Chapter 10: The Herd
The traffic thickened, then congealed into utter stillness two blocks from the hospital. Hank leaned on the horn, the blare swallowed by the dense, frozen air. Up ahead, brake lights bloomed like a field of poisonous flowers. Through the windshield, past the gridlock, they saw it.
The street was a river of naked flesh.
Hundreds of them, a slow, shambling procession moving against the backdrop of skyscrapers and grimy snow. Men and women, young and old, all states of physical fitness, utterly bare under the iron-gray January sky. Their skin was mottled with cold-induced pink, but they moved with a single-minded purpose that bypassed shivering, their eyes fixed on the distant hospital complex. The low, collective moan that emanated from the crowd was a sound unlike anything Hank had ever heard—not pain, not pleasure, but a deep, cellular yearning, a hungry vibration that seemed to make the truck’s windows tremble.
“Holy fucking hell,” Hank breathed, his hands tightening on the wheel.
Beside him, Fatima stared, her exhaustion momentarily burned away by sheer, staggering scale. “It’s a pilgrimage. He’s calling them all.”
In the back seat, Stacy’s knuckles were white on the headrest. “They’re going to swarm the maternity ward. They’ll crush everything just to get to him.”
Just then, the flow of bodies shifted. From a side street, a new scent cut through the urban odors of exhaust and brine—wildflowers, honeysuckle, and fresh-turned earth, impossibly vibrant in the dead of winter. The naked crowd nearest the corner slowed, their heads turning as one, confusion momentarily disrupting their programming.
An elderly woman with a kind, wrinkled face and hair the color of spun silver stepped into the thoroughfare. She wore a simple, long dress of earthy green, and she moved with an unshakable calm. Arlene. She held what looked like an ornate piece of polished burlwood, about a foot long, covered in intricately carved, softly glowing runes. It was unmistakably a dildo.
“This way, dears,” Arlene called out, her voice carrying with a gentle, compelling warmth that was pure Green Moon magic. “The real party’s in here. Warmth. Touch. All the friction you could dream of.”
She gestured with the wooden artifact toward the open doors of a modern convention center annex, a blank, glassy structure that was supposed to be hosting a tech conference. The runes on the dildo pulsed with a golden light. A dozen of the nearest candy-slaves, their attention fully captured, peeled away from the hospital-bound stream and stumbled towards her, their moans shifting into eager whimpers.
A lanky man in his fifties with a paunch and a lost expression reached her first. “I need… I need to…” he slurred.
“I know exactly what you need, sweetheart,” Arlene said, not unkindly. In one fluid motion, she hiked up her skirt, revealing sturdy legs and a thatch of silvered hair. She spat into her palm, slicked the carved head of the dildo, and without ceremony, guided it to the man’s asshole. “This will help you find the way.”
The man cried out as she pressed the thick, rune-etched wood against his tight pucker. He pushed back, impaling himself on it with a desperate, animal need. Arlene worked it into him, her movements practiced and efficient, fucking him with the toy right there on the sidewalk. His cock, which had been half-hard, sprang to full, dripping arousal. The runes flared brighter with each thrust, emitting that wildflower scent in dizzying waves.
“Yes! Oh god, fuck my ass! Use me!” the man babbled, his earlier confusion gone, replaced by rapturous submission to the new, more immediate magical command.
The other candy-slaves crowded around, hands reaching for Arlene, for the man, for each other. The wildflower scent enveloped them, a potent olfactory lure. Arlene kept working the dildo in and out of the man’s ass, the wet, sloppy sounds of the act serving as a siren call. “Inside, everyone,” she coaxed, her voice still grandmotherly even as she reamed a stranger’s asshole on a public street. “Plenty of room to play. Follow the feeling.”
As if on cue, a nondescript man in a worn flannel shirt and jeans—Norm—appeared, holding a second set of convention center doors wide open. He gave the arriving Hank and the others a casual nod, as if directing traffic at a county fair. “Best get ’em contained. Path’s clear here for you folks. The lovebirds upstairs need you more.”
Bethany’s sedan pulled up beside Hank’s truck. She and Liam got out, staring at the bizarre, meticulously managed chaos. Liam’s poet’s brain finally found words. “It’s… horrifyingly beautiful. She’s conducting an orchestra of fuck.”
“She’s minimizing casualties,” Bethany corrected, her Agent Pendragon persona analyzing the tactics. “Using their own programming to redirect them. Efficient.”
