Sundowner

by King of Beggars

Chapter 7 - Night Moves

We drove in utter silence, save for the roar of the heater going at full blast and the splash of tires churning through flooded streets. Lightning must’ve screwed with the broadcast towers, because not even the radio could save me. It was all static, storm warnings, and an AM station that was trying to make the week’s college baseball scores sound exciting. I would’ve put on a tape or something, but the case with all my cassettes was under Celestia’s seat. Didn’t help that I took the extra long way home, just to be sure nothing was following us.

Cheese Cake had tried to give me a little pep talk on my way out of the restaurant. It was mostly the standard platitudes about how nobody with a little sister liked it when that sister brought someone home, and that I shouldn’t take anything Celestia said as personal. Cheese didn’t know enough to know the situation was more complicated than that, but it still made me feel a little better knowing she was in my corner.

The city streets were in rough shape. Some places were ankle-deep with water, and downed power lines were dancing on sidewalks, throwing up sparks that might have caused a few fires if everything hadn’t been soaked down to the atoms. The people who’d gotten caught in the downpour were hurrying home, quick as they could without being reckless in the poor conditions.

I kept my eyes on the road, but I couldn’t help but sneak furtive looks out the corner of my eye at Celestia. She hadn’t so much as glanced at me since we’d left the ICLOP. She just sat there, waterlogged and emotionless as she glared at her phone in distraction. I might as well have been a taxi driver to the woman.

Even going slow, the drive should have only been around a half hour, but I pulled up my driveway feeling fifty years older. I didn’t even bother pulling into the garage, I parked and killed the engine as soon as I was in the drive. The second the car was stopped, I got out like it was on fire.

The girls must have seen the lights as I was pulling up or something, because I was barely on the porch before the door was open and Luna had rushed out in her bare feet. I almost took a tumble back onto the lawn as the little blue-haired minx practically threw herself into me, burying her face in my neck and doing her best to squeeze the life out of me.

“Thank god you’re okay,” she whispered in my ear.

At a loss, I just put my hands on her waist as best I could with my arms pinned to my sides. My pitiful attempts to reciprocate the hug had her nuzzling into my shoulder even harder, like she was trying to mark me with her scent.

Twilight was there too. She was standing in the doorway, bouncing with an unrestrained childish glee that would have been appropriate if I’d come up the driveway with a new puppy in my arms.

Celestia was right behind. I knew she was there because I could feel her eyes trying to burn a hole through me.

“Hey, we better get inside,” I said, giving Luna a feeble pat on the small of her back.

Luna disengaged her bear hug and pulled me into the house by the hand. Twilight stepped aside to let us in, and when Luna helped me out of my jacket in the entryway, Twilight took it from her and folded it carefully, laying it on the phone stand with almost reverent care.

Luna and Twilight crowded me as I bent over and undid the laces to kick off my boots. Questions were getting fired at me in salvos from both directions. Luna wanted to know if I was hungry, or hurt, or if I wanted a change of clothes – she wanted to take care of me. Twilight’s questions were just as rapid-fire, but more along the lines of asking what it was like and what I’d done to break the storm, while also trying to give the play-by-play of what the whole thing had looked like from all the way out here.

I was hard-pressed to decide which was making me more uncomfortable, Twilight's gushing worship or Luna's pampering. They were both more than I deserved, and too much for me to cope with after the night I'd just had.

“Guys, please.” I held up my hands to stall further questions, and to my surprise they both quieted down right away. I rubbed my forehead like I was trying to soothe a migraine and affected a weary tone. “I’m actually kind of tired, ya know? I used up a lot of magic, so I think I need some peace and quiet to recharge my batteries.”

It was a lie. I was comfortable in lies. A good enough lie was a house that could shelter you from any rain.

“You want to go to bed?” Luna asked.

“I need quiet, so I think maybe the attic is better,” I said.

Twilight made a little chirp of recognition. “Oh, because of those magic thingies you were drawing on the walls?” She turned to Luna and tugged on the older girl’s wrist. “She’s got all kinds of cool magic stuff up there.”

Bless her heart. The kid was inadvertently helping me sell my lie by making the same logical leap that I was going to use to defend my decision.

We exchanged a few more words, which consisted mainly of me insisting that I didn’t need anything other than rest, and letting them know they had the run of the house. I almost mussed Twilight’s hair in passing, but I could still feel Celestia’s gaze, and what had become an almost reflexive gesture of affection these last few days felt shamefully inappropriate under her watchful eyes.

I went upstairs alone, pausing just long enough to grab a blanket out of the hall linen closet where I kept the towels. Once I was safely in the attic, I shut myself in and inhaled the musty scent of wood shavings and dust. I reached overhead and grabbed the pull-chain for the light. I could find it easily, even in the dark.

I picked a corner of the room at random and hunkered down, wrapping myself up in the blanket, which wasn’t much thicker than a sheet, but was better than nothing. There were no heating vents in the attic and I’d torn out most of the insulation to expose more of the house’s framework for magic junk, so there was a definite chill up here that was somehow worse than just being outside. It was enough to make me regret not bringing my jacket. At least my clothes had mostly dried from battling that storm earlier, so thankfully I wouldn’t completely freeze my tits off.

I wasn’t even remotely tired, but I forced myself to sleep anyway. I didn’t want to be here, in the waking world where I had to deal with necromancers and orphans and potential girlfriends and bitchy dopplegangers of psuedo-mothers.

I just wanted to be alone. I wanted some peace and quiet.

* * *

Whether it was intentional or not, Celestia had hurt me. She hadn’t said anything I hadn’t been thinking to myself, but that was probably why it had stung so bad. Her words had touched on one of those deep down fears that kept me up at night – the fear that even if I could be the good person I was striving to be, I’d never be able to fully outrun my past. The power that I had made me different from normal people, and because of it I couldn’t have a normal life, with a normal lover, normal kids, normal friends. They’d always be too… fragile… to exist in my orbit.

That knowledge was especially bitter fruit when I recalled the way Luna and Twilight had looked at me the night before – as if the leather jacket on my back was made from the freshly tanned skin of the Nemean Lion. I wondered what they would think if they knew that the thing I’d done the night before – that impressive, heroic thing – was accomplished using a demon’s power. A demon’s power paid for with an IOU on my soul, no less.

I’d slept well, at least. No dreams, and I’d woken up feeling better than I had in years.

I knew the reason, of course. I’d let Fiddler’s magic take hold of me again for the first time in a long, long while. My body felt light, felt good. The little aches and pains that I’d grown used to were still there, but they were muted and hazy, like all my delicate and tender bits were covered in bubble warp.

I hated it. I hated how comfortable I felt curled up in the warm blanket of a devil’s power, and how easy it was to say that I felt like I was myself for the first time in a long while. I knew it for the trick it was. That wonderfully terrible magic was addictive and what I was feeling was just the euphoric guilt of a junkie riding the high of her first time off the wagon in years. I wasn’t even tired. Considering the magic I’d been slinging around the night before, I should’ve been half dead, but the bump of power I’d borrowed from the ink had me feeling like I was back in my prime – I probably was.

It was all just a reminder of how little I was like other humans. I had their shape, but the insides were wrong, like a piece of fruit that squirmed in your mouth when you bit into it.

I tried not to think about the myriad of problems that had accumulated in my lap over the last week, but there wasn’t much in the way of distraction in the attic aside from tracing the magical formulas in my wards or poking at my empty belly. If I’d been a smarter woman, I would’ve claimed the basement as my recuperation place. At least I would’ve had something to read, and maybe I could’ve licked the cookie crumbs Twilight had left in the folds of the beanbag.

The online news, which was blowing up with stories about the storm, had been an interesting diversion. The crackpots were throwing around their end of the world theories and meteorologists were called in for emergency interviews, allowing them to enjoy the type of flash-in-the-pan celebrity status that was usually reserved for reality TV stars.

What was really interesting, though, was the fact that even days after the fire, there was still no news about Twilight’s missing body. Even with the little extra magical oomph I’d put in the fire, there should have still been some remains. Medical and fire examiners aren’t idiots, even with the freak storms contaminating the scene, I had trouble believing that they’d gone this long without noticing that Night Light’s family of four had left only three corpses.

Maybe they thought the remains of the magical construct I’d left burning in the upstairs hallway were from Twilight? Nah, that was stupid. Any idiot off the street could tell that there wasn’t a single human bone in that thing.

Once I’d realized I was seeing something weird, I’d practically chewed my lower lip bloody mulling it over. Ultimately, all I could do was shrug and thank my lucky stars that the situation wasn’t even more complicated than it already was.

Or maybe it was more complicated and I just wasn’t smart enough to see how… Man, I really wasn’t cut out for this crap. Thinking about it only made me feel more inferior, like I was taking a test for something I’d never even thought to study.

I whiled away the night like that, until I’d had my fill of the news. The last of my phone’s charge had been spent watching cat videos, and once that was gone there was nothing to do but try to sleep a little more, though even that was becoming increasingly difficult.

It was almost noon when I heard the heavy clunk and squeal of the attic stairs being pulled down. I could tell it was Twilight from the sound of her footfalls. An adult woman would have had heavier steps. Her head popped up through the hatch, wearing a big smile on her face that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She looked nervous, like maybe she was afraid I would get mad at her for disturbing me.

“Hey,” she said as she climbed the rest of the steps and walked over, her stride stuttering with hesitation. She was holding a plate of something that was steaming in the cold attic. “I made you rolly-tacos... In the microwave.” She held the plate up with both hands like an offering.

I gave her a smile. I was glad to see her, but I knew I shouldn’t be. I didn’t have the right. I waved her over and justified the smile to myself by saying I was happy to see the tacos. “Thanks, kid. I was getting peckish.”

Twilight handed me the plate, all smiles as she sat cross-legged on the dusty floor a few feet away. She was dressed in a denim skirt and a t-shirt with the animal sidekick of those magical princess characters she liked on it. It was one of the outfits I’d gotten her, but her wearing something other than pajamas was probably Celestia’s doing. That woman struck me as the kind of prig that frowned on being comfortable in the middle of the day.

“How’d you get up here?” I asked.

“Luna pulled down the stairs for me.” Twilight cast a quick glance back toward the open hatch. She leaned in and half-whispered to me conspiratorially, “She wanted to come up, too, but I told her you were probably too tired to make-out.”

I laughed and the crappy microwave tacos went up my nose. I coughed until it went back down, patting my chest to settle the little panicked flutter.

“Good call,” I told her. “You guys doing okay down there?”

That troubled look again. She wiggled, fidgeting as she tugged at the hem of her skirt anxiously. “We’re okay…” she answered meekly. Another look back. “We’re, um… Luna and I are doing laundry.”

I groaned internally, trying to keep the grimace off my face. I already had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about, but I figured I’d ask anyway. “What are you washing?”

“That big pile of clothes in your room,” Twilight explained, shrugging apologetically. “Luna and I slept in your bed since you were up here, and Celestia slept in mine. Luna said it smelled bad in there, so we should wash the clothes for you… but she also spent a long time smelling one of your shirts… if it was stinky then why would she want to smell it?”

I stuffed one of the soggy-slash-dry taquitos into my mouth and chewed it to buy myself some time. I reasoned that maybe if I spent long enough eating I wouldn’t have to answer that question. Kids were full of questions, and if you just waited long enough they’d forget whatever they’d just asked and move on to another.

Sadly, Twilight was once again proving to not be like other kids.

“This is another one of those weird grown-up couple things.” It wasn’t a question. She was just stating the facts as she saw them.

I nodded and she seemed to accept that.

“Anything else happening?” I asked.

“Celestia and Luna are fighting a lot...” Twilight wrung her little hands in her lap.

I couldn’t hold in the sigh. “About me?”

Twilight nodded. “Celestia’s been saying bad stuff about you, like that you’re dangerous and scary... I wish she’d just go home. We don’t need her here.”

Celestia sure didn’t waste any time trying to sour their opinions of me. Guess I couldn’t blame her. Twilight, Luna, and I were already chummy. The last few days had the three of us thick as thieves, and if Celestia was going to sell them on distancing themselves from me, she had to start laying the groundwork right away.

I didn’t like it, but I didn’t blame her for it. Probably would be doing the same, if our positions were reversed.

“You shouldn’t be like that with her,” I said as I wiped my greasy fingers on my jeans. “She cares a lot about you… and besides, I thought you liked her.”

“She’s saying bad things about you,” Twilight repeated, her mouth drawing into a tight, angry line. “I don’t like it.”

“That’s stuff between me and her,” I explained. “You don’t gotta worry about how Celestia and I feel about each other. That’s grown up stuff.”

“It’s not just about that,” Twilight insisted. Her cute little face scrunched up in childish indignation. “She won’t leave me alone. She says she wants me to live with her.”

I hesitated, but Celestia’s words were still bouncing around in my head, and I figured this was as good a time as any to start pushing Twilight in her direction.

“Would that be so bad?” I asked, gently.

The words felt wrong in my mouth. I’d heard the same from the adults back at the orphanage, talking down to the few kids who were up for adoption but didn’t want to go with whoever had picked them out of the rabble. It was rare, but not every kid wanted to be saved. Whether it was because they were scared, or because they just didn’t trust strangers, some kids were just fine with the idea of never leaving the orphanage until they were too old to stay. For them, the orphanage had been the most permanent home they’d ever known. When you’ve been hurt, when you’re a kid who’s all on their own, it’s hard to leave a place of security, no matter how tenuous it might be.

Twilight seemed to curl up into herself, her arms and legs tucking in defensively – the number-one technique in orphan kid kung fu for defending against uncomfortable questions. “I don’t want to go with her…”

“Why not?” I asked, although I already had an idea of why, and the thought that I might be okay with it actually scared me a little. “Celestia’s got money, and she’s smart, educated… she’s going to be something someday and she seems to really love you.”

“She doesn’t understand,” Twilight said, mumbling the words into her chest. “She doesn’t know what it’s like…”

I wanted to hug her, just to touch her and let her know I was here with her. I knew I shouldn’t though. I was getting too comfortable with the thought that hugs were okay.

In the orphanage, our caretakers only touched us when it was necessary. They knew they were only meant to be our temporary custodians, and getting too close to us made it harder for everyone when it was time to adopt a kid out, or for staff to leave for other jobs. Distance was important, it was a buffer that protected us – the adults as much as the children.

“She wants to understand,” I said softly, playing another borrowed card.

Twilight looked up, her cheeks flush with indignation. “She wants someone to kill her parents?” Twilight asked coldly. “Or Luna? Does she really want to know what that’s like?”

“You don’t mean that,” I said with a sigh.

She looked away, nearly in tears and clearly ashamed of her sudden outburst. “I know…”

“You knew this was going to be temporary.” I scratched at my arm nervously, immensely uncomfortable with this conversation. I’d never in a million years have thought I’d be playing the role of the adult in one of these discussions. “I told you I’d find you a good home, and maybe it happened a little quicker than either of us thought it would, but I really do think that Celestia will make a great home for you. I would never have given the okay if I didn’t think she was perfect for the job. Plus, she lives with Luna, so you’ll get to see her all the time. Even if you’re mad at Celestia, you’re not mad at Luna, are you?”

Twilight shook her head. “No, I’m not… I guess that would be okay… And… and if I’m living with Luna, that means I’ll get to see you a lot, too, right?”

My mouth suddenly felt very dry.

I’ve stared monsters in the eye and didn’t flinch, but the hopeful look in Twilight’s eyes, begging me to tell her that I wouldn’t be completely out of her life… that was almost too much to bear. It took all my willpower to maintain eye contact, and all my skill as a performer to put on a smile that felt convincing.

“You’ll see me as often as Luna will,” I said.

