//------------------------------//
// Chapter 9 - When the Children Cry 
// Story: Sundowner 
// by King of Beggars 
//------------------------------//

A lot of what had happened after I’d kicked out the girls was lost to me. I could remember driving to the gas station for something else to drink – vodka and a Gatorade, I think – and trying in vain to clean up the mess I’d made of my living room. Everything else that might’ve happened in that span of time had sort of smeared between those two events into indecipherable static.

I probably hadn’t lost anything important. Just more of the same self-abuse I’d always heaped on myself when I was depressed. Just thinking that I’d drunk-coma’d my way through it made me feel a little guilty, though. Like I’d weaseled my way out of a deserved punishment.

I didn’t even dream in those few days. It was the only mercy I didn’t feel guilt over. My dreams were always awful memories, replaying themselves in my head over and over. Given what I’d had to do to close out this stuff with Twilight, the dreams that would have come would have been… bad.

It wasn’t until two days after everything with Twilight had been said and done that I managed to pull my shit together enough to put on pants and take a meeting. The appointment had brought me to a bar smack in the middle of downtown. It was an upscale place disguising itself as an old time speakeasy.

I was sitting in a booth near the back, separated from the rest of the patrons by a thin velvet rope and a sheer curtain that only afforded the illusion of privacy. There was a live band playing on the stage at the front of the place. Nothing too fancy, just a piano with a stride player noodling on the keys while a couple of other guys honked a free-formed accompaniment on the brass.

Clavus was with me.

Neither of us had said a word since I’d sat down. He’d called earlier in the day, telling me he was back and that he needed to talk. He’d been curt, but surprisingly less so than normally. I think he could tell I was still a little hungover when he called, because he wasn’t as shouty as he usually was. I don’t know whether that was because he could hear it in my voice, or because he’d heard about the week I’d had from Cilia and just knew enough about me to know I’d get hammered. I appreciated the softness in his voice all the same.

Clavus had already been waiting by the time I got to the place. He’d given my name at the door, and the bouncer had called over a waitress to escort me straight to his table. A drink had been set out for me, and Clavus didn’t even respond when I said hello. He just waved towards the empty booth across from him and stared at me without so much as a word.

It was the sort of treatment that usually meant you’d broken the Don’s heart and were about to get a silenced .22 pistol pressed to the back of your head. I’d have been unsettled if I didn’t know him as well as I did.

When he finally broke the awkward fifteen minutes of silent glaring, it was with an anticlimactic, “How’ve you been holding up?”

I grabbed the drink – a rum and coke – and took a distracting sip. I’d been nursing it, having already had my fill of drown-it-all drinks over the last couple days. It was nice to just drink for the taste, socially… anti-socially… whatever.

“Well enough,” I said, shrugging with the glass.

He went quiet again for a moment.

“How was your trip?” I asked, curtailing what I was certain would be more questions about things I’d rather not talk about just yet. My throat was still too sore for those words. “You go anywhere fancy?”

More silence, and then, “I was burying a friend.”

I set my drink down with respectful deliberation. It suddenly didn’t taste as good. “Guess there’s a lot of that going around.”

Clavus picked up his own drink for the first time that night, swishing it around in the glass and staring into it with a genuine rendition of the intensity I faked when I read cards. He struck a pretty picture – the handsome, brooding man pensively swirling a drink. Clavus as an adult was the Greek Ideal, with chiseled features and a sharp, hawkish nose that made his every glare just that much more intense. His normal childlike disguise was boyband pretty, but adult Clavus looked like he just fell assfirst out of a soap opera. The Italian sport coat and the Swiss watch added the spice of wealth to the tasty dish he presented, and I knew I had more than a few envious looks thrown my way when I’d joined him at his table.

The old timer took a deep, gulping drink that emptied his martini in a single pull, and flipped on a light in the middle of the table. It wasn’t bright, but it could easily be seen from the bar through the sheer curtain separating us from the rest of the bar. The waitress who’d guided me to the table flitted over like she’d been summoned with magic, and considering Clavus’ supernatural looks, she sort of was. She had another drink ready for him without him even having to ask. She set it down, turned off the magic light that summoned her, and reluctantly bounced away, shaking her butt as she went. She hadn’t even asked me if I wanted anything.

“It was the friend who helped me with your sigil,” he said, sounding wearier than usual. He gave me a sorrowful look. “When he sent the response, he included a second note asking me to come see him. I had assumed it would be a quick visit, that perhaps he wanted to further explain your sigil to me in person, but when I arrived he was already Starving.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said.

He nodded in polite appreciation of my condolences. It was an oddly mechanical exchange given that we were fairly close, and that neither of us was a stranger to death. Fresh loss always seemed to color everything around it with a strange tonality.

“He was a deeply unpleasant changeling, but he was my friend, despite our differences, and he cared deeply for his young ones. He was, if nothing else, admirable for that devotion…” Clavus grimaced into his drink, sipping it and swishing the clear alcohol in his mouth like he was trying to get rid of a bad taste with a worse one. “It took a few days for him to pass, and a few days more for me to get his final affairs in order. Everything was done in seclusion, according to his wishes, otherwise I would have hurried home to help you with your troubles here.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I worked it out. Cilia was a big help, too. Whatever you’re paying her, you should double it.”

“I’ve no doubt of that,” he said, cracking the ghost of a smile. A rare occurrence for him. “She’s told me about the week you’ve had.” He paused, then added, “That storm made the news.”

“National news,” I said, feeling an inexplicable surge of pride rising up in me at the mention of the coverage.

The band changed tempo suddenly, dropping out of some three-beat jazz thing to something smoother. Clavus closed his eyes and leaned back to listen, and I let the old guy have his moment.

“It’s been a difficult week…” Clavus said wistfully. He laid his hands flat on the table, leaning forward with a look that would’ve taken the breath away from a less experienced woman. “I’m sorry that man died.”

I turned away, trying not to let the little hitch I felt in my throat show on my face.

“His name was Night Light, and yeah… I’m sorry he died, too. I didn’t know him long, but I liked him. He cared about his family, and he was funny, and...” I racked my brain, but found precious little else I knew about him aside from the fact that he was nervous and bookish, and that most everyone had kind words about him. “I guess I don’t know much more than that about him, but I’m still sorry he’s gone. I’m sad that I didn't get to know him and his family better.”

“There aren’t many things more regretful than lost opportunity,” Clavus said.

“Yeah…” I dipped a finger into my drink and fished out an ice cube, just to feel something crunching between my teeth. “Something like that, I guess.”

Clavus nodded and left the issue of Night Light at that. “I suppose I should ask about the necromancer,” Clavus said. “Ahuizotl… I don’t know the name, but Cilia told me he’s supposedly some sort of revenant?”

“Caballeron said Ahuizotl had shackled his soul into his body, and that’d been keeping him alive since Aztec-times,” I said, shrugging.

“Life through undeath...” Clavus leaned back in his seat, stroking his perfectly square chin in thought. “That’s the stuff of fantasy. There are zombies, yes, but with their minds and magic intact?” He shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve heard of sorcerers trying, but never of anyone succeeding.”

“Because no one has,” I said. “I’ve worked the math out, and there’s a lot of ducks that need to get into one long and very perfect row, but it’s possible. As long as you’ve got a deal, and the thing that has your deal wants to cooperate, you can swing it. Fat chance of getting some higher being to let go of a snack, though. This was a weird one, I gotta admit.”

Clavus’ eyebrows knit together in thought. “His backer wanted him here?” He frowned, deeply, as I nodded in assent. “The wants of gods are… inscrutable, but rarely mean good things for the rest of us.”

