Border, KS

“He still looks like he’s sneering, even when he’s unconscious.” Morgan Winters commented as she came up on the mostly still, but sadly breathing, man. “I wonder if that’s actually like, permanent damage.”

“One can only hope.” Walter commented as he made sure he still had his…well, everything secured about his person as he came up to Morgan’s side. He took a moment to look down at the fallen Earl, and then looked up to Gabriel Shepherd. “You keep showing up at interesting moments, Mr. Shepherd. That’s going to warrant some questions, real soon.”

“I am a humble servant of the people, Deputy Marshal.” Gabriel said as he tossed the shovel casually to the side.

“And a litterer.” Walter pointed out to the dull, reverberating clang of the shovel on the cobblestones. “The seriousness of the questions that I want to ask you only grows with each passing offense, Mr. Shepherd.”

The trilling sounds of the Heat Miser song filled the air for a moment and, with a taser still in one hand, Morgan casually looked down to check the text from Tania. She made it seem very natural doing so, and Walter quirked an eyebrow. “Am I a little bit broken for thinking that’s hot?” Walter paused his rising annoyance to comment to the former shovel wielding man.

“No.” Gabriel, confirmed a twinkle in his eyes. “It’s kind of working for me too.”

“Mmm. I can pick back up the shovel, gentlemen.” Morgan commented idly, as she put her phone back in to her pocket. She looked up, catching Walter’s eyes with her own. “Tania managed to…subdue the attackers at the school. The girls are fine, and the police are on their way. The students are awake again, and the blood should come out of the walls.” The last bit she said with a mix of amusement and exasperation.

“Ok, I’m going to ignore that last bit.” Walter said, turning back to Shepherd. “So how is it that you keep showing up exactly at the most interesting moments in the city, Mr. Shepherd? You have a good record for a not psychic.” Walter renewed his questions, before once more he looked over to Morgan. “Will you dial in and get some backup here too?”

As Morgan nodded, the avowed not-psychic answered. “I’m not psychic.” Shepherd offered with a shake of his head.

“I do believe I covered that when I called you a not-psychic.” Walter confirmed. “And yet…you live in very interesting times. I want to know how, and why. Or why, and how—I’m not particularly picky.”

“Walter…” Gabriel said, and the use of his first name caused one of Walter’s eyebrows to rise very slowly. “There’s a lot of weird shit in this world, and you’re not ready for all of it.” His voice was low and dark, and filled with shadows that swam behind the words with a quiet menace. “And once you know all of them there is no going back, and there is no safety in the night or the gentle embrace of sleep. Suffice it to say that I am privy to some things, and let’s go from there.”

Walter considered him for a long moment, hearing the gnashing teeth veiled by his sentences. He gave them a weighty consideration. After those long moments he nodded as if agreeing, and began to speak in a conciliatory tone. “That is a very heartfelt and very pretty pile of bullshit, Gabriel.” After a moment of processing the dissonance between the words and the tone, Gabriel laughed. “I’m up to my eyeballs in weird crap, and I’m trying to just keep swimming. I need to know as much as I can, and I need to know what I don’t know.” Morgan put a foot on to the chest of the still unconscious Earl, her eyes cast with curiosity as she watched their interaction.

Gabriel gave that consideration back as well, before he sighed. “I can’t, Walter. I’m not psychic—that much I’m 100% honest about. But there really are things I can’t tell you yet. But—” He began, holding up a hand as Walter went to interrupt him. “There are things I can and will tell you tonight, and some day you will know all of the rest of it. Or at least most of the rest of it. That’s the best I can do. And no arrest or subpoena will change that, for now.”

Walter sighed, long suffering and looked to the heavens for a long moment before he nodded. “Fine, what is it you can tell me right now.”

Gabriel Shepherd looked down at the Earl, and then oddly looked to Morgan for a long moment. “Right now, before we can look at it, I can tell you this. What they were making is a portal, to a place far beyond here. It isn’t to the land of Faerie, and Morgan can tell you why, and I don’t know where it goes exactly—but it is dangerous, and I have to go. So we will need to speak to your police, and talk to this sad lump of treason, to start getting that set up.” He said with a sigh, that made it clear he did not particularly want to.

“Is that it?” Walter asked, drawing a head shake from the other man.

“There are seven words that will cause you grief tonight, Walter. Seven words that will start a fight, and I don’t know how that fight will change things down the road.” Gabriel said very seriously. “All I can say is when you think of them, wait to make a phone call. There are four times in your life when your future will be set by seven words, and tonight is one of them.”