Not a lie, just not all the truth. Fiddler would be proud.

Twilight smiled, obviously relieved, but not fully happy with the answer. She was a sharp kid, so maybe she saw the loophole I’d left myself. If that was the case, she was also smart enough to know not to press the issue.

Twilight reached for the empty plate and stood to leave. “I’ll let you get your rest,” she said. “Do you need anything else?”

“Nah, I’m good, thanks, kid.”

Twilight disappeared down the stairs, tossing a final wave just as her head was disappearing beneath the floor, and a few seconds later the hatch closed up. Luna must have been sitting down there and listening to us. I felt a flash of irritation that she’d been eavesdropping, but I squashed it. She was probably just worried. Worried about me, about Twilight, about everything. Luna was a worrier – people with big hearts always were.

My chest tied itself into a knot as Luna came to mind. I regret a lot of things about my love life, but breaking up with Luna was going to be at the top of the list. I was really starting to like her.

I could make the argument that Luna was an adult, that she was old enough to understand the risks of being involved with me and to make a decision for herself of whether or not it was worth it to her to be with me... I could make that argument, but it would feel hollow. Deep down, I knew that I didn’t want Luna getting wrapped up in the trash hole my life was anymore than I wanted that for Twilight.

I cared enough about them that I wouldn't be so selfish as to inflict myself upon them.

I laid down, wondering if I could force myself to sleep again without the use of magic and doing my best not to think about Luna. It was no use, though. Now that she’d come to mind, she was like a song with a catchy hook, and even as the minutes ticked by I found I couldn’t think of anything else. It didn’t help at all that I could hear little snippets of her voice from downstairs from time to time.

I grabbed my stuff and got up. I couldn’t be in this house right now.

I lowered the stairs, careful to wait a second before pushing them down all the way so I wouldn’t brain anybody that might be in the hall below. I tiptoed downstairs, sneaking out of my own house like I didn’t want my parents to know I was going to see Judas Priest. The TV was on in the living room, so nobody had heard me lowering the attic stairs, and it looked like they were all in the kitchen anyway. The coast was clear, so I made a beeline for the front door, pausing only long enough to grab my jacket and boots.

It was sunny out. The sight of clear skies straight to the horizon pissed me off something fierce, like they were mocking me with their promise of a better tomorrow. I couldn’t believe I was missing the rain. A little cold water on my face would’ve been great, even with nasty magic in it.

I walked to the end of the porch and dropped to my ass, sitting on the stoop and dusting off the underside of my socks so I could tug my boots on. The door opened behind me as I was tying my laces, and for just a second I felt a flutter of panic.

Luna was standing in the doorway, a puzzled look on her face. She was wearing an outfit that I immediately recognized as having come from the pile in my room – a pair of dark red shorts that I sometimes wore as pajamas, and a plain white tank top that hung on her like a nightgown, her being so much more petite than me. My heart betrayed me again, pounding at the sight of her in my clothes.

“Hey,” she said in a half-whisper. She looked over her shoulder, back into the house, and stepped out, carefully closing the door just as quietly as I had. “Is everything okay?”

I had wanted to get out of here without anybody catching on, but I guess the universe screws Sunset yet again. I took out my frustrations on my laces, pulling them fight enough to hurt.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m all better, but I can’t just sit around all day. I still got some stuff to take care of. Magic, y’know? Storm like that, it can screw things up real bad. Have to make sure there’s no weird aftershocks.”

“Oh…” Luna muttered, obviously unconvinced. She chewed her lip apprehensively, fixing me with the same cautious look that Twilight had when she’d thought she was disturbing me in the attic. “What time will you be back?”

“I dunno, depends on a lot of things.” I stood up and pulled on my jacket. It was too warm for leather, but I felt better – safer – with it on. A little bit of well-worn leather was better than plate armor when you took a dive off your bike and were in a skid.

She crossed her arms under her breasts, hugging herself like she was fighting off a chill. It was such a small movement, but it was genuine and vulnerable enough that the knot in my chest tightened again.

“Tonight?” she asked hopefully.

“Tonight,” I replied, though a moment of hesitation betrayed the certainty of my answer. I honestly didn’t know if I’d be back tonight, but I couldn’t tell her that.

“Okay,” she said, her eyes downcast.

I started walking to the car without saying goodbye, which Luna must have taken as her cue to follow. She plodded along dutifully, still barefoot from last night and seemingly not caring. It was a short distance, but knowing Luna was only a few steps behind made me so self-conscious that I could barely walk a straight line. When I got to the car I found the door was unlocked. I’d been in such a hurry the night before that I had forgotten to lock up.

I got in and started the engine, but a knock at the window kept me from just driving off. Luna was leaning down, her face inches from the glass.

“I can make you lunch before you go,” she said, putting her hands on the door and leaning half way into the car. “Or you could have a shower, since I washed your clothes for you. You don’t have to go right now… I’m sure whatever this is, it can wait. Come inside, at least to say bye to Twilight.”

“No, I can’t put it off,” I said. “If I do, I know I won’t be able to do it later… it’s gotta be now, before it’s too late.”

Luna held out a hand and cupped my cheek. Her hands smelled vaguely of onions from whatever she’d been cooking in the kitchen, with just a hint of the brand of dish soap I used.

“Is it really that bad?” she asked.

I swallowed. “It’s never been this bad before.”

“Okay,” she said, resignedly. She leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t the impassioned, amateurish tonsil cleaning she’d given me before. It was just a peck. Maybe all she wanted was to see if I’d let her do it – a kiss like the first cautious step onto thin ice. “Twilight and I will be here. We’ll be waiting for you, for however long it takes for you to do whatever this is.”

She let go and backed away from the car, giving me silent permission to leave.

I drove away, not daring to look to see if she was in my rearview, because I knew if I saw her I’d end up doing something stupid like turning back around.

I didn’t get very far before something tingling at the back of my skull exploded into a sense of anxiety that spread through me, pouring down until it hit my gut with the hard, bitter burn of cheap tequila. It was something I hadn’t felt for a while, that weird, indescribable sense of having nowhere to go. I’d run away from home twice in my life, and so had twice been homeless. The sensation I was feeling wasn’t as acute as all that, but it was certainly in the same neighborhood.

I couldn’t go home. There were too many problems there, too many regrets that had sprung up like weeds the second I’d stopped tending my garden. And the worst of the regrets weren’t even for things I’d done, but for things that I knew I’d have to do in the very near future.

Nowhere to go. Homeless. For only a day, or two, or seven – there was no telling – but still without a home for the moment. It was a familiar feeling, and bad for the familiarity.

There was a small gas station about halfway back into the city, just at the edge of the suburbs. It was a last gasp kind of Mom and Pop joint that always had cheap gas and homemade beef jerky that they sold out of mason jars with screw-on lids.

I didn’t need gas but I pulled over anyway. I went around the side, where the perpetually out-of-service Quarter-Vac was, and parked.

I leaned back in my seat and just thumped my skull against the headrest until my brain unscrambled itself.

This shouldn’t have been as complicated as I was making it out to be. Luna and Twilight were too good for me, and so I couldn’t have them around me. Once the books were balanced and they didn’t need to hide behind me anymore, they would be free to return to the normal, completely mundane and only slightly-perilous real world. It was better for them, better for me, better for everyone. It was really that simple once I stripped it down to the brass tacks.

But then why did this feel so bad?

I groaned. The little spot in the middle of my chest was burning again. Maybe it’d be a heart attack this time.

Nah, I couldn’t be that lucky.

I fumbled in my jeans pocket for my phone to check the time. I tried to thumb it on and remembered that it was dead. Funny, the things that slip your mind when you’re in the middle of drama. I had a charger in the glovebox, so I plugged it into the lighter socket and got out of the car to buy some more smokes while I waited for it to juice up.

A fifth of a pack and ten bucks of homemade jerky later, I got back in the car and tried the phone.

Seven missed calls, all from Cilia. I knew she wouldn’t call without reason, especially not seven times, so I dialed immediately to return the call.

Five rings, then a small, sleepy voice picked up the other end.

“Sunset Shimmer, you need to learn to answer your phone,” Cilia grumbled irritably. I could hear her stifling a yawn away from the phone. “I take it that storm last night was your doing.”

“The part that ended it was mine, yeah,” I replied. “And my phone died, sorry.”

There was a pause.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “You sound odd.”

“I’m peachy,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“You don’t sound peachy… Whatever. Maybe your mood will improve to hear that my honored Uncle has sent word that he will be arriving within the next day or so.”

“That’s great.” A sense of relief came over me so strongly that it made my skin tingle. I leaned back in my seat and sighed. “That’s great news, thanks.”

“That’s not what I originally called you about,” she added. “One of my nephews went out early this morning to attend some business... He found your man.”

Just like that, my whole body tensed back up. I was having a real roller coaster of a day, but for the first time, I cracked a genuine smile.

* * *

The city was still a mess, which was to be expected after the stratospheric slapfight I’d had the night before. The cold light of day had shown just how bad things had gotten, and the storm hadn’t even touched ground. Trees and powerlines were down all over the city, with police and city workers running Golden Time to try to put Canterlot back in working order. It was already mid-afternoon, and some parts of the city, mostly the older ones, were still flooded. Couple of years ago the City Council had tried to get funding to renovate some of the old irrigation systems that hadn’t been properly maintained since who knows when. It would’ve been a tenth of a percent added to the county sales tax and it had been shut down in a landslide.

Something told me that a redux of the proposal would be a hot button issue come next November.

All the flooding and street repair meant closed roads, so it took a while longer than I had expected to get to the address Cilia had given me. By the time I got there, I was fit to be tied and sick of police barricades, but the sight of the place lifted my spirits with the hope that I would finally be getting somewhere with this screwed up adventure.

The Golden Moon Plaza was a dirty strip mall in a dingy part of town that was somehow even more of a slum than the quaint little barrio where Nightriver Park was. It was the kind of place that most people just drove past – a cold-sore on the city’s face that wasn’t more than a few blocks wide but sat smack dab in the middle of more respected and well-kept neighborhoods. Even the light-up sign in front of the sidewalk seemed like it had given up. The lettering that had once proudly proclaimed the name of the stripmall – written in an ugly font that hadn’t seen commercial use since the 70’s – was faded with age and exposure where the plastic hadn’t been outright broken by rocks.

No one would accuse the joint of being an attractive place to spend your money. More than half the shops were closed, with the windows boarded up with sheets of plywood to protect the glass displays from getting vandalized and to keep out squatters. All it did was add more canvas for the local troublemakers to tag up with incomprehensible graffiti. Some of the plywood hadn’t even survived the storm, and was lying flat in the parking lot or half clinging to the walls with only a few stubborn nails.

As far as I could tell, the liquor store and sex shop at the end of the strip mall seemed to be the only things that kept the shopping center in operation. They were the twin pillars of moral decay holding back the tide of urban decay – it was kind of beautiful in its own way.

I wasn’t here for the booze or blow-up dolls. I had my eyes set on the opposite end of the strip, to the rundown furniture store that occupied thrice the footprint of any of the other shops. Maybe it was because of the extra big display windows, but it was the only one with metal shutters. Even from the street, I could see the that the shutters were conspicuously clean, shiny new metal ruining the overall slum-hole aesthetic. Very suspicious.

I drove past the strip mall to the actual grocery store up the way. Philomena stood out too much and depending on how things went I might end up doing something that the cops would be interested in, so I didn’t want to be all that memorable in case they started questioning the local rummies and daytime perverts.

I parked the car near the entrance and hoofed it to the strip mall. By the time I got back Cilia was already there, standing in an alleyway across the street, between an automatic laundromat and a video store that was somehow keeping the doors open despite the internet totally being a thing. She waved me over and I followed her into the alley, my nose wrinkling only slightly as the smell hit me. I’d spent a lot of time in alleys over the years and found that they all smelled pretty much the same no matter where you went. The stink of urine and over-ripened food was one of those oddly universal bouquets, with only subtle differences to account for local spices. You’d think the storm would’ve washed some of the smell away, but you’d be wrong. All it did was add a pungent undertone of wet dirt and soggy trash.

Cilia greeted me with a nod. “Sunset.”

“Hey, you didn’t have to come yourself. I know you gotta get your sleep.”

Cilia tossed a braid over her shoulder with a flick of her head. “I’ve slept enough,” she said. “It holds back my hunger pains but makes my back hurt. One discomfort isn’t much better than the other.”

“People don’t starve to death of a bad back,” I pointed out.

“I’m not that old yet,” she snapped, her cheeks pinkening in a girlish way. She looked me up and down, relaxing the furrow in her brow at whatever she was seeing. You could never tell what magical beings were seeing when they looked at you, and from my experience that went double for changelings. The little shapeshifting vagabonds sometimes saw things even other magical types couldn’t. It’s what made them good friends to have, but also made them obnoxious as hell when they had a mind for it. “Are you sure you’re alright? You look… disheveled.”

I scoffed. “Says the homeless woman.”

She was right, though. I was still wearing what I’d had last night. My clothes were all wrinkled and crinkly in that way that rain-soaked cloth got when you didn’t dry it right, and my hair was still a mess even after I’d taken a pocket comb to it.

The only thing that rose to my bait was Cilia’s eyebrow. She wasn’t buying my attempts to joke it off and I wasn’t in the mood to explain the complicated mess that my home life had become.

“Like I said on the phone,” I said, pointedly looking away, “I’m peachy. Let’s just take care of business.”

“If that’s what you want.” Cilia subtly pointed to the shuttered furniture store across the way. “My nephew stuck around and watched this place all morning. Your man entered and left several times, but he’s not in right now. He left, along with another man – very big, red hair – and they haven’t been back in the past hour.”

“Where’s your nephew now?”

“I sent him home.” She pulled her cellphone out to check the time. She was still wearing mismatched donation-bin clothes – today it was a pair of boy’s corduroys, brown, and a knitted button-up Christmas sweater, emblazoned with prancing reindeer, that fit her like a trench coat – but her phone was the newest model. I vaguely remembered that Clavus had once mentioned that Cilia had a thing for electronics. “I didn’t want any of my young ones near here. We do our best to stay under police radar and I don’t want to give them an excuse to start trying to round up the city’s street children by connecting us to a crime scene.”

“Possible crime scene,” I corrected.

She rolled her eyes cutely. “Regardless, I assumed you might need backing up. They’re not as crafty as I am, so it’s better to have them wait at home.”

“I actually appreciate that,” I said with genuine gratitude.

She nodded and hopped up to take a seat on the mangled remains of a laundry cart that was hidden from the street by a dumpster. “To tell you the truth, though, I think this is a bad idea. Uncle Clavus will be home soon. I think it would be wise to wait for him.”

“I’d be inclined to agree with you if we hadn’t all nearly died last night,” I said as I plopped down on the cart next to her. It wasn’t a big seat, but her tiny butt didn’t take much room, so we both fit comfortably enough. “I’m almost certain that the skies will be clear tonight, but I don’t want to give the asshole that cast that spell a chance to rev up another go at it. I don’t know what his resources are like, but I definitely don’t have the supplies I’d need to break that storm twice.”

“It might still be worth the wait,” she said with a slow shake of her head.

“Did he tell you what he’s been up to?”

The long-suffering groan she gave told me everything I needed to know. “He only said that he would be back soon. Regardless, I highly suggest we await his return.”

“You said he might not be back until tomorrow and I want this done tonight if I can manage it,” I explained. “If this guy knows something that can lead me to my necromancer then maybe I can settle all the accounts before morning.”

“You don’t believe this Caballeron himself is your necromancer?” Cilia asked with a curious tilt of her head.

