S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 12

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Sixteen, Pt. 1

Salem, MA; August, 2016.

“Yeah, that’s right. Hands up, real slow.”

Zoe took a deep breath, spread her fingers wide, and one-inch-at-a-time lifted her arms overhead. She felt every centimeter her hands traveled from her holster, her kit bag, her sack of tricks. Nearby, the commercial drone hovered, out of sight. Ahead of her, burnt offerings and leftover magic, a river blackened by the lightless skies. Behind her, an automatic pistol, a blond-haired, blue-eyed enforcer working for the most powerful and sinister man alive.

“Who do you work for?” Frank asked.

“Nobody.”

A suburban street waited silently only six hundred feet away. Nobody dozing through their pre-sleep routines knew what happened at such distance, but they’d hear the gun chatter if Frank pulled the trigger. She knew he could do so only once.

So she knew she could afford to push him a little.

“You think you’re clever?” Frank took a step, sole scraping rock and hard dirt. “Tracking us down, breaking into our rental, making us move…”

He paused as if waiting for a response.

She pursed her lips.

He continued, “At first I really did think Lacey was just having nightmares. She’s paranoid, been working for the boss too long to keep her head straight. But then…someone had tapped into our magic. And it made sense, seeing as how someone’s been tampering with our operations all over Salem.”

She wondered if his sight-enhancing invocation was more powerfully laid than her vision-blurring ward.

“So,” Frank said. “How big’s your team? Three people, four?”

“Just me.”

Frank snorted. “Sure.”

“If I’m not alone, where’s my cover?” she asked.

“Hey,” Frank wasn’t talking to her, but to someone on the other end of a mic, a radio, a cellphone. “You guys find the rest of her squad, yet?”

Zoe relaxed her shoulders, let her elbows and knees soften. Frank’s answer came unheard—not over a radio but through some other piece of tech.

“I think you’ve got a guy in the graveyard and someone else on the drone,” Frank replied. “Maybe a fourth on the other side of the river, if you’re smart.”

“Maybe,” Zoe said.

“But the ritual site’s got canopy cover from above, tree cover from the bank, and it’s about two hundred feet of open grass from here to the street.”

“It’s a good spot. It’s exactly where I would have gone.”

“Good for you. Now, slowly, put your hands behind your back.”

She had to admit, they’d accounted for everything. Almost. She stretched her arms behind her back. “What about the school?”

Nearby, an elementary school backed up to a stretch of barely-maintained forest. Crossing the rough, occasionally hazardous terrain made for a difficult approach, but still an approach. Assuming an appropriate distraction—such as a witch showing up to degrade and disrupt their spells. The forestation edging up to the riverside also provided a great hideaway for someone to operate a drone.

“The school?” Frank echoed.

Foliage rustled from twenty feet behind Zoe. She ducked and banked left, sprinting.

Frank lifted his pistol but didn’t fire. “She’s running,” he said, talking to his earpiece again.

When he turned to give chase, Frank ran face-first into the butt of Omar’s pistol. Frank shouted once before Omar grabbed his collar. Omar slammed his pistol-grip into Frank’s temple and the latter dropped like a man hanged. “Okay,” Omar said, “grab his feet. We gotta get him back to the school before anyone else shows up.”

Zoe grabbed Frank’s ankles.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fifteen, Pt. 3

Wilmington, NC; September, 1997.

Nothing happened after the power surge. The bulbs all blew, the windows exploded shardly outward—but nothing else happened. The next morning, Zoe felt the Gateway open.

The Gateway only lasted for two days, so they acted quickly.

They didn’t have time to repair all the glass, of course, so they bought plywood and two-by-fours and nailed up barricades at all the broken windows. They bought panicked-people volumes of canned and frozen goods—their diet for the next nine days purely vegetarian and most produce being spoilable—and stocked up on paper goods, flashlight batteries, candles (votive and otherwise), and other essential miscellany. By the time they’d finished the various chores, shopping trips, and errands required to continue the ritual, thirty-six of the Gateway’s forty-eight hours had passed.

Sung-ho pulled into the driveway just before dinner. He drove a wood-paneled station wagon, the back compartment stuffed with briefcases and storage tubs. As he stepped out, the sunset shining off the bristles of his recently-shaved scalp, he peered up at the boarded up windows and adjusted his sunglasses. Put his hands on his khaki, utility-shorted hips.

Zoe descended the steps from the front entrance to the driveway. “I’ll cover the damages.”

“What exactly, uh…happened?”

“The shaved head looks great.”

Sung-ho had worn long locks, side-swept, and a rough goatee, once upon a time. Sometime after Gillian’s second stint in rehab, however, he’d started developing a bald spot. Never one for half-measures, Sung-ho confirmed his situation and took a razor to the whole thing. “Thanks,” he said. “But, ah, again…what happened?”

“The ritual turned out to be more dangerous than we thought.”

“Hum me the tune, Zo’.”

“I might’ve made a small mistake very early on, tracking Jill after…getting extremely drunk. I’m not sure if it impacted the ritual directly, but there’ve been other small things. And Jill’s made a few small mistakes, too.”

“Hmmm, yes, it’s clear to me now how all of my windows broke. Many small mistakes.”

Zoe continued as if the sarcasm hadn’t registered. “There’s a manifestation in the spell, some material or semi-material extrusion of Jill’s…trauma. We ran into it a few nights ago during the end of the second phase, the Proclamation, and we managed to activate all the magic anyway. But then the windows exploded.”

“And is there a particular reason somewhere in all that jazz?”

Zoe peered back at the house behind her, the numerous plywood sheets patching its dozen eyes. “I assume so, but we really don’t know.”

He arched eyebrows. “That’s a bad sign.”

Zoe cleared her throat. “Were you able to deal with the dietary bullshit?”

“I haven’t had a drink in a week, a smoke in three or four days…”

“Coffee?”

Sung-ho shrugged. “Eh.”

“It’s a rough quit.”

“Everything is.” He sighed, turned back toward the station wagon. “Come on, help me unpack. You owe me for the windows.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fifteen, Pt. 2

Salem, MA; August, 2016.

They’d spent a few days searching the town for signs of larger matrices at work. Darnell’s dark premonition had Zoe on edge, whether she admitted it or not. And if the Powers-That-Were planned to dismantle Jill’s school through nonviolent means, they’d need powerful magic to do it; not just a handful of rental sites scrawled with glyphs and runes but a considerable circuit of interlocked mysticism.

It hadn’t taken long to find the first clues. The Belgian’s crew, aided by Malleus and presumably everyone else Zoe had noticed in town besides the Winters team, had set up a vast network of spells all over Salem and even into Peabody, Beverly, and Clifton. In five days, Zoe and Omar uncovered six ritual sites, with evidence suggesting several more.

Even then, haunted by a psychic’s suggestion, she wondered, too, if the paranoia owed itself to opposition forces. It didn’t take a psychic to foresee dark days and terrible traumas ahead for the school and its constituents, but perhaps Darnell’s frenetic insistence pointed at something else. Maybe it illustrated the extremes to which the enemy’s campaign of psychological warfare had already succeeded.

(there are no enemies anymore)

Still, they knew they had to disrupt or neutralize the major matrices if they wanted to save Jill.

