellcraft as soon as she returned.

The night stretched with labor. Jill’s condition called for more than basic morning invocations. It called for spells more powerful and longer lasting. Jill needed increased endurance and stamina not for twenty-four hours, but for at least sixty. Jill needed dulled pain receptors not for an intense, hour-long raid but for days of mundane exhaustion. And while Zoe knew a handful of quick-and-dirty combat healing rituals, she didn’t know much about cleansing a person’s blood of toxins or bolstering a naturally-failing organ. Stringing the single spells into a concentrated matrix increased their overall efficiency and decreased the overall strain on Zoe, but that work, too, took time and focus and effort.

All in all, Zoe spent four caffeine-headached, sweat-slick, queasy hours building up magic in Jill’s bedroom. Even as Jill tossed and turned and muttered in her sleep, Zoe’s concern puddled in her exertions on the floor. By the middle of the third hour, her grief over Jill’s situation had transformed into frustration at the complex task she’d taken on. She cursed and snarled over simple mistakes and multiply-repeated incantations. She tipped over a candle and had to start a fifteen-minute spell-phase from the beginning again. She didn’t bother cleaning up the spilled and drying wax.

She stopped funneling her energy into the spellcraft when confusion and dizziness started blanking her mind. She stopped because she repeated the same step of the same spell three times and still couldn’t get it to take. Breathing hard and feeling embarrassingly frail, she pushed herself away from the symbols and glyphs and ashes and bone and miscellany littering the floor. She used a tipped-over stack of books to help her stand back up.

After the day’s labor and the night’s extra credit, she couldn’t think straight. Her mind felt simultaneously chaotic-cluttered and serenity-empty. She felt like crying and screaming and laughing all at once but couldn’t find a reason to do any of it. Remembering why she’d stood up to begin with, she leaned against a wall and closed her eyes.

When she triggered the matrix she almost lost consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered and she collapsed to her knees, but the bang of her joints against the hardwood sent her straight back up, yelping, wide-awake. She cursed, massaging the bones.

At least the thing took.

She hobbled away from the wall and maneuvered the room to the exit. She left her stuff behind. She could pick it up the next morning.

Still snarling in the hallway, she took out a clove, lit it with her Zippo, and took a puff.

Froze. Exhaled.

And realized that she hadn’t put her Zippo in her pocket that morning and that she hadn’t bought a pack of cigarettes in weeks. Dashing the cherry against the wall until the whole black stick broke apart to the filter, Zoe knew it was already too late. She stood for a long time in the dark corridor waiting for everything to collapse. Nothing happened.

At least, not yet.

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Table of Contents

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 2

Salem, MA; September, 2016.

They had a lot of work to do.

According to Frank, still locked in a closet at a Malleus safehouse Zoe prayed no other agent thought to use, the Belgian’s team had arrived before Malleus Intel-A division sent out the widespread report. Even before making the situation known to other organizations, Malleus and the Belgian’s ‘Consortium’ had started making moves against Jill. They had a three week head start. Three weeks, two covens, and a small target group.

Comparably, Omar and Zoe had three opposition parties, multiple targets each, and several ritual sites to sabotage. Working to regain lost time, they were outnumbered, outplanned, and outflanked. From such a disadvantaged position, their only hope of coming out on top rested on Zoe’s powerful expertise and Omar’s clever short-cutting, his efficiency and cleverness.

The night after they returned to Salem proper from their first encampment at the safehouse, Zoe laid awake in bed and stared at the ceiling. Why had Leo sent her here? The circumstances seemed insurmountable. Had he told her about it just to get out ahead of the story? Sooner or later, Jill would have called her. Jill would have asked for help and Zoe would’ve agreed. So maybe Leo just handed her the dossier to avoid her getting it from someone else, later.

Or maybe Leo really believed she had a chance.