I sighed and leaned against the brick facade of the laundromat. “The more I’ve thought about it the more I’d have to say no, Caballeron’s not the guy. Celestia, the student of Night Light’s that turned me onto Caballeron, said that he had been caught skulking around the college Night taught at. Doing things in person ain’t a necromancer’s modus. They deal in cat’s paws, usually of the reanimated and zombified variety. If he was a necromancer and wanted to get info on Night, he wouldn’t have gone himself.”

“It’s a sound theory,” Cilia commented, nodding in appreciation. “I don’t know many powerful sorcerers who would be hampered by school security.”

“It’s a theory supported by the fact that Night almost definitely had flesh golems stalking him for a while before he got killed.” I kicked a random crushed beer can across the alley. “A guy handling the kind of power that was getting thrown around last night wouldn’t decide to do his creepy stalking like any other mundane magicless mook. Not before breaking out the undead winged monkeys, that is.”

“So then it’s information we want from Caballeron,” she summarised.

“Yeah, he’s gotta be connected somehow. How connected is the real question.”

“He might not wish to speak to you,” she added.

“He will,” I said with finality in my voice. “I’ll make it happen.”

There was a moment of silence as Cilia unpacked the meaning of my words. She was old and magical. A creature that knew the concept of survival with an almost intimate familiarity. She knew was I was hinting at.

“Very well... hopefully this impatience won’t bite us in the rear,” Cilia muttered pessimistically.

“I know you’re more comfortable waiting for Clavus,” I said, “so if you really feel like this might expose your family too much, I’d understand if you wanted to go home.”

I knew she wouldn’t. She already said she was here to back me up, and I knew enough of her character to know that she was the kind of chick that stuck to her guns and did the things she said she was going to do. Regardless, I still felt I had to give her the offer.

She turned it down predictably, rejecting my suggestion with a subtly dismissive wave. “You’ll probably die if I’m not here.”

“Aw, Cil, we’re becoming real friends, ain’t we?” I nudged her with my elbow. I was thrice her size but she didn’t even budge. “Few more days like this and we’ll be braiding one another’s hair and gossiping about boys over popcorn and issues of Teen Vogue. Should we coordinate pajamas now or do we surprise each other?”

“I can see this is going to be a long wait,” Cilia said offhandedly as she leaned against the dumpster we were hidden behind.

“Probably so.”

I could feel Cilia watching me out the corner her eyes, her gaze heavy with unasked questions. I knew she wasn’t buying my attempts at humor. I didn’t know what changelings saw when they looked at emotions, but I knew that she could tell with supernatural certainty that something was wrong. I just ignored it and opened a new pack of smokes while I waited for Caballeron to show.

I wondered, for only a second, if I still reeked of love to her, or if the smell of it was drowned out by the stink of alley trash and mud.

* * *

The sun had already set by the time we saw Caballeron pull up. According to the changeling kid that had spotted him, he was driving around in an early model Cadillac with out of state plates, and just such a car had pulled into the parking lot and gone straight around to the back. Guy had good taste in cars, I’d give him that.

I stood in the shadows of the alley, pacing back and forth as I waited for Cilia to come back. She’d insisted on going ahead and checking the place out before I headed in, and while I was eager to get this over with, I saw the wisdom in her suggestion.

I pulled out my phone and checked the time. Cilia’d been gone for almost twenty minutes. She had said to give her a half an hour before kicking down the door, but I wasn’t sure I could wait that long. I was starting to like Cilia and I knew for a fact that Clavus wouldn’t be pleased if I let his gal Friday get snuffed while he was out of town doing whatever he was doing.

I wasn’t too worried about her getting seen, changeling magic’s too good at what it does. What I was worried about was any warding Caballeron might’ve set up.

The best wards were set in places the caster lived, and the longer they were there the stronger the wards got. At the end of the day, wards were just another way of staking your territory, and the bigger the sense of ownership on a property, the better you could set something up. All the home improvement stuff I did wasn’t just a way to unwind on the weekend, it actively made my house safer.

This half-abandoned strip mall may have been on its last legs, but the two stores still keeping the walls upright did enough business that people were wandering in and out of the property at all hours of the day. The place was way too public for anything too crazy as far as magical protection went.

But there were ways around the limitations of such a public place, of course. I knew dozens of little tricks to set up really nasty temporary wards that covered small areas, but by their nature most of them wouldn’t last very long. If it were me setting up the fences and I wanted something really good? I’d use the life energy radiating off people going to the porno place next door. Humans were at their most full of life when they were all horned up – a little something I’d learned from a succubus who’d run a very successful brothel out West. Now that was a teacher I’d liked. I had lost my virginity in that cathouse.

As for Caballeron, I doubted he knew as many tricks as I did, but even if he was just some low-tier hedge wizard, there was no telling what he knew about setting up wards. Even without a backer, some sorcerers still managed to piece together a pretty decent set of specialty skills. Still, while Cilia wasn’t an expert spell caster, she was as clever as anyone I’d ever met and had enough muscle to punch her way out if things got hairy, so all I could do was trust that she wouldn’t trip her way into something too rough.

Five more minutes went by before I finally caught sight of something small and furry darting across the street. A little rat climbed up onto the sidewalk and hurried into the alley, running straight past me and into the darkness. A few moments later Cilia walked out, again human, wearing nothing but her sweater.

“Sorry, I had to get up on the roof to find an open vent,” she said as she pinched the garment closed with casual modesty. “He’s in and the big fellow is with him. Your man’s magic seems… puny... and the big one is about as magical as a brick from what I can tell.”

I smiled. Most magical creatures were great about sniffing out how magical something was, just as a self-defense thing. After all, if something smells really magical, it’s probably really dangerous. Changelings, being what they were, were especially good at guestimating something’s magical potential, so Cilia’s recon was definitely good.

“How’s it look for warding?” I asked.

“You were right about the wards, nothing serious. There’s something on the doors and on the loading dock gate, but everywhere else is clear.”

“That’s good, the less work for me, the better.” I zipped up my jacket and cast a quick spell that changed my hair color to something a little less conspicuous. I held a lock of hair between my fingers, squinting in the moonlight at the magical dye job. I kind of liked myself as a brunette. “You going to come in with me?”

She nodded. “I’ll be in your shadow. Try not to step on me.”

“Got it, no squishy.”

Cilia turned around and went back into the shadows to shed her human form. Changelings have trouble adjusting their size and that goes both ways. The fact that Cilia could turn into something as small as a rat said a lot for her skill as a shapeshifter. It actually kind of made me wonder what she might look like in her adult human form, considering how man-sexy Clavus’ was.

Questions for another day.

I hurried across the street and went around to the back of the shopping center. Aside from the areas directly in front of the liquor store and the porno shop, the parking lot wasn’t all that well-lit, but it was even worse around back. None of the security lights were working, which meant I would have been running around in the total dark were it not for the moonlight.

There were two ways into the furniture store from the back. The large metal shutter covering the loading dock was just as new and shiny as the one out front. It looked sturdy, but I was pretty sure I could tear it open if I really wanted to.

While that would’ve been flashy and impressive, I decided to just use the back door. It was your standard steel security job. Nothing special, but clearly recently installed, just like the shutters. The thing didn’t even have a dent in it, and I’d always assumed these things came from the factory with at least one built in.

I took a deep breath, pulling in the cold air and holding it until my lungs hurt.

It had been a while since I’d last met face to face with another magician of any caliber, aside from Clavus, of course. While Caballeron was, by all appearances, the bottom link of the magical food chain, he was still a part of a world that I’d thought I’d left behind. It'd be lying if I said a part of me wasn't excited about coming back to it.

Everyone’s got a little bit of darkness in them. It’s that small, dark corner of your soul that makes you slow down to rubberneck at accidents on the freeway. The bit of you that hears about some gruesome video going viral on the internet and wants to go looking for it. That sliver of darkness was larger in me than in most people. It was the part of me that was selfish, that told me, on an instinctual level, that anything was permissible so long as it was what I wanted, and as long as it furthered my own personal goals. It was the part that could turn a blind eye to any sin, even my own.

It was the part of myself I hated… but for tonight, I’d submerge myself in it, just a little. When it came to dealing with other wizards, you couldn’t afford to be soft. I’d do my best to get what I wanted with bluster and posturing, but if intimidation didn’t work, well… there were other ways.

I was staring down a very slippery slope, but I wasn’t about to back down now. I’d known it would end up like this eventually. My course had been set the second I’d pulled Twilight out of that house.

“Just do it the way you were taught…” I whispered to myself. “Be the biggest thing in the room.”

I licked my lips and pressed my hand to the door. There was a slight hum of magic through it. I could feel the current just beneath my palm. Cilia had been right, this was pathetic. Her changeling magic was some of the most powerful concealment mojo in the paranormal world and she probably didn’t even have to try to sneak around this. A little of my own power and I cut off all the alarm bits of the ward, as easily as pulling loose a badly done shoelace.

I magicked open the lock and pushed the door open. The wards were tripped but there were no alarms to warn the occupants, and the defensive part of the magic rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. It was rigged up like a curse, and I think it was trying to give me boils or something. Thing was basically a prank – Home Alone stuff if the kid in that movie was a baby wizard.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss, letting me into a half-darkened loading dock. The lights were on, but only one or two of the fixtures had bulbs. Old couches and boxes of cheap Swedish furniture – the kind you put together with tiny, ineffectual hex keys – were strewn about in the places I could see, and there was probably more in the places I couldn’t. A few crates were mixed in with the abandoned furniture. They were big things packed with straw that stuck out between the slats, suitable for shipping stuff. Celestia had mentioned that Caballeron had been busted for smuggling. This must have been where he stored his merchandise. Criminals that dealt in volume tended to have stash houses like this… well, in the movies, anyway.

The Caddie was parked right in front of the shutter like a garage. A third generation DeVille with a drop top – it was a damn nice car and I was glad I didn’t tear the gate off the hinges. I would have hated to scratch up such a classic.

The sound of teeny-tiny nails clicking on cement scurried past me as Rat-Cilia darted off into the darkness.

I let the door slowly close behind me and took a moment to jot down the car’s license plate – just in case – before I made my way further into the building. Aside from the couple of bulbs overhead, the only other source of light was coming from beneath the crack of a door at the other end of the storeroom.

I inched my way forward, careful not to let the sound of my heavy boots give me away. Once I was closer I could hear the low murmurs of conversation. Two voices, indistinct but definitely male. There was a dusty bronze placard on the door that read ‘Break Room’.

I pressed my ear to the door but couldn’t make out more than a few words that made me think they were discussing dinner plans. Hardly helpful.

There was nothing but to do it, so I shrugged, opened the door, and stepped inside. When you’re making an entrance, sometimes silence is the strongest opening.

My first thought was that this was a pretty big break room. It was almost empty, save for a small table with some chairs, an old beat up Coke machine next to the counter where the coffee pot probably use to sit, and a couple of single beds that had been set up and pushed up against the walls at opposite ends.

There were two men sitting at the table, staring at me in wide-eyed surprise like teenage boys that had been caught looking at dirty magazines. I could understand their shock. The little rascals here were in their super secret criminal clubhouse talking about getting chinese and suddenly some strange dame waltzes in, right past the ‘No Girls Allowed’ sign they’d hung up on the door.

I ignored their stares and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and had a seat. I even gave a little extra flip of my hair, like I was just sitting down for cocktails and business.

Caballeron looked about the same as he had in the picture I’d taken from Night’s office, if a few years older. He had a bit more gray in his hair, and the dirty three-day-old stubble was similarly salt-and-pepper. Even dumbstruck and gaping like a moron, he was handsome in that older-Latin-man way, with crow’s feet and the air of a man who’d lived a lot of life in not so many years. He’d probably broken a few hearts in his time.

You couldn’t say the same about the gorilla sitting opposite him at the table, though. His ugly, stone-cut face was framed by a pair of rust-colored muttonchops. The guy looked like what you’d get if you asked a Renaissance master to carve you a Frankenstein monster out of granite. Cilia had been right about his size, Ginger was huge. His ugly face was probably about as wide as my rib cage. I’m a good height for a human woman, but even sitting, the big guy looked down on me the way I looked down at Cilia. The scar down over his right eye didn’t much help, and it was so stereotypically thuggish that I wondered if he might’ve done it himself, just for the appearance of street cred.

Caballeron was the brains of this pair, I could tell just from the sharpness of the eyes, but Ginger was definitely the one that was tuned for action. He leapt to his feet, the plastic chair that was two-chairs-too-small for him flew back, sliding across the cheap industrial carpet. His hand was in his coat in a flash and a revolver was pointed at my head so quick it was like a magic trick.

I didn’t pay him any mind. He wasn’t who I need to talk to and not even that gun would convince me otherwise. All my senses told me that while he was willing to pull the trigger, we hadn’t yet escalated past the posturing part of the display. No need to get startled.

The big guy’s movement must have kickstarted Caballeron’s brain. He blinked momentarily, but quickly collected himself. The shock on his face was gone like there was a switch that turned it on and off. His expression softened into the subdued, congenial smugness of someone who was used to using words like grease.

“Well, I won’t say I’m not surprised, but I am not one to be displeased when a beautiful woman walks into a room,” he said with predictable greasiness. His voice was smooth and his accent was just prominent enough to seem exotic and sophisticated. He had the seductive latino thing down pat.

“Caballeron,” I said, inclining my head into a slight nod.

The pleasant mask of an aging lothario twitched, cracking just enough to show a flash of ugliness. It was gone as soon as it appeared and he collected himself by smoothing the wrinkles in his shirt like nothing had happened. “Doctor Caballeron,” he said, stressing the title. “Might I be as bold as to ask your name?”

“The gun,” I said simply, ignoring the question. I maintained eye contact with Caballeron, as though the gun I was talking about was in another room and not inches from my head. “Put it away before I get upset.”

“Ah, I am very embarrassed to say that it shall have to stay right where it is for the moment,” he said, holding out his hands like he was helpless. “You understand, yes?”

“The gun,” I repeated with ice in my voice. “Now.”

The muzzle of the big revolver – some big Dirty Harry thing that I couldn’t identify with my limited knowledge of the subject – tapped against the side of my head.

“Please,” Caballeron said as he laced his fingers and leaned closer. He smiled, showing off perfectly straight white teeth. “Let us not make this ugly.”

I figured it would come to this, and I was actually kind of glad that he wasn’t going to be reasonable. This was one of those rare situations where it was easier to do things the hard way.

I gathered magic in my chest and when my words left my mouth the air trembled with their power.

“No one move,” I commanded. “No one speak.”

Compelling someone with magic isn’t an uncommon trick for a certain class of magician. It can be hard to do well, though. One of the common sense rules about it is that you can’t force someone to do something against their nature. When you command someone to do something, it’s easiest if it’s something they might have been inclined to do on their own in some capacity. For instance, say I wanted to command a cop to let me out of a ticket. If the cop was staring at my chest, it’d be infinitely easier to make him do what I wanted than if he wasn’t thinking about what I’d look like bent over the hood of my car.

That’s only common sense to your average wizard, though. If you wanted to make someone do something they wouldn’t ever do, even if you sucked at compulsion as a skill – and personally, I wasn’t actually all that good at it – you could still get it done with enough muscle.

And wouldn’t you know it? After screwing around with Fiddler’s magic, I was just chock full of demony goodness.

I turned my head just enough to glare at Ginger out the corner of my eye. “Put that gun in your mouth,” I told him.

His arm moved, slowly... tremulously... bringing the gun to his mouth. He opened up and stuck the end of the barrel against his hard palate. He was shaking, trying to throw off my control, but the way I was burning magic he didn’t have a chance. This kind of mind control usually made the subject’s brain glaze over, but Ginger’s natural instinct towards self-preservation was keeping him dreadfully lucid. I let him stand that way for a while, just to let the suspense take hold. Cruelty was like making love, best and most effective with a steady hand over a prolonged, sustained period of time.