Siobhan had just long enough to think that she was dead before she realized that she was being violently jerked to the left. She yelped as she hit the ground, managing to roll back to her feet despite the dress as she looked back. Tania had her arm out and had apparently done something that sent her sprawling.

“I tried.” Tania said almost conversationally as she looked at the men facing her. “I want it noted, for the record, that I did try.” A moment later she was not conversational at all, moving toward the six men almost faster than Siobhan could keep track of.

She hit the man in the center like a runaway train, laying him out with a fist to the jaw that filled the gym with a sickening crack that Siobhan was sure wasn’t healthy. Without stopping she grabbed the rifle that he had in his hand and turned. Rather than shooting it she simply turned and flung it at one of the other men with guns. It thwacked him right between the eyes and he fell down to the ground unconscious.

“But this is why we can’t have nice things.” She proclaimed as she turned to the one remaining man with a gun. She started walking toward him slowly this time, with a leonine and predatory grace. She almost casually reached in to her jacket and pulled out a slender knife. She let her arm drop down to her side as she walked, the blade glinting in the uncertain light of the dance hall and taking on a menacing air. A more menacing air, Siobhan found herself thinking absurdly, as she was forced to admit that brandishing a naked knife would be menacing no matter the circumstances—unless there was waiting cake.

The other man started to say something and raise his pistol at the same time. One of them might have been a good instinct, but the other was definitely terrible. Before he could do anything with the rising weapon Tania’s arm flashed and the knife flew from it in a blur. Siobhan turned away quickly so that she didn’t see what happened when it landed.

That might have been what saved her life, or at least her well-being and non-kidnapness. One of the three remaining men, one of the ones with knives or small swords, had come up on her. She stared wide-eyed at him for a moment as he came close, shocked that Tania wasn’t just handily slaughtering everyone. He seemed fairly surprised that he had been spotted as well, and it caused him to pause in the act. After a moment of consideration he reached out with the knife as if to poke at her, as if unsure he should do it—she got the feeling that he had been given orders to deal with the students, but not her. And it mad her wonder, in the shocked moment, why that was.

Before her shock and brain-locked curiosity could get her stabbed, something latched on to the attacker like a particularly enthusiastic ferret. After a blink she realized it was Antigone, wrapping her arms around the attacker in a desperate attempt to keep him from poking her with the knife. “Hurry?” Antigone said in a little bit of a panic, her voice strained.

Siobhan didn’t wait for the world’s easiest escape attempt, instead quickly moving forward. One hand moved to grab the knife hand by the wrist; her other hand lashed out and impacted the side of the man’s neck. It turned out that faerie assassins still have a nerve there in the neck, and a blow to the brachial plexus origin will stun. She followed it up by bringing her knee deeply, deeply in to his crotch. This resulted in him dropping down to his knees, and so she punched him in the nose and he fell back to the ground unconscious.

She turned quickly, the blood pounding in her ears as she looked around to see what else was coming. All she found was Tania standing there waiting, almost bored looking.

“Finally.” She said, with a little roll of her eyes. “You didn’t have to take so long, it was just one man.”

Siobhan studiously avoided looking behind her.

There is a particular violence to a horse collapsing. All of that lean elegance and those long limbs are suddenly chaos and horror, whipping around unnaturally as the formerly majestic animal tumbles to the ground. Greyhounds have a similar horror to their tumbles, Walter knew. He had only seen a horse really go down at speed once, and as the bike whipped around and he brought it to a stop he was not looking forward to seeing it happen a second time.

By the time the bike was stopped he turned out to be relieved and annoyed on that account. As the horse started to go down it dissipated quickly into a splash of warm red light and sparks. That sent the Earl tumbling to the ground with all the violence and speed the horse might have saved him from, but it also meant that there weren’t hundreds of pounds of equine pain to roll over him a couple times. The Earl crashed into a mail box hard enough to make sure it could neither hold mail nor be called a box in good conscience ever again, but a heartbeat later he was staggering to his feet again. Blood ran down his face and his eyes were limned in bright anger, but he was neither dead nor incapacitated. Walter stumbled off of the motorcycle at the same time that Morgan almost flowed off, charging toward the man before he could get his feet back under him.

The Earl snarled and reached out to grab a stunned onlooker, a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight, by the arm. But instead of taking her hostage he flung the girl bodily at Morgan who started in surprised. Pivoting she caught the girl and turned the motion in to a roll that kept her body between the girl’s and the ground at all times. When she came up she set the girl aside with a pat on the head, and then pivoted back to see Walter already giving chase to the Earl on foot into a busy street.