“Whatever ceremony he wanted Twilight for, it probably would’ve been bad.” I knocked on the table twice, superstitiously. “Doesn’t matter anymore, though. Whatever they wanted, they can’t do it now. It was some complicated ceremony that Ahuizotl had to make himself, wholecloth. He’s gone, and I doubt he would’ve told anyone else about it. You know necros as well as I do. Those little weasels don’t play well with others, as a matter of general temperament.”

“But why the girl?”

“I don’t know, man,” I said, throwing back my head in frustration. “I’m chalking that up to another ‘it doesn’t matter’ and I’m going on with my life.”

Clavus frowned, disappointment darkening his perfect features. “That’s not like you,” he said. “You’re faced with a magic you’ve never seen and you’re going to leave the stone unturned?”

“Like you said, it’s been a shitty week, okay?” I replied, lamely. I could feel shame burning my cheeks at the mention of my often damning curiosity. “You know I don’t jive with necromancy. It’s icky.”

“‘Ickiness’ notwithstanding,” Clavus said. “Are you really not worried the girl may become a target again?”

“No,” I said flatly. “If she’s important, fine, hooray for her, but only Ahuizotl knew the truth of it. I’m not going to lose sleep over the why, I’m just going to be glad she can slip back into the herd with the rest of the normals. She can try to put her life back together, go to school, meet someone special, pop out some kids if that’s her thing, and maybe snag a Nobel Prize while she’s at it.”

Clavus raised an eyebrow at my mention of accolades.

I rolled my eyes and explained, “She’s smart.”

“Yes, well, regardless,” Clavus said, “were I you, I would at the very least be worried about this necromancer coming back a second time.”

“It’s not something he can do again,” I said. “Granted, it’s a new one for me, seeing a soul get shuffled back into the deck like that, but I know it’s not going to be a trick he can repeat. I burnt his body down to the last carbon molecule, using a jiggered version of that Greek Fire you taught me. The soul and the mortal body are inextricably linked, and no other vessel will contain it. No more body, so nothing else to do with the soul but to eat it. That storm god of his, Tlaloc, is probably picking that son of a bitch out of his teeth right about now.”

Clavus nodded along with my explanation, again stroking a beard he didn’t have. “Hm, I suppose you must be right,” he said. His eyes drifted south, down to my chest. I was used to men looking down there, but I knew it wasn’t my goodies Clavus was eyeing. “You are the expert in matters of the soul, after all.”

I cinched my jacket closed around my chest. “Guess that’s a way to phrase it...”

“How has that been doing?” he asked. “Is it still giving you trouble?”

“Yeah, it has,” I said. It was warm in the club, but I zipped up self-consciously. “It’s been hurting a lot lately.”

“I see.”

Clavus was starting to get pushy. He was always like this, but tonight I didn’t have the patience needed to let him dissect my new emotional traumas. That was the problem with making friends with monsters that instinctually preyed on emotions. Even when they had good intentions, they couldn’t help but want to peek at what made you tick.

Maybe another drink would help.

I shotgunned what was left in my glass in a single pull. The fizz in the soda burned going down more than the alcohol. I reached for the light that Clavus had hit earlier, the one that summoned the drink-nymph. Clavus’ hand reached out and took hold of my wrist, stopping me just short of the switch with a stern grip.

“Perhaps ordering you a drink was a bad idea,” he said. He held his eyes and his grip on me for a few oddly tense moments before letting go.

I pulled my arm back, glaring daggers as I rubbed my wrist beneath the table. It didn’t hurt, but the warmth of his skin lingered uncomfortably.

“Don’t put your hands on me like that,” I warned.

“I know you’ve been drinking again,” he said, heedless of my rapidly souring mood. “There’s nothing wrong with wine, but I’d rather not see you trying to destroy yourself with it again.”

“That was a long time ago...”

“And yet you still flirt with those same vices with casual regularity.” He shook his head, fixing me with a sad, worried glare. “For someone who spends so much time running from her past, you certainly do enjoy wallowing in it.”

It was time to leave.

“Look, not that it hasn’t been fun catching up, Clavus,” I said, “but I haven’t been sleeping well and I really gotta catch up on that.”

“Brat…”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” I said as I slid out of the booth. “You’re sorry about my friend, I’m sorry about yours. Condolences all around.”

“Sunset…”

The softness in Clavus’ voice stopped my hasty attempts to leave. I sat back down, at the edge of the booth, eyes fixed on the curtain that promised escape from this velvet-roped hell.

“What?” I asked. The word came out harder than I had intended. I felt bad about that for about half a second.

“Where is the girl now?”

“She’s somewhere safe,” I said.

I intended to leave it at that. Clavus had other ideas.

“With that girl, Luna?” he asked. My face must’ve betrayed me, because he quickly added, “You tend to talk to yourself when you’re bored, and Cilia heard you mumbling the name during your stakeout of Caballeron’s warehouse. If I recall, that was the name of the young lady who kissed you on the night—”

“That’s enough,” I said. I ground my teeth, torn between my respect for Clavus and how upset I was that he wasn’t letting this go. “If you really have to know, yeah, she’s with Luna and her sister. The older sister, Celestia, was close with Night. She looked up to him like a surrogate dad or something. They’re going to take good care of her.”

I watched out the corner of my eye as Clavus again leaned back in his seat, confidently folding his hands on the table. “And you pushed them all away, did you?”

“You already know the answer to that.” I turned to face Clavus, with that same old temper rising up in me. “You think I don’t know the look you changelings get when you’re peeping at someone’s heart? Cilia’s been giving me the evil eye the whole time you’ve been gone, and when I walked in here you were looking me up and down like a butcher inspecting a piece of beef that’s gone bad.”

“Cilia told me that your emotions have been quite volatile lately,” he said, opening his hands in an impotently conciliatory gesture. “Right now, you look heartbroken to me. It’s not difficult to piece together what’s happened.”

I laughed, loud and humorlessly. “Oh, is it?”

He nodded. “You failed to keep your promise to keep this man and his family safe, and I know how seriously you take your word. Your failure of course resulted in suddenly finding yourself taking care of a child, who no doubt became very attached to you. Being the solitary type that you are, that must have felt quite nice, to be looked up to by someone so young and innocent. I know intimately how purely human children can admire and love.

“And meanwhile, during all of this, a young lady is showing a romantic interest in you, which, from what Cilia has said, wasn’t unrequited. Add in the fact that you’re the type to put yourself on a cross over your personal failings, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be overwhelmed, and that you would almost certainly pull away from their attentions.”

“And what choice do I have?” I hissed, jabbing the table angrily with a finger, as if my anger was enough to prove my point. “You know what I am, and you know what I used to be like. I admit I get all high and mighty about necromancers being scum, but was I ever really much better?”

“You’ve been trying to improve yourself,” Clavus said.

“But I’m always going to be that person, Clavus.” I leaned across the table, meeting his ancient, weathered gaze with my own – white-hot and tempered by the literal fires of Hell. “You think your hunger is hard to fight? What about mine? Stars help me, I miss what I used to be some days. I miss not having to worry about money. I miss being able to study whatever the hell I want, to screw who I like, to abuse my power. In the cold, sober moments where it’s just me and those ugly thoughts, I hate myself. I hate myself more than I’ve ever hated anyone.”

I slapped the table. Hard. Hard enough to feel the sharp, aching burn in my palm.

“You’re the goddamn love expert at this table, so why don’t you tell me this? How am I supposed to love someone else if I can’t even love myself?”

Clavus didn’t flinch. You don’t get to be over two-thousand years old by being the type of guy that flinches.

“Brat…” he said in a throaty whisper. “You’ve always thought the worst of yourself, but I tell you, you’re no monster. That you feel these things at all proves it. You are human, and you can be better. You deserve to be loved.”

I sat back in the seat, lacking steam, but not fire. For a moment – just a moment – I thought about striking him.

“You’re not that naive.” I tapped my chest, at the spot where Clavus had been looking only moments before. “I can feel my soul, Clavus. I can feel the place where Fiddler scooped a piece of it out, and I can feel the thing he put in there scraping against the walls whenever it’s pissed at me.”