Zoe climbed out of the top bunk of their rented bedroom. She padded socked feet out of the bedroom and into the living room. Letting her mystically-enhanced eyesight turn the fumbling darkness into mere dimness, she sat on the couch with the lights off and plucked up her pack of smokes from the table. She turned the package over in her hand, staring.

Leo hadn’t called back with an updated offer, yet.

Shoshanna hadn’t gotten in touch about possible defection, either.

Her body remembered the reason she’d picked up the smokes. Absently, she pulled a long black clove from its casement and put the filter between her lips. She switched the pack for the Zippo but paused before lighting the cherry. The flame danced and glowed.

“You okay?” Omar asked from the bedroom doorway.

Zoe flinched, surprise derailing her train of thought. She lifted the Zippo to the clove and puffed. Clapping the lighter closed, she put it back on the table. “It’s almost dawn and I’m smoking alone in the dark. What kind of detective are you?”

“I never did well with behavioral deduction. Or tactical body language.”

Zoe snorted. “Guess not.”

“Zo’…the ad said ‘no smoking.’”

“Fuck the ad and fuck the people who own the place.” She took a long drag, breathing silver. “We’re never going to catch up to this…”

Omar walked into the room, pajama-clad. His breezy silk sleeves and pants made Zoe self-aware; the undershirt/boxer combination she’d relied on since training felt suddenly immature, beneath her. He sat on the floor on the other side of the table. “You want to try the grab-and-go plan?”

Zoe stared at nothing in particular. “If Frank told us the truth, I don’t see how we have a choice.”

“We need to get the tracking and scrying spells off of her, first.”

She shook her head. “Darnell’s losing it, Jill’s getting paranoid…their plans are working. I don’t know if we have time to disrupt every single spell keeping track of her—I don’t even know if it’s worth trying.”

“If we grab her without taking down the tracking spells, they’ll just follow her.”

“Taking down all those spells will take…what, two weeks? Assuming nothing else goes wrong?”

“We both felt the power in those matrices,” Omar said. “We could drag Jill out of that house and drop her in the middle of flyover nowhere and they’d still ping her ass within a hundred feet.”

“Maybe a hundred feet is enough.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

Zoe wiped at her face, took a fevered puff from her smoke. “Goddammit.”

A knock echoed in from the front door. Omar and Zoe glanced between each other. Zoe put out her cigarette, standing. Omar jogged back to the bedroom, socks quieting his footfalls. Zoe followed, walking. The knock repeated, louder.

Zoe took a breath, closed her eyes, and listened to her sixth sense. A vague dread and animal anxiety sizzled beneath her normal perception. When she opened her eyes again, Omar pushed a submachine gun into her hands. Pulling a tactical strap over one shoulder and cross-body, she took her armored jacket from him next. He donned a kevlar vest. Armed and armored, they each took their run kits and clipped them over their waists. Zoe had ditched one of her spare clips to make room for two of her burner phones. She thought about Sung-ho and all of his strange habits. She couldn’t quite recall the connection.

The wards they’d set around the perimeter spiked a warning through their minds. Something non-human skirted around the rental, seeking gaps in their defenses.

Zoe ejected the magazine, checked it unnecessarily out of just-in-case impulse, and slapped it back in. The same standard pattern of ASOD armory munitions filled the mag—silver bullets, alternating armor-piercing and frangible rounds, and tracers—except now she had thirty-one of them and could rattle them out of the barrel in half the time.

Omar had brought them. A decade earlier, after what had happened with the Summoner, he’d asked why Zoe hadn’t filed an armory request before launching the raid. She’d shrugged, offered some half-lie about timelines. Omar never made the same mistake.

She pulled on her jacket, unfolded the gun stock, and peered back over her shoulder at the condo beyond. Everything felt still and quiet and brittle. Omar stepped around her, taking point as they walked back into the living room.

“We can’t get too loud,” Omar whispered.

“Uh… ‘can’t’ is a strong word.”

“If it gets in, we take the opposite way out. Don’t shoot if you don’t need to.”

“We fall back to the car, take off, regroup?”

“Bingo,” Omar confirmed.