So before they had time to develop a plan, they already had tasks to accomplish.

Zoe watched their latest target through binoculars, waiting for the sky to fade into dusk. Prepared practitioners favored certain times of day for spellcraft—the rumored ‘witching hour’ from two to four in the morning, the dawn and dusk of every day, and whatever hour it was when the sun hit its zenith or the moon shone its brightest. With so many people building up so many spells, Zoe imagined they worked in shifts. She hoped to spy on whoever showed up to tend to the rituals before moving in to disrupt them.

But she wasn’t going to wait until two in the morning, if it came to that.

Her mind wandering, it occurred to her that she’d never known anyone who’d died in the field, before. Few people did, on the whole, but the anxiety that she might made the odds feel worthy of re-examination. Most agents switched to a desk job in their forties or fifties and retired in their sixties and died from the same things everyone else died from. More of them died from suicide than the gen pop, but that grim statistic applied to every industry that specialized in horror.

Valley had killed himself in 2011. He’d left a note—something about something he’d done on a job, a price he’d been willing to pay at the time but, then, after years of having to remember it…

And Sung-ho had died from a heart attack owed to decades of smoking and drinking and burning out his adrenal gland on a hundred dangerous jobs. It had been his second heart attack, the first having been relatively minor. It had happened two years ago.

It made sense, intellectually. Emotionally, it felt cosmically unfair that someone as grandiose as Sung-ho had died from a fucking heart attack. It also would have felt cosmically unfair if some monster or egomaniacal sorcerer had deprived Hyun-jung of a father, Seo-yeon of a husband.

Some people lived so iconically that any death at all seemed unfair; any ending, unsatisfactory.

“Not him,” she’d wanted to tell the universe. “He’s never supposed to go.”

But, of course, sooner or later, everyone went.

(every story)

As dusk darkened to night, she lowered the binoculars. She wanted a cigarette very badly but couldn’t risk the cherry glowing through the black curtain of night. Dropping the binocs into her kit, she checked the rest of her inventory: two spare mags, a set of lockpicks, and a satchel of esoteric materia she planned to use to enhance the upcoming sabotage.

They’d hidden their work well. Two cemeteries backed up against an arc of parkland flanked by forested suburbs. Nearby, a school campus waded a soccer field into a thicket of brush, a swath of untended land skirting the park. Near the water, a copse of trees and foliage hid the ritual site, itself.

Zoe headed that way.

People forgot about their own myopia all the time. The tucked-away sprawl of brush surrounding the ritual space grew only six hundred feet from a residential street. But who saw six hundred feet? In the darkness, it didn’t take long to lose a person. Sometimes they stayed lost.

Overhead, a drone whirred near-inaudibly. It drew long paths across the night, flying low over the graveyards and parkland, avoiding the suburban streets.

Zoe crept into the copse of trees and tangled bush hiding the ritual site. She found an offering bowl, a brazier, a handful of broken rune sticks, and a pile of burnt bones and ivory shards. The opposition had stayed away from spells that required sigils or glyphs, they’d avoided making any long-term markings. The defensiveness implied knowledge.

It implied that they’d known someone would show up to screw with things.

Zoe reached for her holster, cerebral judgment and sixth-sense impulse reaching the same conclusion at nearly the same time.

“Freeze,” a male voice growled. A voice she knew as ‘Frank.’ “Put your hands up. Nice and slow.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fifteen, Pt. 1

Wilmington, NC; August, 1997.

The music stand hit the floor as Zoe sprinted past it, eyes shut. She leapt over a table and prayed she landed where she’d hoped to land. She didn’t open her eyes to check. All around her, snarls and hisses filled the air. Claws raked at her clothes, tearing fabric. Shallow cuts peeled skin from her sides. She dropped the real-not-real Zippo and dove forward.

She landed in salt. And then—

She fell. Darkness surrounded her. Wind whipped past her ears. Her hair danced away from her scalp. She put an arm out ahead of her as if that would stop her from splattering all over the place whenever her incredible velocity suddenly ceased.

She landed, didn’t explode, and rolled onto her side. Black floor, black walls, black ceiling. She barely saw a foot in front of her. All around: lightlessness.

“Help!” Jill shouted, her voice a directionless echo through unknown halls.

Zoe crashed into a wall. The stonework came to life, squirming wetly into a limb. It lashed out, all claws, and barely missed. Zoe felt the breeze of it against her nose. She stumbled backwards. She had mystically-enhanced sight and she couldn’t see.

“Help!” Jill cried again. Her voice sounded more ragged, now.

Zoe held up the Zippo—which she remembered dropping but somehow still had—and moved through the dimness. Ink rolled down the walls. Her shoes squicked over slick ground. Even with the flame, eyesight-invocation be damned, she saw only three feet ahead.

“The world wins,” a gravelly rasp insisted. “The world always wins.”

“We have magic,” an ovular, inhuman head oozed out of the wall next to Zoe. Its Jill-like voice made her jump. The visage wore no eyes nor nose, only a gaping mouth of layered fangs and angled incisors. Its purple tongue pulsed bloated between green gums. “We should be able to save someone.”

“Never,” an echo invited Zoe deeper into the labyrinth. “Never.”

(every story)

Two clawed limbs swung through the air in front of her. The slashed ribbons from her kevlar and cut into the shirt beneath. Zoe gasped, whirling from the blow, using the momentum to push forward. When she turned back, she saw nothing.

“Oh my god, help!” Jill shrieked, closer now.

“Under the surface there’s nothing,” the gravelly voice taunted. “Under the surface there’s just me!”

Zoe moved forward, breath coming hard and hot through her nose. Loud, too. The Zippo flame wavered. It glowed along the viscous dripping rocks, the damp everything. Stone bubbled tar-like, eyes and fingers and mouths bobbing to the surface and sinking down again. Zoe came to a four-way intersection and froze, ears burning.

“Come on, Jill, one more shout…”

She waited. It worried her that she didn’t hear anything.

Something roughed against the earthen floor behind her. She spun around, the Zippo almost going out with the sudden motion. Squinting into the four feet of visibility she had, she saw nothing but darkness moving against darkness. Another roughness echoed out, feet against ground. Her palms moistened with sweat. Beads of it drooled down her face.

She couldn’t get Jill out of there if she didn’t move. She had to move.

Which way?

The thing scraping toward her found its footing—or whatever method it used for locomotion. It lunged at her from the darkness and it, itself, was so dark that she could barely understand its shape. She threw an arm up against a shelf-like limb, blocking its descent toward her head, and drove a kick into whatever approximated the monster’s center mass. It slid backward, semi-gelatinous. She spun away from it and fled.

A tremor shook the labyrinth. Stones tumbled from the ceiling. Several crashed on Zoe’s shoulders, on her back—a small one cracked off the top of her head before tumbling away. The Zippo went out and she crashed into a wall, rebounded, and kept running. Limbs lashed out from all sides. They clawed her kevlar down to the shirt; they shore strips of fabric down to her skin. Thin cuts trickled claret.

“Jill!” she called out. “Jill, where are you!?”