Nothing with a soul can touch the soul... Nothing with a soul can perceive it...

...but I could.

There was a sigil written right onto my soul, scratched into it by Fiddler’s own hand. I could feel it, even see it well enough to try to read it if I squinted my third eye. It was a constant reminder that I would always be touched by evil – tainted by it beyond any hope of redemption. Sometimes, with enough drink and enough binge television, I could forget about it for a day or two, but that thing he’d put in there along with the sigil would never let me forget.

“I don’t know what he made me into that night,” I said, the words strangled by the hurt, angry emotions wrapping themselves around my throat, “but I know it isn’t anything human or pony. I sure as hell wouldn’t wish myself on people that I care about.”

I slapped the empty glass from my rum and coke off the table in a fit of rebellious petulance. “Thanks for the drink and the chat,” I said, biting into the words as I got up from the booth. “See ya.”

I shoved the curtain aside and hurried out of the bar before Clavus could try to stop me. The drink-nymph was already hurrying over, summoned with broom in hand by the sound of breaking glass, and I nearly knocked her down as I shouldered past. I barely slowed down enough to let the bouncer open the door.

It was nearing midnight as I stepped out onto the street, but the part of downtown I was in was full of activity. The weekend was just starting, and people were either out on dates or searching for someone to take home. Most of them looked around Luna’s age. Likely college kids coming back from Spring Break, trying to squeeze in one last night of carefree partying before taking their noses out from under random skirts and putting them back into their books.

The skies were looking cloudy again, threatening to bring rain – normal rain – after a few days of perfectly clear skies. No one seemed worried about the coming downpour, so I didn’t worry about it either.

I jammed my hands in my pockets and hoofed it the two blocks to the parking garage where I’d left my car, weaving between the crowd, my head down so I wouldn’t make eye contact with any strangers. Getting heart-read by changelings had left me feeling uncomfortably vulnerable, and some irrational part of me was afraid of how much even normal people would be able to catch just from the look in my eyes.

I ignored a few guys catcalling me in slurred, drunken voices, with the corner of my lower lip firmly in my teeth. Somehow, I made it to the parking garage without hexing anyone, and I climbed the stairs – the ones next to the out of service elevator – up to where I’d parked. Philomena was up on the fourth floor, just below the roof, where the cars weren’t packed in so tightly and the risk of her getting dinged up by some inebriated frat bro was fairly low.

My mouth was already watering as the car came into view. There was a bottle of rye waiting in the glove box – provisions I’d picked up on the way over in anticipation of parting with Clavus in a less than pleased mood. I was a fortune-teller, after all.

A man called out to me, by name, before I could even pull out my keys. Unlike the sexist jeers of drunken yokels, this call out gave me pause. As I turned, I let the sour, angry things I was feeling show in my scowl.

“What do you want now, Clavus?” I asked.

Clavus stepped out of the stairwell with a dramatic flourish, flicking the long braid of his hair over one shoulder. He closed the distance between us quicker than his slow, measured stride should’ve allowed.

“We’re not done, brat,” he said, undoing the buttons of his coat. He shrugged the thing off and tossed it over the edge of the parking garage, onto the sidewalk below, like the obvious expense was nothing – and it probably wasn’t.

“The hell we aren’t,” I shot back, squaring up my shoulders as I faced him. “I already said ‘see ya’, so,” I gave a mocking little half-salute, “see ya.”

“I’m not going to let you trot away so shamefully.” He fiddled with the cuffs of his dress shirt and rolled up his sleeves. “I’ve put too much work into you to see you close yourself off like this. What? Are you going to shun me as well?”

“Dude, we’re still friends, I just don’t want to talk about this, okay?” I took off my own jacket and tossed it onto the roof of the car. “But let me just say, I don’t appreciate you walking up on me like you’re looking for a fight.”

Clavus finally pulled up to a stop about a dozen feet away – gunfighting distance – and stood with his legs apart and hands at his hips. He was looking for all the world like he was just waiting for the bank clock to strike high noon.

“I know you well enough to know your temperament.” He held up a finger and added, “And I can taste your emotions, if you’ll remember, stupid horse.”

I clucked my tongue, annoyed. “Whatever, man. Doesn’t change the fact that we don’t have anything else to talk about.”

“Is that so?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you actually aren’t worried for that girl’s safety? You want that girl to ‘disappear back into the herd’?” Clavus turned his head and spat on the idea. “Whatever that necromancer knew about her means that she no more belongs amongst normal humans than you do. No wizard would go to these lengths for someone ‘normal’.”

“Even if that’s true, who are you to make that decision?” I asked through clenched teeth. “I promised her dad I’d keep her safe, and I’ve decided that throwing her back in the pond is the safest thing for her. So don’t worry about the kid, she’s my responsibility.”

Clavus just shook his head and let out a long, tired sigh. “And you’re running away from it marvelously.”

Thunder clapped in the distance, rolling over the city and roaring in the cavernous expanse of the parking garage. It felt appropriate to the mood, and that urge to lift my hands against my friend – the closest I still had to a mentor – grew with the rumble in the air.

“I don’t want to fight, Clavus,” I said, my voice even and cold. “I didn’t need your help anymore, but I came out of respect for our friendship, and now I’m too tired to keep arguing… We can talk about this later, when I’m not so angry at myself and not so annoyed at you… let’s just go, okay?”

The phone in my jacket pocket started ringing, drawing both our attentions and cutting into the tension and threats of possible violence. The unexpected interruption was like a bucket of ice water being poured on our mutual tempers. A sobering interjection from someone who wasn’t even here.

Clavus tilted his head to the side, with his full, pouting lips drawn into a tight little line. Thunder clapped again, and Clavus relaxed his stance with the quiet drama of a gun hammer being lowered.

“If you didn’t want to talk, why did you come?” he asked, ignoring the ringing phone.

I sucked my teeth, annoyed, but glad that we probably weren’t going to fight now. “I came to find out where you’d disappeared to,” I said, with as much venom as I could squeeze out of these bad feelings.

“That’s a poor excuse,” he said, with a thousand years of patience measuring his voice.

“Why are you pushing this!?” I screamed, loud enough for the echo to ring in my ears. “What’s it matter why I came? I came, we talked, now I’m leaving. Just let this go.”

The call ended, and the peace it had bought us was eroding as quickly as it had come. Clavus didn’t respond to my pleas. He just stood there, watching me with the stoic patience of a monk observing fish in a pond, like he was waiting for me to dart away.

I licked my lips, gathering up my nerve to beat back the self-conscious tingle prickling away at my skin.

“I just want to go home, Clavus,” I said.

“And where is home?”

The phone started ringing again.

“I suppose you should get that,” Clavus said, sighing as he rubbed at his furrowed brow. He feigned frustration, but I could sense the relief I was feeling being mirrored beneath the surface of his grimace. “It might be important.”

I reached for the phone and answered it. I didn’t really care who it was, but at least it was someone else, anyone else but Clavus.

“Hello?”

“Sunset, thank god you answered!” Luna shouted over the phone, her voice breaking as she sobbed with what I imagined was relief. Whatever was going on, she sounded scared.

“Luna?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Twilight’s missing.”


* * *


That storm that had been baying at the edge of the sky had finally started moving in. The wipers on my car swished lazily at the smattering drizzle, which was barely enough to mist over the windshield. The phone, sitting on the console between the seats, vibrated and chirped several times in rapid succession as I was pulling up to a red light.

“News?” Clavus asked.

“Just Luna still having a freakout, asking if we found her yet,” I explained as I typed out a quick reply to the flood of texts I’d just gotten.