Zoe angled her barrel toward the front door. Omar angled his toward the kitchen, the angle of structure that led to the back.

Seconds crept passed.

Glass shattered. Talons clacked and scraped against kitchen tile.

They padded backwards, down a narrow hall leading to the front door. In the hallway, they slow-slow-slowly slipped their feet into laceless shoes. From the kitchen, an inhuman throat grumbled gutturally. Omar slo-mo unlocked the latch and knob locks. “My car,” he whispered.

The creature in the kitchen snorted loudly. Its clawed, clattering movements stopped.

Zoe nodded. She didn’t speak.

Holding his submachine gun left-handed, its strap hanging off of one shoulder, Omar turned the doorknob with his right hand. They braced themselves to run, if need be. They took long, quiet breaths.

One of the phones in Zoe’s kit started vibrating.

Omar glared.

The creature in the kitchen made a noise somewhere between snake-hiss and raptor-shriek.

Omar threw the door open. It banged the side of the condo but they didn’t care—they ran outside and raced for his rental car. Omar worked the locks while Zoe rushed for the passenger side. Behind them, furniture crashed to the floor as some sharp, fast beast pursued.

They clambered into the vehicle clumsy and desperate. Omar brought the engine to a roar. His gun tumbled from his shoulder and Zoe ended up with two of them on her lap. She fumbled through straps and gunmetal to unzip her kit. A phone buzzed inside. As Omar reversed, the headlights showed something impossible burst out of the house. The size of a moose, six-legged, head an elongate combination of lupine and arachnid, it leapt into the driveway.

“Shiiiiit!” Omar yelled, spinning the wheel as he switched gears.

If enough people witnessed the thing, mundanity would kill it within minutes. But who was around to witness it at three-something in the morning in Salem?

The car squealed, trunk swinging wide as Omar spun the vehicle onto a street. Zoe finally dug out the phone. Jill’s complementary burner number flashed on the screen once. It stopped ringing. “Omar, hold on, I need to—”

Something heavy crashed into the side of the trunk. Omar worked the wheel, keeping them more-or-less steady. His submachine gun tumbled out of Zoe’s lap and landed on the floor. Zoe reached for it and a second concussion dented the rear of the vehicle. Omar kept it steady but the phone jumped down to join the gun. It started buzzing again. Zoe reached down, not sure what to grab first.

“Get ready!” Omar shouted.

“For what!?”

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Table of Contents

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 1

Wilmington, NC; September, 1997.

The final phase of the ritual happened in nine day cycles. If the Confrontation didn’t trigger on the ninth day, another two day Gateway would open and the process would start again. But in the best case scenario, it only took nine grueling, ascetic, laborsome days to complete.

It went like this:

At dawn, Zoe and Jill awoke and meditated on concepts of beginnings, resurrections, and other related metaphorical notions. They considered the day’s destruction of night and night’s destruction of day. They meditated on the topic of relapse.

For breakfast, all practitioners (Zoe, Jill, Sung-ho) gathered for a meal. They shared greetings and well-wishes before the meal, ate the meal without speaking a single syllable, and continued talking after setting the dishes aside.

After breakfast, Zoe and Sung-ho worked on building the Confrontation itself. They folded numerous invocations into each other. They arranged good luck charms and minor protections around the ritual space. They reinforced the existing wards.

Meanwhile, Jill continued to fortify the perimeter and its various ingresses and egresses. She summoned potential interlopers into complicated seals and banished them from the procession to follow. She built up the wards protecting the house, shielding it from notice, and preventing supernatural break-ins.

The practitioners met for lunch, speaking both before and after the meal but eating, again, in silence.

After lunch, Jill returned to her room for further meditation and self-counsel.

Zoe and Sung-ho checked all the boards blockading the windows.

They had a break until sunset.

At sunset, the practitioners met in the ritual space and meditated on cycles, behaviors, and their own failings. They spent sixty minutes self-assessing. After this, the trio continued working up the interlocking spells of the Confrontation. The work lasted up until dinner.

