Chapter 9: The Greyhold Breach
The orange sigil on the Greyhold’s face didn’t just pulse; it bled. Rivulets of molten light dripped down the seamless dark stone, sizzling where they met the spongy ground. The air, already dead, now tasted of burnt copper and static.
“Warding glyphs,” Bethany muttered, her eyes narrowed behind non-existent sunglasses. Her hands were a blur inside her handbag. “Aggressive defensive patterning. Not standard Wand issue. This is custom work. Bedivere’s vanity.” She withdrew not the ray-gun, but a slender, tuning fork made of a dull blue metal. She struck it against the bag’s frame. It emitted a sound no one could hear, but the dripping sigils shuddered, their light stuttering.
“Can you unravel it?” Jan asked, her fingers curling around the smooth river stone in her pocket. It was cold.
“Not quickly. It’s layered like an onion designed to make you cry acid.” Bethany’s lips were a thin line. “A direct assault will trigger cascading rebukes. Probably disintegration.”
Lady Eleanor floated closer, her ethereal form causing the mist to swirl. “Oh, I do dislike brutish architecture. No sense of play. Perhaps a more… indirect approach?”
It was Cassie who moved. She walked past them, her worn boots silent on the strange earth, straight toward the bleeding wall. She didn’t look at the sigil, but at a point about three feet to its left, near the ground, where a single, faint crack in the obsidian seam was almost invisible.
“The Path isn’t through the door,” she said, her voice calm. “It’s through the flaw.”
Jan didn’t hesitate. She followed, pulling the river stone from her pouch. As she neared the wall, the stone erupted in a shower of green sparks, not from the grand sigil, but from that insignificant, hairline fracture. The sparks dug in, like emerald ants, chewing at the edges.
“Beth, here! Amplify this!”
Bethany was beside her in an instant, her tuning fork humming. She pressed it to the stone beside Jan’s hand. The blue resonance met the green sparks. Instead of an explosion, there was a sound like a thousand locks clicking open at once. The fracture widened, not with a roar, but with a tired groan, peeling back just enough to reveal a dank, dark opening scarcely larger than a laundry chute.
“Ladies first,” Jan quipped, her heart hammering against her ribs.
One by one, they squeezed through. The interior was a slap of sensory deprivation after the alien nowhere. The air was cold, recycled, smelling of antiseptic and something else underneath—a sweet, coppery tang that Jan recognized from Bedivere’s lab. It made her stomach clench.
They were in a narrow, curved corridor of the same seamless obsidian, illuminated by strips of sickly green light set into the floor. The hum was louder here, a sub-audible vibration that made their teeth ache.
“No guards,” Bethany whispered, pulling a small, circular scanner from her bag. It projected a holographic wireframe of the level ahead. “Heat signatures are clustered… here. A central chamber. One powerful source. Several weaker, stationary ones. Prisoner pods.”
“Morgane,” Jan said.
“Likely.”
They moved like shadows, Cassie taking the lead with unnerving certainty, turning corners without pause. The silence was a living thing, waiting to be broken.
It broke when they pushed open a vast, iris-like door at the corridor’s end.
The chamber they entered was a cathedral to cold intent. Obsidian walls rose to a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. In the center, on a raised dais, Morgane stood beside a shrouded figure, her silver hair the only bright thing in the gloom. Floating holograms displayed Chicago, the Lodge, faces of their friends. Around the room’s perimeter, six figures in charcoal suits stood rigid, their features obscured by shimmering energy fields that served as helmets. They didn’t turn. They were part of the room’s system.
“Agent Pendragon,” Morgane’s voice was smooth, patronizing, echoing slightly. “And the Red Tornado. I must admit, your method of entry was… inelegant. But you are welcome. You save us the trouble of a retrieval team.”
Jan felt the woman’s contempt like a physical wind. “Where’s the Merlin, you icy bitch?”
Morgane’s smile was thin. “Safe. Undergoing a transformative understanding. As you will.” She didn’t move a muscle. “Subdue them. The Green Moon is to be preserved for extraction. The others are… expendable.”
The six guards moved. Not with the jerkiness of humans, but with a single, fluid, synchronized turn. Their helmet-faces resolved into blank, mirrored ovals.
Bethany’s bag was on the floor, her hands full. In her left, the tuning fork. In her right, a device like a spinning brass gyroscope. She flung the gyroscope into the air. It didn’t fall. It whirred, emitted a piercing chord, and a wave of distorted gravity slammed into the first two guards, crushing them against the wall with a crunch of breaking technology.