The ground fell away beneath her. It tumbled into a rockslide. Zoe leapt away from it and flew into—

She stood in front of the music stand. The ritual space crawled with shadows. On the other side of the room, Jill’s sigil lay ruined, salt sprayed all over the floor. A creature exactly Jill’s shape but seemingly constructed from sizzling viscous something bore down over Jill, skin dripping off of its hands as it clasped tight to Jill’s throat.

Zoe blinked, breathless from everything that had or hadn’t just happened.

“The world always wins,” a shade whispered, behind her. Her hand shook around the Zippo that wasn’t really hers.

Jill fumbled at the monster on top of her. Her blows came weak, unsupported. She punched at the Dark Jill’s sides with the strength of a child. One arm went limp, falling to the floor. With the other, Jill held onto Dark Jill’s wrists. Her grip, too, loosened.

“Always,” the shade echoed, its cold-as-corpses breath against the back of Zoe’s neck.

The walls were rocky cave walls, but the floor was the same as Sung-ho’s summer house.

Jill tried to buck against the boiling-skinned track-marked version of herself but Dark Jill held fast. Jill’s second buck barely lifted off the ground.

Zoe pushed aside the music stand and charged. A chorus of shrieks rose up around her. A whirlwind of appendages whipped out from the dark. She dove for the sizzling flesh of melting Dark Jill. Cloth ripped from skin ripped from muscle; shots of anguish sliced her back like a dozen starving whips. She screamed, crashing into Dark Jill. Their bodies plunged into a sigil and—

Zoe rocked back, still standing in front of the grimoire.

Across the room, Jill sat folded in her protective circle. Both of them panted, sweaty and breathless, clothes soaked. Distant, near-phantom pains ached along Zoe’s back and sides, wounds that hadn’t really happened but, in a way, also had. The sensation dissipated quickly.

Zoe blinked, searched for her place on the page. “I promise to you my strength and my counsel. I vow to buttress you and carry you, I vow to lend my aid whenever and always. I steel myself to this will. As above, so below.”

Jill wiped sheets of sweat from her brow. “As above, so below,” she whispered.

All the interlocking spells of the Proclamation triggered. Invocations and psychic wards fused through their bones. Blessings electrified them. Good luck charms, spiritual protections, and physical power; a dozen spells wormed through them all at once.

The candelabra flared, banishing all darkness.

The magic reached its apex. The mysticism fused with them. So much energy thrummed through the room, editing reality, that it lifted Zoe off the ground. She floated with her toes just an inch above the floor.

The Proclamation took. It activated, infused them, and settled.

Zoe landed gently back on the ground. “Whew, okay,” she muttered, wiping sweat backhanded from her brow. “Not so bad, after all. Right?”

Jill chuckled, too drained for real laughter.

Then all the lights went out at once and all the windows shattered.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fourteen, Pt. 2

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

“Okay!” Sung-ho shouted, through the wall, close but not close enough, “okay, okay! I’m putting down the gun.”

“Kick it over!” the Summoner shouted back.

Zoe slowed as she reached the rapidly-disintegrating corpse of a construct. A doorless threshold invited her into dimness. Somewhere beyond, Sung-ho put his pistol on the ground and kicked it scraping across the floor.

“Get on your stomach,” the Summoner said. “Slowly. Slowly!”

Zoe half-crouched, passing through the threshold into a place that looked like a loading dock. Another dissipating Construct, formless in its rot, stewed on the concrete ahead of her. She followed the wall.

“Hands behind your back. Who are you?”

“What?”

Zoe took one careful step at a time, approaching the argument.

“Who the fuck are you? Who do you work for?”

“My name is Tom Kim,” Sung-ho said.

“Who do you work for!?”

Zoe saw them at the end of the chamber. Sung-ho laid stomach-down flat on the concrete. Judging from his position, he’d been about to breach and clear the office that contained the abattoir’s old import/export paperwork. The Summoner, garbed in baggy clothes, wearing a gas-mask and an overstuffed hiking pack, pointed a large-barreled semi-automatic rifle at Sung-ho. He stood with his back to her.

“I’m a private investigator,” Sung-ho said.

The Summoner fired a bullet into the air. “Bullshit. Fucking bullshit. And where’s your partner?”

“Dead.”

“That’s the last fucking lie you ever tell you—”

Zoe let her boot scrape against the floor as she widened her stance. The Summoner heard it. She’d needed him to hear it. The Summoner started to turn and the magic made him seem like the slowest person she’d ever fought. His eyes left Sung-ho and the barrel of his rifle followed.

Zoe opened fire before he finished turning.

Three sharp barks echoed and resounded into each other. The Summoner’s shot joined the chorus as he blasted air and dropped his weapon. He screamed, twisting toward Zoe in one moment and losing all control the next. His gun tumbled across the floor. He reached for a wound he couldn’t stop.

“My legs!” he shrieked, “My fucking legs!”

Sung-ho sprang to his feet, scooped up his own empty gun, and pointed it at the Summoner. “Don’t move.”

Two silver bullets and one armor piercing round had blown through the Summoner’s body. Judging from the way his sprawled legs bent and the continuous wailing plea gushing from his lips, one of them had buried itself in his lower spine.

“My legs my fucking legs why can’t I—”

“Shut up,” Sung-ho said.

The Summoner threw himself onto his stomach and crawled desperately for his gun. Sung-ho casually strode over and crushed his hand with a boot. The Summoner screamed again, the small bones in his palm splintering into fractal slivers.

Zoe holstered her pistol and withdrew a pair of zip ties from her tac-pack.

The hyperspeed invocation fell away. Void-gut hunger and bone-deep exhaustion chewed through her. She walked slowly. Her heart pounded. Hunger pains and nausea danced through her innards.

“Just do it,” the Summoner spat, on his back now, glaring up at Sung-ho. “Just do it you piece of shit.”

Zoe kicked him in the ribs and he landed face-first. As he tried to push himself up again, she put a boot between his shoulder blades and leaned in. He hit the floor. She sucked air, her periphery clearing, her heart still ramming into her ribs.

“Do it, then!” he shouted. “Do it!”

Leaning over, she grabbed his broken hand and wrenched on it. He lost language for a second, all words gone from his screams, and she used the pause to tie the injury-bloated wrist to the normal one. She pulled the zip too-tight. If the inflammation got worse, the plastic would cut his skin. She paused, coughing. Something caught in her throat and she swallowed it.

“Cowards.”

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Zoe said, examining the Summoner’s wounds. Clearing more gunk from her throat, she added, “Not us, anyway.”

Sung-ho holstered his own ammo-less gun and found a pack of Lucky Strikes somewhere on his person.

“Who are you?” the Summoner asked the floor.

“It doesn’t matter.” She used a long zip tie to bind his ankles, too. Just in case he knew healing magic.

“You can’t keep the truth buried forever,” the Summoner said. “You can’t. People will find out.”

Sung-ho rolled his eyes. With a match produced from—where, exactly?—he lit his cigarette.

“No, they won’t.” Zoe checked the binds for tightness. Nodding, she forced the Summoner onto his back again. She wanted him to see her face for this. “Because you don’t know anything about what you’re playing with.”

“Magic changes everything. Don’t you get it?”

“No, it doesn’t. It never has. You’re not the first person to find it and you’re not the first person to believe that it can fix things—you’re just another sadistic moron who thinks they deserve to be important.”

He spat at her but missed.