They ate dinner according the same rules as every other meal.

After dinner, under the moonlight, Zoe and Sung-ho listened to Jill talk. Jill talked about relapse and resurrection, about nights that destroyed days and days that destroyed, about her behaviors and her cycles and all of her failings. Once the moon reached its brightest, the ritual allowed Zoe and Sung-ho six sentences each to advise, counsel, and buttress Jill.

After that, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted. But even by the end of the first night, what they wanted was to sleep.

They all had caffeine headaches and Zoe still had lingering nic fits. Sung-ho, freshly quit of a lifelong fondness for coffee, threw up once on the first day. He managed through the second day in a grump, a walking underbreath mutter. By the morning of the third day, things had settled somewhat. As much as they could in a house full of itchy, physically uncomfortable, and utterly exhausted witches.

The third day also went according to plan. As did the fourth. Until.

After dinner, under the moonlight, Zoe and Sung-ho listened to Jill talk. Jill talked about relapse and resurrection, about nights that destroyed days, about all of her failings. Jill stared at the floor in front of her, cross-legged, seated on a sigil. “When mom and dad kicked me out, for a while I guess I thought, I dunno, maybe the world was supposed to eat me. I let a lot of bad people into my life and hurt a lot of other good ones and now I think—or I wonder—whether I did it subconsciously. Maybe I wanted to get hurt. Maybe I wanted to disappear.”

They still had nine minutes until the moon shone its brightest.

Jill coughed. “I think I did. I wanted to—to—to—” she stuttered. She froze. She reached for her throat, gagging. Her eyes bulged, emeralds drowned in milk. Something rattled wheezy and phlegmatic in her windpipe. Something started crawling under her skin.

Zoe lurched forward and Sung-ho put an arm out to stop her. He gestured for her to ‘wait.’

Jill leaned forward and planted her hands on the ground, four-legged. She sucked air, burped, sucked air, burped. Sweat beaded her brow and scarlet flushed her face. “Mmm,” she groaned. “Mmmhmmnnnn!”

Zoe rocked back and forth. Sung-ho kept his arm out straight.

Jill’s visage writhed as if a civilization of slender worms frenzied beneath it. “Hhhuuhhh!”

Zoe pursed her lips. Sung-ho swallowed hard.

Electronic feedback shrieked through the air. The unnatural sound dopplered and faded, echoed and overlapped itself. Zoe grabbed her ears and Sung-ho dropped his arm, grimacing. The candelabra burned bright and hot, flames dancing higher and higher. The flat, chemical stench of burnt ozone filled their nostrils.

Jill puked up a ball of hairy brown-yellow vomitus. Every vein in her body bulged.

“The sun screams butane down on a sea of sizzling black tar!” Jill screamed. Another skin seemed to jerk and stab out from under her own. “The waves bubble, they seethe up to eat the shores.”

Zoe had a hand over her mouth. Every muscle in her body tightened to move.

Sung-ho stared at her in warning.

“There is a war going on behind things,” Jill shouted. “Beneath them! Every story ends the same way. In the long run,” she arched her back, lifting herself up until she howled at the ceiling. “The seas eat the shores, the skies choke, the land blisters, this world is track marks and hollow cheeks. There’s a war going on in every story.”

Zoe could’ve cried. One hand clamped over her tight-shut lips, joints aching with the want to act, she felt the impulse crawl up her neck and across her scalp, felt it tingle in her sinuses. She could’ve. But she didn’t.

Sung-ho held onto her other arm, grip weak from the day’s efforts. They’d seen things like this in cases of possession or infestations of psychic or semi-psychic entities—rare fringe occurrences so improbable that most agents didn’t train to deal with them, anymore. But as a byproduct of a ritual spell? Never.

Jill shot to her tip-toes, standing rigid as a nailed-up scarecrow. “The sun is a spoonhead sizzling, the seas boil black tar, my veins, every story, a war, above and below, macro as micro as macro as apocalypse. Don’t you get it, yet? Under the surface there’s nothing. Under the surface there’s just me!”