Jan didn’t go for tech. She reached inside herself, to the warm, swirling core of Green Moon energy. She didn’t send out a wave of general lust. She focused it, like a scalpel, aiming not at Morgane, but at the four remaining guards. She poured the feeling of need into it, the desperate, clawing hunger for touch, for release, for sweaty, fucking connection.
The effect was instantaneous and grotesque. The guards, programmed for combat, shuddered mid-stride. One let out a choked gasp, his hands flying to the front of his suit, gripping himself through the fabric. Another turned to the colleague beside him, a low moan escaping his featureless helm. The synchronized unity shattered into a mess of writhing, desperate bodies.
“How crude,” Morgane sighed, as if disappointed by a poor vintage. She raised a hand. Dark energy, like threads of condensed shadow, spun from her fingertips, lashing towards Bethany.
Lady Eleanor chose that moment to act. With a joyful shriek that was utterly out of place, she streamed through the air, a streak of pearlescent light, and plunged directly into the chest of the guard nearest to Jan—the one clutching his own cock.
The man’s back arched violently. His mirrored helmet flickered and vanished, revealing the face of a young man, his eyes wide, pupils dilated with Jan’s magic and now flooded with Eleanor’s anachronistic consciousness. He looked down at his own hands, then at Jan, and a delighted, old-fashioned grin split his features.
“Oh, this is simply marvelous!” came Eleanor’s voice from the man’s mouth. He—she—flexed his new hands. “The strength! The urgent feeling! Let’s have some fun, shall we?” With a fluid grace that was all Eleanor, she grabbed the helmet of the guard next to her, who was currently trying to rub himself against the dais, and slammed his head into the obsidian wall. He dropped.
Morgane’s shadow-whips wrapped around Bethany’s gyroscope. There was a shriek of shearing metal, and it exploded into shards. Bethany staggered back, blood welling from a cut on her cheek. She triggered the tuning fork again, the sound wave visibly disrupting the shadows, making them fray like old rope.
In the chaos, Cassie wasn’t fighting. She was walking, calmly, across the chamber, ducking under a wild grapple between two enthralled guards, her eyes fixed on a section of blank wall behind Morgane’s dais. She placed a single, unassuming hand against the obsidian.
The wall hissed and dissolved, revealing not a prison cell, but a small, comfortable-looking antechamber. A sofa, a low table with a tea set, and shelves of old books. A prison meant to lull, not punish. Sitting on the sofa, reading a leather-bound volume, was a man with silver-streaked hair and an impeccably tailored suit, now slightly rumpled. He looked up, his expression one of mild surprise.
Percival.
Before he could speak, Cassie reached into her jacket and tossed a small, cloth-wrapped object onto his lap. It was a vintage, silver pocket watch. He stared at it, then at her, understanding dawning in his eyes. He gave a slow, deliberate nod.
Morgane shrieked in genuine fury. “You! Nomad! You interfere in affairs beyond your station!” The shadows around Bethany retracted, coalescing into a spear of darkness aimed straight for Cassie’s heart.
Jan was moving. She couldn’t match that dark magic speed. But she didn’t need to. She channeled another, more specific pulse of Green Moon power. This wasn’t a wave. It was a lash, a direct, intrusive filament of pure, unfiltered craving. She didn’t aim it at Morgane’s body, but at her mind, at the core of her focused contempt.
It hit.
Morgane’s flawless composure ruptured. The shadow-spear faltered, dissolving into mist. Her back stiffened, a sharp gasp tearing from her throat. Her grey eyes, fixed on Cassie, lost their icy focus. They dilated, clouding with a sudden, invasive heat. Her hand, raised to command, trembled. She slowly, almost against her will, turned her head toward Jan.
Jan walked forward, each click of her boots on the stone echoing. She poured it on, not with rage, but with a terrifying, empathetic intensity. She made Morgane feel the emptiness behind her contempt. She made her feel the lonely, aching void that only the press of another body, the frenzied joining of skin and sweat and wanton noise, could possibly fill. She made the elegant woman feel horny. Desperately, shamefully, overwhelmingly so.
“You’re so empty,” Jan whispered, her voice carrying across the room. “All that control. All that cold. It’s just quiet, isn’t it? Don’t you want to feel something real?”