Their car chase had taken them from the school into the shopping district, and Walter ran over charming brick streets to chase after the man. He fumbled in his coat as he did so, grunting and trying to keep a sight of the other runner through the disturbingly oblivious crowd. Finally he got his badge out of his jacket and held it up. Between that, the taser, and his beginning to shout “POLICE! MOVE!” people finally began to notice that what was going on.

He finally caught up to the Earl in one of the sections of the market district that had a fountain in it, and thus absolutely no car traffic. As the Earl tried to duck around the circular fountain Walter had a clear shot and he took it, drawing the reloaded taser out of his pocket and firing. But the man was too on guard and dodged to one side out of the way. Catching his footing, the Earl stepped on to the fountain and bounded in to the air, coming down toward Walter fist first. Walter almost got out of the way but caught a stone-like fist in the shoulder that sent him spinning to the ground. He rolled to his feet just in time to see the Earl starting to break away, only to be pegged in the head by something.

Walter blinked a bit and looked back to see Morgan, her hand covered in red powder, standing next to one of the brick buildings that was now one building block short. Apparently she had grabbed it and chucked it, and she looked rather proud of the fact. At least until the Earl reached out and pulled a chunk of the fountain out, streaming the dust of shattered masonry, and threw it back at her. She started to dodge until she visibly realized there were still people behind her, and was forced to catch it awkwardly. It caught her in the body and grunted with the impact as something cracked audibly.

The Earl turned and fled, but not very far. His destination was apparently a small office off of the fountain that looked like it hadn’t been used since 1998. The sign was cracked and faded beyond all recognition save for one absurdly well preserved letter, an ‘O’ in green on a yellow background. He ran to the dilapidated door and reached out to grab it, yanking it open with so much force that Walter could hear the hinges strain even over the growing shouting and shock of the crowd.

The Earl looked back over his shoulder to give them a triumphant look before starting to step in. His step was interrupted as something cracked him hard in the face and drove him back in to the street with a gasp and a shriek of pain. Blood streamed down his chin from a broken nose and his eyes were crossed in confusion and fury. But the expression went blank as Gabriel Shepherd stepped out of the disused office and once more beat the Earl in the face with the shovel he was holding.

Chaos has a sound. It’s an amalgamation of other sounds, but it has its own distinct tenor and quality—and every human being knows it on an instinctual level. It plays its symphony when the orchestra of confusion and wariness join in not just with fear, but with a very good reason to be afraid. It is the sound of a group becoming a mob, and a mob becoming a roiling mass; and it was the sound beginning to be heard in the gym of Dwight D. Eisenhower High School.

Siobhan, Antigone, and Tania hit the gym in a dead run just as the chaos was beginning. Six men were coming out of apparently nowhere, each of them holding either a gun or a blade of some kind in hand. They looked like move hit men in dark suits and pony-tails, except each man had a different shade of inhumanly colored hair on their head. Siobhan didn’t think they were dye-jobs, either.

“Damn!” Tania muttered as she saw the men coming in to the room. The students were beginning to run, making a mad dash toward them. Soon they would either have to move or be crushed, and before either of those the men in the back would begin to kill. Siobhan still didn’t know why, but she reached into her purse to pull out her pocket knife, and knew it was laughably underarmed. She also wished, absurdly, that she was taller.

There was a frozen moment where the three women stared at the oncoming rush, and the mob of panicking students seemed to stare at them back. Through the shifting crowd they could see the men with their odd haircuts grinning wickedly, the lazy smiles of predators who knew there was nothing else with the teeth or the claws to stop them.

In that moment of crystal clarity Tania’s face turned into a snarl of anger, a mask of hatred etched across her lovely features. Her red hair blazed about her like the halo of an angry sun god, and she shook her head once. “No. Fuck this. That’s enough hiding.” Something…changed about her in that instant. It wasn’t that she stood up a little bit straighter, but it was like she did. Something different, as if she were letting the room see her truly for the first time.

Tania Summers raised both hands and spoke a single word toward the crowd, away from Siobhan and Antigone. “Sleep.” She didn’t raise her voice or shout, but the very air carried it through the crowd. She wasn’t sure how, it had to be part and parcel of magic or an essential bit of Tania-ness, because with the music still going and the screaming Siobhan herself could barely hear it from two feet away. But she felt it tickling at her ear, teasing a part of her mind that wanted to obey before dissipating like mental smoke.

It apparently did not dissipate so easy from the mob, because all at once they stumbled to a stop, and slowly collapsed down to the floor. The air seemed heavy with the command to slumber, as if the atmosphere itself wanted to obey, and in the span of a few moments they were staring across the room at the gunmen. Now it was the turn of the gunmen to look at them in dawning horror, as the growing darkness of terror writ its way across their features.