“Pull back the hammer.”

He twitched in a futile show of resistance, but his big sausagey thumb still moved. The chamber turned and the mechanism locked into place with a click. Ginger shut his eyes and let out a blubbering moan. He was mewling in fear, half-sobbing. He didn’t look the type to scare easy, but magic like this was a special case. When you’re in the grip of magic that’s way, way beyond your understanding, it touches the most naked and animal part of you. That’s what magic was – power that could bring even kings to their knees in fear.

I could feel Caballeron struggling against my first command. I released my hold on Caballeron just a bit. Not enough to let him move, just enough to let him talk.

“You wanted to say something?”

“Please!” he said immediately. “Please, let him go!”

“I warned you. Now you have to pay the price for your disrespect.” I held out my hands helplessly. “You understand, yes?”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he implored. “Please, he is my subordinate, his rudeness is my failing.”

Huh. I had expected a little negotiation before outright surrender. The guy seemed awfully concerned for his partner. I raised an eyebrow at that.

I made a show of thinking about it before I shifted my focus back to the big guy. I released my magical grip on both of them, but even without magic my words still had weight.

“Take all the bullets out of that gun, then set it on the table along with anything else you’ve got on you.”

Ginger did what I said. He emptied out the gun right onto the table, sending loose bullets rolling around. He set the revolver in front of me, like a gift. A punch knife and a second little single-shot pistol from an ankle holster joined it.

I gave Caballeron a look and he immediately pulled a small stitchwork doll from the breast pocket of his khaki shirt. I held out my hand and took it from him.

It was a little hoodoo doll. They’re common enough that even regular folks knew what they were from movies and stuff, but in the right hands the real deal was way more versatile than that pin-cushion stuff. Still, this faceless little scarecrow wasn’t much. I’d spent some time under a mambo and had sewn these things by the dozen. It was interesting magic, but I had hated that teacher. She’d cut open my back and carved the names of all the Loa she knew directly onto my ribs. Even with magic dulling the pain that had hurt like hell. I hadn’t even kept those carvings for very long. Once I was finished learning from her, Fiddler had removed them because he said they would interfere with later lessons.

I used my magic to snap the stitches and undo the fabric. The doll practically melted, turning to loose threads and tufts of cotton that slipped through my fingers. The small velvet bag inside, the gris-gris, was where the real magic was. A spell in a bag, the mambo had called them. I opened the pouch and dumped the ashes and bits of bone and feather onto the carpet.

Caballeron watched me break his toy with a look of sad resignation. It was trash to me, but he’d probably paid quite a bit for whatever he’d stuffed the bag with.

I tossed the empty bag over my shoulder, shoved the weapons to the middle of the table, and gave a smile. We’d reached the part of this interaction where I no longer needed magic. They knew what the deal was and they would talk. It was better this way. Compulsion magic is bad for conversation because it fogs up the brain even when you’re really, really good at it, and all the power I was using to make up for my lack of magical charisma would have been very bad for them if I’d kept it up. They probably would’ve preferred the bullet by the time I was done.

“Now we can talk like adults,” I said.

Caballeron licked his lips dryly and laid his hands flat on the table. “May my associate please be excused from the proceedings to attend to himself?”

I quirked an eyebrow and wondered what he meant by that. I looked over at Ginger, who was standing with his hands at his sides, red in the face from more than just his genetics. It took me a second to notice the big wet spot on the front of his pants. He’d pissed himself and I hadn’t even realized it. Spending the day in an alley, next to a dumpster, probably had something to do with me being momentarily blind to the smell.

“He can sit in the corner,” I said. “He can clean himself up after I leave.”

The big guy was still shaken, but he didn’t move until he had the okay from his boss. With a nod, Caballeron sent Ginger shuffling off to the corner, geisha-like in his timidity.

I wasn’t worried about him causing trouble out of sight. Cilia was probably prowling around in here somewhere. She’d keep an eye on him.

“I apologize for the rude greeting,” Caballeron simpered. “You seem to know my name, but I do not remember having met you before…” He trailed off, probably waiting for me to fill in the blank. When I remained silent he cleared his throat uncomfortably and continued. “Yes… I… might I have the humble pleasure of knowing your name?”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out a cigarette. I’d practically emptied the pack in just a day. I conjured a tiny flame and lit up. The flame danced in my hand, weaving in and out between the tips of my splayed fingers. I watched it a bit, pretending the mundane trick was more important than the man in front of me.

“I’m… was... a friend of Night Light’s.” I snuffed the flame out with a pinch. “That’s all you need to know.”

A curious look of disbelief came over Caballeron. Couldn’t blame him, Night Light wasn’t exactly a supernatural wheeler and dealer. I’d been just as surprised to know that Night knew a guy with even a hedge wizard’s grasp of the art.

Caballeron recovered quickly enough. You could only really be surprised so many times in a night before you start going numb to it. “My apologies, but I did not expect Night Light to know someone of your eminence…” He lowered his head respectfully. “I take it you heard of his passing?”

“His murder,” I corrected. “I saw what happened to his family.”

“Oh…” He squirmed a little before asking, “Was it… quick?”

“You tell me.”

Caballeron’s eyes narrowed to slits. “If you are accusing me of having a hand in his demise then I must inform you that you are sorely mistaken,” he ground out in a tone that was just south of disrespectful.

That was a bit more backbone than I’d expected. Must have touched a nerve.

I tapped out the ash of my cigarette directly onto the carpet. “But you do know who killed him.”

He nodded.

“Then you’re going to tell me everything you know.” I took a long drag and let it out with a long sigh. “If I think you’re lying I won’t be happy.”

“If you are Night Light’s friend then I have no reason to lie to you,” he said resolutely. “He was killed by Ahuizotl.”

Ahuizotl? That was an odd name. Sounded Central American, so it fit, I suppose. I may not have known all the small fries, but I was pretty well acquainted with the bigger names amongst the really dangerous sorcerers, so it was a surprise to hear an unfamiliar one. Could’ve been a guy from another world, though. That would make some sense.

“Never heard of him,” I admitted. “Why’d he go after Night?”

“Truthfully? It is… very complicated.” He rubbed his face with both hands, the fear he’d had since I started throwing my weight around replaced by an air of weariness.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning, then?” I put a boot up on the table and snuffed my cigarette on the sole, then leaned the chair onto the back legs, hands folded over my belly like I owned the joint.

“I am a procurer of antiquities,” he said after a moment of thought.

“A smuggler,” I clarified.

“Yes,” he answered with a subtle dip of his head, “I have been called that. When people desire objects which are otherwise out of reach, I obtain them for a nominal fee.” His hand drifted up towards his left breast, resting over the spot where the protective sigil I’d seen in Night Light’s picture was. “In my youth I had some dealings with the supernatural, and that knowledge took me far in my adult career. Art and antiquities pay well, but magic pays even better.”

He wasn’t wrong. There weren’t many people who worked as finders for magical objects, and pretty much all of them lived like kings – caviar and whores by the boatload, with said boats floating in seas of top-barrel scotch. Someone with proper supernatural backing could have almost unlimited resources, and the people who catered to them could reach into those deep pockets without having to pay the same steep price as their clients. It wasn’t all roses, though. There was always risk involved in getting yourself tangled up with people at the top of the magical food chain. I was already getting the feeling that that was what had happened with Caballeron and this Ahuizotl guy.

But what did Night have to do with Caballeron’s shady dealings?

“I deal mainly in small objects of power,” he explained. “Cursed idols, the remains of otherworldly creatures, and so on. I once even had in my possession an atlas of portals into other worlds which sold for a princely sum. However, I never expected to find myself approached by one of Ahuizotl’s caliber.”

Caballeron patted himself down absently, searching for something in his pockets. He pulled a small plastic lighter from his pocket and palmed it as he continued his search. I guessed what he was after and threw him one of my smokes.

“Ah, yes, thank you,” he said, taken aback by the sudden generosity.

I shrugged it off. If I needed to scare him again it’d be easy. Good showmanship is about knowing when to shut the audience out and when to bring them in. If throwing him a bone kept his mouth moving, that was fine with me.

He lit up, tossed the lighter onto the pile of weapons, and continued.

“The name of Ahuizotl is known in the Latin Americas, but only in whispers and mostly by those who have made names of their own. I’m no such figure,” he waved his cigarette in the air vaguely, “but I do have something of a talent for finding things out. Those of us who live in the cracks of the walls that separate mortals from the truly powerful are skilled in these things.”

“If you’re such small potatoes then why did this Ahuizotl guy tap you?” I asked.

“Small ‘potatoes’ though I may be, as I have said, I am well connected,” he replied in a deadpan. “I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew a man, who knew the location of something Ahuizotl required.”

“And what would that be?”

“A knife.” He held the cigarette between his lips and moved his hands to indicate the dimensions of the object, which was about as big as a large kitchen knife. “It is about this size, made of sharpened obsidian – volcanic glass. Such things were fairly common in Pre-Columbian Latin America. Obsidian was precious to the peoples of those lands, but it was used in many goods. Think along the lines of gold – a luxury, though nothing particularly rare.”

“So why’d he want it?”

“The knife was his,” Caballeron said, shrugging. “He said it was stolen several hundred years ago.”

I blinked. “Wait, several hundred years ago? How old is he?”

“To hazard a guess?” He screwed up his face in thought. “Over seven-hundred years, if the stories are to be believed.”

My jaw dropped at that.

Magic does weird stuff to humans, mostly because their bodies aren’t naturally inclined to hold magic in them. Depending on what sort of magic you’re doing and how it’s used, a human lifespan could be reduced to a few years of brilliant power, or extended into the triple-digits. Some sorcerers were able to strike a good balance and lived a normal human lifespan, dying naturally of old age like any other person, but that was rare. Rarer still was the practitioner that was able to extend his life past three-hundred or so – magic was just too hard on the human body to live much longer than that.

Even guys that sold their souls for eternal youth always died very early, usually by the design of whatever being held their soul marker. Demons don’t make deals that prevent them from collecting, they always leave a loophole.

But, man, almost three-quarters of a millennium? That was crazy for a human.

“He couldn’t be that old,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Even with the best deal in the world, that’s not a human lifespan.”

“Indeed,” Caballeron replied, blowing a ring of smoke above his head. “According to rumor, his body died long ago, but his soul has been chained to the flesh, kept animate by his will and magic. By all accounts he is the most powerful necromancer alive, and what is left of him is anything but human.”

I frowned at that. That didn’t make a single lick of sense. You couldn’t just… just do that to a soul.

The soul of a living thing is complicated. It’s the essence of a living being’s intellect, their capacity to grow and think and love – everything that makes a person a person is within the soul. All that potential wrapped up in a single package is also what makes a soul one of the most powerful things in existence.

The whole reason that demons and gods make deals with mortals at all is to get their souls. The soul itself isn’t magic, but it can be… refined, or eaten, or whatever higher-existences call the act of devouring a soul and turning it into magic. When you make a deal, a piece of the soul is gouged out, marking it as the property of the being that owns it, and that small piece of the soul is turned into magic to fulfill the contractor’s desire. Even a small piece of a soul is powerful enough to bend reality itself if that’s what the deal entails.

But everything involving true power comes with limitations.

The first rule when dealing with souls: anything that possesses a soul of its own cannot see or touch a soul, not theirs, not anyone else’s.

And second, but no less important: soulless existences, gods and demons, can touch souls, but they can never take. A soul must be given up freely by the possessor.

These two rules are the unshakable laws that govern souls and the deals involving them. If a mortal practitioner wants to burn their soul for power, they have to find a soulless higher existence to sell it to, and higher existences who wish to increase their personal power have to make deals on the promise of collecting souls later. No entity, no matter how powerful, could circumvent this fundamental arrangement. It was basecode of the universe stuff.

Which meant that if Ahuizotl really was a chunk of meat with a soul chained to it, it wasn’t him that did the chaining. When a damned mortal dies, the debt gets collected immediately and the soul becomes the backer’s full property. If Ahuizotl died, then his soul would go straight to Tlaloc, at which point Tlaloc could do anything with it – which theoretically could include jamming it back in his corpse.

That would mean that what I was dealing with wasn’t some death-worshipping zealot doing awful things in the name of his faith, this was a god’s actual will being carried out by one of his followers. It wasn’t a comforting idea in the least.

“Okay, setting aside the issue of how old the guy is,” I said. I put my feet down and pinched the bridge of my nose, only just barely biting back a sigh. “What was special about this knife that he needed it back?”

“Ahuizotl was once positioned as the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, the ruler of the Aztec Empire’s capital city.” Caballeron snuffed the cigarette on the underside of the table and leaned forward, elbows atop the table. “For years he carried out sacrifices in Tlaloc’s name, offering up their life energy to his god and collecting their hatred in his ceremonial blade. Life energy is a poor substitute for souls to a god like Tlaloc, but Ahuizotl made up for this with numbers. He took thousands over the course of his reign.”

Caballeron shifted uncomfortably, clearly distressed. “You have seen his creatures, yes? He has them in this city. Those awful things bear his name, the ahuizotls, for they are his hands in all his dealings. I did not even meet with Ahuizotl in person, we merely spoke through one of his beasts. They are legends among the mortal peoples of Central America, monsters that lurked in bodies of water and dragged living creatures that wandered too close into the depths. Most were taken to Tenochtitlan to be sacrificed, some went to their deaths and became materials for his craft… Other stories say that the creatures could spirit victims away, directly to Tlalocan, the land which Tlaloc rules. For what purposes they might be taken there, I could not begin to fathom.”

“So he needed the knife,” I summarized. I could already see where this was heading. “I assume it was for a ceremony.”

He nodded. “I obtained this knife for him through great cost and effort. Once I was paid, Ahuizotl made me another offer. He asked for my help in obtaining the sacrifice necessary for a ritual, claiming it was the will of his god.”

I clenched my fist, power gathering in me and waiting to be let loose. “And you gave him Night Light’s family?”

“No!” Caballeron snapped, a sudden anger coming over him like a fever. He slammed his palms on the table, sending the remaining bullets clattering to the floor. “Never! He was my friend!”

Silence gripped the air, broken only by the metallic ring of falling bullets. Caballeron was breathing hard, furious enough to forget how terrified he’d been of me only a few minutes prior. Ginger in the back had gotten up as well. I could feel his eyes on my back.

I could have forced them to sit back down, but I chose to wait, silently staring the fuming man down like a mother waiting out a toddler’s temper tantrum.

Caballeron quieted, his breathing coming under control. He ran his fingers through his thick head of hair and sat back down. This time he didn’t apologize.

“Ahuizotl spoke to me of the ceremony,” he said. “I do not know its purpose, but he claims to have devised the ritual himself and carried out experimental versions of it in the past. This is a working that he has been refining for quite some time and he had already chosen his intended victim…” He paused for a moment, his mouth working like he was chewing on some heavy thought. I couldn’t have expected what he would say next. “You should know… it was not Night Light that Ahuizotl wanted… it was his daughter.”

A chill went through my body and was quickly replaced by white hot anger. I took my feet off the table and the two front legs of my chair hit the carpet with a thud.

“Explain,” I said, practically growling through clenched teeth. “Explain it very carefully.”

“You have her, don’t you?” he asked excitedly. “I had assumed that the reason he was controlling spirits and searching the streets with his beasts was that he had failed to obtain her. It is good that she found someone to—”

“Shut up,” I said. I didn’t even have to raise my voice. I just gave him a look sharp enough to cut his throat and that was enough to make him comply. “You don’t ask about Night’s kid. You just talk.”