Arlene, having successfully herded the first group inside, turned and spotted Fatima. Her eyes, sharp and wise, crinkled at the corners. She gave a knowing wink as she expertly twisted the dildo inside the mewling man, making him scream in ecstasy and stumble backward through the doors, pulling the rest of the eager horde with him. “New Moon! About time. The small knots are easy. The core’s still in the wind. You feel it?”
Fatima, leaning on Hank, nodded. She did feel it. Beneath the miasma of redirected lust, a colder, sharper hunger was centered on the hospital. A singularity of appetite.
“Go,” Arlene said, turning her attention back to the next clutch of approaching naked bodies, her dildo already glistening with fresh spit. “We’ll cork the bottle here. You have to break the hand that’s shaking it.”
Stacy was already moving, pushing past them, her athletic form weaving through the stalled cars toward the hospital’s emergency entrance. Hank half-carried Fatima, with Bethany and Liam covering their rear, stun nodes held low.
The ER doors hissed open to a different kind of bedlam. It was the aftermath. Orderlies and nurses moved with grim focus among gurneys where naked, spent-looking people lay covered in thin blankets, sleeping deeply. The air still thrummed with the echoes of recent, frantic sex, but the compulsion was gone, leaving only exhaustion and the lingering smell of sweat and magic.
Dr. Cho, her white coat buttoned crookedly, intercepted them. Her face was ashen but her eyes were clear. “Jan and Vivian are on the fifth floor, guarding the room. We’ve cleared this wing. The… attraction… seems to have shifted. They’re all going to the south side of the building.” She pointed. “The old wing. The maternity annex before the new tower was built.”
“A more… intimate space for a birth, perhaps?” Liam mused, then flushed. “Sorry. Not the time.”
“It’s the perfect time,” Fatima said, forcing herself to stand straighter. Her voice was a rasp. “He’s not a monster from a story. He’s an artist. He wants the right setting. He wants to corrupt the symbol in its most sacred place.”
Stacy didn’t wait for consensus. She was already at the stairwell door, flinging it open. The clatter of their footsteps on concrete echoed like a frantic heartbeat as they climbed, leaving the sanitized chaos of the ER below.
On the fifth-floor landing, they found Jan and Vivian. Jan was dressed now, in rumpled jeans and a sweater, Godfrey a silent sentry at her side. Vivian leaned against the wall, her human form solid but seeming to drink the weak overhead light. The door to the main maternity hall was propped open with a chair. From within, they could hear Irene and Mona’s voices, still arguing, a bizarrely normal sound.
“—because a trust fund isn’t about stability, Irene, it’s about imagination—”
Jan’s head snapped up as the stairwell door banged open. Her eyes, bloodshot and fierce, locked onto Fatima. “He’s here. In the old building. He’s not in the crowds. The crowds are the distraction. The fucking bouquet he’s sending to the door.”
“He’s already inside?” Hank asked, his body coiling.
“No,” Vivian said, her voice a shadow of a whisper. “He’s making a door. He’s using all that accumulated desire, all that directed need from every single one of those people out there… he’s focusing it on a single point in the old nursery. He’s going to will a connection into existence. A path straight to the baby.”
Fatima understood. Magic was about will and desire. The Candy Man was a genius of perversion. He wasn’t fighting his way in. He was using the city’s own hijacked libido as a magical battering ram, not against a physical wall, but against the metaphysical barrier that separated his realm from this one. He was turning a place of pure love and new beginnings into a receiver for depravity.
“We have to sever the feed,” Fatima said. “Break his concentration.”
“How?” Bethany asked, holding up her stun node. “These aren’t rated for interdimensional voyeurs.”
Jan looked at Fatima, then at Stacy. A bleak, terrible idea passed between them. It was Stacy who voiced it.
“He wants a happy ending?” Stacy’s voice was quiet, stripped of all its usual confidence, leaving something raw and terrifying underneath. “We give him one. But not his. Ours.”
She looked at the door to Casey’s room. “Mike and Casey’s love is the anchor. It’s why he’s here. It’s the purest source. So we… we overshadow it. We create a bigger, brighter, louder signal. Right on top of his target. A celebration of life so intense, so fucking joyful, it drowns out his nasty little fantasy.”
Liam blinked. “You mean… have an orgy? In the hospital room?”