A high pitch scored the crackling air.

Sung-ho removed his hand, bracing for action. Zoe pushed herself up into a crouch, ready.

Jill collapsed. She hit the floor as limp as a haystuffed icon dismounted. A static-colored drool oozed out of one side of her mouth. For five seconds that felt like five years, Jill neither blinked nor breathed. Then she screamed, curling up fetal inside her sigil.

The alarm clock announced the moon’s brightest moment. Sung-ho slapped it off.

“I’m so sorry,” Zoe said.

But Jill just kept crying.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Sixteen, Pt. 3

[REDACTED], MA; September, 2016.

Zoe had to give it to him: Frank didn’t squawk for three whole days.

Omar played the good cop and she played the bad one. They’d performed the routine dozens of times, they had it down to an art. Alas, not a science.

Zoe’s job felt easier than usual. It was easier. With invocations reinforcing her bones, she broke Frank’s cheek. After Omar ‘cooled her off,’ she went through ten minutes of healing magic to un-break it. It still bruised and swelled, but the structural integrity of his skull remained intact.

She’d hit him a few times, sure, but she hadn’t tortured him. Mostly because torture didn’t work. Most intel gathered during torture was incorrect intel. People in enough pain would say anything to escape it, which was the whole problem: they’d say anything. Close to zero percent of any information brokered through duress ended up as reliable or factual. Besides, a career spent adjacent in the industry had given Zoe the strong impression that any single datum rarely panned out useful. Any simple transaction of information wouldn’t be worth the time and labor involved in getting it. The goal was to trick the subject into choosing to talk.

Which meant Omar didn’t just play the ‘good cop.’ He played the role of head interrogator and investigator. Because when a person chose to talk, they talked. Between the carrot and the stick, it was the carrot that got results. The stick just made the carrot look more palatable.

After three days of keeping Frank locked in a utility closet in the basement of a Malleus safehouse, Omar found Zoe in the standard safehouse bedroom and leaned against the doorframe. “He says he’ll start talking.”

“Did he tell you much already?” she asked, reclined on a cot, reviewing their tight schedule of counter-casting, spell degradation, interrogation, and somehow self-subsisting.

“Not much. He’s with the Belgian’s people for sure, but we figured that.”

“Now we know.”

“Which is better, but not by much. I acted appropriately surprised and shit, pretended like the name-drop meant something…he’s already offered a lot of money for me to get him out of here, so I’m in.”

She nodded, setting aside the spreadsheets and the notes. “Now we just need some actual intel.”

“Take the lead, pig.”

Zoe laughed. Standing, she shook her head. “I needed that.” She put her smile away. “Now, let’s talk to Frankie.”

###############

Down the hall from the utility closet, Zoe took out a dictaphone and held it to her lips. “John Doe interrogation session number nine,” she said. “John Doe has agreed to start answering questions from me, lead interrogator,” for the future ‘cover,’ if Omar needed it, “Zoe Briar.”

They opened the door. Frank faced the rear of the closet, hedged in by steel shelving units, hands bound into fists, three rolls of duct tape wrapping him to his chair. The chair, itself, was one of the typical low-budget office varieties with fabric upholstery and wheels that kinda-worked but also didn’t.

“I already saw your faces,” Frank said. “So you might as well turn me around.”

“I heard you wanted to talk,” Zoe replied.

“It’s easier to do that face-to-face, right?”

“You work for the Belgian. I knew that already. If you’re looking to walk out of here at any point, you’ll have to give me more.”

“More I can give. Provided I’m protected.”

“From who?” Zoe asked.

Frank wiggled in his seat, jostling the chair around. An armrest bounced off of a metal shelf. Zoe smirked at his struggles, his inability to do so much as simply turn himself around. He grunted. “It’s ‘whom,’” he said. “Anyway. If I’m gonna tell you anything about the gig, here, I need protection from whatever happens when the Belgian figures out I was the rat and decides to burn my family line out of existence.”