Tania began to advance slowly, walking her way carefully through the crowd of sleeping students. Antigone and Siobhan walked up to follow her, although their eyes were scarcely any smaller than the bad guys’.

“Jesus!” One of the gunmen cursed, as he brought up his own gun to point it at Tania, with a hand that she thought wouldn’t have wavered so much otherwise. “What are you? One of us, but…god!”

“Well.” Tania said as if she were considering that seriously. “Not quite. But close enough. Now you can have exactly one chance children, and only because she would want me to give you one. Guns and blades down, hands up, and you can be interrogated by the mortals. One idiot move, and we switch instead to ‘Look upon me and despair’ mode, and none of you are going to like that one squishy little bit. So what is it going to be?”

Most of the men looked on her with abject terror, but the lead gunman apparently thought he had a little bit more game. Or maybe he was insane, or a true believer. Regardless of the reason he looked right at Tania in all her fury and in the face of the power she had just shown, and spat. And then he moved his gun quickly to the side, and fired right at Siobhan’s head.

BEGIN CHAPTER 9.0: MOVEMENT

Walter had a brief second in which he was convinced that he was dead before Morgan turned both of their bodies and took the impact on hers. They moved smoothly in to a roll, followed by a less smooth second roll, and a third roll that would not have pleased either a gymnastics teacher or sushi chef. It didn’t kill him, but it didn’t feel exactly good either as he pulled himself up to his feet and remembered to check his gun. There were good instincts, and then there was having to remember where anything was when he was being battered around like this.

“Your bike.” Morgan ordered, and they both began to bolt toward the motorcycle. Despite seriously aching joints Walter threw himself on to it and revved the engine. He started off before he even knew Morgan was on, trusting her to be there. As he peeled out of the parking lot he felt her wrap an arm around him, although he wasn’t sure which one of them it was there to steady at this point.

“He can’t have that much of a lead, we didn’t hear a car!” Walter shouted. He took the right turn out of the high school parking lot toward one of the main drags in town. As he brought the motorcycle around he saw a man on foot running impossibly fast, but not faster than a Harley engine.

Or he wouldn’t have been if, at the sound of the engine and a confirming look over his shoulder, thee man hadn’t all of a sudden been astride a mighty horse and charging away even faster than the actual vehicle. And worst of all he did it with a smug, superior look back to them, as if inviting them to look upon his horse and despair.

“A freaking horse?” Walter shouted angrily as he poured on speed as well. The light ahead of them turned red but Walter never stopped. The air whipping around him carried a blare of horns and the sounds of cursing men, employing words proper Midwesterners only did when truly pissed off. “How the hell does that work?” Walter whipped the motorcycle through a left turn. Since the light behind him had been red for this direction he was free from traffic for a moment, but he could see cars they would be on in seconds.

“Remember the hounds? Hit the median!” She pointed. In this stretch of town the street was divided, with a low and flat concrete median between them only occasionally sprouting benches, statues, or trees. Walter spared the upcoming traffic only the briefest glance before he pulled the speeding cycle over and up on to the median with a bump and a whoop.

“Is it an evil horse? You got a plan to turn it in to glue?” Walter managed to shout back. His pull up on to the median had caused him to over-correct to the left, and almost sent them in to oncoming traffic. He yanked them back to the center, and then quickly back to the left as a scenic park bench threatened to turn into a deadly obstacle.

“Will you shut up and drive? Yes, I have a plan! But I can’t be hamburger to do it, and it won’t feel good even to me if we—SHIT!—crash!” She interrupted herself mid-curse as they corrected around a statue with the slightest possible movement before coming back on their original course. If it took paint off the bike it only took a fleck, and Walter let out another whoop.

“Lights!” Walter called out as they kept racing. Pedestrians threw themselves out of the way and Walter dodged around those who were unsure of his coming somehow. “In the saddlebag!” He veered around an elderly couple out for a walk that he only identified a moment later as having been the hat happy couple he met months ago. They never even blinked, but walked right where they needed to be to let him avoid hitting them.

Morgan grunted, but a moment later produced a light that she reached around Walter to slap down on the front of the car and activate. With the whirling and screaming, accompanied by the roar of the engine, they finally made enough of an impression that no one seemed to miss their coming. She fumbled for a moment with something else in her hands, but Walter had no idea what it was.

They were gaining on the horse, and at the end of the long thoroughfare and another near miss they had managed to catch up to their quarry. Walter looked up only quickly enough to find that it was a green light and gunned it, blasting in to the intersection.