“You just need to say the word,” Clavus said, holding up his own telephone in emphasis. Like Cilia’s, it was the latest model, and I knew that had to be by her influence. She was the one that liked gadgets, and Clavus always indulged her love of new toys. “I can send the children out to look for her if you can give me a description.”

The light changed and I stepped on the gas a wee bit harder than I’d meant to, throwing myself back in the seat at the sudden acceleration.

“That’s not necessary,” I said. “She just ran away, and I’m pretty sure I know where she went.”

Clavus hummed, setting down his phone after a moment of thought. He put thought into everything he did.

“What makes you certain she hasn’t been taken?”

I sighed, tapping impatiently at the wheel. “Luna said she’s had Twilight sleeping in her room with her. She put her to bed earlier and then went downstairs to talk with Celestia about seeing some lawyer they know to help with getting custody of the kid. Things got heated, according to her own admission, and when she went upstairs the kid was gone. They searched the house and found the side door in the garage was open and the new bike they’d bought her was missing. They think she might’ve gotten upset over their argument and taken off.”

“That certainly sounds like a runaway,” Clavus said with a sad shake of his head. “Poor child.”

I nodded, silently agreeing with the sentiment while also trying not to think about the part I played in this. Twilight was a smart girl, too smart to do something impulsive like running away in the dead of the night. Running away like this? It was an act of desperation, and if anyone was to blame for her not having her head on straight right now, it was me.

“I’m just glad they had enough sense to not go straight to the cops. It’ll call down a lot of heat if we report her missing when she’s supposed to be dead. At least until they make their arrangements and get the story straight. The second the cops sniff something even a little off they’ll take her into ‘temporary’ custody and that’s the end of it. She’ll get lost in the system and who knows how long it’ll take to get her out.”

Clavus snorted, his handsome visage souring at the mere mention of cops. The old monster had very little love for the boys in blue, going back to the times when they carried brass swords and wooden spears. When you lived on the fringe of society the way the changelings did, you would inevitably have your share of run-ins with the law.

“The police are only good for harassing my nieces and nephews,” Clavus griped. “Better to handle these things on our own… which is why we should send out the young ones to find her.”

I let a little of the annoyance I was feeling creep into my voice. “I said it’s fine. We’re almost there, okay? Just… just leave this to me.”

Clavus buried any further discussion under a throaty grunt that almost felt approving.

I kept my eyes on the road for the rest of the drive. It was mercifully short, but all the thoughts racing through my head made it feel impossibly long. I had no idea what I was going to tell the kid, but something in my gut was telling me I had to be the one to talk her into coming home. Maybe it was guilt. Or my sense of responsibility finally kicking in.

Or, if I was being honest, maybe I just wanted to see her again.

I had to find her first, though. Luckily, I hadn’t been bluffing about knowing where she was.

As a sorceress, I had a lot of ways I could find one missing kid – some of them being the same tricks Ahuizotl had tried, funny enough. But sometimes you don’t need magic to get a job done. Sometimes you just know what it’s like to be a little girl running away from the people who care most about her.

When you run away like that, when you feel like you have nothing and no one to rely on, all you want is to go home. For me? Home was Canterlot. That’s why I’d always found myself coming back here to Canterlot City whenever I felt lost. It was the place closest in this world to the first real home I’d ever had.

For Twilight? It wasn’t hard to guess what she would consider a safe place to run to, even if it wasn’t there anymore. Luckily, I still had the address in my phone. The woman’s voice in the GPS app told me to turn off the main road and down a smaller, better maintained one.

Philomena still stuck out like a sore thumb in this neighborhood. Night Light’s neighbors had been more the Mercedes and minivan crowd, and the flashy ostentation of my Firebird probably made me look like someone’s profligate kid coming home for Thanksgiving dinner.

My phone beeped unnecessarily, telling me I’d reached my destination as I pulled up to the curb where Night Light’s house had once stood. A wall of cheap portable chain link had been put up to keep anyone from stealing while the construction crew swept things up. Tarps were strung across the fence, fixed with zip ties so nobody could see what was going on inside. A kid’s bike was lying abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the fence, and that was enough to convince me I was in the right place.

“It would seem your foolish brain still has some use,” Clavus muttered to himself as he spied the bike.

I reached for the door handle, hesitating as the worries that had been running through my head the whole drive over took one last lap around my self-consciousness. I looked at Clavus, and to my surprise he hadn’t moved to get out of the car. The look in his eye told me he was waiting for me to tell him what he should do.

Back in the parking garage, all I’d had to say was that Twilight had gone missing, and he was at the passenger side door before I’d even finished explaining. Technically, I didn’t need him, and we both knew that, but neither of us had questioned that he’d be coming with me.

Friends – real ones – were like that, I guess. You didn’t need to tell them that you needed them, and they didn’t need to ask. Now that we were here, though, he was waiting for my cue, letting me call the shots on how I handled my own business.

“I’ll take care of this, so can you…?”

I let the suggestion hang in the air and Clavus picked up my meaning. He gave a subtle nod and muttered something about taking a walk around the block before getting out.

I heaved a sigh of relief that we weren’t going to have it out again. One less thing to worry about.

“Come on, Sunset, you got this,” I said, gathering what courage I had left as I forced myself out of the car.

It was still sprinkling, just enough to mist the air without drenching everything. I zipped my jacket closed and turned up the collar against the increasingly chill winds.

I went to where the kid’s bike was and looked around, finding a gap in the fence, where two of the sections hadn’t been properly secured. The fence was kind of crooked there, which probably meant someone had already squeezed their way through. It’d be a tight fit for an adult, but a kid Twilight’s size could make it without much effort.

I wasn’t about to get down on my knees and try my luck. I just walked up to the fence, touched the place where the panels were secured, and hexed the bracket holding them together. Chain link fences tend to be made out of galvanized steel, and just a little play with the natural process of oxidation was all it took to make it rust to nothing. I scanned up and down the street, just to make sure nobody was out late walking the dog, and slipped in through the fence.

The last time I’d seen Night Light’s place had been on TV during news reports about the fire. It had been a hot story for a few days – people love a tragedy, and an upstanding family like Night’s going up in flames in their beds had made for the kind of drama that local stations ate up. News cycles being what they were, though, the rash of storms had bumped their story off the air within a couple of days. Sad, but that was just how it was.

The fancy ironwork fence and all the kitschy lawn ornaments had already been swept away. I could see pieces of the fence sticking out of the big dumpster taking up the driveway. The ruins of the house itself were still mostly up, and the bulldozer parked on the lawn was pointed in their direction, like an attack dog waiting for the order to tear it down. There wasn’t much left, except for some scorched walls and some of the load-bearing studs – just enough of the skeleton to tell you what it used to look like. Some of those standing flood lights had been left out and on, for security, presumably. The bright white lights only made the wreckage look sadder, the long shadows behind the charred walls somehow darker than the unlit night.

Lightning struck again, closer than it had been earlier, but still far away. As the thunder clapped, I heard a sound from nearby. It was soft, a little squeak of panic that trailed off into a low moan. I followed the sound to the bulldozer and found Twilight sitting in the bucket, legs pulled in tight and forehead pressed to her knees. The only protection she had from the lousy weather was a heavy canvas jacket. The thing was clearly meant for a full grown woman, and the drizzling rain carried a whiff of perfume that told me the kid had taken it from Luna’s closet.

“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice soft, like she might dart off like a scared woodland critter at the slightest provocation.

“Go away,” she said.

She didn’t seem surprised to find me. I guess that made sense. Philomena and the sporadic crack of thunder were the only two things disturbing the still of the night.

“Can’t do that. Luna called me and asked me to find you. I gotta bring you home.”

“This is my home,” she said.

I looked up at the burnt remains of the house and shook my head. “This ain’t a home, not anymore. There’s nothing left here but memories, and you can take those with you.”

“I don’t want to hear that from you.”