“Okay, clearly my partner lied to me.” She unholstered her sidearm and stepped into the closet. She put the barrel by his ear and thumbed off the safety. “I heard you wanted to talk, not throw out obvious observations about how your boss operates his business. So do you have any actual intel, or just broad statements of fact? ‘The Belgian is a famously brutal man.’ ‘The sky is blue.’ Maybe you could do ‘The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow’ next.”

“Listen, you—”

She squeezed the trigger and the gun roared. Frank screamed, jerking his head side to side. “Loud? Especially since you probably didn’t go through your morning invocations, so you’ve got nothing helping your ears deal with it.”

“Listen, bitch, I know who you are. I know who you’re working for!” Frank rocked his chair back and forth, clattering into the shelves, rolling tools onto the floor.

“Can you actually hear yourself, right now?”

“You wanna bet!?”

“I guess you can’t. Because that wasn’t a response—”

“You’re so fucked. You’re so fucked if you think you can pull this off…”

Zoe tilted her head. She wanted to know more.

Omar ran up to the threshold, fake panting, and leaned into it. “I heard a gunshot.”

“He’s fine,” Zoe said, playing the part. “Trust me, he’ll get a lot louder if it comes down to that.”

“We can’t just treat prisoners—”

“So make him talk.” She turned back to Frank, rested the barrel of her pistol on his shoulder. “Let’s start with something small. You don’t even have to sell your side out for the first couple questions. But now you’ve got my attention…and I’m interested to know whom, exactly, you think we are, and whom, exactly, you think we’re working for.”

Frank took a few deep breaths, still grimaced and taut from the gunshot blare. He jerked his head to one side, trying to correct damaged hearing. It didn’t correct. Finally, slouching forward just slightly—not enough to noticeably pull on the duct tape—he sighed. “Everyone who’s anyone has a team in the area. The Consortium—” and Zoe remembered the name of the Belgian’s group, an organization so monolithic that it rarely required definition outside of ‘the Belgian’s group.’ “—The Consortium and Malleus are on the same side. We have begrudging support from the Temple. The Druidic Lodge of Ascendant Gaea has a team here, doing nothing, as always, and I think we found a White Ravens ‘grigori’ hovering around somewhere being useless, ibid…which just leaves the Winters crew, doesn’t it?”

Zoe arched eyebrows. “Not bad deductive reasoning. And how does that help you?”

“Because either David ‘Winters’ is about to start a fight with people who will fucking annihilate him, or the two of you are rogue agents. You’d have to be, to have a place this secure. Either way, it’s in everyone’s best interest if nobody ever finds out.”

Zoe chuckled, exaggerating for the stage. She lifted the barrel from his shoulder and slapped it against the side of his face. “Frankie, if this school goes down…you won’t be telling anyone anything ever again.”

“This two-bit homeschool? It’s eight nobodies.”

Omar stepped into the closet. His movement reminded Zoe that he was still there.

She realized her shoulders had tightened, that her grip had clenched. Her index finger poised, ready to slip from trigger guard to trigger again. Mentally, she cued her shoulders to drop. She took a deep breath. “Alright, then, Frank. I tried being polite, I tried hurting you, I tried meeting you halfway…”

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Omar whispered.

“Bring me the dreamer.”

“What, you want to give me visions?”

“I don’t ‘want’ anything. Either you follow the instructions and give yourself visions, or I’ll invest a lot of bullets into turning your hands into stumps.”

“You can’t force someone to do that.”

She laughed—genuinely, this time. “That’s what the ‘or’ is for.”

Omar exited, away to ‘get the dreamer.’

“I won’t,” Frank said.

“I’ll start with a thumb and you will. Believe me. Because when I blow off your thumb, you’ll be in so much pain you’ll think that there’s no sort of emotional of psychic pain that could match it. And you’ll be wrong. Do you know how many terrible places there are in the world? How many vile people and horrible things?”