Morgane’s breath came in ragged pants. A flush climbed her pale neck. Her other hand came up, not to cast, but to fumble at the high collar of her impeccable suit jacket. She couldn’t look away from Jan. The Green Moon’s Power of Exposure wasn’t about nudity now; it was about exposing the raw, pathetic need beneath the armor.
“Stop… this…” Morgane managed, but it was a plea, not a command.
“I don’t think I will,” Jan said, now just a few feet away. She reached out, not magically, but physically. She placed a single finger under Morgane’s chin. The touch was electric. Morgane flinched as if burned, but didn’t pull away. A traitorous moan leaked from her lips.
“You want to be touched,” Jan murmured, her face close now, her freckles stark in the green light. “You want to be taken. You want to forget all this cold, clever plotting and just feel.” Her other hand came up, resting boldly on Morgane’s chest, over her sternum, feeling the frantic rabbit-beat of her heart through the wool. “I can feel your heart. It’s racing. It wants out. Don’t you want to come, Morgane? Don’t you want to scream?”
Morgane’s defenses were ashes. Jan’s magic was a bonfire in her veins, burning up every thought that wasn’t need. With a strangled cry that was equal parts agony and ecstasy, Morgane’s hands shot out. But not to push Jan away. They gripped Jan’s shoulders, fingers digging in with bruising force, and her mouth crashed down on Jan’s in a violent, starving kiss.
It was all teeth and clashing tongues, a battle surrendered and transformed. Jan met the fury with hungry acceptance, her hands yanking at the buttons of Morgane’s suit jacket, tearing them free. The fabric parted, revealing a sleek silk blouse beneath. Morgane tore her mouth away, gasping, her eyes wild.
“Fuck you,” she snarled, the obscenity thick with desire.
“Yeah,” Jan breathed, shoving the jacket off her shoulders. “That’s the idea.”
Morgane spun Jan around, pushing her backwards against the cold obsidian of the central dais. The shock of the cold stone against her back made Jan gasp. Morgane’s hands were everywhere, rough, desperate, pulling at Jan’s thrift-store blouse until it ripped open. Her mouth latched onto Jan’s neck, sucking, biting, marking. Jan arched against her, her own hands raking through Morgane’s perfect silver hair, destroying its order.
This wasn’t love. It wasn’t even pleasure in the gentle sense. It was a conflagration, a magical and biological imperative made terrifyingly flesh. Jan hooked a leg around Morgane’s hip, grinding their clothed centers together. The friction was maddening, insufficient. Morgane’s hand shoved between them, fumbling with the button of Jan’s jeans, yanking them and her underwear down in one brutal motion. Cool air hit Jan’s skin, followed by the burning heat of Morgane’s palm slamming against her exposed cunt.
Jan cried out, her head hitting the stone. Morgane didn’t tease. Two fingers plunged into her, deep and rough, curling upward. Her thumb jammed against Jan’s clit, rubbing hard, fast circles. It was punitive, glorious, an assault that felt like being unmade. Jan’s vision whited out at the edges. She was wet, soaked, her body betraying any notion of resistance, welcoming the violation.
“Is this… is this what you want?” Morgane hissed in her ear, her own breath scorching. “This… filthy… common feeling?”
“Yes, you cold bitch!” Jan roared back, bucking against her hand. “Fuck me! Use me! Feel how alive I am!”
Morgane withdrew her fingers, glistening. She shoved Jan harder against the dais, bending her over the cold surface. Jan heard the frantic rustle of fabric, the tear of a zipper. Then the blunt, insistent pressure of Morgane’s cock—not flesh, but a sleek, smooth construct of enchanted metal and hard light, shimmering into existence from a hidden compartment in her suit—pressed against her entrance.
Morgane leaned over her, her silk blouse open, her breasts heavy against Jan’s bare back. She wrapped a hand in Jan’s red hair and pulled, arching her neck. “You will remember this,” she snarled, and sank the full, unyielding length of her artificial cock into Jan with one brutal thrust.
Jan screamed. The stretch was immense, shocking, a colonization. It filled her utterly, a sensation of being pierced and claimed by the embodiment of the woman’ own twisted will. Morgane set a punishing rhythm immediately, slamming into her with a violence that shook Jan’s whole body against the stone. Each thrust was a conquest, a denial of everything Jan was, transformed into pure, animal sensation.