My guts flipped a little at the hate in her voice. Something nastier than childish anger was seething in that tone – something more fermented, mature. It was another sad reminder of how quickly she was having to grow up.

“I don’t need you,” she added darkly. “I don’t need anyone.”

“What’s your plan then?” I asked. I checked the date on my phone. “Construction crew is going to come into work on Monday. They’re not going to let you hang around. They’ll probably call the cops. What’re you going to do for food? Clothes? Do you even know where you can find a place to take a bath?”

The shiver that trembled through the kid had nothing to do with how chilly it was.

“You’re a smart kid, but I bet you haven’t given much thought to how to live on the streets,” I said. I leaned against the heavy machine and ran my fingers through my hair, which was already starting to frizz in the humidity. It probably wouldn’t be long before the sky opened up again. “It’s not easy, and it’s not fun. There’s no Huck Finn adventures on river rafts and no harmonica-playing hobos cooking a pot of beans in a rattling train car heading for Cala-fornee. Just because I didn’t want you to end up in an orphanage doesn’t mean I would rather have you living in the street. Your dad wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“Stop talking like you care. You’re not my….my fucking mom.”

It hurt having my own words thrown back in my face like that, but I still almost laughed at the way the kid stumbled over the curse word there. That had probably been her first real attempt at profanity. I could just barely make out the rosy glow of her cheeks in the peripheral light from the security lamps.

“I may not be your mom, but that doesn’t mean I can just leave you out here,” I explained.

Twilight looked up at me, glaring at me as hard as she could with those big, bloodshot doe-eyes.  This was so awkward, considering how we’d last parted. When I’d practically thrown her out of my house.

“You can’t make me leave,” she said, growling as threateningly as a four-week-old pomeranian.

“We both know that’s not true.” I held up my hand and wiggled my fingers. Tiny arcs of electrical potential danced in the gaps like a Jacob’s ladder in an old sci-fi movie.

I expected Twilight to recoil at the mild threat. The last time I’d seen her, I’d put the fear of magic in Celestia just by tripping her from across the room. Twilight was made of sterner stuff, though. She just watched as the blue light flashed between my fingers, until the sound of thunder overhead drew her eyes to the sky.

“You’re going to get struck by lightning doing that,” she said, unimpressed by my display.

I flicked my hand dramatically, like I was shaking out a lit match. “Says the girl sitting in a metal bucket that’s slowly filling with water.”

Twilight rocked from side to side, like she was debating whether or not to get up. Her fingers idly played with the shallow layer of water pooling in the bucket.

“I’ll take my chances,” she murmured rebelliously.

I shrugged.

The kid sneezed, wetly, and a moment of adult-like concern flashed through me. She’d been running around all night in just some pajamas and an oversized coat, getting rained on and everything. I knew better than most how drafty an improperly-sized coat could be, so I took off my own jacket and threw it at her – a little rain wasn’t going to hurt me. She caught it with a look of surprise that slowly morphed into wary acceptance as she draped the jacket over her shoulders like a blanket.

"If you can’t dress well, at least you can dress in layers," I explained.

The kid nodded and I didn't offer any more advice than that. I was trying to scare her into going back with me, after all. I couldn't give up too many pro tips.

“I’m surprised Luna called you,” Twilight said, snuggling into my jacket. She pried a stone loose from her mud-caked seat and tossed it at the soot-stained foundation of her childhood home. The rock struck one of the support beams with a thud and splatted into the wet ash. “She’s really mad at you.”

A little heat suddenly flushed my face, pushing back the stinging cold. I’d already known Luna was mad. Even under her concern for Twilight, and the relief at finally getting ahold of me, I could hear all the things she really wanted to say straining her words over the phone. Still, hurt to hear it from the kid.

“She’s got the right,” I began. “I said some awful stuff. Some of it was...”

“Unforgivable…” Twilight finished for me.

“Yeah.” I reached for a cigarette out of reflex, but realized they were in the breast pocket of the jacket Twilight was snuggling into. I just wanted something to do with my hands, so I shoved them into my jean pockets, balled up into fists. “Yeah,” I repeated. “But what I said doesn’t excuse you running away.”

“I didn’t want to be there, so I left.” She shrugged, like it was just that simple. “It's just the same as it was with Luna back at your house. Celestia keeps following me around, asking if I'm okay and how I'm feeling. What I'm thinking about and if I'm comfortable. Luna keeps telling her to give me some space, but that just makes them argue more, and they've already been arguing a lot... Plus, I’m really sick of her ‘trauma resolution handpuppets’.”

“Son of a bitch, the puppets,” I muttered, shaking my head in sympathy. “Adults are always trying to talk to you through puppets.”

Twilight looked up at me with a curious grimace – half-pained, like she was holding back something she wanted to let go of. I could make my guesses what that something was, but in the end it didn’t matter. She let it go with a sigh and a slump of her shoulders.

“Luna's been okay, but it's still hard to talk to her about how I feel, because I know she won't get it…” She pried another rock loose and half-heartedly chucked it into a puddle. “And Celestia has all these child development textbooks. She’s been taking notes and highlighting pages. It makes me feel like I’m a school project…”

“Funny, I thought you would have liked that,” I said.

Twilight snorted with the effort to choke back a laugh. She cast me a quick, weary look, as if to chide me for the joke, but as she snuggled back down into my jacket I caught a glimpse of a smile. “Whatever…”

“She just wants some guidance,” I said. Defending Celestia, of all people, left a sour taste in my mouth, but I didn’t have much choice. Besides, I knew what she had in mind was what she thought was best for Twilight. “The idea of suddenly taking care of a kid is frightening as hell, let alone a smart one like you.” I spared a glance at the kid, who had shrunk even further into herself. Her knuckles were white where she grasped the edges of my jacket. “Let alone one that went through what you did.”

“Thanks for not sugarcoating it,” she said, and I knew she meant that. “You’re the only one who doesn’t.”

“Sometimes, when adults tell kids that things are going to be okay, they're really saying it to themselves." I sniffled, the chill of having lost my jacket starting to finally catch up to me. "They're just scared and they want you to be okay. They don't understand how tough you actually are, but they will."

Twilight hummed contemplatively, nodded, and accepted that assessment with an unenthusiastic, “I guess so.”

She scooted forward, carefully swinging her legs over the lip of the bucket, and pulled herself out. She didn’t ask for my help, so I let her do it herself. Still, I was ready to catch her if she slipped, and the tension in my body didn’t leave until her tennies hit the mud with a squish.

“I know you don’t want me,” she said, looking up at me with so much innocence in her eyes that it almost burned. “I know you don’t want me,” she repeated, forestalling the excuse I was about to give her, “but can I still see you? Please?”

I shook my head, my mouth moving to deny her yet again.

“Please!” Twilight took a heavy step forward, almost losing her balance in the process.

I reached out to catch her, and she took the initiative to lunge headlong into my gut, hard enough to steal my breath. Her little arms wrapped around my waist with desperate strength that was becoming scarily familiar. My own hands hovered in the air, poised to catch someone who had already caught me, and I stood there – dumbly – as she began crying into my shirt.

“Even just on weekends! Or holidays... Or something! Luna and Celestia care, but they don’t understand! Even when they’re sitting right there next to me, I still feel like I’m all alone!” The kid shook, hard, and the skies shook in kind. “I just don’t want to feel alone…”

The rain was coming down harder now, like it was waiting for this exact moment to add to the drama. My brain barely registered the change in the weather.

My arms felt like lead as they closed around the kid. I held her, hunched over her tiny body to try to protect her from the rain as she cried. She was wailing, loud and shamelessly, the way she had that night when we’d just been two strangers sitting in my kitchen eating fried chicken together. Lightning and thunder and the hard patter of rain coming down in sheets spared her dignity to all the world, save for me. I could feel every wail and every sniffle like they were my own.

Her tears began to slow, but the aftershocks of her sobbing made her tremble with impossible frailty.