Frank jostled his restraints but didn’t make a verbal response.

“So many. Humankind’s history is riddled with massacres and slaughters, widescale rape and murder, genocide, name it…and we’ve done a decent enough job at keeping track of what happened, and where, of who did it to whom else, we’ve named all the details and remembered them and thought about them and learned about them, hundreds and thousands of us, so that their psychic gravity must be…wow, right?”

“You can’t!”

“You could have visions of Carl Panzram. Maybe you’ll experience the time he got raped by a bunch of homeless men. Maybe you’ll find yourself raping a young boy. Maybe you’ll be murdering someone or maybe you’ll be the one being murdered. The fun of dreamer really lies in the uncertainty.”

Frank rocked in his chair and she used her off-hand to hold it steady.

“Or we could jump straight to a psychic history of Dachau, if you’d prefer.”

“I’ll lose my hand,” Frank snarled.

“I’ve done this, before, Frankie. You’ll change your mind. And after you do, after you ask the dreamer to tell you whatever we want it to tell you about, we’ll dose you with a sleeping drug and put a black bag over your head just to make sure you have enough time to get a good picture of things.”

“This is…this is beneath people like us.”

Zoe spun him around and moved to jam the barrel in his mouth. He snapped his jaws shut. The steel met his lips. She left it there. “There is nothing beneath me, okay? Nothing. There is no depth I will not sink to. If I decide you’re a bigger cost than a benefit, I will kill you and leave you in this closet to rot and I will not even once second-guess myself. So tonight, you’re either going to go through hours of nightmares and visions and human memories surrounding some horrifically traumatizing people, places, or events in our long and wretched history as a species, or I’m going to make your hands one-finger-at-a-time useless to you for the rest of your life.”

She pulled the gun away. Turned him back around. He didn’t say anything.

Omar hovered at the threshold. “Can we…talk about this?”

Zoe groaned, turning toward him. She levered the safety back on and exited the closet, closing the door behind her. She turned off the dictaphone.

“How is he?” Omar whispered.

“He’s all yours,” Zoe answered, grinning.

And when Omar walked back in alone, Frank told him everything.

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Table of Contents

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Sixteen, Pt. 2

Oceanrest, ME; August, 2007.

The police never picked up the Summoner. The case trailed off.

The story read like this: the Summoner, real name [REDACTED], and at least one as-yet-unknown accomplice murdered at least three men and four women across five different crime scenes. Perhaps the accomplice was one of the kids at the rental cabin, but evidence didn’t point to anyone in particular. Everyone felt certain that the Summoner, now a known entity, would rear his hideous visage once again, and when he did, the badges would swarm.

Of course, Zoe knew better. Zoe knew that, realistically, either Malleus had spirited the Summoner away to what was essentially a black site, or the man had died from complications of his wounds. There were other possible endings, especially given the reality-bending nature of magic, but those two were the most likely.

The story didn’t end, it just unraveled. It went on as the world did.

(every story)

(life’s a bitch and then life’s a bitch and then life’s a)

The people who needed answers would invent the answers they needed. The Summoner would rot in some unmarked grave, a closed case never officially closed.

Maybe the story would end differently if it read differently, but the story read the way it read.

Omar left the bomb but the bomb never went off. None of them went off.

After, he went through the various NDA procedures. It took four days for all the interlocked hexes and curses and corporate paperwork to process, but after that, he walked outside with Delta clearance. He went back home to visit his mother and consider what the future held for him.

Zoe went back to New York City. She went on assignments in Montana and Louisiana before Omar got back to her with an answer. Some time in late July, Omar sent a ciphered message to Zoe through an email address attached to a random-numbers domain. Zoe forwarded the decrypted message to Sung-ho and Leonid Singh.

They granted Omar’s mother Class-E intel clearance.

A week later, Omar officially requested training. Zoe forwarded the decrypted message to the same people and the same people pulled whatever favors and applied whatever pressure and everyone agreed to meet in Oceanrest for Omar’s official induction.