“Magic’s been here this whole time and the world is still the way it is. Magic doesn’t make people better the same way cellphones don’t make people better. It’s just a tool. And armed with that tool, we’ve arrived at exactly the world we’ve arrived at.”

“Not enough people know—”

“They can’t. Most people can’t remember paranormative experiences, or remembering them is traumatizing. The average person either forgets or goes insane.”

“I had plans. I could’ve—”

“You had plans to bomb some buildings and summon monsters.”

“Everyone sees magic when it’s pointed at them!”

Zoe laughed. “For a second, sure. Then they forget. Or they go crazy. And your amateur, half-cocked psychic defenses weren’t going to stop that. All you were going to do was hurt a lot of people.”

The inferno of commingling pain and frenzy stuttered in the Summoner’s eyes. His face fell. “I—I—no. No.”

“Yes.”

“They would’ve figured it out.”

“Nobody else has.”

Sung-ho cleared his throat loudly. Smoking, helmet off, he gestured to the place on his arm where a wristwatch would be—if he wore them.

“Who are you people?” the Summoner asked, no longer screaming or shouting at all.

Zoe stared down at him for a moment, watching his expression change. “I literally can’t tell you and it honestly doesn’t matter.”

She turned away and joined Sung-ho. She noticed blood trickling out of the gashes in his armor, bruising and swelling around one cheek, and shallow cuts across his nose, his shirt, his arms, everywhere. “Are you okay?” she whispered, approaching.

“If you’ve got half an hour so to run a healing ritual.”

“Alright. Let’s go.”

“I can’t—wait!” the Summoner called out behind them. “Wait, please, wait.”

She turned back his way. “What?”

“I can’t move. I really—you can’t just leave me here.”

She smiled. “I can.”

“I’ll crawl out.”

“No you won’t.”

“Don’t you have to detain me?”

She glanced back at Sung-ho and Sung-ho bobbed his head, smirking. Grinning, she turned back toward the Summoner. “I don’t. My job was just to neutralize you.”

“So do it.” He closed his eyes.

“Wow. Dramatic.”

His eyelids fluttered, his brow trenched.

“You’re neutralized,” she clarified. “You’re paralyzed from the waist down, short a hand, and bound. I know you’re not a born adept so I know you can’t do anything with just your mind alone. So since my job’s done, I’m going home to celebrate.”

“Wait—wait!”

“What now?”

“What…what happens next?”

“That depends,” she said. “This morning, police from [REDACTED] and police from Pittsburgh started talking. A lot of evidence started coming up these past few weeks. So if you’re lucky, the next people you see will be cops, and after that you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.” She started walking back toward him, a surge of adrenal something giving her a second wind. “Alternatively, one of our people could show up. If that happens, they’ll put a black bag over your head and nobody will ever see you or hear from you again, and not even I will know when or how you die. But I’ll know you will. Or maybe the thing you made a deal with shows up—and I know you made a deal with some power or another, because a two-bit amateur like you couldn’t build these Constructs or summon these monsters on his own. And I know that these deals usually involve costs, and since you’re useless to pay, now, maybe the other party just eats you.”

It looked like he might cry.

Noticing the blood leaking out of him, remembering the holes she’d put in his body, she added, “And all of this is assuming your wounds don’t just get infected and kill you, first.”

“I just wanted to make things better…”

“Look at me.”

He did.

“I don’t care,” she said.

And then they left.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fourteen, Pt. 1

Wilmington, NC; August, 1997.

According to the grimoire, the Proclamation was the easiest part of the ritual.

Zoe prayed that held true.

They’d started preparations three days after they’d put Jill’s bedroom back together. Jill reinforced the old wards and put up new ones. She handled routine summonings and banishments, inviting nearby interlopers in, sealing them, and flinging them off into nowhere again. Zoe worked on the Proclamation itself, a massive series of interlocked invocation and psychic spells allegedly meant to strengthen them for the final phase of the ritual.

On the bright side, preparing for the Proclamation took time. It was labor-intensive. The work left them with only a few, exhausted minutes per day to itch and fiend. Zoe thought about smoking every hour, but between the normal routine of the spell and the added burden of the Proclamation, she didn’t have time to dwell on it.

They put the finishing touches on the preparation at dusk, after their dinner and before their nightly meditations. They rested.

Before the moon reached its zenith, before it shone its brightest, they regrouped in the ritual space. Jill sat cross-legged in the center of a salt sigil. Between the lines of salt, dozens of smaller glyphs rested in white paint. Jill peered up through the skylight at the moon. The curtain of the cosmos seemed to roil and warp beyond the lunar glow.

Across the room, Zoe stood in a similar protective circle, parallel to Jill, before a makeshift altar (a music stand) which held the open grimoire. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“I am prepared,” Jill replied, still staring at the moon.

Immediately, voices began whispering under the floorboards. The shadows thrown by lit candelabra shivered and stalked. The electric light spilling in from the open door flickered. The dimness surrounding the threshold pulsed and quivered.

“Are you prepared to seek that within yourself that drives you toward damnation?” Zoe read the words from the book.

“I am prepared to confront my own weakness and overcome my own pain. I seek the counsel of my fellow practitioners and make plea to the secret and sacred energies of this world for strength.” Jill spoke, bathed in moonlight.

“Speak the names of your foremost weaknesses, speak the names of your worst wounds.”

“I am selfish, I am tired, I am easily hurt. I lash out at others, I lie and steal, I harm people without thinking in pursuit of blind solace. My wounds are the very knives of this world, every corner jabbing into me everywhere, its cruelty without reason.”

“Where did it all begin?” Zoe asked.

“After Jonathan killed himself, some of his older friends invited me over to their apartment. They were doing heroin, mostly just snorting it at the time, and I wasn’t sure but they wouldn’t stop asking me if I wanted to do it and I knew they wouldn’t stop until my answer was ‘yes’ so I did it. And I loved it. And I have been finding it at all costs ever since.”

The electric light flickered and buzzed. The candelabra flared. Shadows unstuck themselves from the angled darkness. They moved sinuously around the room’s perimeter, stalking and waiting. Magic crackled in the air. The faint scent of heating ozone tickled Zoe’s nose.

“Do you commit to mastering yourself?” Zoe asked.

“I seek the counsel of my fellow practitioners. I make a plea to the secret and sacred energies of the universe. I commit to discipline and meditation, I commit to the first step and the second. I will master myself.”

“As above, so below,” Zoe said.

“As above, so below,” Jill repeated.

A tremor shuddered through the floor. The sky behind the moon changed. The air grew humid with potential energy. Every tiny hair on Zoe’s body straightened out. A scab of darkness reached across the door to the room and blocked out the electric glow from beyond. “What are the first vows of your transfiguration?”

“I have control of my thoughts. I seek the counsel of my fellow practitioners and the strength of the secret and sacred energies. I will banish temptation and soothe anguish from my mind. Through my thoughts, I control my actions. Through physical fortitude and strength of will, I will maintain the cleanliness and stability of my vessel. I will master myself.”

“As above, so below,” Zoe said.

“As above, so below.”