“Walte-” Morgan began as Walter plunged headlong into the stream of turning cars. He flicked the bike left a much as he could with a grunt of effort and momentum before ripping it to the right. This time more than a little paint came off as a Honda did some interesting detail work to the back of the bike. They almost spun out but they both threw themselves into the turn and regained control, only to find themselves spinning around the other way.

For one shocking moment Walter could see the surprised look on the Earl’s face as they spun, and he fancied that he could see at least a curious look on the horse’s face too. But then he was spinning away and the back of the bike zipped around as the tires squealed and smoked. Now Morgan looked the Earl in the eye and produced her plan.

In the space between seconds, when the whole world seemed to be still and calm despite the high speed dervish they had become that seemed likely to kill them both any second, Dr. Morgan Winters almost lazily reached out and fired her taser to send 50,000 volts of blue lightning directly into the apparently magical horse.

Every human being knows, in the deep and dark and primal places of their brain, a certain set of feelings and smells. After the first time the brain learns to associate a stimuli with an ancient and primitive fear, he never forgets it. Fire is the most common, the smell of smoke and the feeling brought by waves of prickly heat. But electricity is a close second, born of the terrifying nights when the gods themselves seemed to vent their fury upon the landscape. Ozone and crackling lights, the hallmarks of that primal fear, filled the disused Stargate room of Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, and a faerie lord collapsed to the floor grabbing at his most sensitive area.

Walter turned and pulled out his backup weapon left-handed as he kept his hand on the Taser. He knew that he had a cycle time of about thirty seconds, and then—

Before he could finish the thought, and before anyone should have been able to react (even with his quip), he was bowled in to by a burly man wearing a leather jacket. The breath left his body with an ‘oof’ of expulsion as the two of them crashed down on to a cardboard box filled with old textbooks. They scattered across the dusty and tracked floor, both men and all the books, mingling with the crackling of the Taser to form an odd symphony.

“Go!” The faerie nobleman grunted as he, with great efforts, yanked the leads out of his chest. He was about to snarl something else when Tania Summers hit him like an oncoming freight train, with a roundhouse to the side of the face that probably would have killed a mortal. Walter saw it flash by as the man who had jumped him tried to crawl on top of him and grab him by the neck. With training and instinct alone Walter was able to push his arms away and roll, twisting his body and hips with every bit of leverage he possibly could to end up on top. He managed to do it and tried to bring his gun to bear on the other man, only to find that the gun had gone scattering in their tumble. He turned the motion into a punch that cracked the other man in the nose, although he knew it was a particularly ineffective one. He drew his hand back for another try, but a strong hand closed around his arm and hauled him back. It didn’t stop hauling, although at some point the haul became a throw and Walter found himself once again sprawling across the floor and grunting.

“I think we missed some of them.” Morgan offered helpfully as two faerie men started, literally, out of the shadows in the room and began moving menacingly to reinforce their boss. Seeing them Tania stepped back to face them squarely, and Morgan moved up beside her to stand shoulder to shoulder. Neither of them looked particularly concerned about the three to two odds, although Walter was certainly less sanguine about the overall four to three odds if they counted him and his current target.

“Who the hell are you?” The nobleman, who Tennyson had called an Earl, asked angrily as his men helped him to his feet. He rubbed his jaw, which had already blossomed into a magnificent bruise that was also already fading—a point which seemed tremendously unfair, as Walter’s shoulder hurt. He and his opponent eyed each other as the Earl advanced toward the sisters. “And how the hell did you hit so hard.”

“Two little girls from school are we.” Morgan said sweetly, as she looked between the three advancing men. In her hand what Walter had thought was a little bit of perspiration began to form more aggressively. But rather than dripping off her hand it collected into a slowly growing icicle, before sharpening into a solid spike of ice menacingly wrapped around her hand. “Bitch.” She finished, holding up her improvised weapon. Tania held up her hands and snapped, which apparently caused them to be wreathed in crimson flames that lit up the room and sent the shadows fleeing from the corners of the rooms.

The Earl considered those weapons nonplussed. “You shouldn’t be able to do that, without me knowing who you are. You shouldn’t be that powerful.” He offered almost conversationally, which drew a shrug from both girls.

“We’re not particularly interested in what we shouldn’t been able to do, my lord.” Morgan offered with a friendly smile. “We’re interested in whether or not you will come with us, or we’ll have to take you in pieces.” The spike in Morgan’s hand slowly grew longer, and her smile grew fiercer. “Think what else we shouldn’t be able to do—it will make it more fun when we can.”