I felt something warm streaming down my face along with the freezing rain. I just let it be and kept stroking the kid’s hair, waiting for her to calm down.

A lifetime ago, in another world, I had hated this child. I had hated what she was, and what she represented. A hatred so deep and powerful that I couldn’t set it down until I found something I hated even more.

And now.

And now… It was what it was. She was so much like me, save for the one way that mattered. She was human, fully and whole. That difference was the reason I couldn’t give her what she wanted.

I would have given anything for that to not be true – even my soul, were that still mine to give.

The rain surged as Twilight’s sobbing slowed. I waited until she’d gotten it out, and got down on one knee to look her in the face. I needed to explain that I was taking her home, and that this was goodbye.

A part of me was glad that I was getting a second chance to do this. I could handle things with more tact than I had the other night, and maybe in the far flung future, when she looked back on this part of her life, the grapes wouldn’t be quite so sour.

I owed her that much, and so much more.

I took her by the shoulders and kneeled to meet her eye-to-eye. My knee sunk uncomfortably into the muddy ground. “Kid, I know this is going to be hard to accept, but…”

“You’re bleeding.”

I reeled back, stunned for a breath or two by the simple statement. I reached up to where I had felt warmth trickling down my face. My fingers came away from my cheeks pink with watery blood. The rain washed the stuff away, so I dabbed at my eyes again, just to be sure.

“The hell is this?” I muttered.

A familiar iron tang filled my mouth as my nose started bleeding as well. My balance went next, as the roar of falling rain turned into a deafening electric whine that felt like it was pressing on the inside of my skull, like pressured steam whistling out of a tea kettle. The same trickle of warmth spilled down my neck, trailing from my ears, and I knew I was screwed.

Magic welled up in me, sudden, like a flood of water from a bursting dam. It boiled and surged and fizzed through my body, and the seed of demonic fire in my bones felt like it was searing away the marrow, eating its way out of me. I tried to pull it back in, but every attempt to form a conscious thought felt like a needle being stabbed into my brain.

I shoved the kid away, an action of pure instinct. I wasn’t in a mind to measure my strength, and a bit of magic might’ve been in that push. She flew back, sliding across the mud until she crashed into one of the security lights.

It wasn’t gentle, but it had probably saved her life.

The magic burst out of me, and I mean that literally. The force of raw, unfiltered magic left my body, directionless and without any form, licking at the air, boiling the rain, and carving gashes in the mud right where Twilight had just been standing.

My own magic pushed and pulled at me from the inside, trying to tear me apart. What magic was expelled from my body became fire, and lightning, and gusts of wind that seared, and charred, and tore at the ruins of Night Light’s house. Something exploded behind me with an electric pop and sizzle.

I fell on my back, feeling like an empty husk as the rain pelted my face. Lightning crackled and whirled in the sky above, the thunder rolling like the sky was laughing at me as I drowned beneath it.

The roar in my skull died down, and the electric whine began to peter out, returning my hearing to me, albeit damaged. The last things I heard as my consciousness sunk into mud were the sounds of Clavus shouting, and the snapping of jagged, misaligned teeth clicking with mechanical purpose.


* * *


I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. My body hurt from head to toe, right down to the tips of my nails. I could still taste the tang of my own blood, and there was a ringing in my ear that was already worrying me. At least I was in my own bed. The familiar bedding and the slight sag in the old mattress took a little of the sting out of my body.

I wanted to groan, in the vain hope that it’d relieve a little of the discomfort, but the realization that I wasn’t alone held down that urge. There were two voices speaking softly to one another, both instantly recognizable.

“Is she really going to be okay?” asked Luna.

Clavus made a soft, affirmative grunt. When he spoke, his voice was higher than I’d last heard it, but it was him. “She will. She’ll be in bad shape, but that brat is too stubborn to die to something like this.”

“I’m sorry I keep asking… I’m just… I don’t know what to do. I don’t know any magic, I don’t know how to help, I just.. I don’t know what I can do…”

“You care for her and that’s enough. The affection of a good woman like you is more than this ungrateful idiot deserves. Go back downstairs and see to your sister. I believe it’s best to not leave her alone for long.”

I listened to the sound of Luna’s footfalls receding into the distance, down the hall, all the way to the stairs. The door creaked on the hinges and closed with a gentle click once she was gone.

“Don’t pretend to still be asleep, I can hear the change in your breathing,” Clavus said. “Congratulations on cheating death yet again, now get your lazy self up.”

I sat up, with immense difficulty. My joints ached and screamed with every inch as I struggled to get upright. The muscles in my forearms were twitching like I’d overstrained them, and I could feel my heart beating behind my eyes. I lifted the comforter and checked to make sure I still had legs. They were there, but the clothes I’d been wearing were gone. I’d been dressed in a knee-length nightshirt that I had thought disappeared weeks ago.

Clavus was standing next to the door, his arms crossed over his chest as he glared at me. He was young again, and there was a slump in his usually flawless posture. Even his perpetually hawkish glare was uncharacteristically dull. Frankly, he just looked exhausted.

“Why’s Luna here?” I asked. I had more pressing questions, but they could wait until my head was a little clearer.

“You dropped your phone in the car,” Clavus said. “I was bringing you home and she kept calling. I got tired of hearing the ringing from under the seat, so I answered and told her the abridged of what happened to you.”

I took a deep breath and tried to steady my nerves. My ability to hold a train of thought was kind of fading in and out, but every lungful of air helped.

“What did happen to me?”

Something came flying at my face, and in a mush-brained panic, I swatted it out of the air. Clavus stood next to the dresser closest to the door, one eyebrow quirked infuriatingly.

“You were cursed,” he said, gesturing towards the glass jar he’d just thrown at me. “I found that in your ear.”

I picked up the jar from where it had landed on the bed. It was an empty jelly jar from my kitchen. At the bottom was a little white bug, barely bigger than a grain of rice.

“Is this a maggot?” I asked.

My stomach started doing flips at the thought that this gross little worm, which was puking out some kind of grimy black liquid in proportionately impossible amounts, had been in my ear.

“Don’t worry, I already checked for eggs,” Clavus added, as though that helped. “Do you have an idea when you might have been infected with this thing?”

The little bug wiggled in the jar, practically swimming in the effluence it was ejecting from both ends. Shaking the bottle seemed to make it even sicker, and the flow of foul liquid sprung anew with the motion.

“Ahuizotl slapped me with a curse while he was dying,” I muttered, trying to hold down my own stomach juices. “Felt like a knife stabbing into my head pudding. I... might have lost consciousness for a couple of minutes.”

“Foolish,” Clavus spat. “I tell you to always be cautious, and you let down your defenses like this?” He came over and grabbed the jar out of my hand, shaking it in my face. “The curse carved into this thing’s belly was meant to cut off a sorcerer’s connection to its pact holder, and expel magic from their body in a way that would tear down whatever protections they might be behind, telling the caster exactly where the victim was. Hiding it in that big empty cavity between your ears was the perfect way to sneak it past your warding.”

I frowned, listening to what Clavus was saying, but not getting the scope of it right away. I was still a little out of sorts, having just gotten smacked with a full on reverse-Highlander Quickening in the middle of that construction site.

“I don’t have that kind of connection to my pact holder...” I muttered.

“Which is why this thing almost killed you!” Clavus shouted. He slammed the jar down on the bed stand. “The spell wasn’t meant for someone with the amount of power you have. If this had activated here, in your house, the magic rebounding off these wards would’ve torn you apart.”

A shiver went through me as I imagined what that might look like. The wards on my house were built out of the best stuff I knew how to do. Trying to tear that down would’ve been like trying to break out of a bank vault by slamming against the door, and I was just strong enough to hurt myself in the doing.