Jan’s knuckles were white where she gripped the dais edge. Pleasure, sharp and catastrophic, built with every jarring impact. She was being fucked apart, and her magic, her goddamn Green Moon essence, sang in tandem with it, amplifying the raw feedback loop between them. Morgane’s ragged breaths were sobs of release, her polished façade obliterated by primal need. She pounded into Jan, her hips a piston, her grip on Jan’s hair unrelenting.
“Come for me, you chaos-bitch,” Morgane demanded, her voice broken. “Come on my cock. Show me your joy.”
The command, the sheer dominant hunger, was the final key. Jan’s climax detonated, tearing through her like a supernova. She convulsed, a wild, screaming release that clamped her body around the invading length, milking it. The intensity triggered Morgane’s own. The elegant woman threw her head back with a guttural, uncouth roar, her body seizing as her own magical construct pulsed within Jan, simulating a hot, shocking flood of release.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing echoing in the vast chamber. The fight had stopped. Bethany was staring, her face a mask of shock and clinical fascination. Lady Eleanor, still in the guard’s body, was watching with avid, appreciative eyes. The remaining guards were slumped, unconscious or dazed.
Morgane slowly withdrew, the hard-light cock shimmering out of existence. She staggered back a step, her blouse hanging open, her suit ruined. The savage heat in her eyes was receding, replaced by a hollow, stunned horror at what she’d done, at what she’d felt.
Jan pushed herself up on trembling arms, pulling her jeans up over her slick thighs. She turned, leaning back against the dais, spent and raw. She met Morgane’s shattered gaze.
“See?” Jan said, her voice hoarse. “That’s feeling. That’s real. Remember it.”
Before Morgane could respond—whether with a spell or a sob—Percival’s calm voice cut through the tension from the open antechamber doorway.
“The diversion, while… graphic… appears to have been effective.” He held up the pocket watch Cassie had given him. “Thank you, Nomad. This contained a localized temporal stasis key. My captivity was comfortable but quite binding.” He stepped fully into the chamber, his eyes moving dismissively over the wreckage of Morgane and her forces, Coming to rest on Morgane herself. “Acting Commander. You are relieved. The Merlin’s authority, through me, is reinstated. Your faction is dissolved.”
Morgane simply stood there, her world in ashes.
Bethany wiped blood from her cheek, looked at Jan, at the ruined suit, at the whole unbelievable scene. “Did you…”
“Later,” Jan croaked, pushing off the dais. Her legs held. “Percival. The Merlin. Where is he?”
Percival’s face grew grim. “Not here. Bedivere is still looking for him. This was a decoy, a trap within a trap. He is in Chicago. Somewhere public. Somewhere we would never think to use force.” He looked at the holograms still floating, now showing a quiet street, a coffee shop front. “Somewhere perfectly ordinary.”
The hum of the Greyhold’s systems was the only sound as Morgane’s quiet, shattered weeping began. Jan ignored it, zipping her jeans with fingers that felt numb and distant.
“Ordinary,” Bethany repeated, holstering her devices. She eyed the floating holograph of the Chicago street, a familiar intersection near Lincoln Park. “A coffee shop. He’s using the banality as a shield. No magical signatures to track, just… espresso machines.”
“He could be anyone,” Percival said, straightening his rumpled cuffs with precise, anxious tugs. “A customer. A barista. The Merlin excels at hiding things in plain sight, especially people.”
Cassie nodded slowly, her eyes unfocused, reading a thread only she could see. “The Path turns there. It’s close.”
“Then we’re already behind.” Jan’s voice was gravel. She became abruptly aware of the sticky feeling between her thighs, the phantom ache of Morgane’s violation still echoing in her muscles. It was a useful ache, a reminder of the cost and the weapon. She looked at Bethany. “Can you get us back? Not to the void. To the Lodge. We need to rally, and we need to move fast.”
Bethany was already kneeling by her bag, assembling components from the larger-on-the-inside space. A crystalline lattice, wires of gold, a smoldering piece of black rock from the Greyhold floor. “Won’t be a gentle ride. Short-range dimensional hop, using the Lodge’s own wards as a beacon. It’ll feel like being squeezed through a straw.”
“Just get us there,” Jan said.
The bell on the coffee shop door jingled with aggressive cheer. Mike shuffled in, the baby carrier hooked awkwardly on one arm, a diaper bag slung over the other. Casey followed, holding the door, her eyes scanning the cozy, sun-drenched space.
“There she is,” Casey said, a genuine smile breaking through her usual sardonic expression.