The Earl looked at them as if considering for a moment before he looked to his two guards. “Tell the pair downstairs to start killing the children. That should keep them distracted.” What had been a still moment, a stand-off between the two groups, turned suddenly to violent motion and desperate speed. The two men with the Earl bolted in opposite directions to move around Morgan and Tania, while the Earl spun on his heel and bolted. At the other end of the room was a large window, and in the space of two heartbeats he was at it, and before the next heartbeat he was crashing through it with the discordant symphony of shattering glass.

“Balls!” Walter cursed loudly, starting to turn to run downstairs.

“No, Walter, we need to go get the Earl!” Morgan shouted in return, moving forward quickly to reach out and grab him by the arm. Her grip was strong and firm, without hesitation.

“Morgan, Antigone and Siobhan are down there, I’m not leaving them!” Walter shot back in a voice that was every bit as firm as her grip. Morgan’s eyes flicked over to Tania, who gave a nod and began to move toward the door and the exit back to the rest of the school.

“She’ll handle it, but I need you to help me catch the Earl.” Morgan said. “Tania is…very, very good.” She reassured, before her voice took on an edge of strain again. “And we’ve got no time!” When despite being torn he gave a little bit of a nod, Morgan started to move again.

“How are we going to get out to him?” Walter asked, before he felt Morgan grab him around the waist. His question was answered a moment later when Morgan leapt in to the air toward the broken window and the parking lot beyond, carrying him with her.

“SHIT!”

“You’ve always been too damned squeamish.” The cultured voice pronounced. His voice slithered with disdain, as if he were addressing something so far beneath his contempt he felt there should have been a law against their interaction. “I thought the children of Winter were supposed to be a hardier lot then you seem to be. You argued against using the Hound, and you’ve always supported his insane idea that we shouldn’t kill too many mortals.” He sniffed, and even that sound managed to convey a depth of arrogance. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected much from a bas-”

Walter had been leaning around the whole time to get a better look at the situation, and so when Tennyson began to move he had to keep himself from whistling in appreciation. Walter had thought he was getting a handle on how fast these people could move, but he also remembered that his primary antagonist—Ninja Grandpa—was apparently not a seasoned warrior. Tennyson was. In the blink of an eye he was gone from the spot he had been standing in and was instead next to the tall man with the cultured voice, holding a very long and very slender blade to the other man’s throat.

“Do not, if you would be so kind my lord Earl, finish that sentence. Because I like this shirt a lot, and blue blood will stain the same as peasant red. I’m no less sidhe than you, and you will not like my reminder.” The man who had unleashed such havoc in the Police Station had a knife’s edge smile on his features as he spoke, and all the calm courtesy of a sharpened razor. “Ah…no protests. I’ve had about enough of you, you vicious inbred shit. The fact that you continue to confuse principle with weakness is something we will have to work out later. In a dark alley. With an iron pipe.” His voice was the very heart of an icy storm, and Walter was almost surprised that he didn’t see frost gathering on the lapels of the other man’s coat.

The alleged Earl was a tall man with strawberry blond hair in a ponytail. Slender like a knife’s edge, Walter was certain he would be annoyingly handsome, and he wore is designer suit well. He sniffed, apparently disconcerted by the knife in his throat but not enough to put him completely off his game. “He has decided that he is tired of waiting for them to come, and wants to up the stakes. This will up the stakes, certainly.”

“This will turn us in to monsters.” Tennyson responded angrily. “There is nothing good about this, and stop smirking.” Walter watched Tennyson stalk away angrily, although he kept his blade in hand. The Earl let his shoulders sag for a moment when he did not think anyone was watching, his relief evident from the little bit of tremor that ran through his arms. Tennyson turned back around quickly, and Walter was forced to pull himself back before he was spotted. “I’m going to go see the old man and figure out what the hell he was thinking. If I’ve find you’ve started killing children before I get back, I will carve your balls out for cuff links.” Before Walter could formulate a plan to jump him he turned to enter in to a storage closet, and the flutter of wings announced that Ninja Grandpa wasn’t the only one who knew that particular trick.

Walter, Tania, and Morgan shared a particular look as they realized that Tennyson had gotten away, at least for the moment. That look was composed largely of scowls, and largely communicated various profanities as appropriate for the person. But their eyes snapped back as the Earl resumed speaking. “Now that the uppity bastard is gone, would you please take a gun and go brain some of the sleepers so that we might draw out the foe?” The contrast between the high class accent and the euphemism ‘brain’ caused a bit of whiplash, but not so much that Walter wasn’t intimately aware that he was ordering his brawny looking minion to where his children were. “Carve my balls out, will he?” The Earl snorted dismissively.