Why hadn’t the thing activated here? If I were crafting something like this, I would have it just go off as soon as it crossed a ward line. There would be less points of failure that way.

I sat there, chewing my lip and staring at the jar, trying to reverse engineer the trigger in my head. Of all the ways I could think of to make it work, there was really only one that fit when I put myself in the place of someone who played with dead bodies for fun and profit.

“That stuff it’s puking,” I said, reaching over to tap the glass with my nail. “That’s Twilight’s blood, isn’t it?”

Clavus grunted affirmatively. “Or that of someone in her family.”

Night Light had groked onto someone watching him weeks ago, and judging from what Caballeron had said, Ahuizotl had had him in his crosshairs for way longer than that. Plenty of time to get a little bit of blood.

Blood is a good medium for magic, especially for curse magic. There’s a lot of symbolism in using the fluid of life to bind a spell, and symbolism gives shape to the shapelessness of magic.

The night I had killed Ahuizotl, I had come home with this thing in my head. I was drunk and angry, and when Twilight had approached, reaching out to comfort me with her touch, I had… said what I said, and she was gone.

The kid’s touch was the trigger. With the same blood as was in her veins hidden in my body, touching her would’ve been like closing the loop in an electrical circuit. Whoever had picked her up and taken her away before she could touch me that night had saved all our lives.

Whether he understood what he was doing or not, Ahuizotl had turned Twilight’s innocent need for affection into a weapon against us.

And angry as I was… as much as I could feel the indignation searing me from the inside out… the only thing I could think about was the pit of cold, dark fear festering in my stomach. The look on Twilight’s face as my power ran amok had scooped something out of me, and all I wanted to do was to hold her again, to know she was okay and that she…

I just needed to know where she was. I asked Clavus, hoping against everything that she was laying in the other room, sleeping off the scare I’d given her.

“Taken,” Clavus answered. “When the creatures came, a man followed behind them. He rose up out of a muddy pool of water, the way they did, and carried the girl away. I had my hands full just protecting you. I had to make a choice and I—”

I didn’t want to hear excuses. “What did this man look like?”

“Very big. Redhead. I described him in more detail to Cilia, and she identified him immediately as the lackey of the man you met the other night, Caballeron.”

I shot out of bed, furious enough that I barely registered the sway in my stance until Clavus was steadying me with a firm grip on my waist. The differences in our height must have made us look quite silly, but we were alone, and I knew his small frame could take my weight, so I let it.

My addled mind went back to that night, when I was torturing the thing I had thought was Ahuizotl. I’d known sorcerers that had killed most of their sense of touch and pain through experimentation or trauma, but the absolute lack of response to the beating I gave him was decidedly unnerving now that I thought of it.

“He played me,” I growled. “The thing I killed was probably one of Ahuizotl’s goddamn puppets. Caballeron said that necromancer could speak through flesh golems. He had to have set me up. He told Ahuizotl I was coming so he could set a trap.”

I spat and cursed the name of Night Light’s former friend, with the urge to run straight back to that shitty strip mall furniture store growing stronger in me with every malicious word. The flood of anger only subsided as I felt Clavus’ arm across the small of my back tighten, and the tips of his fingers digging just a little harder into my side.

“Enough of that,” Clavus said, clearly annoyed. “That anger does you no good… Not against a dead man.”

Clavus guided me back to the bed, helping me sit at the edge of the mattress with my aching bones grinding the whole way.

“What do you mean he’s dead?” I asked. The words fell out of my mouth, numbly. The unexpected betrayal of the murderous thoughts I’d been entertaining had left me instantly bereft of the only emotion that could distract me from worrying about Twilight. I could only take so much more of this emotional whiplash.

“I assumed, just as you did, that Caballeron had betrayed you. While I tended to you, I sent Cilia to search for signs of the girl at the place of your previous meeting with the man. When she arrived, she found the warehouse in shambles. There was blood, and a trail of it led into a back room where she found Caballeron dead. He was gutshot.”

Clavus reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a bit of spiral notepad, with the jagged little fringe from where it had been torn away still decorating the top edge of the paper. It was folded into fours, wrinkled, and splotched ominously with blood.

“The man must have thought this very important to have crawled halfway across the building to write it down,” Clavus mused as he handed me the paper.

I held it, struck dumb for a moment by the crisp, flakey texture of the paper where the blood had dried. The anger I’d felt at the man only moments ago died along with the man as I ran my fingertips over the blood.

The big man had been descended from someone with magic, and had enough of it in him to possess some rudimentary magical sight. People like that, with just enough power to get a taste for what it was like, were never satisfied with what little they had. I could see it all in my head – Big Ginger going back to Ahuizotl after the fact, striking up a deal of his own in exchange for some little power and burning Caballeron in the process.

Poor guy.

I unfolded the paper and read his last words. “Sixth sun...”

“Does this have meaning to you?”

I shook my head. “Not even a little.”

“Then why would he leave this message?” Clavus mused, almost to himself. “Presumably it was meant for you. If he never made any mention of ‘Six Suns’ when you spoke to him… perhaps it was something he learned or overheard between your meeting and his death?”

And then he was quiet, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, head lowered and eyes closed in thought.

Whatever thought he was having, it wasn’t important to me right now. All I could think about was Twilight and the fact that she was… That she wasn’t here.

I rubbed my legs until they didn’t feel so much like jelly, and then pushed myself back to my feet. I had a feeling that the only thing that would help me keep my head would be to keep moving, and I wasn’t about to go against that feeling.

“How long have I been out?”

Clavus looked up and frowned before answering, “A day and a half.”

Ahuizotl had had the kid for almost two full days.

A swell of fresh panic helped move my feet, bringing me to the window. I pulled open the blinds to find a calm sky, the soft blues just beginning to harshen into something fitting for late evening. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, and there weren’t demons flying in the sky, or lightning scorching virgins where they stood.

“World hasn’t ended…” I muttered, relief mixing with the foreboding worry in my chest like a horrible, horrible cocktail of anxiety. “Could mean a few things… but I’m going to choose to be optimistic for once and assume if he’d done what he wanted to do, we’d know about it by now.”

“That’s probably a safe assumption,” Clavus said, nodding in approval. “When gods move, seas boil. I doubt Tlaloc would have sent this sorcerer back for anything small, considering what he was willing to do just to find her.”

Two days and nothing. My guess that Ahuizotl’s power was only available to him every other day had held up to this point, and what evidence I could gather by peeking out the blinds wasn’t changing my mind.

I turned and shuffled towards the dresser near the door. I had work to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. I had already lost a night, I couldn’t afford to lose another.

“What are you doing now?” Clavus asked.

“I’m going to get something to wear,” I said as I pulled my night shirt off and started looking through the drawers. Luna had gone through the trouble of organizing my dresser, which might have felt a breach of privacy if the contents hadn’t already been out all over the floor before she’d gotten to them. “Then I’m going to find where they took Twilight.”

The drawer I had my hands inside of closed with a bang, nearly catching my fingers.

“I won’t allow it,” Clavus said, his hand still flat against the dresser. “You almost died, and the only thing keeping you on two feet is your own stubbornness. I can’t let you walk out of this house just to get your damn foolish self killed.”

“Move your hand, Clavus.” I leaned down, bringing us closer to eye level. “Now.”

“You think this is one of your posturing games, brat? I’ve put too much work into you to watch you die so easily. This sorcerer has bested you at every turn. And why?”

He reached up and jabbed me on the forehead, hard. The movement was so sudden that it took me off guard. I stumble as I flinched away from the attack, and I would have fallen on my butt if I hadn’t grabbed the edge of the dresser.

“Because you never listen to me!” he shouted, his voice rising in volume with every sentence. “I tell you to be vigilant, to always be on guard and to look out for every angle of a situation, and what do you do? You do what you always do, you run head first into every problem and brute force your way through it!”