At a corner table by the window, a woman in her late forties with elegant silver-streaked hair pulled into a loose knot waved. She wore a simple cream-colored sweater and looked, for all the world, like a favorite professor or a particularly stylish librarian. Calista Gunderson.
“Aunt Calista!” Casey weaved through the tables, leaning down for a hug. “You made it.”
“I told you I would, didn’t I?” Calista’s voice was warm, tinged with the faint, educated accent Casey remembered from childhood. Her sharp grey eyes were soft now, crinkling at the corners. She turned the smile on Mike. “And Michael. Always good to see you.”
“Hey, Aunt Calista,” Mike said, shifting the carrier. “This is, um, Rick. Rick, this is your Great-Aunt Calista.”
Godfrey II padded in last, sitting politely by Mike’s feet, his golden tail giving a single, dignified thump on the tile floor.
Calista’s gaze dropped to the sleeping baby, and her breath caught. Just a tiny hitch, a swift glimmer of moisture in her eyes that was gone in a blink. She reached out a perfectly manicured finger and gently traced the curve of Rick’s tiny fist. “Richard,” she whispered, her voice thick. “After my father. Oh, Casey.” She looked up, her expression one of pure, unguarded familial tenderness. “What a beautiful honor. Truly.”
“We thought you’d like it,” Casey said, sitting, her own eyes misty.
The conversation that followed was a masterpiece of mundane theater. Mike and Casey, believing utterly in their aunt’s normalcy, launched into the safe, gossipy catch-up they always did. Casey’s latest freelance mural project (“It’s for a pediatric dentist’s office, so it’s all happy molars with faces”). Mike’s ongoing battle with a particularly stubborn home network. The challenges of infant sleep schedules, described with a blend of exhaustion and awe.
Calista listened, nodding, asking perfect aunt-ly questions. She told small, believable lies. A recent conference in Toronto (“Dreadfully boring, all corporate tax law”). A problem with her garden’s soil pH (“The hydrangeas are simply refusing to turn blue”). She carefully edited out the reality of her last month: directing global magical operations, hunting a traitor within her own Order, being kidnapped, escaping and going on the run. To them, her life was quiet, orderly, and blessedly dull.
After about fifteen minutes, Calista let her hand rest on the table, index finger making an almost invisible circular motion. A spell, gossamer-thin and utterly benign, wafted towards Mike and Casey. A sudden, compelling need for the restroom.
“Oh, shoot,” Mike said, shifting in his seat. “I should, uh. You know. Before the next feeding chaos.”
“Yeah,” Casey agreed, standing abruptly. “Me too. Aunt Calista, do you mind?”
“Not at all, dears,” Calista said, her smile serene. “Take your time. Rick and I will get better acquainted. And I’ll introduce myself to this handsome fellow.” She leaned down to scratch Godfrey behind the ears. The dog’s tail thumped again, but his eyes, a deep, liquid brown, watched her with an intelligence that was profoundly unsettling in a puppy.
The moment they disappeared around the corner, Calista’s demeanor shifted. The warm aunt vanished, replaced by the Merlin. Her expression didn’t become harsh, but it settled into a plane of profound focus. She leaned over the carrier.
Her hands moved, not with dramatic gestures, but with the precise, economical motions of a surgeon. Fingertips hovered an inch above Rick’s sleeping form. Magical sight, tuned to a frequency even the Archimedes Society would need specialized lenses to perceive, scanned him. She saw the healthy glow of his life-force, the tiny, bright spark of his own latent potential—a legacy of his parents’ many weird adventures. She saw no foreign enchantments, no psychic hooks, no trace of Bedivere’s meddling.
“Good,” she murmured.
Her fingers then danced, weaving threads of protection so subtle they integrated with the baby’s own bio-rhythmic field. A ward that would cause unbearable, feedback-loop nausea in anyone who approached him with harmful intent. A second that would blur his form from scrying spells, making him appear as a vague smudge of light. A third, a tiny pulse-transmitter linked directly to a beacon in her own pocket dimension. She poured potency into them, yet made them delicate as a spider’s web. Invisible. Undetectable. Perfect.
She sat back, satisfied, and found Godfrey’s unwavering stare. She looked into those eyes and saw it: the ancient canine soul, the spectral shadow of a massive Bernese Mountain Dog superimposed over the golden puppy like a lingering afterimage. A reincarnate familiar, bound soul-to-soul to Jan O’Connor.
Godfrey gave a small, approving whuff.