“Well, I could do it instead.” Walter offered as he stood up and fired his taser, impacting the murderous nobleman in his royal treasury.

“They must be meeting in the Stargate room.” Morgan commented as they began to climb up the stairs toward the top of the building. Walter didn’t give her a side-eye because she did it so quietly that it didn’t bother him; he gave her a side eye because the sentence didn’t make any sense to him.

“Stargate?” He murmured as they carefully made their way up, and up, and up. “The movie and TV show with Alan Shore and MacGuyver?”

“Ok…” Morgan murmured. “You’re not allowed to look at me like I’m a nerd, and then name two different actors from the show. There are a series of rooms in the attic of the school that happens to contain some of the HVAC and pump equipment. When they turn on it makes some unusual noises that students decided was a Stargate when the movie came out. Before that they had decided it was a movie theater.”

“So what’s actually in this room specifically?” Walter asked.

“Just loose storage and a big brick wall.” Morgan answered softly.

“She gets to talk all she wants, but we talk about fashion for two steps and I get yelled at?” Tania pointed out from the rear as they came up to the final flight of stairs. “Discrimination.” She muttered, before she grew quiet as they came up to the door that some enterprising student had recently graffiti’d with something unflattering and anatomical.

“Charming.” Tania murmured as they knelt next to the door. It had been left open just a crack, and they got quietly up to it. Walter leaned in and heard the murmuring of people speaking beyond, too blocked by the door to make anything out. He took the handle carefully in his hand and lifted the door up and toward the hinges gently so it wouldn’t squeak before he began to slowly push it in.

Through the slowly growing crack Walter, Morgan, and Tania could see in to the dimly lit storage room. At first Walter thought that it was illuminated by candles or some other natural lighting before he realized that it was blue. And that was probably not an actual candle, although he had seen Siobhan buy some pretty weird stuff in her time.

As the door slid open Walter saw a relatively convenient pile of what looked to be discarded overhead projectors, likely the technological detritus of some new grant program that made them obsolete. He tapped Morgan and then Tania on the shoulder, and pointed to himself. He then pointed to the pile, and they both nodded.

As he was carefully crouch-walking the short distance to the cover, he began to hear the voices more clearly. He didn’t recognize either one of them, but he started making out the words as if they were also moving closer to him.

“I’m telling you I looked again, and none of them are the ones we’re interested in.” A guttural voice said in anger.

“And I’m telling you we had people who saw them come.” Another man, his voice a smoother and more cultured sounding tenor, responded. “Did you check perhaps outside, or deem it sufficient to rifle through children’s wallets for identification?”

The silence that followed was somewhat telling, as was the quiet sound of a boot scuffing on the floor. A third voice let out a harsh snort. “Jesus, this is just one more reason why we shouldn’t be doing it this way.” While the voice hadn’t been quite so disaffected last time, Walter recognized it immediately. “What a cluster this has turned out to be. Again.”

Apparently so did Morgan and Tania, as all three of them met eyes for a quick moment and mouthed his name. “Tennyson.” Walter noticed that Tania looked angry, but Morgan mirrored the growing smirk on his own face at the thought that the man was not particularly happy with his current situation.

“You didn’t want to use the dogs either.” The rough voice accused, as Walter started to slowly crouch-walk his way to the next bit of cover, looking for a good angle to see the people speaking in the room.

“Yeah, I didn’t. And what did it do?” Tennyson challenged. Walter came around and found himself looking at the backs of the three men as they stared at something. Walter was going to look more at the two men he hadn’t met, but then he saw what was between them.

On the wall beyond them was a circle of white paint with strange symbols surrounding it. Small tings had apparently been set in to the bricks of the wall, and they glowed with a milky white-blue light. The inside of the circle was filled with what Walter would have, in all honesty, called a Stargate. It seemed to glow and ripple with the same light as the things put in to the bricks, and for brief moments Walter could see a snowy landscape through it. He almost stumbled before he caught himself and his composure kept him from knocking everything over.

Even Tania and Morgan seemed like they were surprised to see it, although they obviously recognized what it was. They looked around the symbols and more recognition dawned in their eyes, before they shared a quick look.

“We need to keep them from closing the doorway.” Morgan said, gesturing to the Stargate. “It’s probably important.” Walter nodded, looking around the room to see what he could use to get closer.

“Well fine. The time for arguing any of this has past. Was there any sign of the police?” The cultured voice asked.