Caballeron swallowed audibly and nodded.

“The ceremony, as I understand it,” he said, “requires the sacrifice of children. Tlaloc is fond of them, and so every year a festival was held wherein children were offered up to him over the course of weeks. The children were taken to the tops of mountains, closer to Tlaloc’s domain in the sky, and sacrificed through the removal of their hearts.” His face screwed up in disgust. “They would… frighten the children in order to bring tears to their eyes – torment them. The weeping of the children symbolized the rains that Tlaloc brought and would give power to the ceremony.”

“And Twilight was his intended victim?” I snapped. “That’s why her family was killed? So she’d be sad and cry for this fucking stupid ceremony? Why? Why her!?”

“I do not know!” Caballeron shouted. He held out his hands, palms up, as if to show they were empty. “I asked, but he would not say. He only told that it must be the daughter of a man named Night Light who lived in Canterlot City.”

I glared at Caballeron, unwilling to believe that Twilight could have been the target all along… but the longer I looked, the more I was certain that he wasn’t lying. He was just as confused as I was as to the reasons why.

His eyes fell to his palms, still outstretched to me in supplication. He brought them close and just stared at them in silent anger, betrayal and guilt etched on his face.

“There should have been no reason for Night Light to be the target of Ahuizotl’s ceremony,” Caballeron said, sighing as he weighed his guilt in empty hands. “I thought that perhaps maybe this was my fault. The only contact Night Light has ever had with the supernatural has been myself. I thought that… that maybe I was the vector which landed this evil on his doorstep.” He shook his head slowly, as if in disbelief. “But no, I am not so important. It could not possibly be me. It has to be fate, playing some cruel joke on us all.”

Caballeron slumped in his chair, looking very tired and very sad. “Whatever the case… Ahuizotl told me that he wanted assistance in… preparing the child. I am of a mercenary disposition by nature, but such work is repulsive to me. I was already prepared to turn down the offer once I heard what it entailed, and when he gave the name and location of his intended sacrifice… well…” He gestured weakly in the direction of Ginger over in the corner. “Our band of two was originally a band of five... Ahuizotl does not take ‘no’ for an answer, and does not care for loose ends…”

Caballeron got to his feet. He didn’t ask for permission, and the defeated, haunted look in his eyes told me I shouldn’t demand it. He went to where one of the beds had been pushed against the wall and kneeled down. He reached under the bed and pulled out a long, flat wooden crate, from which he drew a large bottle of wine.

“I am not a good man,” Caballeron said in a quiet voice as he stared at the bottle in his hands. He pulled a two glasses from the case, stood with a groan, and brought the wine back to the table. “I have done things I am not proud of in order to feed myself and to care for my men. I have learned that loyalty is a fragile thing, and this makes it all the more precious.”

He poured the wine and took a sip from each glass before setting one in front of me. It was a show to prove that there was nothing wrong with either drink or glass.

“The men Ahuizotl killed were my subordinates, but they were also colleagues… friends…” He drained the glass in one pull and immediately poured another. “And Night Light was… I made his acquaintance during a brief flirtation with attempting to live a ‘normal’ life. I cared for him very much. He was a good man, with a good and understanding heart. Even when I embarrassed myself by getting caught falling back into my old habits, he stood by me. He said he would fight to make sure I could continue teaching somewhere, because he truly believed that I was also a good man, deep inside.”

He chuckled ruefully into his glass. “We did not part under the best of terms, but that was my doing. I felt it was better to push him away, rather than to drag him down with me. He saw much more in me than there was and a part of me resented him for it… but in the end, I could not abandon him, so I came to help.” He laughed again, swirling the wine around in his mouth like he was trying to rinse out a bad taste. “What could I do, though? By the time I arrived Ahuizotl’s pets were already stalking Night Light from the shadows, biding their time until… I don’t know. Who knows what the hell that monster is thinking? I could not warn him without revealing myself to Ahuizotl, and so I searched for alternate means to help him. Sadly, it all amounted to nothing. I have very little power myself.”

He held the glass up, closing one eye to peer at the artificial light through the liquid inside – an affectation of sophistication that separated the connoisseurs from the winos. “What a strange thing fate is, to have brought my old friend back into my life only to have him taken away in so grisly a manner.”

I couldn’t help but empathize with Caballeron. Here was a man who’d made mistakes and walked a crooked path for selfish reasons, who regretted those decisions to some degree, and whose reflex to melancholy was inebriation.

Maybe the only real difference between us was our skill as sorcerers.

“In my experience, fate is just another word for the universe laughing at us,” I said as I reached for the glass in front of me. I swirled it around and took a small drink, just to get the flavor of it. “Everything I’ve been through this week pretty much confirms as much.”

Caballeron tilted his glass in salute at the sight of me joining him, a wry smile finding its way to his face.

“Night Light was cursed,” I added. “You know anything about that?”

“Cursed?” Caballeron asked, his eyebrows inching upwards. “What sort of curse?”

“No idea,” I said, shrugging with the glass. The wine was good, so I had another sip. “Night got bit by one of the monster ahuizotls, it branded him with a magic tattoo. It was some kind of face. I pulled it off him and showed the design to an expert that identified it as belonging to Tlaloc, but he couldn’t give me more than that.”

Caballeron leaned back in his chair, the glass held to his lips as he mumbled into his wine.

I let him work out whatever he was pondering and tossed a look back at Ginger. Being left alone must’ve given him time to find his balls, and the embarrassment of being so thoroughly shamed by a woman half his size had boiled into frothing resentment. Big boy was just sitting there, watching with a smouldering gaze that communicated a lot of what he would have liked to do to me if I didn’t have magic. He was definitely the type to hold a grudge, but he wasn’t anything I was worried about. I could see two little glimmers of light from beneath the bed next to him that told me Cilia was close by and watching.

Caballeron pulled my attention back with a sigh. His breath fogged the wine glass held against his lips. “No, I’ve no clue what that could be.”

“I could draw the sigil for you,” I offered.

“It will not help,” Caballeron said, swatting the idea away with a wave of his hand. “The curse would have been in the ink itself. If this ‘face’ was Tlaloc’s symbol, it meant very little, but putting curse to ink and delivering it through the bite of a controlled animal – usually something small and unnoticed, like a rat – is quite common in that part of the world. As to what the curse could be, it is almost impossible to know. Very likely it was some sort of… preparation for the ritual, or that at least would be my guess.”

I tilted my head, frowning in frustration at the way Caballeron was making sense, but not making enough sense. At least now I knew why Clavus’ changeling friend had been so vague with his note.

“I don’t get it. If the curse was part of the ritual, why put a curse on Night Light? Why not Twilight, if she was the sacrifice?”

Caballeron shrugged. “Perhaps he intended to curse the entire family eventually, or maybe Night Light was intended to die slowly. The ritual calls for the child to be in tears, emotionally disturbed. A dying father would go quite a way towards that sort of preparation.”

“I dunno… If all he needs is tears then torture would have been enough,” I said, swallowing down the sick feeling I got from putting ‘Twilight’ and ‘torture’ in the same thought. “Seems like an awful roundabout way to get a kid to cry.”

“Perhaps her sorrow needs to be more significant,” Caballeron suggested.

I ran my fingers roughly through my hair, spilling mousey-brown locks in my face. I really wasn’t cut out for this detective stuff. All I was getting was broad strokes, and the finer details seemed to be slipping through my clumsy grasp. That wasn’t good. When it came to magic, the finer details were often more important than the larger movements.

“If he wanted Twilight, then why the storm?” I asked. I had my theories about it, but since I was already bending Caballeron’s ear, I figured it didn’t hurt to get his opinion. “Why risk killing her if he needed her so badly?”

The corners of Caballeron’s lips tugged into a frown. “I am unsure,” he admitted. “Though, Ahuizotl did not strike me as a… balanced individual. I would hazard to guess he was venting his frustrations.”

Yeah, that was about what I figured, sadly enough. When you get right down to it, most of the strongest sorcerers I’d ever met had temperaments that made them more like enormously powerful babies than the wise and learned masters of the arcane they presented themselves as. When you have the power to get anything you want with a snap of your fingers, you end up spoiling yourself. Wizards just outright hated being denied the things they wanted, and when they threw tantrums, rivers boiled.

“So what have you been doing all this time, then?” I asked in a huff.

“There was very little we could do,” Caballeron said, frowning as he glanced helplessly at Ginger. “I was the ostensible sorcerer of our band, but what power I had was more or less worthless. My associate, Mister Rogue, is actually the one of us who had the best luck.”

Ginger puffed up, his lips curling into a sneering grin that stunk of smugness. It was the most arrogant I’d ever seen a grown man look while having a wet stain going down his trouser leg.

“Mister Rogue possesses no magic of his own,” Caballeron explained, “but he does have a rather unique sensitivity to spirits.”

“Gran was a druid priestess,” Ginger said pridefully, his voice a stereotypically gravelly Irish brogue that suited him so well it was almost comical. “Died a’fore she could pass the ways, but she left a bit of the old Sight in the blood, whole family has a tetch of it.”

Caballeron lifted his glass in salute and tilted the contents into his mouth. “Ahuizotl has been rather frantic since Night Light’s home caught ablaze. I assumed that it meant that Twilight had slipped his grasp, likely with the protection of another sorcerer. My assumption was validated when a mass of spirits descended upon the city, flitting from window to window seemingly in search of something.”

“So you had Ginger chase the spirits?” I asked.

Caballeron arched an eyebrow at the name I’d given to his partner, but didn’t comment on it. “He managed to track them to where Ahuizotl’s magic was strongest.”

I rose from my chair in a flash. “Awesome, that means you got his address. Give it to me.”

Caballeron gave a start, my words clearly cutting through the fog of his melancholy and the fuzziness of the wine. “You are going after Ahuizotl?” he asked, blinking at me like I’d just grown a second head.

“I’m going after whoever hurt my friend and orphaned his daughter.”

Caballeron nodded slowly, his hand moving to set his glass down. “You are the one who disturbed the storm last night, aren’t you?” he asked as he looked me up and down with almost academic appraisal, as if he was studying some historical curio.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and shrugged.

Caballeron reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, where he’d had the magic doll, and pulled out a pocket-sized notepad with a stubby pencil threaded through the spiral.

“I liked Twilight, but the last time I saw her, she was just a baby,” Caballeron said as he hunched over the table and began writing out directions. “Night Light’s son, though… I was very fond of Shining Armor. He was a fine lad, inquisitive and rambunctious. Very much the physical type, unlike his father. He took more after his mother, you see. She did lacrosse in college. Lovely woman…”

Some sudden memory stilled his hand as a look of pained longing came over him. It lingered long enough to be noticeable and disappeared just as suddenly. It was the kind of look that made me think there was something more there, something between Caballeron and the older Twilight. It probably wasn’t an affair. In my day job I talked to a lot of people who wanted advice about their love lives, so I’d seen the look of some poor schmuck crushing on his best friend’s wife enough to know it when I saw it. That kind of thing was real common.

It was a tough thing, pining over a friend’s woman. It was the kind of frustration that could drive a man to do desperate, even cruel, things. I got the feeling that it hadn’t come to that, though. Caballeron seemed to have a real thing about loyalty. I got a good judge of character and the way the guy came across told me that he would never have acted on it.

“Excuse me,” he said, clearing the lump in his throat. He finished writing the note and tore it out. “I forget myself. I very nearly showed you something shameful.”

“It’s cool,” I said. I could appreciate him not wanting to get all emotional in front of a woman, Latin machismo being what it was. “Been a rough week all around.”

He dipped his head in thanks and held up the folded piece of notepaper.

I stared at the note, eyeing it suspiciously without reaching for it. I’m a professional liar so I’ve got a good grasp of when someone is trying to give me the business. Everything my gut was telling me pointed to Caballeron playing me straight, but being a cynic at heart meant being distrustful of a lot of things, myself included. I just couldn’t quite swat away the little doubting buzz in the back of my head that was telling me that I might get hoodwinked.

Guess it didn’t matter. Trap or no, Caballeron was the best lead I had at the moment. All the same, didn’t hurt to throw one last threat in.

“Going to give you one freebie to write that again, just in case there’s something wrong with it,” I said, emphasising my words in a way that was unmistakable.

He raised an eyebrow and wagged the slip of paper, encouraging me to take it. “I would not deceive you. I want Ahuizotl dead for what he did to my friend and his family.”

“Be it on your head,” I tossed in casually. I took the note, checked that it wasn’t just a bunch of squiggles, and stuffed it in my pocket.

“The rumors say that Ahuizotl’s power is not what it once was, and the infrequency of his storms would support that,” he said. “If you are determined to battle with him, it would be in your best interests to do so tonight, while he is still weakened from the spell he worked last night.”

“I figured that much out on my own, but thanks for the warning,” I said, mildly impressed that Caballeron had made the same deduction I had.

“You should still be wary,” Caballeron said. “The sun is down, and weakened or not, Ahuizotl still serves Tlaloc. In the pantheon of the Aztecs, Tlaloc is one of the strongest of the Nine Lords of the Night.”

I rolled my eyes. Magical superbeing-types always had big fancy titles for themselves. Demons had an excuse for it, being that their real names could be used as words of power against them, but the gods that took highfalutin appellations almost invariably did it out of pure self-importance. Granted, gods tended to have enough power that they could be as self-important as they wanted and nobody could tell them boo, but still.

It was just so gauche.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said as I turned and made for the door. “Not that this hasn’t been a gas, but I’d like it if you rode that nice Caddie of yours right out of my city and never came back. Don’t worry about writing. I’ve got your scent now. If I need to, I’ll find you.”

I had one foot out the door when the sound of chair legs skidding across carpet made every muscle in my body tense up.

“Wait.”

I stopped, my back still to Caballeron and his ginger golem with the facial scar, holding the door open to the darkened warehouse long enough for Cilia to skitter past me while I kept the room’s attention. “What?” I asked, tossing an impatient look over my shoulder.

“You never gave me your name.”

“I know,” I said with a dismissive flip of my hair.

* * *

Canterlot City wasn’t always a city. Like most places, it had gotten its start as a farming community. The Canterlot Mountains surrounded the valley on three sides, and the peaks were high enough that snow gathered in the winter months, providing water for the city as it melted throughout the year.

The small rivers and creeks that threaded through the valley to the farms and orchards surrounding Canterlot City rarely saw more water than they could handle, but the recent spat of rains had filled them to bursting, and the magical typhoon Ahuizotl had tried to flatten the city with had only made it worse. There weren’t a lot of rivers on my side of town, but heading North, following the directions that Caballeron had given me, I could see that not everyone was so lucky. The real farms had been established close enough to take advantage of the natural water sources, but the difference between boon and bane was often razor-thin, and what had once been the lifeblood of the local farms was now turning the fields into marshland.

What Caballeron had given me wasn’t really an address, more of a series of directions and a description of the place that his big Irish goon had scouted out. I followed the main road out of Canterlot, but about ten minutes out of the city I’d had to turn off the main thoroughfare and onto muddy road that cut the border between a strawberry patch and what might have been a field of kale, or maybe spinach. Honestly, though, it all looked like rice paddy, it was so flooded. The organic grocery types were going to be hurting for their hip salads this year.

The access road was narrow and rocky, and all the water had my tires sinking at least four inches into the muck. Driving in mud is tricky unless you had some clearance, and Philomena was a heavy gal. I couldn’t drive too fast without getting stuck, but driving too slow would have ended the same. Slow and steady was the way. As long as I kept the high beams on and my eyes on the road I’d be fine.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve been out of the city,” Cilia commented, breaking the nearly hour of silence since we’d left Caballeron’s hideout. “This side of the valley all used to be pears, you know... I like pears.”