The shades charged at them from the room perimeter. Their claws bled blurry black and their teeth sputtered gray dimness. Thirteen of them stampeded from the dancing dark, all of them twisting-contorting around light and shadow. They stopped just a foot away from the salt circles, six on Zoe and seven on Jill. They held ranks in perfect circumference, hissing and whispering in other people’s voices.

“You’ll never be free of this,” one of them snarled.

“Never.”

Zoe gasped at the suddenness of their movement. The momentary panic affected the ritual, her strength and fearlessness a part of the magic. The ward keeping the shades at bay weakened, a scratch in its surface.

“We can do this,” Jill whispered, moonlight glowing off her eyes. She didn’t look at the monsters around her.

Zoe swallowed, nodded. She braced herself against the music stand, focused on the grimoire. “As your fellow practitioner,” she cleared her throat, worried her voice might break, “I promise you my guidance and my counsel. May the secret and sacred energies connect us always.”

“I lean upon your strength as I confront my weaknesses and wounds. As above, so below.”

The candelabra flared. The shades snarled and rasped. A pack of cloves appeared on the music stand.

Zoe stepped back.

Salt crunched beneath her boot heel. She froze. The shades lurched forward several inches, all-at-once. A phlegmatic snicker rolled through the room. A long hiss breathed up from the floorboards. The air reeked of burning ozone. Energy hummed through the walls. No pack of cigarettes waited on the music stand. Only the grimoire, open.

“As above, so below,” Zoe repeated.

Jill disappeared. In the blink of an eye, gone.

The candelabra all went out. An unnatural light bathed Zoe, glowing up from the circumference of her protective circle. As she stared breathless and wide-eyed across the room, Jill’s circle started glowing, too. In the center of the angled lines, a lunchbox opened to a bag of crumbled heroin, a butane lighter, a spoon.

Jill had disappeared. Zoe stared.

All around her, shades snickered and snarled. They rasped and whispered in voices not their own.

“We know magic, Zo’,” one of them muttered. “We should be able to save someone.”

“Never,” another snapped. “Never.”

Zoe pulled the clove from between her lips (how had it gotten there?) and dropped it to the floor. From her pocket, she withdrew the Zippo she hadn’t put there that morning. She hinged open the top.

Would the little flame keep the monsters away? She pursed her lips, breathing hard. Sweat rolled down her forehead.

She had to cross the room. Didn’t she?

Of course she did. Because her fearlessness was part of the magic. And these things scared her.

Unless it was a trap.

But her thinking it was a trap might be a trap in and of itself.

She squeezed the real-not-real lighter. Only a dozen feet stewed in the darkness between her ward and Jill’s. She could make that. Couldn’t she?

The flint sparked. She squeezed her eyelids shut. Inhaled.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Thirteen, Pt. 3

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

Zoe crept across the slaughterhouse floor, the spell still hastening her, her eyes roving across every detail as she moved. She gripped her pistol in her hands. Muffled by structure and distance, she heard Sung-ho fire several rounds elsewhere in the building.

“Constructs present,” Sung-ho whispered in her earbud.

Pursing her lips, she came to the next intersection. The wire-fenced window gave sight lines from the monster’s shed to the upramp leading inside. Zoe figured the Summoner had taken his shots from there. Approaching the spot where the two hallways yawned into each other, she pressed her back against the wall and listened.

Something scraped against the floor around the corner. It didn’t sound human.

She spun around the corner gun-first.

A rust-toothed bear trap gaped in front of her—even with the magic, she didn’t notice it soon enough to stop her momentum. But, thanks to the magic, she noticed it soon enough to jump over it.

She landed two feet from another of the Summoner’s monstrous Constructs. A pig’s head stared at her vacantly as two curved blades flickered toward her. She threw up her arm and the honed edges carved through the leather and dug into the armor beneath. Parrying the creature’s attack, she fired four rounds into its center mass, a barrel of mixed rotten and rancid meats all pulped together. The construct stumbled backward noiselessly and reoriented itself.

Another bear trap waited five feet behind it.

Zoe charged. The creature brought one of its bladed appendages down as she crashed into it. It sliced through her jacket and armor and bit the skin between her shoulder and neck. The cut didn’t drive deep, but it drew blood. Stopping all-at-once, Zoe pulled back from the tackle and opened fire again. Two more bullets blew through a body of vatted mystery meat. The construct tipped over and fell.

The trap snapped rusted teeth into one of the monster’s slashing appendages.

Zoe stomped on the pig head. The construct lashed the air with a curved blade. She stomped again. The magic making the thing alive gave up—her boot crushed the melty, long-dead skull and splattered vile across the floor. Even with the mask, she gagged from the rush of scent. But she didn’t puke.

Somewhere in the distance, Sung-ho fired four more rounds.

A rifle returned fire. Zoe ran.

“I can’t—I can’t do this,” Omar suddenly crackled in her ear.

“Not right now,” she panted back.

He sounded breathless, panicked. “I can’t just leave it here. I can’t. People could die.”

“Leave it!” she shouted, dodging two more bear traps she barely noticed in time.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’tknowIdon’t—”

“Get a hold of yourself and get out!”

“Please—”

“Fucking leave it!” she muted the relay, finding another room she couldn’t figure out the use of, a vast chamber with a series of offices compartmentalized in the corner. Trying to catch her breath, regretting her loudness, she searched her surroundings for a threat. None emerged. Good. But which way to go?

Another exchange of bullets echoed through the walls, louder.

She spun toward the sound and sprinted.

A living scarecrow lunged out of the darkness toward her. She threw her shoulder into it as it came and they rebounded from each other. The scarecrow pinwheeled from the momentum and jerky-stilted rushed back toward her. She emptied the rest of her mag, shredding stuffing. The incendiary rounds smoldered and sizzled in the scarecrow’s body. It slashed at her with one clawed hand, raking leather and armor away from her body. Then it fell to its knees and collapsed.

Something inside of it caught fire but Zoe couldn’t stop to do anything about it. The invocation seething through her musculature had started wearing off. She had to use the speed while it remained available.

She slapped in her last spare mag and—

Her last spare mag. Which meant—

“Drop the gun!” someone shouted in the distance. Someone not Sung-ho. “Now! Now!”

She ran as quickly as she could. The smoking caught up to her, the earlier exertion, the enhanced metabolism and burning-too-hot demands all the invocation put on her body—it all caught up. A cramp sliced up her thigh and along her side. She limped, slowing. Pressed on even as the invocation began to collapse.

“I said put down the fucking gun!” The voice sounded meters away, through one wall.

She searched for a way through. She couldn’t keep running. Her body ached and the movement made too much noise. She slowed, willing herself to stay upright. The cramp twisted, tightening. Her gait warped around it. She clutched her side with her left hand, limping along the wall, searching for a door.

A dead construct rotted and dissipated on the floor ahead.

Zoe went for it.

On the other side of the wall: “Three! Two!—”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Thirteen, Pt. 2

Boston, MA; August, 2016.

Omar and Zoe held the embrace for a long time. The car Omar had stepped out of with his kit bag had pulled away seconds earlier. People passed them on the sidewalk, at least one of them noticing. Still, they held on. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say after so many months.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he soothed.

She hadn’t always been as good a mentor as Sung-ho had been.