So, the third weekend of August, Zoe found herself parking a rental car in Sung-ho’s driveway. For a second, the sight of their place, the one-car garage, Sung-ho’s car parked outside of it, Leo’s car behind that—she felt displaced from time. It took her back. The sharp, sudden crash of memory froze her. After a couple long seconds, she withdrew the keys from the ignition.

She was still standing next to her rental when Omar’s arrived.

He parked behind her and emerged smiling. Freshly-renewed dreadlocks fell nearly to his shoulders. A trimmed beard sandpapered his face. He wore a tailored suit, three-piece and gray, with a purple tie as a slash of color down his chest. “I look good, right?”

“Right,” she answered, back in the right year again. “How’s it feel?”

Omar leaned against a still-open door, staring at the house. “Honestly? Weird.”

“Yeah. Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

###############

The Parks had installed a deck. It reminded Zoe of the one they had at their summer home in Wilmington. It brought back memories. She swallowed them down. Climbing the few steps to join the rest of the crew, she re-introduced Omar.

“Leo,” Leo said, last, extending a hand.

“Nice to meet you, Leo. There a reason everyone else has a last name ‘cept you?”

Leo grinned, bright ivory slicing through a bristling beard. “Because I’m about to be promoted.”

“Pffft,” Sung-ho snorted.

“I’ll never see a day of field work again,” Leo continued, leaning back on the cushions of the outdoor furniture. “And my full name will be categorized as Class-C intel. Which means you’ll have to wait until after graduation to learn it.”

“I could probably use your picture and a search engine to find it,” Omar replied, finding an empty chair between Leo and Sung-ho.

“Which is why the NDA has to be a full-fledged curse.” Leo exaggerated an ‘alas what the world has become’ sigh.

“I noticed that,” Omar sank into his seat grinning. “That’s why I had to get you guys to set my mom up.”

“Family members usually receive special permissions,” Leo had always had a heightened, semi-formal way of speaking, but since his path out of field work and up the ladder toward the Board, he’d certainly honed it. “As part of standard operating procedure. After in-depth background checks, of course.”

“Of course,” Omar echoed, mimicry subtle enough to be funny.

“Drink?” Sung-ho asked Omar.

“Sure. What’s good?”

“Everything I buy is good,” Sung-ho answered. “But the bottle closest to me is a Macallan eighteen-year single malt Scotch.”

“Any ice?” Omar asked.

“Not in an eighteen-year single malt, no.” Sung-ho poured from the bottle into a clear plastic cup. Halfway full, he handed it to Omar. “Well, maybe one cube, tiny, to spread the flavor out, but all our ice already melted.”

Zoe only the noticed the large cooler behind Sung-ho’s chair, a number of bottles swimming in a shallow sea.

“Zoe?” Leo prompted.

“Hm?”

“Would you like to join us? Have a drink? Share some war stories with our new recruit?”

“Yeah,” she unglued her feet and walked to the rest of them. Among the circle of chairs surrounding the square, glass table, two waited empty, one next to Leo and the other next to Sung-ho. She sat next to Sung-ho. “Scotch sounds great.”

“So…Zoe’s a pretty big deal, huh?” Omar asked.

“A sufficiently large fish in a relatively small pond, indeed she is,” Leo answered. Turning to Sung-ho, he added, “How many times did you and Zo’ earn Best in Field?”

Sung-ho smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “We’re not here to brag, Leo. We’re here to get tipsy and high and tell Omar what training’s going to be like and then shoot guns at cartoon caricatures until the cops show up to fine me again.”

Leo didn’t literally roll his eyes, but the twist of his facial expression—and a slight tic in his right eyebrow—achieved the same effect. “Suffice it to say, Omar, that you’re in very good hands. I expect Zoe will be a mentor unmatched by any other.”

“Hey!”

“Present company excluded, of course.”

And Zoe had really wanted to be.

She really had.

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