The little changeling matron had taken off her coat and draped it across her lap. Her elbow was propped up on the door, her chin resting in her hand as she watched the darkened fields roll by. Changelings have good eyes, so day or night didn’t make much difference to her when it came to scenery. Something told me, though, that she was paying more attention to my reflection in the glass than whatever was happening out in the darkened fields.

“Always preferred apples, myself,” I replied.

We hit a bump in the road, probably a half-buried rock that had been unearthed by the rains, and the sound of thunking metal had me grinding my teeth. My poor baby wasn’t made for this kind of off-roading.

“That was quite a good show you put on,” Cilia said. “For a moment I almost thought you might have made that giant man shoot himself.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “What can I say? I’m a showwoman.”

“Impressive as your acting is,” Cilia continued, “I don’t think a simple show of force will make this Ahuizotl character back down. From what I’ve heard and seen, there’s little recourse. This man has to die.”

It was a very simple statement of fact, but a weighty one, so I let it sit for a minute before replying.

“No argument from me,” I said.

Cilia turned away from the window, tilting her head curiously as she looked at me. I realized with some discomfort that it was a supremely child-like quirk that Cilia seemed to share with Twilight.

“Are you going to do it?” she asked.

“Who else will?”

“I could do it for you,” she said as she held up her hands. “No need to dirty your own hands. I don’t mind it.”

It seemed like a straightforward offer, but something about it bothered me.

“Think I can’t do it on my own?” I asked.

“I think maybe you don’t want to. You’re not as bad as you let on.” The car struck another unseen rock and lurched again, but Cilia didn’t so much as blink.

She wasn’t completely wrong. The idea of killing makes me sick to my stomach, but no matter how distasteful I found it, I wasn’t so weak that I couldn’t do it if I had to. I knew that wasn’t what she meant with the offer, but that’s how it felt to me, like she was saying that I couldn’t do something unseemly if it was necessary.

It was complicated, and I’m sure it said a lot about me as a person that I took offense to people saying I wasn’t as bad as I knew I was.

“I'm getting really sick of hearing that,” I grumbled. “I ain’t no fresh-faced kid that can’t see past her own ideals. Sometimes your hands have to get dirty, and mine are already plenty dirty. A little more ain’t gunna hurt.”

“This isn’t about your capabilities,” Cilia insisted. “For all your personal failings, I know you’re a woman of conviction where it counts. Even before I liked you, I at least respected that about you. The offer I’m making is as a friend, to spare your heart a burden that I know you’re dreading.”

I turned up the radio, drowning out Cilia’s disagreeable gum-flapping with the honey-dipped voice of Bob Seger.

“Damn changelings think you know everything,” I muttered.

I could tell from the adorable pout that Cilia’s sensitive changeling hearing had picked up my complaint. She reached over and turned the radio off.

“We know about the human heart,” she said, unashamed of how rude she was being, messing with my radio like that.

Why was everyone touching my damn radio lately? It’s like nothing was sacred anymore.

“Look, it doesn’t matter how I feel. Yeah, maybe at first I wanted to try to end this without any more bloodshed. I would have swallowed down all this anger inside me and abided by whatever agreement we came to, if that was the best way to keep Twilight safe. But that option got blown off the table by the tantrum he threw that almost killed everyone in the city – which includes you and your kids, I might add. The fact that he wanted to torture Twilight for his stupid ass ceremony only upgrades this from ‘should die’ to ‘needs to die’.”

I turned the radio back on, low enough that Cilia wouldn’t have an excuse to try to turn it off again. I wasn’t in the mood to preface my fight with Ahuizotl with a fight with Cilia over the radio. I took my eyes completely off the road for just a second, long enough to level a challenging glare at Cilia, daring her to touch the dial again.

“Night and his wife, Twilight’s big brother, their deaths are on my head,” I continued. “That’s my fuck up, and I need to be the one that sees this through. Me and nobody else. This is my responsibility and if you think you’re going to shoulder that burden for me, then you can just wait in the car.”

The headlights bounced as we hit an extra hard bump in the road, and the slosh of muck turned into the crunch of grinding rock. The access road had widened and turned into a long stretch of drive covered with loose gravel. The drive was smoother, and just about a half mile up the road I could see the outline of man-made structures.

“You really like that little girl,” Cilia said matter-of-factly. “Your feelings about her are very complex, though. I haven’t wanted to say anything, but… It’s different tonight. If you want to talk about it, I’d be happy to help you sort out whatever—”

“Cilia!”

Cilia’s mouth closed with a soft click of her teeth. She must’ve known she’d overstepped her bounds from the sound of leather squealing in my hands as I wrung the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip.

“Cil… Just don’t.” I relaxed my grip on the wheel. “Clavus is the only changeling that gets to Yoda me.”

“Alright, then,” she replied, folding her hands in her lap like a good little girl that had been sent to the corner. “I want to say, though, that I meant it when I said I’ve begun to consider you a friend. You’ve changed quite a lot in the time I’ve known you, and I’ve started to see what my honored Uncle saw in that selfish and dark-hearted little girl that came to him to learn magic all those years ago. Killing is bad for the soul, and I’d just rather not see you backsliding into someone I dislike, is all.”

I sighed. I really wanted to go back to sleep, but at least after tonight I’d be able to sleep all I wanted. All I had to do was kill some possibly half-immortal necromancer that had maybe been sent back to the living realm in order to carry out a god’s mysterious will. No big deal.

The road led us to the archway of a big iron gate. I parked a few feet away and got out to take a look around.

The gate was a decorative thing that sat crooked, half out of the ground and likely only held up by the lengths of fence attached to its sides and stretching off to the far ends of the property. The actual gates were laying on the ground, the rusted hinges having long ago succumb to the elements and the sheer weight. A sign hanging across the top of the arch swung minutely on creaking chains with every push of the gentle breeze blowing across the grassy expanse. Whatever name the sign had borne had been scrubbed away by the elements, leaving an appropriately blank slate that proclaimed no master for this land.

The sky was perfectly clear, bathing us in that blue-shifted light that was impossible to notice in the city. In the distance, maybe two-hundred yards or so, I could make out the outline of an abandoned farmhouse, flanked on all sides by fields choked with overgrowth that were so badly flooded they had become an actual marsh. The rotting remnants of fencing from disused animal paddocks marked the places where livestock had once been kept. The barn, set a bit away from the main house, had collapsed in on itself, but whether that had happened in the recent storms or decades ago, there was no telling.

It didn’t look like anyone was waiting for us, and that was a surprise. A V-8 isn’t exactly quiet. Maybe Ahuizotl was asleep. I already knew he’d probably be out of commission for the night, so maybe sleep was how he recharged his batteries. Something about that thought tickled me – that I might come across an undead monster laying in a coffin, arms crossed over his chest like Nosferatu.

“This place is disgusting,” Cilia said as she joined me in surveying the abandoned ranch. I hadn’t even heard her get out of the car, and her creepy little changeling cat feet didn’t so much as unsettle the gravel.

“Yeah, I imagine death magic isn’t your thing,” I said. “I reckon this place hasn’t felt a loving touch in some time.”

“Reckon?”

“I dunno, it’s a ranch, it’s got me all… ‘reckon-y’,” I said defensively.

“Yes, well it’s best for us to mosey along, then, before you’re again overcome. What sort of wards are there and what are the chances of me sneaking around them? I can’t smell anything over this awful stench.”

“There aren’t any,” I said. Cilia gave me a quizzical look, silently prodding me for further explanation. “I don’t know a lot about pure necromancy, but I do know that the way those creeps use their magic is incompatible with pretty much any kind of warding. Warding requires a sense of home and ownership. The undead don’t belong in the world of the living, so their nature contradicts the fundamental intent of warding spells. Basically, it’s two schools of magic at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“Black and white magic, you mean.”

I groaned at the simplification. “I don’t like those labels, but yeah, that’s close enough in this one instance that I don’t have to spend the rest of the night explaining the nitpicky reasons why it’s wrong. The trade-off for wards isn’t bad for them, though, considering the quality of their guard dogs.”

“Guard dogs?” Cilia tilted her head in that Twilight-ish way. “Oh. Yes, guard dogs.”

Cilia undid the three buttons holding her Christmas sweater closed, tossing it onto the hood of my car without flourish. The shirt she had underneath it was clearly sized for a grown man and showed a cartoon frog doing something obscene with a cactus – no idea what the joke was, which was probably why it had ended up in a donation bin.

“I suppose those will be my responsibility while you have your wizard’s duel,” she said in a tone that was remarkably playful for her normal disposition. The ghost of a smile made its way to her face as she rolled her shoulders like a wrestler about to step into the ring. Girl had some claws, apparently. “If we are beset, run for the house, I will delay them.”

“You sure about that?” I asked. “Clavus will be pissed at me if anything happens to you.”

She snorted, affecting a look of offense. “I’m not so fragile. Just take the help I offer and let me worry about backing up my words.”

I still felt a little weird about it, but I didn’t push the matter. Cilia was asking me for her trust and it would have been disrespectful to question her again. Asking once was polite, twice was an insult.

I led the way through the gate and Cilia hurried to walk alongside me. She must’ve been doing me a courtesy, because for once I could actually hear her footfalls, though they were still unnaturally quiet.

Crossing the gate was an uncomfortable sensation. The fencing around the property was old enough to have long ago become a part of the land, the way old stone walls and statues often did, and had created a natural boundary that Ahuizotl’s magic had contoured and confined itself to. Once inside the boundary, it was like we were stepping into another world. The sensation I’d felt the night before – that thick, greasy feeling of hateful magic that had tainted the rain – was strong here.

This magic had to be Ahuizotl’s, the residue of the vast amounts of power he’d poured into conjuring a storm large enough to blow down a city. It had seeped into the earth, like the musk of an animal grinding itself into a rut to mark its territory. It was strange, though. I could make an educated guess at how much magic Ahuizotl had thrown into his storm, and it shouldn’t have been enough to blight the land this powerfully, at least not on its own. This had probably been the site of something evil, and psychically significant enough that death magic was sucked into the very earth like a sponge.

Something bad had happened here, I’d put money on it. Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre stuff.

If horror movies had taught me anything, it was that you don’t have sex when scary music is playing, and you should never trust abandoned farmhouses. Abandoned farms always have zombies in the barn or hobo skeletons in the walls – it’s a fact.

What struck me most as we made our way to the house was how still everything was. There was no wind, no sound save for what Cilia and I made, and even the moonlight itself seemed unusually lethargic, like the air here was too thick for these things to behave normally. An aura like this was unnatural even in magically-rich worlds, and a shiver crawled up my spine even as we pressed forward. I’d been to worse places, but no matter how strong or how experienced you are, you never quite overcome that unevolved part of your brain that tells you to run from scary things.

As usual, my instincts in these things proved right.

The steady silence was broken as Cilia’s whole body went rigid, her feet skidding in gravel with the jarring abruptness of a record scratch. Her hackles raised as she turned her head to watch the pastures with the alertness of a spooked alley cat.

“Run for the house,” she whispered in a throaty rasp that was closer to her real voice – the clicking, hissing one I sometimes heard her speaking to her children in – than her human one.

I didn’t hesitate. When the person watching your back tells you to run, you run. That goes doubly so when your backup is a supernatural creature that was built for survival instincts.

I broke into a full sprint, estimating in my head how long it would take me to run the last fifty meters or so to the house and counting the seconds as I ran. Focusing on numbers helped. It kept me from losing my nerve as the eerie silence was replaced by the sound of clacking jaws opening and closing mechanically, and the splash of dozens of mismatched paws and hooves and feet running in our direction from every corner of the property.

I’m not as young as I once was, but adrenaline is a good motivator, so I covered ground fast and was at the house in a time that would have made Luna’s college track coach proud. Something behind me cracked with the sharp, distinct sound of breaking bone and the noise squeezed an extra burst of speed out of me. The air filled with more crunching and snapping, like a gruesome orchestra playing the melody of carnage, telling me that Cilia was making good on her promise of handling the dogs.

The front door was boarded up with planks, but that wouldn’t stop me. I reached out with my magic and tugged on the boards, yanking them out of the doorframe, nails and all. I tried the knob and found it predictably locked, so I hunkered down, tightened up my shoulder, and threw myself at the door. The locks were fragile by modern standards, and old as the place was, it only took one try to get the door open.

I tumbled into the house, landing on a rug that threw up a geyser of what I hoped was mainly dust. The cloud was thick and moldy and burned my eyes, but I didn’t have the luxury of taking time to hack out my lungs. I got to my feet and found the door half broken, crooked and dangling from only one hinge. I pushed the door back into place, holding it up with my magic as I conjured some light and looked around frantically through watering eyes. The windows had been boarded up from the inside, and a quick application of magic pulled a nail from one of the boards and summoned it into my hand. I enchanted the nail with a spell and pushed it into the wood like a thumbtack, just far enough to stand on its own, and then drove it in the rest of the way with the heel of my palm.

The enchantment on the nail held the door in place and I stepped back just as something slammed into it, sending up even more dust and causing the nail to throw out little white sparks of light. One of Ahuizotl’s pets must have tried to crash its way in like I had, but with that nail in place they wouldn't be able to get in so easily. The charm I’d cast was a high-grade temporary ward, so even the windows were closed off. It was a quick-and-dirty job, so they’d be able to overcome it if they slammed themselves into the walls enough times to deplete the magic in the enchantment, but something told me that Cilia wouldn’t let them have enough time to attempt it.

It was an audacious bit of magic. There were a lot of ways the spell could’ve fizzled out, and without the dregs of Fiddler’s magic still in me I probably wouldn’t have even tried it. Fortune favors the bold, though, and even a slapdash kludge of a spell like this worked when you had demon magic powering it.

I let out the breath I’d been holding for fear of triggering a coughing fit, and sure enough, it did. My eyes felt like they were on fire and my chest was heaving as I coughed, trying to get out all the crap I’d sucked in. Rubbing at my eyes only seem to make it worse, so I conjured a handful of water by pulling the moisture in the air – which there was a lot of – and washed my face to try and get some relief. The little ball of light I’d conjured earlier hovered around my head, bobbing playfully like a sprite, as if amused watching my suffering. I’d put a little more magic into it than I had intended, what with the hasty summons, and so it had apparently developed a bit of a personality. It wasn’t alive, though. It was merely animated with false-intelligence, like the robot lady in really nice cellphones.

“This place is grody,” I commented to myself as I pulled up the hem of my shirt to dry my face. I frowned as I lowered the shirt and found it streaked with filth. Let no one say that being a sorceress was all glamorous.

I wasn’t getting attacked the second I was in the house, but I couldn’t take that for granted. All I had to do to remind myself that I wasn’t out of the woods yet was reach into my pocket and take out the broken and charred halves of the trinket I’d brought with me.

After leaving Caballeron’s place I’d hurried back to my car to do some prep work while I waited for Cilia, who had left her stuff in a milk crate behind the dumpster we’d been hanging out next to all day. Being the savvy woman-of-the-world that I am, I always made sure to keep an emergency road kit in my trunk with a few odds and ends for magical emergencies. You never know what trouble you might get into in the middle of nowhere.

The trinket wasn’t anything expensive or supremely magical. It had started out as a domino from an incomplete set I’d gotten at a yard sale. After that, all I had to do was paint it with black nail polish and scratch a sigil onto the back of it. Including what it cost for the polish and the rest of the set, I hadn’t spent more than three bucks making it, and the thing had probably just saved my life.