“Next to it,” Jan corrected, a feral grin touching her lips. She looked at the janitor’s closet across the hall. “The family lounge. Where the grandmas are. We clear it out. And we fuck. We fuck with everything we have. Hank and Fatima. Bethany and Liam. Me and Vivian. Stacy…”
Stacy met Jan’s gaze. “I’ll be the conductor. I have… a vested interest.”
It was insane. It was perfect. It was pure, untrammeled Green Moon logic.
Without another word, Jan turned and marched into the maternity hall. Irene and Mona were sitting on opposite sides of a small table, glaring over paper cups of vending machine coffee.
“Ladies,” Jan announced, her voice brooking no argument. “Family meeting in the waiting room down the hall. Now. This lounge is needed for a… spiritual cleansing ritual.”
Irene’s mouth opened to protest, but Mona, perhaps sensing the electric desperation in the air, stood up. “C’mon, Irene. Let’s go find out if the cafeteria’s kosher. For later.”
As the two bewildered grandmothers were shooed away, the group moved. Hank dragged couches into a wide circle. Bethany locked the door and pulled the blinds. Liam just stood, looking from face to face, his bewilderment slowly melting into a kind of awed acceptance. “Right here, then?” he asked, his Scottish accent thickening around the words.
“Right the fuck here,” Jan confirmed, pulling her sweater over her head. Her small breasts, pale and freckled, seemed to glow in the sterile light. “No time for foreplay. We need a conflagration, not a candle.”
Hank was already unbuckling his belt, his eyes locked on Fatima. “You got any juice left, Fati?”
“I have enough to scream,” she rasped, reaching for the button of his jeans. Her fingers fumbled, but she got them open, yanking his denims and boxers down in one rough pull. His cock, thick and already hardening, slapped against his thigh. “I need you inside me now. Hard. Don’t be gentle.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Hank grunted, shoving her leggings down over her hips. He didn’t wait for them to clear her ankles. He turned her, bent her over the back of a vinyl loveseat, and spat into his hand. He slicked his broad cockhead once, then pressed it against her soaked pussy from behind. “This what you need?”
“Yes, god, just fuck me!” Fatima cried, pushing back against him.
He drove into her with one brutal thrust, burying every inch of his substantial length in her clutching heat. She shrieked, a raw, Arabic curse tearing from her throat as he filled her utterly. He set a punishing, immediate rhythm, his hips slamming against her ass with wet, meaty smacks. Each pump drove the loveseat forward on the linoleum.
Across the room, Bethany pulled Liam’s face to hers, kissing him with frantic hunger. Her hands tugged his shirt apart, buttons pinging against the walls. “Don’t think,” she ordered against his mouth, guiding his hand under her skirt. “Just feel. Make me feel it.”
Liam’s poet’s hands found her bare cunt, already slick. He groaned into her mouth, fingers sliding through her folds. “Yer drenchin’,” he breathed.
“Then do something about it,” she panted, unbuckling his belt. She freed his erection, stroked him twice, then hiked her leg up. He lifted her, her back against the wall, and she guided him into her with a sharp, sure motion. He thrust up, sheathing himself inside her with a guttural cry. The force of it knocked a cheap landscape painting off the wall.
Jan watched them, a spark of her old power flickering in her chest. She turned to Vivian, whose human form was shimmering at the edges. “You need this. We need you.”
Vivian nodded, her timid expression dissolving into something hungry and ancient. Shadows leaked from her skin, curling like smoke. “Feed me,” the half-succubus whispered, and her mouth opened wider than should be possible.
Jan kissed her, pouring not just passion but a river of pure, Green Moon amplified desire into the contact. Vivian drank it in, her form solidifying, growing warmer. Jan’s hands cupped Vivian’s breasts, thumbs circling her nipples until they were hard peaks. She then dropped to her knees, yanking Vivian’s simple cotton panties to the side.
She didn’t tease. She buried her face in the half-succubus’s cunt, her tongue lashing Vivian’s clit with relentless, expert strokes. Vivian gasped, her shadow-tendrils whipping around the room, anchoring to furniture as her knees buckled. “Oh, fuck, Jan… right there!”
Stacy stood in the center of the room, her eyes closed. She wasn’t touching herself. She was conducting. She felt the rising heat, the slam of flesh, the gasps and curses. She focused on the room next door, on the quiet love holding a newborn, and she wrapped the maelstrom of raw fucking around it like a shield. Her own need, a deep, future-shaped ache for a man barely born, thrummed in time with the rhythm of Hank’s thrusts and Liam’s groans.