“It wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t fucked up…”

He pulled away from her just enough to hold eye contact, his endless pools and her gray-blue shallows. “Everyone fucks up,” he said. “You still pulled me out in one piece.” “

It’s less impressive when I’m the one who put you in the shit to begin with.”

His lips parted, not quite a smirk but not quite not, either. “Funny.”

They drifted away from each other inch by inch. “What?”

“I know you’re talking about what happened in New Mexico, but I was just thinking…it’ll be ten years ago this winter. When we met.”

She blinked. Laughed. Some of the tension aching along her spine melted away. “Oh, my god, I really am the one who put you in this shit to begin with.”

Omar’s face lit, cheeks high, a grin so wide it almost split his face. “Exactly.”

She laughed again, more falsely this time. “Well, I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Hey, don’t be. It made my life.” Omar used a rolling suitcase as a general gig kit, a ‘tactical’ fanny pack for proper runs. He popped the handle up and tilted the case to roll. “Besides, if I was really holding onto anything, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

They walked down Boylston toward the Public Garden and Commons. Zoe chose the rendezvous point for its clamor; a place too busy for them to stand out. “Thanks, by the way,” Zoe said.

“Thank me when we win.” This one was a smirk. “So. You mentioned an active opposition on the phone.”

“I think they’re with the Belgian’s people. And I think they burned my last rental.”

“Wait, they burned it?”

“Not literally. Just…they compromised it.”

“I was kidding,” Omar said. “But if you’re right, that means they got a hell of a head start.”

“They do.”

“So how do we come back on ‘em?”

“I’m still figuring it out. I just know…on my own, I can’t do this. Even with everything Jill and her people are doing inside the house, there’s just too much. We’re losing. I’m losing.”

Omar rolled his neck, shoulder-length ‘locs spilling down. Something popped and he noised that it felt good. “Well,” he said, after, “that’s just a numbers game. One of the best witches in the world is still just one witch. Now you’ve got backup. And in case you forgot, I’m pretty good at this, myself.”

She stopped walking. He went on a few more paces before stopping, himself. He turned toward her with a face lined in questions. “I was so scared you wouldn’t show up,” she admitted. “Or that it would be someone else from ASOD waiting to drag me in front of the Arbiters.”

“Zoe…it’s me, remember? I’m one of the good guys.”

“It just…thank you.”

A phone rang. One of her burner phones, though now she had several all cluttered at the bottom of her purse. She dug through gig supplies, foundation, a snack bar, and a water bottle to reach the phones. She grasped them one by one, feeling for a vibration.

When she found the right one she pulled it out, frowning. It was the number she’d given Jill, but Jill hadn’t called it, yet.

“Hold on,” she said, signaling for Omar to stop moving. She leaned against a column outside of a clothing store. “Jill?” she asked, answering the call.

“Something bad’s coming. Soon.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. Darnell’s a psychic, Zo’.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“You think I don’t know how it ‘works?’” Jill almost snarled. “It’s been keeping him up, waking him up…it’s been hitting him at work, blindsiding him. His sixth sense is going crazy. He knows. And whatever it is, it’s happening soon.”

“There are a lot of spells targeting you, right now. Psychic attacks, dream magic, astral—”

“He knows,” she repeated as if cursing. “Just believe me.”

“Okay, I do, I do,” Zoe soothed.

Omar watched, rucking his brow.

“What if we just moved?” Jill asked.

“You’d never show up at your new house and you know it.”

“I don’t know what to do. My—the kids, they’re so scared.”

“We’re putting things together,” Zoe said. “Just…hold out for me, okay?”

“They’re winning, aren’t they?”

Zoe changed tactics. “I need your people to bunker down. Whatever jobs you’ve got, you and Karen and Darnell, use your PTO or you sick days or something, but stop going.”

“We can’t—”

“Just for now. Just until we can get closer to these guys.”

“Isn’t there something I can do besides reinforce defenses and wait?”

“Anything else you do will expose you to attack.”

“Then let them attack me!”

Anger roughed Zoe’s voice, “No! Goddammit, stop!”

“What!?”

“I can’t—” (lose you), “I—I just…you’re the best witch in that house. If you go down, if something happens, who’s going to protect everyone else?”

“Darnell’s a psychic and Karen—”

“They’re not using bullets. Karen can hide you and Darnell can see shit coming, but sooner or later…they’ve got oneiromancers and anti-psychic specialists and spells that can hum subsonic vibrations through a whole house.”

“There’s got to be a way out.”

“There is,” Zoe said. “I’m putting it together, myself.”

For five out of the eight people living there.

Zoe cleared her throat, taking Jill’s silence as an invitation for more. “I need to neutralize some of the more powerful spells targeting your school and I’m putting together an evac plan to extract you, after. There is…there is a catch.”

“I don’t care,” Jill replied. “Whatever the catch is, please, just…get us out of here.”

“I will. I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.”

And who knew, maybe she even could.

“I’m sorry I’m so…” Jill sighed, the breath expressing too many emotions at once. “I’m just sorry. I thought I was out of that world but I guess nobody ever is and…and I just don’t want all these other people to get hurt because of me.”

Zoe peered back at Omar, questioning with her eyes. Omar scoffed, nodding. “We’ll do everything we can to stop that from happening. Just please…do whatever you can do stay inside.”

“I love you, Zo’.”

“I love you, too.”

The call disconnected.

“Sorry,” Zoe said, not looking at Omar anymore.

“Sounds like the A-team and the B-team have a head start on us.”

“Like I said, I’m losing.”

Omar put a hand on her shoulder. Some other time, years ago, he might’ve pulled her to him. But this wasn’t that time, anymore. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said, his voice soft and calm. “Let’s not throw out the white flag until we’re done with it.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Thirteen, Pt. 1

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

The grenade exploded on descent, spraying napalm all over the charging beast. As gelatinous burn sizzled through enlivened corpses, Zoe and Sung-ho leapt from the overgrown brush. They stayed close to the mess of tangle and nettle, the gnarled twigs and reaching branches obscured by the snow. The monster kept coming, the livelier corpses composing its body squealing and cooking. The longer-dead ones merely huffed air through decomposed throats, the flame-bright ooze eating through skin to reveal gas and putrescence.

From their position on the other side of the foliage, Zoe and Sung-ho opened fire.

For the most part, Constructs died. Architectural damage that immobilized them worked fastest and best, but when uncountable cow legs served as the monster’s locomotion, disabling it seemed unlikely. Luckily, magic seemed to understand that anything existing could be made to not-exist through methods of force, and so even extremely mobile Constructs usually died after extreme enough applications of violence.

Some particularly powerful outliers, however, operated as functionally-unkillable, with no exterior feature to differentiate them from more mortal opponents. So when her first, fourteen-round, extended mag ejected from her sidearm, Zoe decided she didn’t have enough intel to continue an offensive. “Sung—”

Some of the cow legs and rebar-tusks tangled in the brush. The monster shook itself, burning and squealing and still shifting its weight back and forth, side-to-side, breaking free.

“Zo’,” Sung-ho interrupted, his hand again on her arm. “Zo’, look.”

Drips of napalm singed through winter-dry tangles. Cattle prods shocked the air. Pigs shrieked.

“Zo’! We gotta go!”