“Shut up!” I demanded, beating my fist against the top of the dresser. Pounding it in frustration once, twice, again and again, until the skin burned and the bones in my hand ached. “If you don’t want to help, then fine! I’ll do it on my own if I have to, but I am going to get her back and I don’t care what it takes!”

“Why? So you can hand her off to someone again? What’s the point then? If you don’t want the girl, then let that bastard have her. I have my ways, and we can just abandon this world if we have to. I’ll gather my hive and you can come with us. You can even bring that girl downstairs with you if you wish.”

I took the collar of Clavus’ shirt in my hands, trying to pull him closer, but the old changeling’s small stature belied how heavy he was, and all I managed was popping a few of his buttons. He reached up and brushed my hands away. He was weakened, probably half-starving, but I wasn’t in much better shape and he still had enough strength to throw me to the ground with a casual flick of his hand.

“This was never about me not wanting her!” I shouted into the carpet. Again I had the urge to pound my fists against something, but my body felt cold, and tired, and all the anger in me smoldered impotently in a broken vessel that couldn’t act on it. “I want her… When she looks at me, when she smiles… I can feel it in a part of me that I thought had died… I need that. I need her...”

My hands flexed, over and over, scratching uselessly at the carpet, just to feel something with my body that wasn’t this pain in my chest. I could hear something, like bad plumbing, and I focused on that. It was this sort of wet, churning whine that I’d never heard before.

It took a minute to realize I was making that noise.

Clavus’ hand was on my back, stroking me like an upset cat. It only made me cry harder, and Clavus pulled me into a hug.

The hug helped, and within a minute or so I was able to breathe again. He let go of me, and I grabbed part of the comforter half hanging off the bed to clean my face.

“You don’t understand what that little girl’s existence means to me… you can’t know…” My mouth was dry and my face was still burning with frustration. “I told you about where I came from, why I left… but I never told you any names.”

I looked up at Clavus with emotion blurring my vision. The angry scowl he’d been wearing was gone, replaced with a curious, almost sad look.

“The little unicorn filly that was going to steal my place,” I said, surprised by how steady my voice was at this part, “her name was Twilight Sparkle. That’s who Princess Celestia had chosen to be her new pupil. That’s the name of the girl who sent me running from my world and into this one.”

Understanding filled Clavus’ young face with the slow and steady grace of sunrise. He looked down, in the direction of the kitchen below us, and then back to me. The gears were whirring in his head as he put together the pieces of what he knew with what I’d just given him. Clavus, ancient and clever as he was, never forgot anything and never missed a trick.

“Oh…” he said, eloquently. “Oh, you poor girl…”

I pulled myself up, using the bed as a crutch to get my feet back under me. Clavus had moved aside, so I was able to get back to my dresser.

“You can’t know what it was like to finally let that go,” I said as I sifted through my bras. “That Twilight and this Twilight are different, but still… To let go of all that hate, only to fill the void it left with guilt. It’s my fault her family is gone. Because I didn’t see the angles, didn’t move fast enough, didn’t realize someone that dangerous was running around in my town.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Talking about all this had me thinking about that afternoon that had started all this. Just me with my drink and my cards, and one nebbish middle-aged man with worry in his eyes.

“You asked me last week why I decided to help Night Light.” I gave a weak shrug. “I told you I did it because he asked, and he seemed like a nice guy who was in a jam, which was all true… but the fact was, I was just lonely. Tired of sitting alone in my house, just watching TV and hoping someone interesting comes by for a reading. I just… wanted to see if maybe I could make a friend… just a normal, regular, human friend.”

I shrugged again.

“I’ve tried before, y’know. To make normal friends. Never works out. I start getting into my moods, and I start worrying that they might see me for what I really am.”

I found some clean underwear and put that on. Clavus and me didn’t have much in the way of shame between us. Not even when he’d let me crash with him for the year or so between my leaving Fiddler behind and buying this house.

“That’s what happened with Twilight… and with Luna… I start pushing people away because I know, deep down, I’m just evil, and even if I try to be a better person, I’ll just fail…”

The thing in my chest was burning again, hot, but not unpleasant for once. I could feel that warmth filling me up, driving away the cold in my tired limbs.

“This isn’t like those times, though,” I said. My lips were dry and my throat was sore from wailing and mewling into the carpet, but my voice felt strong. “Right now, tonight, Twilight doesn’t need a better version of me, she needs the worst. I swear on my blood, on every ounce of darkness staining my soul, on every sin I’ve gathered chasing knowledge – I’m going to get her back and kill every thing, living or dead, standing between me and her. Whatever happens after that, I’ll just learn to live with it. I can do that if I have her with me.”

Clavus looked thunderstruck, which was yet another new look for him. If I could say anything about this odd chapter of my life, it was certainly letting me see a few different sides of my changeling friends.

“That’s… a heavy oath…” Clavus said.

“They took her out of my arms.” I turned to Clavus, with the fire in my chest burning my throat, I said, “They can’t have her. She’s mine.”

I waited to see what Clavus might say, to see if he’d still insist on trying to stop me. I hated that this was the second time in so many days that we stood before one another with the threat of a fight hanging in the air. I’d had precious few friends in my life, and Clavus might have been the best of them. Certainly, he was the only one that cared enough to try to stop me from getting myself killed.

He nodded, and there was a thousand words in that brief motion. “You’ve come a lot further in these few short years than you think...”

He sat at the edge of the bed, one leg crossed casually over the other, his fingers laced over the knee. He would look like he was posing for a photoshoot if his shirt wasn’t torn from my attempted manhandling.

“Contrary to what you might think,” he said, “I don’t owe that demon of yours anything. He approached me looking to make a deal, to bargain to share my knowledge with a girl he was training.”

I blinked, taken aback by this confession.

Clavus was far, far older than any changeling I’d ever heard of, and I knew quite a bit about them. My assumption, from the very day Fiddler had taken me to meet with him, had been that his longevity had been the result of a bargain. After all, that had been the case with all my other tutors. Each one, regardless of their field or level of power, had already had a pact with the demon.

It was weird that he was talking about this. Clavus, for all the honesty his friendship demanded, was very secretive about more than a few periods in his life. I respected that. I always figured that if you lived for over two-thousand years, maybe you earned a few locked doors. I sure wasn’t about to stop him from opening them for me, though.

“I told that repugnant thing,” he continued, indifferent to my surprise, “that I would never make a bargain with him. I’m too old and too experienced to not know how deals with his kind go.”

“Then why did you take me on?” I asked.

Clavus just raised his hands in a sort of half shrug. “I told him I would meet you, just as a matter of curiosity. I’d already heard of you, after all. The Daughter of the Smiling Beast – a name that even demons gave respect.”

I felt my face set into a scowl almost out of reflex. “Don’t call me that,” I demanded. “You know I hate that name.”

Clavus scoffed, waving my interruption away like an errant pest. “You are what you are, stupid horse,” he said. “That name has power, whether you like it or not. Regardless, I wanted to meet you, to find out what kind of child would be patronized by so notorious a fiend.”

“Yeah?” I asked, feeling my hackles standing at having had an unpleasant memory dragged up. “And what’d you see?”

“Potential,” he said as he walked to the door. “Meet me outside. I have something to give you before you leave.”

The door closed behind him, and I stood alone in my bedroom with nothing but the thoughts and questions he’d left behind to keep me company as I finished dressing. As I was looking for some pants, I caught a look at myself in the mirror hanging on the inside of the closet door.

I looked about how I felt. Someone must have tried to clean me up, but I still had little flecks of mud in my frizzed, tangled hair. And for having been unconscious for a day and a half, I sure looked like someone who hadn’t slept in a week.

I leaned closer, tracing the bags under my eyes with my fingertips. Luna, Clavus, Twilight, even Cilia – I couldn’t help wondering what it was that everyone else seemed to see in me that I couldn’t.



* * *