The moment I’d touched the doorknob I’d felt the trinket burning in my pocket, and I knew it had eaten a curse for me. It couldn’t have been a particularly powerful spell, because it had only broken one of the five trinkets I had, but the thing about curses was that they didn’t need to be strong to take your life. Using magic to hurt someone is a lot like those martial arts where you counter big punches with as little energy as possible. Sometimes it’s just more about being tricky than being strong.

Not that being strong isn’t useful. All the aikido throws in the world ain’t going to stop you from getting crushed by a dump truck.

I made my way through the house, poking my head in every room as I went. The foxfire light floated along behind me, bobbing and darting around to peek curiously into rooms like it was mimicking me.

This must’ve been a nice place some time in the far past, before age and circumstance had settled in. The architecture reminded me of one of those model houses that people used to buy out of a catalog – the kind that always used to fall on top of Buster Keaton in the silent movies. The house was a shadow of what it must have once been, though. Whatever happiness and hopes the family that had built this place may have had were long dead, and from what I could see, they had probably died tragically.

Sadness had soaked into the timbers, growing like mold and peeling the yellowing floral-print wallpaper. Everywhere I went, the signs of the house’s final days were on the walls like scars – holes at punching-height, broken furniture, and large stains in the creaking floorboards that stretched through the house, like something had been dragged along the floor, bleeding the whole way.

When in doubt, follow the blood.

I followed the thickest trail from a closet near the entranceway towards the back of the house, past a staircase that had once led to the second floor before succumbing to some combination of age, infestation, and poor construction to collapse in on itself.

The trail led into the kitchen, and a wall of stench hit me full in the face just as I was walking in, making my stomach flip backwards and inside-out. I took a second to acclimate to the burning smell of chemicals and spoiled meat. There were jars everywhere, on the table, on the counters, in the spice rack, stacked precariously in the sink. A few of the containers were broken or leaking, spilling the contents onto the floor where they were clearly eating away at the already damaged wood.

I grabbed one of the leaking jars, holding it gingerly by the screw-on lid, and squinted at the opaque yellow fluid. There was something dark and vaguely meat-shaped inside. The cracked glass had a glaze of grease around the edges of where it leaked, which told me that what was inside was probably a tincture made of liquified fat, and knowing where I was, my guess would be human fat. I set the jar down into a pie tin with a film of dark black goop and the jar settled into place lopsidedly and with a squelch.

I looked around the room, trying to see past the disgusting jars of pickling meat and the enormous stain on the floor that marked a gruesome memorial to whatever tragedy had taken place here. There was a cast iron stove in the corner of the kitchen, next to the trough-style sink. I’d briefly considered getting one of those stoves once, in one of those delirious Sunday trips to the hardware store, where you drunkenly fantasize about impractical home improvement designs. Those stoves had still been popular in Equestria when I’d left, because they were very easy for unicorns to light with magic. We even had one in the orphanage when I was growing up. We kept it burning all day, so in winter it kept us warm, and in summer it drove us outside.

Next to the stove was a small pile of wood. Just enough to start the fire for morning coffee. The wood was graying and decayed, like most everything else in the house. Nobody had made coffee here in a very long time.

What caught my eye, though, was the hinged door set into the floor. I might have missed it were it not for the big iron ring bolted to the ground. There wasn’t much more of the house to explore unless I wanted to try to shimmy up the rotted timbers of the broken stairs, so the trapdoor was my best bet.

My false-sprite followed behind, quivering slightly as we approached the hatch. It wasn’t smart enough to know real fear, but it was doing a good job of imitating it.

I knelt down and held my hand over the ring. The thing was cursed, just like the doorknob had been. It only took me a few seconds to break the curse, but it was definitely a bad one. Some kind of weird blood curse if I was reading the signs correctly.

The hinges groaned and something came loose with a wooden crack as I struggled to lift the heavy door. Despite its protests, I managed to get it opened, revealing a set of stairs leading into a darkened root cellar.

I went down, testing each step before committing my weight to it. That would’ve been a fine way to die after coming this far, falling down a flight of stairs because of a loose step and breaking my neck. I definitely didn’t want to spend eternity as the laughing stock of all the damned souls in Fiddler’s belly.

The upstairs had been nasty, but the cellar? It was like the set of some low-tier torture-porn flick. Steel tables and gurneys, like the slabs from a coroner’s office, had somehow been brought down, even though the hatch was barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Piles of fur and flesh and bone were stacked everywhere – on the smooth chrome tables, on ancient shelves next to dusty jars of expired preserves, even just on the filthy dirt floor. One of Ahuizotl’s monsters was lying unfinished on the largest table, waiting to be stitched together and animated with its master’s magic.

Heavy chains were attached to the rafters, with enormous meathooks dangling at eye-height. There were dozens of hooks, and several had animals hanging from them by the hocks or by the throat. The fresher ones – ‘fresher’ being a relative term – had their throats cut open to bleed them out, the way hunters strung up their kills to prepare them for butchering. Buckets were scattered around beneath the animals, poised to catch the magically significant fluids so nothing would go to waste. Ahuizotl seemed pretty sloppy about his lab discipline, though, because most of the buckets had overflowed, leaving blood to soak into the dirt.

None of that mattered, though. The thing that really mattered was the man sitting at the back of the room.

If it weren’t for the slow, steady wheezing and the rise and fall of his chest, I would have thought he was just another corpse. He was seated in a faded yellow recliner, the sort you might find covered in protective plastic in a retiree’s sitting room, and he was the very picture of enfeeblement. His pallor was that of death, his skin gaunt and pale, and what was left of his hair was long and stringy, almost Cryptkeeper-esque. He was ancient, and his face was deeply lined like the hard, parched earth of the Southwestern desert I’d lived in while learning shamanistic magic. He watched me as I descended the stairs. His eyes were milky-white – blind, I would have guessed if it weren’t for the intensity of his glare – and every time he inhaled, his chapped, bloody lips pulled back to reveal gray teeth.

This was the bastard that had taken away Twilight’s family. The selfish and cruel thing that wanted to blow down a city just because he didn’t get his way. I knew he was monstrously powerful, but the sight of him, so decrepit that he couldn’t even rise from his seat to threaten me, almost had me feeling sorry.

Almost.

I stalked closer, tossing aside everything between the two of us. The righteous indignation rising up in me was agitating my power, and the heavy medical tables were thrown aside with casual flicks of my fingertips. Magic is tied to emotion, and what was left of the demon magic in me was loving the seething hatred I was feeling.

Ahuizotl’s hand fell from the armrest, reaching into a pocket sewn into the side of the chair, which must have been designed to hold a remote control or one of those little TV Guide books. When he lifted his hand, it was clutching a knife. It wasn’t the magic one that Caballeron had described to me, but a knife is a knife, and as he finally found the energy to rise on shaky legs, his bones creaking like the hull of an old ship in hard wind, I knew he meant to use it.

I grabbed the recliner behind him with my magic and tugged, clipping the back of his legs and sending him to the ground. His ragged wheeze sped up to a terrible rattling hiss. The last table between us blocked him from view, so I send it flying against the wall hard enough to crumble the bricks. He’d dropped the knife in his tumble, and his hand was outstretched to summon the knife as he hurried to his knees. He reclaimed his weapon and plunged it into his open palm. Blood flowed from his wound like sap from a tree, thick and oozing. His mouth began to move, mumbling something, not to me, but to the source of his magic.

I didn’t give him a chance to ramp up his incantation, whatever it was. My magic took hold of his arm and snapped it below the elbow. His creased face twisted like crumpled paper, lips pulled back in a rictus of pain.

I hadn’t expected his arm to break that easily. A fight like this should’ve been power against power, his will ablating whatever magic I threw at him, even if it was something as simple as magical telekinesis. I pressed again, wondering if maybe it was a fluke, but his knee shattered just as easily. With his leg broken as well, he couldn’t hold himself up and fell to the dirt pathetically.

“Look at you,” I said, shaking my head in disgust. “Your body’s falling apart.”

Ahuizotl managed to squirm his way onto his back. He stared up at me, his horrible wheezing ringing off the walls like the squeal of a broken machine. He looked even worse up close. The clean white light of my spell showed every vein beneath his paper-thin skin, bulbous and pulsing with his filthy blood.

Was this what happened to a creature that had its soul stuff back into its body? This was no man. This was a horrible specter of a living thing – an unnatural wraith. No matter how I looked, he wasn’t any different than any other off-the-rack zombie moving around under control of someone else’s power. It was no wonder that he could only cast his magic once every other night. Magic can be hard on the body, and a body like this couldn’t possibly handle the strain of channeling a higher existence’s magic for extended periods. The storm he’d conjured had practically already destroyed him. Forget every other night, with his body in this condition, I’d be surprised if he was working craft within the month.

“Who are you?” he managed to wheeze out, his voice feeble and dry as the air escaping a dying animal’s lungs. “Who dares to attack Great Ahuizotl?”

“You don’t look that great to me.”

I pressed my boot down on the wrist of his unbroken arm. The knife was still in his palm, so I stooped down and gave it a twist before yanking it free. He grimaced, but didn’t give me the satisfaction of hearing him cry out in pain.

“I’m a friend of the man you killed,” I said as I tossed the knife to the side. “Night Light, if ‘man you killed’ wasn’t clue enough.”

“You broke my curse on him,” he growled out.

“You should’ve run,” I said. “As soon as you knew another sorcerer was in town, you should’ve packed up your monkey show and headed for the hills.”

Ahuizotl’s breathing sped up, his eyes twinkling with a desperate, excited gleam. “The girl. You have her. Bring her to me and I will forgive the disruption.”

My already-thin patience snapped at his offer. The darkness inside me was prideful and seethed at Ahuizotl’s offer. He was weak, practically crawling at my feet, and he wanted to bargain with me? To tell me that he would forgive me?

He still wanted Twilight?

I lashed out in anger. Not with my magic, but with a hard, undignified kick to his face. It wasn’t satisfying. His head was too light and my boots were too heavy. I kicked him in the stomach and this time I felt the impact. It was cathartic, so I did it again.

I kept at it until my head cleared. Ahuizotl hadn’t fared well against my attack, but he hadn’t cried out. It was like kicking a bag of sand, but it still felt good. He just kept glaring at me, his pain masked behind impassivity, like he was beyond the sensation of violence inflicted on his un-mortal flesh.

I squatted down and looked him in the eyes. His milky, unblinking stare met mine, and I could almost see my ugliness reflected in his.

“Before you die, I want you to tell me why,” I said, my voice tight and angry. “Why did you want the kid so badly?”

His bloody lips curved into a smile. “The sun must set, so another can rise.”

I clucked my tongue in disgust. Wizards, especially older ones, loved that cryptic stuff. It seemed simple enough – sun goes down, sun comes up – but you could never take wizard riddles at face value. It could mean literally anything, and wizards never told it to you straight. I could tell that Ahuizotl wasn’t the kind of guy that cracked under torture, so there was no point in dragging this on if he was just going to throw fortune cookies at me.

“Guess that’s how it’s gotta be then,” I said as I rose to my feet, casually dusting off my knees.

I plucked a strand of hair from my head and held it against my conjured ball of light to examine it. I threw it away, and it took a couple more tries before I got one with the root on it. I dangled the hair between two fingers, above Ahuizotl’s prone body like a dagger.

“Your soul should go straight back to Tlaloc—” Ahuizotl hissed angrily at my overly familiar use of his master’s name, “—so ‘go to Hell’ doesn’t feel appropriate. Why don’t we just call this ‘get bent’?”

I let go, and the single hair slowly fell towards Ahuizotl, who met my glare with that same bloody grin, seemingly unafraid of what was about to befall him. The hair was freshly plucked, still mostly a part of my body and bearing a connection to my magic.

My mouth moved rapidly, speaking an incantation to give shape to my will. I’d learned the words from an alchemist I’d met in Canada, and it was one of the few bits of Quebecois that I spoke, aside from touristy things like asking for the bathroom or requesting to be driven back to my hotel.

The strand of hair landed on Ahuizotl’s arm, laid for only a moment, and then wriggled, digging under his skin like an earthworm burying itself in the dirt. Ahuizotl’s flesh rippled with the movement, and the ripple grew... and grew... and grew. It stretched throughout his body, until every inch of his bare skin was covered in throbbing vein-like bindings.

The grin on his face died with the first twist. The curse constricted, pulling and twisting, wrenching bone from socket and tearing tendons like paper.

As I watched, something struck me right between the eyes. My vision went out in searing white light as I felt a sharp pain, like a needle digging straight into my forehead and trying its damndest to get to the other side. The trinkets in my pocket burned hot enough that I noticed them even through the pained fog of the worst headache I’d ever felt, and I could distinctly feel them each snapping under the weight of the spell Ahuizotl was throwing at me.

I’d taken for granted the fact that my opponent was so feeble. If this hadn’t been so easy, I would have had some more defenses ready. Still, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. The trinkets had done their job and given me enough time to start undoing the threads of the spell. It only lasted for a minute or so, but the pain had brought me to the ground.

I kneeled in the dirt, on my hands and knees, panting and cursing myself under my breath for being so sloppy. When my vision stopped swimming, I found myself face-to-face with Ahuizotl. Right until the end, he’d never looked away, probably never even blinked. Even as my own curse was twisting his body up like a pretzel, he laid there watching me, defiant to the last.

I got to my feet with a drunken sway, feeling like I’d just gone one-hundred-and-twenty-seven rounds in a bare-knuckle match against a grizzly. There was something wet on my face and my fingers brushed against it reflexively. My nose had started bleeding. I wiped it on the back of my hand and sniffed, snorting up as much of the stream as I could.

I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket and pulled out a small tobacco pouch, just big enough for a few pinches of snuff. The white dust inside was made from teeth – some human, most not – that had been individually charmed and ground into a powder, then mixed with a few parts of the periodic table that they don’t put in kids’ chemistry sets no more.

I undid the knot holding the pouch closed and sprinkled it over Ahuizotl’s body before retreating to the stairs. Of the stuff I could make with the bits-and-bobs from my trunk, this was probably the most dangerous, so I definitely didn’t want to be near it.

I snapped my fingers and lit a spark from across the room. The powder ignited with a fizz and a fwoosh, filling the room with a pure white flame that dwarfed the little ball of light I’d summoned.

I hurried back up the stairs as quickly as I could. My head throbbed with every step. The spell-light bobbed and weaved excitedly, as if its antics could urge me to move a little quicker.

The nail I’d pounded into the door was still intact, telling me that my temporary ward was still in place. It was made to create a threshold that magical creatures couldn’t transgress, but being a flesh and blood human, I just opened the door and stepped out.

I half expected to have to help Cilia finish up with Ahuizotl’s pets, but I’d apparently sold the old girl short. She was standing in the flooded pastures, water up to her shins and grass to her waist. Her phone was in her hand as she snapped pictures of the veritable mountain of broken creatures.

“Alright, Cil?” I asked as I approached.

“Well enough,” she replied, turning her back to the gore and holding out her phone to take a morbid selfie with her pile of victims.

I let out a low whistle as I got a better look at her handiwork. She’d pulled the things apart like an over-boiled chicken and just tossed the bits into a pile. Considering how tough I knew these things were, she must’ve done it a lot.

The pile was so impressive I almost didn’t notice that she was nearly naked. Just outright barefoot and nude, save for the coat I’d seen her leave on the hood of my car.

“What happened to your clothes?” I asked, unable to bear the curiosity.

“These creatures are blind,” she said. “They track by magic and by scent, from what I can tell. I can disguise myself enough, but my clothes were another story. I had to shed them. It was easier to dispose of the things when they couldn’t see me.”

I whistled again, impressed with her insight. She was a few hundred years old, and if I needed a reminder that you didn’t get to be that old without learning a few tricks, this was it.