She’d been about to say the same thing. Turning away from the burning-alive beast charring the air, she saw more mutant figures shaking off snow, rising from the ground. Most looked small, two or three animals workshopped together, but others stood man-sized. Two of them looked like animated scarecrows, makeshift limbs jerking sharply forward.

In the field between them and the slaughterhouse, a dozen such monsters rose up, awake.

Zoe slapped in her first backup mag. She had three in her kit, plus a combat knife, which meant Sung-ho only had two.

“Run for it, break left,” Sung-ho said.

Pigs screamed and boars huffed. Pork-smoke and corpse-stink billowed the air. Brush snapped, hooves stomped.

“Go!”

They raced away from the monster, toward the slaughterhouse, through ankle-deep snow. Zoe estimated the span at thirty meters. Thirty open meters, through snow, across poor terrain. She darted around spikes of advancing nature and dodged remnants of steel fence. Something lunged at her from her glare-blind periphery and all she recognized was that it was not Sung-ho. She fired without learning more, four bullets into the center mass of the silhouette, kicking it to the ground—and she spun back toward the abattoir itself.

A gunshot blasted the snow a foot ahead of her. She broke left. A second shot patted somewhere behind her. Her thighs burned. “Shooter!” she shouted—or screamed—the difference no longer certain. “Dead ahead!”

“Here!” Sung-ho shout-screamed back.

She banked according to echolocation. Another shot blew through brush-cover ahead of her. Back behind her, the pigs grew quieter, and the groan of the monster’s mass snapping free of its tangles crescendo’d. A rifle-crack thundered. It didn’t hit her but she didn’t know anything else. She ran toward the smaller-arms fire ahead. She found Sung-ho crouched behind a pile of wrecked steel parts, reloading.

“Down to one spare,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. “This fucking helmet…”

The humidity slimed her, too. Her hair felt like a bundle of grease adhered to her skull. “He’s got sights…not sure where…”

“We can’t stay here forever.”

Crouching next to him, she squinted through bright white toward the next piece of cover. There wasn’t much. Another twelve meters ahead she saw the ramped entryway to the slaughterhouse, the alley they’d marched animals through to their deaths. “I think we have to make another rush, a sprint straight at it.”

Sung-ho squinted with her. “Goddammit.”

“I think now’s the time.”

Cow hooves kicked through snow.

“Now’s the time,” Sung-ho confirmed.

Unzipping her kit, she took out the thin piece of wood. She focused her willpower into the vessel and the myriad symbols inked into it pulsed a half-second’s glow. The muscles binding her shoulder blades to her spine bundled and tightened. She broke the chip in half. The spell pulsed through them so sharply that she couldn’t move for a second. Then everything slowed down.

“Run,” she said, already zipping the pack back up and grabbing her sidearm from the ground.

They didn’t pause for target assessment, they just ran. Something lunged at Zoe and she fired four rounds, shoved it away from her, and kept running. Another rifle-shot struck the ground ahead of them and they broke away from each other. Zoe slowed fractionally to give Sung-ho a lead. A bullet blew through the air in front of her and she renewed her pace.

The Summoner must have lost his line of sight, at that point. No further rifle-fire followed them.

But cow hooves did. They gained, accelerating into a stampede.

“Faster!” Zoe shouted.

Something lunged at Sung-ho with a cow’s head and stilt-legs, buzzsaw-armed. Sung-ho ducked the swinging blades and shouldered the construct aside. It stumbled and re-oriented but he’d already dawn sights. He opened fire and Zoe followed suit. They each put four bullets into the thing and it went down. Ahead, another grotesquery blocked them from the slaughterhouse entrance.

Without hesitation, they both turned their pistols toward it.

It lunged at them, a coiled-wire skeleton and eight wriggling limbs tipped with automatic carving tools. Garlands of meat and fused parts gave it a torso and joints. They aimed for the center mass of the thing, hoping the repeating combination of armor piercing and frangible rounds would shred it apart.

And they did, but not before the thing had reached Sung-ho and slashed ribbons out of his knife-resistant kevlar vest. A single blade notched a slender gap in the side of his helmet and several more carved fiber from his armor. Zoe didn’t see any blood. Before the monster could do more harm, it stumbled backward and fell to pieces.

“You okay?”

“Fine!” Sung-ho ran for the entrance, limping.

The cow hooves thundered—close, now. Too close.

She sprinted after Sung-ho. They hadn’t seen it through the snowglare, but a barricade of plywood shored the entryway. Pulling a loose corner wide, Sung-ho crouched and peered within. Zoe caught up and glanced behind them. The charred and still-bubbling monster-construct teetered toward them. It had lost some of its legs but didn’t seem to care. “In, in!”

Sung-ho rolled inside. Zoe followed.

Inside the dim-dark building, rows of steel fence guided them toward assembly-line machinery. Without scanning for more than their basic terrain, Zoe grabbed Sung-ho’s arm and hauled him with her. They rushed through the guideways. Behind them, the rebar-tusked and cattle-prod-armed monster crashed through the plywood.

It didn’t slow down.

Screaming, Zoe sprinted. Her legs ached, molten and collapsing. Still, she sprinted. Her shoulder clipped a gap in the steel fence and she let go of Sung-ho. She spun toward him but he gestured for her to keep moving. Blurry, behind him, the monster crashed through sections of fence and knocked over barricades, pursuing.

She sprinted.

She lost balance, bounced against a rusted piece of fence, rebounded from more steel on the opposite side, and swallowed ragged gut-filling gulps of air as the monster barreled through architecture like a bull through paper walls.

The monster killed itself trying to reach them feet before it reached them.

On all fours without remembering the fall, Zoe allowed her breathlessness to turn to laughter. As the massive construct tripped and speared itself to death, she scrambled away from it, cackling. It heaved one final whuff of reeking, rotten air and went limp. The cow legs came loose from the platform. Pulling herself up by fence-rungs, her panic-joy rush softened to erratic chuckles. One of the rebar tusks, machine-sharpened and grimed with blood and rust, pointed at her from a mere foot away.

“Keep moving,” Sung-ho panted, next to her. “Before the decay starts.”

They moved. The guidelanes narrowed to an assembly line killing floor. They followed it to an unlit intersection, their invocations making the boarded-up darkness visible. Mold, fungi, and dust plastered every surface. The abandoned slaughterhouse had already begun its transformation, fruiting a new environment through its dereliction, becoming the thing it would one day become.

(everything becomes something else eventually)

“Team B?” Zoe asked.

“At site four. I’m getting tired but…we’re okay,” Jill answered.

“Delta?”

“Uh, I’m fine,” Omar’s voice crackled back. “Just. Uh. This one doesn’t look like the others.”

She glanced over at Sung-ho. Sung-ho nodded.

“If it comes down to it, leave.”

“What?” he asked.

“We already went over this,” she hushed her voice as they approached an intersection. “If it comes down to it, leave. This isn’t your job.”

A long pause. She felt Omar thinking.

“We’re going quiet,” she said. “Over.”

The intersection split the structure into two wings. Ahead, the continued butcher’s alley led to faint outlines of maybe-lockers; to the right, scores of unused meathooks dangled from the ceiling, a wire-fenced window peered across bright white snow, and another left turn led…somewhere.

Toward the Summoner, in any case.