Calista smiled, a real one this time, thin and sharp. She leaned close to the dog, her voice a whisper lost in the hiss of the espresso machine. “This is the first step. The contract Mara is crafting… it will be ironclad. No rebellions in his future. No one will use him as a pawn. He will be safe.”
She straightened, her magical senses brushing against the dozens of tiny emanations across the city—the low buzz of the Lodge’s wards, the distant, fizzy burst of a Glorious Kaboom firework, the distinct, warm ripple of Green Moon energy emanating from… her eyebrow arched. It was coming from the Lodge, but it had the recent, frenzied aftertaste of a powerful, coercive release. Jan’s work.
Calista looked back at Rick, her expression softening once more into the aunt. “Listen to that,” she whispered playfully to the sleeping baby. “If I’m not mistaken, you might have a little brother or sister before you know it. Your family is nothing if not… productive.”
Mike and Casey returned, apologizing, sliding back into their seats. The conversation resumed its comfortable, ordinary flow, a gentle stream around the monumental, hidden rock of Calista’s actions.
At the Lodge, the air in the main hall was thick with unresolved argument and anxiety. The strip poker deck had been confiscated. Fatima stood with her arms crossed, glaring at a sheepish Youssef and a wide-eyed Zara. Amir was talking in low, urgent tones with Becky and Aaron by the fireplace. Hank was checking his phone, bored but tense. Stacy was by the main doors, her posture alert, hand resting near the small of her back where her pistol was holstered.
Gregor Stone-eye shuffled into the hall, his large, bat-like ears twitching. He had been in a side chamber, inventorying Golden Wand response kits. He stopped, his large, stone-colored eye narrowing as he looked at the figure of Percival, standing stiffly near Aaron, nodding along to the tactical discussion.
Gregor sniffed the air. He smelled old paper, enchanted beeswax, cedar… and under it, something sweet and wrong. Like rotting honeysuckle and wet clay. It was a smell from the Deep Markets, a smell of things that wore skins they didn’t own.
He didn’t shout. He was a goblin of action. He scurried, staying low, heading directly for where Charlie Winkle and Rebecca Franklin sat slightly apart, Rebecca sipping tea while Charlie explained the basics of magical nullification theory to her in simple, teacher-like terms.
“Mister Charlie, Miss Rebecca,” Gregor hissed, tugging on Charlie’s sleeve. “Trouble. You need to go. To the back kitchen, now. The ward-stones are strongest there.”
Charlie’s kindly face went blank for a second, the echo of the Auditor he once was sensing the dissonance. “Gregor? What’s—”
Across the room, the figure of Percival stiffened. Its head rotated towards Gregor, the movement a fraction too smooth, too fluid. The crisp line of its charcoal suit blurred at the edges.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Aaron muttered, his ink-stained fingers already moving to trace a Bargain-breaking sigil in the air.
“Something’s off!” Stacy barked, her hand now firmly on her gun.
The Changeling dropped the pretense. Percival’s form melted like wax under a blowtorch. It slumped, then erupted upwards, stretching, its features swimming through a horrifying gallery of stolen faces—a smiling barista, a weary bus driver, Stacy’s own face for a heart-stopping second—before settling into a generic, porcelain-smooth blankness punctuated by two pits of swirling ochre light.
“Changeling!” Brigid O’Connor’s voice cut through the panic, clear and certain. She was already moving, her braid whipping behind her, a piece of chalk snatched from a table in her hand. Across the room, her cousin Aisling mirrored her, a smirk on her face as she vaulted over a low couch.
The creature screeched, a sound of grinding slate. It lunged not for attack, but for the nearest source of stable identity—Rebecca, who sat frozen, her teacup rattling in its saucer.
“Where’s the real Percival?” Stacy yelled, drawing her pistol but hesitating, the target too close to her friends.
The air three feet from the Changeling tore open with a sound like ripping canvas. Violet mist from the void beyond spilled out, followed by a stumbling sequence of figures.
Jan landed in a crouch, her clothes torn, smelling of sex and ozone. Bethany came next, shoving a dazed but real Percival through. Cassie stepped out calmly, and Lady Eleanor, now disembodied again, wafted out like a sigh.
The Changeling recoiled from the sudden influx of potent, complicated energies.
Cassie looked at it, then at the room, her gaze settling on the real Percival. A small, satisfied smile touched her lips. “The Path leads true,” she said.
Chaos, coordinated and furious, erupted once more.