The air grew thick, shimmering with a golden-green haze. The scent of sex and magic overpowered the antiseptic. The noise was a symphony of obscenity: the slap of skin, the creak of furniture, Fatima’s sobbing pleas for more, Bethany’s sharp, commanding cries for Liam to go harder.
It was working. The psychic pressure in the building shifted, the predatory focus wavering, diluted by this sudden, localized supernova of life-affirming lust.
Then Godfrey, lying by the sealed door, growled.
It was a low, visceral sound that cut through the moans. Katie’s voice echoed from the hallway, tense and high. “Hey! This is a restricted—oh, shit—”
A sound like a hundred champagne corks popping filled the hall, followed by the acrid smell of ozone and burnt sugar. Katie’s controlled explosions.
Lady Eleanor’s voice, usually so jolly, rang out in sharp protest. “I say, you cannot simply—oh, dear me, that is quite rude!”
A heavy thud, then the splintering of wood. Jason’s voice, a roar of effort. “Get back!” The unmistakable crash of a chair breaking against something unyielding.
A twin cry of surprise and pain—Amy and Yukio—and the sound of bodies being carelessly flung aside.
The door to the lounge blew inward. Not from an explosion, but from a sudden, overwhelming absence of resistance, as if the wood simply forgot how to be a barrier.
The Candy Man stood in the doorway.
He looked like a kindly pediatrician gone subtly wrong. His sweater vest was a cheerful yellow, his slacks neatly pressed, but his smile was a stretched, toothy thing that showed too many gums. In one hand he held a simple wicker basket filled with brightly wrapped candies. The other hand, gloved in white, was raised. Behind him, Katie was slumped against the wall, dazed, her hands smoking. Lady Eleanor flickered, transparent with distress. Godfrey barked, lunging, but was held in mid-air by an unseen force, his growls muffled. Jason lay sprawled amidst chair wreckage, unmoving.
He took a step into the room. The orgiastic energy recoiled, not disappearing, but curdling. Hank froze, buried deep in Fatima. Liam held Bethany against the wall, both of them staring. Jan rose from between Vivian’s legs, her face drawn with utter exhaustion.
He took another step, his eyes passing over the scene of tangled, panting bodies without interest. His gaze was fixed on the wall shared with Casey’s room.
Jan moved. She stumbled, her legs weak, but she put herself in his path. She was half-dressed, her jeans unbuttoned, her chest bare and heaving. Vivian moved with her, shadows coalescing into a defensive wall, but the Candy Man simply walked through them as if they were mist, Vivian crying out as her own power was shredded.
“Stop,” Jan whispered, the word scraping her throat raw.
The Candy Man paused. His head tilted.
Mike and Stacy burst in from the other door, the one connecting to the hospital room. Mike held a fire extinguisher like a club. Stacy positioned herself in a fighter’s stance, her body a living barrier. Behind them, Casey sat upright in bed, clutching baby Rick to her chest, her face a mask of protective fury.
The Candy Man looked at the family tableau—the father, the guardian of the future, the mother and child—and his smile widened. The basket in his hand began to glow with a sickly, enticing light.
Jan pushed past Mike and Stacy. She stood directly before the entity, her small, pale form a stark contrast to his polished malevolence. She was trembling from effort and depletion.
“You don’t want them,” she said, her voice gaining strength through sheer will. “They’re a happy ending. You’d spoil the punchline. It’s too obvious.”
The Candy Man’s glistening eyes shifted to her.
“Take me instead,” Jan said, spreading her arms. “A Green Moon initiate. The ‘Red Tornado.’ I can make people want to fuck without any candy. I can turn a board meeting into a bacchanal with a whisper. Think of the corruption you could sow with me as your… vessel. A distributor. It’s a better joke. More subtle.”
The Candy Man went perfectly still. The glow from his basket dimmed. He was considering it. The frantic, defensive energy in the room seemed to suspend, hanging on his deliberation. His head cocked again, studying Jan’s exhausted defiance, calculating the deeper mischief. The offer, it seemed, held a certain perverse appeal. His too-many-teeth smile softened into something contemplative. The glowing basket dimmed to a dull pulse. He took a step toward Jan, his polished loafers silent on the linoleum. A gloved hand began to rise toward her face.