They conversed with gestures. They decided to split up, that Zoe would turn right and move through the span of meathooks, that she’d take the next intersection and find out where it led. Sung-ho would take the straight-ahead avenue, through a hundred forgotten years of dying animals to the lockers and whatever else waited beyond them. If more Constructs guarded the halls, they’d keep track of each other through echolocation, gunfire and radio chatter.

They split up.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 3

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

The old slaughterhouse sat three miles northwest of the Asher farmstead proper, itself five miles northwest from Squatter City, itself eight miles northeast of Sung-ho’s house—as the crow flew, at least. As the car drove, the path somewhat longer, it took Zoe and Sung-ho just under forty-five minutes to make the trip. They parked in the afternoon sun a mile north of the abattoir and approached from there on foot.

Wilderness erupted all around them. Tucked away northwest of the highway and far removed from populated civilization, nobody bothered to maintain the foliage growing between the slaughterhouse and the proper wilds. Angled deciduous trunks and conifer needles spiked the earth, and tangles of bush and brush garlanded the ground. Winter whited all of it, burying the pine greens and dusting over the rest of the naked branches. Tall, dead grass poked up from the snow and bent back down to it again.

They found an old hiking trail near the potholed backroad they’d parked on and followed it half the distance to the slaughterhouse, their boots crunching ice with every step. From there, they trudged through ankle- and sometimes shin-deep snow until they saw it.

Little remained of the old Asher slaughterhouse. Time and the elements had pulled the perimeter fence apart, strangling boards of wood and rusted steel with fingers of brush and foliage.

Descending the gentle slope toward the abattoir, they pulled ventilated facemasks over their noses and mouths. The masks filtered air, reducing the potential effectiveness of any biological or gas-based attacks, including those of a mystical nature; they also minimized whatever stench might still linger in that ancient derelict of death. The masks counterbalanced the sense-enhancing invocations they’d undertaken that morning. Still, climbing over the wreck of the perimeter fence, Zoe noticed a faint senescent scent sticking around her uvula.

Most of the animal guiding rails were gone, leaving only spans of white between the different herding and slaughtering structures, all of which sagged and rubbled, demolished by a decade of untended Maine winters. They approached slow and low, eyes wide and sweeping, invocation-enhanced, ears prickling, invocation- and miltech earbud-enhanced. The helmets shielding the rear and top of Zoe’s head swamped with humidity, hot sweat bristling on the back of her neck as they crunched through the cold.

“No movement,” Sung-ho said.

“Let’s advance there,” Zoe gestured to the half-splintered building farthest from them. “Clear our way to the interior.”

Sung-ho bobbed his head. “Advance.”

Slow-and-low, they moved along the wreck of the perimeter toward the far corner. The wind pushed something steel and rusted, a metal groan echoed out from the structure. Zoe’s sixth-sense pulsed a steady stream of adrenaline through her veins. A threat lurked nearby, waiting.

Somewhere.

“Hold.” Sung-ho grabbed her arm.

“What?”

“Hold,” he repeated, almost inaudible. He squinted, scanning the wreck ahead. Muffled through his mask, he sniffed. He unholstered his sidearm. Zoe’s skin crawled with sixth-sense instinct. She unholstered her pistol, too.

“It’s too bright out here, I can’t see inside,” he muttered.

“Let’s advance. We’re in the open, here.”

“No. Wait.”

“Why?”

(you’ll smell it first you smell it first you)

“Just…” Sung-ho trailed off.

Something stirred in the shadows of the half-collapsed building ahead. A sheet of white dusted free as a mutated silhouette huffed and shrugged itself up from the ground. Slowly, Sung-ho let go of Zoe’s arm. Zoe’s thumb levered the safety off; she kept the barrel pointed groundward. The construct, whatever it was, hoofed at the dirt and snorted. It shuffled in the dimness, hidden less by the dark than by the contrasting brightness glaring off the snow.

“We should have requisitioned bigger guns,” Zoe whispered.

“Too late, now,” Sung-ho replied. “But…yes.”

Armory requisitions processed quickly for active-assignment agents, Zoe just hadn’t filed one. There’d been too much else going on.

“Are you guys alright out there?” Jill’s voice whispered through the miltech earbuds.

Zoe pressed the helmet mechanism to transmit her mic. “Shh.”

Jill shushed.

“Change course?” Zoe suggested.

Sung-ho raised his eyebrows.

From their position crouched in brush-cover, both of them could see only a yawning, dangerous span of property between themselves and the slaughterhouse proper. Little protection existed if the monsters started multiplying. Worse, assuming the Summoner expected some kind of attack or raid, he could easily watch their approach across the open space.

“Fair enough,” she muttered.

“I should have mentioned,” Sung-ho whispered, “I took one of my spare mags out of my kit so I could fit a grenade, instead.”

“You brought a grenade?”

He shrugged.

The monster hoofed the ground and snorted, again. Its unclear mass edged closer to the light. Zoe estimated it at six feet tall, eight feet long, two-men-wide, front- and top-heavy. When it neared the edge of its shelter, it sniffed. The sound echoed. Zoe frowned. How?

But when it nosed into the sun, the answer became obvious. It hadn’t been an echo. It had been a dozen different snouts scenting not-quite-simultaneously.

An unclear number of boar and swine corpses made up the creature’s face, piled up and speared together, outfitted with rebar tusks. A steel skeleton supported their heft, itself armed with four jabbing cattle prod arms. Below, a grinding mass of cow legs steered the beast. It reeked. Magic had given it muscle and flesh but not enough. Already, strips of skin hung loose from the thing, and some of the carcasses composing its body bloated with gas. The more lively ones gnawed and gnashed at the air hungrily.

“Okay,” Zoe said, “let’s use a grenade.”

Reaching into her own kit, a ‘tactical’ fanny pack, she withdrew a thin, one-inch by quarter-inch sheet of plywood scrawled on every millimeter with calligraphy.

During the late morning’s casting session, Zoe had used invocation to enhance her and Sung-ho’s natural stamina, endurance, speed, and reflexes. Sung-ho handled basic defensive wards, reducing velocity of incoming attacks, minimizing impact forces, and giving them a slightly-blurry look to anyone or anything that saw them.

Lastly, the three of them had worked together on a final invocation, a powerful and deep spell that took the three of them working in tandem an hour to cast. When Zoe snapped the thin piece of wood, she and Sung-ho would temporarily increase the metabolic efficiency and response rate of every muscle in their bodies, as well as the rate at which their synapses and neural networks could process incoming information.

In laymen terms, it made them about 13% faster than they already were. It still didn’t make them Olympians.

“Save it.” Sung-ho put his hand on her hand and she dropped the piece of wood back inside her kit. “In case things get worse from here.”

“He can’t have had time to build more than one of…that huge fucking thing.”

“But he’s had plenty of time to build one big thing and many, many smaller ones.”

The monster huffed again, stepping into the light. It scented the air and searched with its half-gone, rot-melting eyes for a source.

“Now or never,” Zoe whispered.

Sung-ho took a bright cylinder from his kit and grabbed a pin at the top.

“What kind of—”

“Thermite.”

“How—”

“From work.”

Zoe had more questions but the beast noticed them, then, and its centipedal swarm of cow legs stampeded their way.

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