Cilia put her phone in her sweater pocket and turned to me with a questioning look. “Was he in there?” she asked.

I nodded, thumbing in the direction of the house. The flames had already spread enough to be seen through the gaps in the boarded windows. These flames weren’t like what I’d used at Night Light’s house. The alchemic powder I’d added had changed them in a qualitative way. This fire would burn away everything in that house and not leave a single trace. No cinders, no ash, nothing to sift through. It wouldn’t even smoke. Come morning, all that would be left was a blackened hole in the ground where the foundation had been.

I watched it burn, feeling a sense of… not relief… Finality, maybe. This wasn’t satisfying, it couldn’t possibly be, not with blood on my hands and Twilight still without a family. Ahuizotl, for whatever his motivations were and for all the power he’d wielded – and it was power enough to destroy his own body – had died with barely a fight.

It felt… limp, but nevertheless the experience left me feeling drained. Sometimes this was just how things ended – not with a bang, but a whimper, and all that.

The ball of spell-light must have picked up on my mood. It nuzzled against my cheek, trying to cheer me up. I took it in my hand and crushed it, scattering the magical light into dozens of little motes that drifted away like fireflies and faded into the night. It might have acted cute, but it was never alive in the first place.

We waited until the fire had consumed enough of the structure to collapse the framework. The pile of meat Cilia had left behind had to be disposed of, so I took a few minutes to clean up, using my magic to huck chunks of the rotting golems into the fire pit. While I did that, Cilia found the scraps of her clothing, and deeming them unsalvageable, she tossed them into the fire as well.

We got in the car and drove back into the city. There was a lot to say, from both sides, but neither of us could find the words.

The trip back from the creepy farm seemed a lot shorter than the trip to. We were back at Nightriver Park before I knew it, and two of Cilia’s little ones were waiting for her, sitting in the sand beneath the slide and playing a wholesome children’s trading card game at three in the morning.

I was thankful for a lot of what Cilia had done tonight, but what I was most grateful for was the fact that she didn’t ask me what I was planning to do next. I knew she was curious. I could see the desire to meddle burning inside of her, but she proved herself to be a real friend by getting out of the car without a single word. The only farewell she gave was a slight nod before turning on her heels and waving for her nephews to follow her back to wherever they nested.

I sat in the parking lot for a while longer, my hands tight around the steering wheel while the engine idled. I wasn’t in a hurry to go home, and looking at the gas gauge, I had an excuse to put it off for a few minutes more.

The nearest gas station was one of those fancy chains that tacked on an extra thirty cents for premium because their additive was more marketable than anybody else’s. I worked for my money and so usually avoided these places like the plague, but they took plastic at the pump and I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with the attendant in the store.

My hands were trembling as I pulled the card out of my wallet. I hadn’t noticed, but they might’ve been doing that the whole way back. Keying in my PIN number with the shakes was an almost Herculean labor, but I managed somehow.

I needed a cigarette and I needed it bad, so I let the gas pump itself and got back in the car to smoke. I lit up and yanked the lever that lowered the seat, sinking into a reclining position as I took my first drag.

Smoking has always been therapeutic for me, even though, as I’ve said, I knew it was a dirty habit and tried to quit as often as I could. More than just the act of drowning my brain in nicotine, I like the smoke itself. It’s calming to me, watching the wisps of vapor twist and curl through the air.

Maybe it was because I’d grown up in Canterlot – the one in Equestria, that is. The city was built atop a mountain, and living that close to the sky, in a city filled with pegasi, meant the clouds held a special place in my heart. Sometimes, on sunny days when I’d finished all my reading and had nothing else to do, I’d just watch the clouds and wish that I could float away to somewhere else, anywhere else. My expectations were low in those days. I had no illusions about my lot in life being better, I would have just settled for it being different. I would have given anything for it to just not be the same.

Maybe the the smoke reminded me of those cloudy skies on some deeply primitive level.

My vision went hazy and I knew I’d started crying. I didn’t bother wiping away the wetworks, as no one was around to see my shame anyway. I just let the tears run down my face as I watched the smoke dance above me without a care in the world.

I had killed a man tonight.

I had a lot of excuses for why. I knew he was evil, that he’d deserved it, that he wasn’t much better than a zombie, that it had been my duty to make sure he couldn’t hurt Twilight again, and that what I’d done had made the world just a bit better… but I had taken his life all the same. I had still felt hatred in my heart and acted on it. Now, after the act, all I could feel about it was guilt, not because I’d done it, but because I’d wanted to do it. That was the part that turned my stomach, that any part of me could be happy that I’d given in to the worst of my own nature.

I hated killing for that feeling, and I hated how easy it was for me to justify it. Killing is tricky like that, it presents itself as a solution so tempting in its simplicity, like an outstretched hand offering warmth when you’re most vulnerable. The decision is always easier in the moment, and the gravity of the deed doesn’t come to you until you’re alone, until it’s quiet, until you’re sitting in your car at a gas station and watching puffs of smoke drift out the window to dissipate into the cold, uncaring night.

Cilia had offered to take the responsibility off my hands, but there was no way I would have let her. My pride wouldn’t have allowed it. It was my duty to uphold, my penance to pay for the blunder of letting Night Light die.

Having blood on your hands isn’t like anything else. It makes them feel heavy, and you can wash the blood away, but the weight never leaves them. You carry that forever.

I’d killed before. None of them had been easy to live with after the fact, but the one before this, the death that had firmly placed Fiddler and I at opposing sides of a vast enmity, that had been…

Something loud banged against the side of my car. It was a hard, mechanical sound, and my heart leapt into my throat at its suddenness and proximity to my head. I sat up straight, tossed the cigarette out the window, and had magic dancing at my fingertips ready to cast at a moment’s notice.

No attack came. My brain eventually caught up with the rest of my body to tell me that the noise was just the gas pump shutting off. I released the magic I’d gathered, and a sense of tingling cold prickled through my extremities as my heart began pumping again.

I laid back down, slowly, and sobbed into my hands. I was a long ways away from that little girl who learned to cook because she felt sorry for having to kill her chickens.

* * *

Author's Note:

Holy shit this took me a long time to write. So much fiddling. Sorry about the wait, everybody, hope it was worth it.

This was a very big chapter to get through for editing, so if you see anything screwy, as usual, let me know in a PM! It'll send me an email and I'll be able to correct it right away.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll all join me next time!

Please be excited!

Comments

[Couron]

Update! Huzzah!

[Starlight Nova]

You reply to comments by moving your mouse over to the right-hand corner of the comment you want to reply to then clicking on the >> that appears. Why did you make the chapters so long?

[Balewood]

'LeGasp' and thusly my day is made

[JMP]

I love it when this story updates. The long chapters make it feel like an adventure. The story is not quite done, it seems, so there's the definite question of "what will Sunset do now?" that will probably need to be addressed.

[Dream Dusk]

A good read once more... Now that riddle is sending shivers down my spine and I can't help but speculate more and more what's in store for the future chapters.

[Selenelion]

I will just say before i get reading that I'm glad you are still writing this story.

[TheStratovarian]

Now this was a heck of an update.

A heck of a lot, loved both sections, and damn if its not a great view of everything.

Looking forward to when this next can, because holy crud, for all of sunsets awesome. She has to deal with something worse, celestia.

[Joural]

this was great. On the one hand, the god being actively involved leads me to believe this isn't the end(if he didn't let him die the first time, why would he now?), but on the other hand... this story could go from here on angst and emotional drama for atleast three chapters.

So I don't know what's next.

[Erico]

Damn. Just damn.

I have no idea where you plan on taking the story from here, but wherever it goes, it's going to be awesome.

[permeakra]

it's alive !

[wolfstorm56]

Good shit.

[Unknownlight]

I love these massive chapters. This story might not update often, but whenever it does I get to sink my teeth into a whole lot of content, and I love it.

The only thing that mildly disappointed me was the lack of Sunset/Twilight interactions (besides the short bit at the start) since that's by far my favorite dynamic in this story, but it's clear that a whole bunch of that will be coming in future chapters, so I'm not worried.

I feel slightly bad for thinking about how badass Sunset was for... y'know, forcing a guy to stick a gun in his mouth and threatening to pull the trigger. I mean, it's awful, but still pretty badass.

What's your estimate for how many chapters this story will be by the time it's finished?

[inkarnadine]

Great chapter!
I love how you can make magic and its properties understandable while still keeping it terrifying.

Can't wait for what's next!

[catinthesocks]

This story updating marks a highlight of my year.
Excellent chapter as ever, loved being able to sink my teeth into it. I'm still fascinated by this world, and would love to see Sunset finally resolving her problems with Twilight, Luna and Celestia, rather than running away to brutally murder another poor old man.
Very much excited for another chapter! I'll wait as long as I need to.

[Heidao]

Well shit, at first I thought, if Ahuizotl was aware of how special Twilight was, then the other five were in danger. But what was seen at that farmstead, and the level of degradation he faced in his desperation to find her.

This wasn't a mere AU where Twilight was orphaned, this was an end game scenario where all the other girls are potentially dead, and Sunset stopped it at the final phase...

Fuck

[Twilight_Crow]

Oooh, I smell other storms on the horizon! Just a hunch, and it's not the fact that the bad guy was "killed" easily, is how that dead was written. And probably Twilight is gonna need Sunset badly. But I bet Sunset is going to mess it up first, by trying to push the girl away.

Thanks for the exciting chapter! Will eagerly wait for the next one.

[Dream of Ponies]

That was another fantastic chapter in one of my favorite stories on this site. The way you weave the emotions Sunset is feeling into words that I can empathize with and feel myself is truly awesome. That feeling of just pure "I don't know what I'm going to do"-ness about Twilight and Luna is tangible.

Her conflicted mind towards them, should she allow something good in her life knowing she doesn't deserve it and will probably hurt them in the end, was shown so beautifully this chapter.

I know she lives in a world steeped in darkness and she has a soul sold to a demon, but I'm still holding out hope she can have a happy ending with Twilight and Luna. And not just while she lives but after she dies I hope that somehow she will have broken the contract on her soul.

But this truly doesn't feel like the end of their troubles. The villain too weak, the ending too unsatisfying. Sunset isn't out of the woods yet is my guess and Twilight is still in danger.

Will Sunset make it out alive? Will Twilight get into Harvard at the ripe old age of 14? Does Luna's ass look bomb in short shorts? Tune in next time to "Lesbian Horse Turned Magical Girl" to find out!

[goldfencer]

Thing was basically a prank – Home Alone stuff if the kid in that movie was a baby wizard.

Home Alone included smashing people in the face with paint cans, setting somebody's head on fire with a blowtorch, and a barefoot man putting his full weight onto an upright nail. Yup. Pranks.

[nobody dreamer]

Yay, update! And a long chapter too, I don't mind time between updates when there's this much content. Now the question is if this arc is over or there's another "boss battle" waiting, or if Sunset's just going to have to deal with her new home situation. If Twilight is special enough to get the interest of an Aztec god, then Sunset probably can't just risk leaving her with social services. And it can't just be a coincidence that last cryptic riddle almost named Sunset by name. I honestly forget if human Sunset's been mentioned, but probably not that. I wonder if it was intentional that Cilia mentioned that used to be pear country, as if that place had used to be an apple farm, I'd be worried about what had happened to the native Apples.

Don't see Caballeron written with that much depth often, he honestly seemed regretful over Night Light's fate. With Ahuizotl involved too, I was half expecting Daring Do (or AK Yearling) too, but sounds like there's possibly quite a bit more story to go, especially with those references to Sunset's dark past, so who knows. Not to mention whatever Sunset's other contact found out, I worry Sunset is going to wish she had waited to hear from him first. Looking forward to more, the atmosphere of your story is always so fascinating.

[shy sad jaded shard]

Love long chapters so it's all good

[Nali]

As captivating as ever.

So... we've got a god who's after Twilight's soul, and under the conditions of some very particular sorrow to boot. Given the mention of hereditary magic, it sounds like she might well have some serious power in her blood to attract to sort of attention she has. And if Twilight is special in this dimension, I have to wonder if that has any implications for the sisters as well.

Don't feel like Caballeron's role in this is quite over yet either, now that he's part of the small circle of interested people who know that Twilight's alive, if not exactly where.

Mysteries abound!

[PhycoKrusk]

Yes, perhaps it was too easy, but then, maybe that isn't a bad thing.

After all, depending on what just happened, Sunset may have just been given one of the keys to get out of her deal with Fiddler. I mean, probably not, but this remains to be seen.

[GuestD579]

this chapter captures that sense of guilt well. Its impossible to actually discribe let alone talk about. But what makes this so real is that moment, when you finally stop to think. All those question start to bubble up to the surface, the ones you cant answer, its in those quite moments when you feel the most dread. No one around you will never truly understand unless they too have taken a life, for them its time to relax and be at peace but for those of us that have had to take a life or seen a life taken then its in those moments where you feel the darkness press in. The slow creep of maddness and the voices of those that haunt, you even if they never spoke you hear the whispers, drums in your head till you can stand it anymore. And thats for those who are trained, those who are not have even worse nightmares

[BabySkittleMonster]

Another fantastic chapter! I have to say, I'm a little uneasy at the apparent ease in which Sunset killed a 700+ year old agent of a god... and I'm even more uneasy at the curse she was hit with. Yes, I've no doubt she thinks she broke free, but my inherent paranoia is screaming at me with both Ahuizotl and this curse.

I'm also wondering what will happen with the Happy Family waiting back home. Clearly everything is going to fall apart imminently, but will Twilight, Luna, possibly Celestia and maybe even Sunset herself realise that they're all being idiots and they should work together to stay together and fix this whole mess? Stay tuned to find out...

Anyway, TL;DR: story, good. My own paranoia, activated. Anticipation for next chapter, high.

[Nudebovine]

An update from one of my favorite authors!

*Looks at clock, realizes I have to take off for Eclipse camping with no internet in only 6 hours*

"Why King? Why would you promise me such joy just to watch it slip through my fingers?"

Seriously though, YAY! You hooked me long ago ToTRG and seeing an update to your wonderfully rich characters' worlds is one of the happiest things I find on the internet. Thank you and I will enjoy this..., *sigh* just as soon as I can. Glad to see your new chapter and thank you for sharing it with us all.

[BigD]

Mm, too easy...and now I'm very suspicious about Celestia.

[Web of Hope]

THIS IS SO GOOD I'M SO EXCITED AAAHH!!!

You asked

No but really, I love this fic and this world so much and cannot wait for more.

[394VikingPinkiePie]

The scar down over his right eye didn’t much help, and it was so stereotypically thuggish that I wondered if he might’ve done it himself, just for the appearance of street cred.

How do you come up with these comments from Sunset?? They're brilliant!

[One Winged Sin]

Oh man... so I’ve binged this story from the weekend and... I haven’t picked up an EqG Alt like this before. It’s great, maybe -maybe- typos so small that the brains n reads through it. And these 10k chapters... No Heroes was the first story I had picked up with chapters like me this, and I’ve really enjoyed the swim.
Nice works.
Of course, no w I’ll have to favorite/track this piece for updates...

[e520]

oh shit, i had no idea my favorite story had updated! dear god this universe is so good, you put so much detail and emotion into it that i feel like i just got off a roller coaster at the end, no matter how long its always too short

[SunnyShim1]

When will the next chapter be completed/posted

[PrincessCadenza]

don't suppose we could get a blog update? havnt heard anything since September now...

[Blue Horizon]

I need more, I hope we get more. Even as is though, this is an amazing story and keep up the work.

[Vigriff]

I like this version of Dr. Caballeron.