Then the hallway outside exploded with the scent of wildflowers and damp earth.
Arlene strode through the shattered doorway, her grandmotherly face set in lines of formidable power, the ornate wooden dildo still in her hand, now crackling with green energy. Norm ambled in behind her, hands in the pockets of his worn jeans, looking like a man who had just happened upon a confusing garage sale.
The Candy Man’s head twisted with a wet, clicking sound. His eyes narrowed on Norm.
“You,” he hissed, the word sounding like crushed sugar cubes. “The wanderer. The coincidence.”
Norm nodded, amiably. “We do keep tripping over each other, don’t we? Fifth time this century, I think. For such a small club, we sure ruin a lot of your parties.”
Arlene moved to stand beside Jan, her body thrumming with a deep, ancient magic that made the air taste of ozone and pollen. She raised her free hand, her fingers weaving a complex, defensive glyph in the air that shimmered like heat haze.
The Candy Man ignored her, focused on Norm with a bitter, pinpoint hatred. “Your ‘Path’ is a stumbled walk through my designs.”
“Maybe the Path just doesn’t like your designs,” Norm shrugged. He glanced at Jan, his eyes kind but piercing. “Remember earlier, Jan? At Mike and Casey’s place, before all this? I stopped by to tell you about this guy.”
Jan, still trembling, blinked. The memory surfaced through the fog of exhaustion. “Yeah. Right before I left for the hospital with Irene and Mona.”
“Right,” Norm said, his voice calm, conversational. “And I gave you a piece of candy. A little peppermint lozenge.”
Jan’s breath hitched. Her eyes widened, the horrific dots connecting with awful, elegant clarity. “Oh, fuck me.”
“You gave it to Ginny,” Norm continued, as if discussing the weather. “Told her to share it with Molly. To keep their spirits up while they went to… entertain a certain royal distraction.”
The Winter Queen. Jan had suggested Molly go perform for the Winter Queen so Jan could focus on Casey’s delivery. The power of coincidence. It wasn’t an attack; it was a ricochet. A stone she had unknowingly thrown that had circled the globe and was now whipping toward the back of her own head.
“Molly and Ginny,” Jan whispered, the horror dawning. “They must have eaten the candy. At the Winter Queen’s court.”
The temperature in the room plummeted. Frost flowers bloomed across the vinyl loveseat, the shattered door, the fire extinguisher in Mike’s hands. The air grew sharp and thin, smelling of pine needles and starlight.
Between one heartbeat and the next, she was there.
The Winter Queen materialized in the center of the room, and reality bent around her displeasure. She was beauty made of frost and sharp edges, her gown a drift of living sapphire, her hair a waterfall of impossible white. Her ice-blue eyes swept the scene—the half-naked, panting couples, the shattered door, the terrified family, the glaring Candy Man—with an expression of profound, ethereal annoyance.
“This mortal noise disrupts my season,” she said, her voice the crackle of a frozen lake. “The two performers you sent me. The blonde and the nervous one. They have been copulating incessantly for hours. It has grown tedious. Even my frost sprites are blushing.”
Jan’s mind, ever the tactician even when broken, saw the chessboard. She looked from the enraged Candy Man, to the irritated Winter Queen, to Norm’s placid, waiting face.
“An exchange,” Jan blurted out, the words tumbling free. “Your Majesty. Take him.” She pointed a grimy finger at the Candy Man. “He’s the source of the candy that’s ruining your… aesthetic. He’s a creature of sticky, messy desires. I bet he’s never seen a proper blizzard. He’d be a fascinating new distraction. A project. And you give me back my friends.”
The Winter Queen’s glacial gaze shifted to the Candy Man. He took a step back, his confident malevolence wavering before her ancient, capricious power. He was a trickster. She was a force of nature.
“The source of the candy?” she mused, drifting closer to him. The air around her sobbed with cold. The Candy Man’s cheerful yellow sweater-vest began to crystalize with frost. “This… confectioner?”
“He spends all his time thinking about people getting naked and fucking,” Jan pressed, seizing the angle. “It’s all he does. It’s vulgar. It’s repetitive. You could teach him about subtlety. About the quiet desire of a frozen waterfall. The slow, inevitable seduction of a glacier.”
The Winter Queen’s lips, the color of a winter rose, curved into a faint, chilling smile. She liked that idea. A new, messy toy to refine. A corruption to purify with millennia of frost.
The Candy Man opened his mouth to protest, to bargain, to unleash some last spell. The Winter Queen simply reached out a pale, perfect hand. She did not grab his sweater or his arm. She seized the very concept of him.
There was no sound, no flash of light. One moment he was there, his form beginning to twist in protest. The next, he was simply gone. The wicker basket of candies clattered to the floor, the sweets spilling and melting into harmless, non-magical syrup on the linoleum.
In the space where he had stood, two naked women appeared, tumbling onto the cold floor in a frantic, moaning heap.
Molly and Ginny were a blur of moving limbs and stolen gasps. Ginny was on her back, her strawberry blonde hair splayed out, her legs locked around Molly’s waist. Molly, her blonde curls damp with sweat, was piston-deep inside her best friend, using a sleek, lavender silicone vibrator with desperate, driving strokes. The toy hummed loudly, buried in Ginny’s cunt alongside Molly’s pounding fingers.
“Oh god, Ginny, yes, take it, I’m gonna come again,” Molly sobbed, her comedic actress’s voice ragged with raw need.
“Don’t you stop, don’t you fucking stop, Molly, I can feel it in my throat,” Ginny screamed, her head thrashing, her hands clawing at Molly’s back. Her heels drummed against the small of Molly’s back, urging her on.
They were utterly consumed, lost in the candy’s fever, unaware of the freezing room or the ring of stunned, battered faces watching them. The brutal, rhythmic sound of wet flesh and the electric buzz of the vibrator filled the sudden silence.
Arlene sighed, a sound of profound weariness, and lowered her hands. The green energy around her dildo winked out. She nudged the basket of melted candy with her toe. “Well. That’s that, then.”
Norm smiled. “Told you the Path was clear here.”
Jan sank to her knees, the last of her strength deserting her. The relentless tension that had held her ribcage together for hours snapped. A single, hiccupping laugh escaped her, then another, until she was kneeling on the hospital floor, laughing and crying at once, her forehead nearly touching the linoleum next to where Molly was violently making Ginny come for what was likely the tenth time.
Stacy was the first to move toward the new arrivals. She knelt, avoiding a flailing limb, and placed a firm hand on Molly’s slick, heaving shoulder. “Hey. Performers. Curtain call.”
Molly didn’t hear her. Ginny’s whole body was bowstring tight, a shriek building in her lungs.
Fatima, still bent over the couch with Hank deep inside her, turned her head. Her voice was a wrecked, spent thing. “Jan. A little help?”
Jan lifted her head. She looked at the entwined, desperate women, at the collapsing energy in the room, at Mike and Casey holding each other in the doorway, at her friends scattered and bleeding and exhausted. She drew the deepest breath she could manage, pulling on the dregs of her power, on the relief flooding the space now that the Candy Man’s presence was gone.
She focused not on amplification, but on release. On the gentle, soothing balm the Green Moon could also provide.
“Enough,” Jan whispered, and the word carried every ounce of her compassionate authority.
A wave of tranquil, golden warmth radiated from her, washing over Molly and Ginny.
Molly’s frantic thrusting stuttered. The vibrator fell from her fingers with a clatter. Ginny’s arched back slowly lowered to the floor. Their connected bodies shuddered, not with climax, but with the sudden, breathtaking cessation of compulsion. The manic glaze faded from their eyes, replaced by dazed confusion and profound physical exhaustion. They blinked at each other, at their nakedness, at the room.
“Wh… where’s the ice palace?” Molly mumbled, then her eyes rolled back and she collapsed atop Ginny, unconscious.
Ginny stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles. “I think I need a Gatorade,” she slurred, and passed out cold.
In the sudden, stark quiet, the only sounds were ragged breathing and the distant, blessed cry of a newborn from a room down the hall. The crisis was over. The grotesque pilgrimage outside would be dispersing, the magic unraveling now that its source had been taken to a different, frozen court.
They had won. They were a mess of torn clothes, sweat-damp skin, and psychological bruises, surrounded by the sleeping forms of friends and the melted evidence of a deranged scheme, but they had won.
Godfrey finally wriggled free from the dissolved magical restraint and trotted to Jan, nudging her hand with his wet nose. She buried her fingers in his fur, the one solid, normal, magical-immune thing in her world, and finally let the tears come.