“No, sir.” The rough voice responded. “The man, Walter, is probably in the building. But he hasn’t tripped any of our alarms yet.” Cultured man sighed, while Walter looked to the two sisters at the word ‘alarms’. They both smirked in satisfaction, and Walter gave them a grin.

“Very well. Go pick some of the children and kill them. That should draw them out.” Cultured man said.

“WHAT?” Tennyson shouted, at the same time the smirks and grin fled from the features of their quiet watchers.

“Lacey! Monica!” Antigone shouted as she threw herself down at the side of the unconscious girls, reaching out with a careful hand to check their pulses. “They’re still alive and breathing…what happened?” She asked, looking up to her father with wide eyes. Siobhan, having so carefully worked the taser in to her hoodie pocket, pulled out the stun gun again in slightly shaky hands. Walter scanned the room, but moved to kneel down next to the girls when he didn’t see anything.

“I don’t know. Gas would have lingered, this is way too much for something in the drink too—unless they all drank the exact same thing.” Walter spent another few seconds looking over the unconscious girls before he looked back to the sidhe women.

Morgan was already kneeling, looking over an unconscious boy in an unfortunate pastel blue tuxedo that looked like it had just escaped from the 70s. “Glamour.” She responded with a shake of her head. “I can’t wake them up except one by one, and slowly at that.”

“Right, Glamour…” Antigone murmured as she held Lacey, looking up to the older women. “Fashion magazines will do that.” Her voice was threaded through with anger, and her eyes were unusually hard. “What do you mean, glamour?”

Morgan sighed. “It’s our form of magic, and don’t give me that look Walter.” She said quickly, giving him a sidelong glance as he started to voice his apparently instinctive response to any mention of magic. “They’re under a spell. When we get rid of whatever it is that did it, they’ll wake up again. And not know any time has passed, I think.” She said, rising back to her feet carefully.

Walter considered the crowd of unconscious teens for another moment. None of them looked in pain, none of their faces were contorted or looked like they had been struggling at all—they just looked like they had fallen to the ground where they stood, with no ill effect. “I hate magic. I hate that I have to say that I hate magic.” He pronounced as he stood, looking over to Ryan. “Lead on, but when we get close all three of you stay back, alright? I don’t want any of you…” He paused to consider his children’s schoolmates, “Napping.”

Both Antigone and Siobhan looked like they were going to protest until they too took another look around the room and just nodded, moving to fall in with the group as they followed Ryan back in to the depths of the school.

“Nothing creepier than an empty school…” Tania murmured as they walked along through the hallway, shaking her head. Siobhan and Morgan both looked at her for a moment, before sharing a look with one another and then laughing a little bit.

“Remind me to tell you about the time we were…” Morgan began, before she quirked an eyebrow at a look back from both Walter and Ryan. “Alright, another time.” She offered amusedly as she quieted. They walked along in various states of stealth, from Walter and the Sidhe who walked along with a very practiced hunter’s tread, to Siobhan who had on the clunkiest shoes until she kicked them off—and was subsequently joined in the act by Antigone shedding her heels.

“Why do girls buy expensive shoes for a dance just to take them off?” Ryan asked with a look back to the assembled women.

“Because like most women’s clothing no matter how great they look, they are awful.” Tania answered simply. “It’s also why our jeans have enough room for a small number of Tic Tacs and broken dreams.”

“This is a good discussion.” Walter offered sarcastically, shaking his head. “I especially like how we’re having it while we’re trying to sneak the hell up on someone.” Walter finished with what almost resembled a hiss, clearly filled with annoyance.

“He gets pissy when he’s getting his sneak on.” Siobhan stage whispered to the others before the glare from her father actually managed to silence them all as they came in to the back stairwell. Ryan stopped them with a raised hand.

“It’s up.” Ryan gestured. “Store room, through a door; they broke the lock. Some freaky stuff through there, and the bad guys.” He offered, stepping aside to let the adults go by, and then idly stuck out a leg to actually stop his sisters from trying to sneak up. Walter gave him a thankful smile, and the girls a smirk. The girls, meanwhile, pouted and glared at their brother respectively.

“Be careful.” Antigone gave in after a moment, moving to lean against the wall with her stun gun pointed down.

“You too. Shout if something happens, and we’ll come running.” Walter offered his children, giving each one of them a hug in turn.

“Ready?” Tania asked, no sharpness or sarcasm in her voice. At Walter’s nod, and her sister’s, they all three began to climb the stairwell to see what had brought about an auditorium full of fright.

The alerts that had broken the lovely stillness and quiet moment had both been text messages. Walter looked at his, which was from Siobhan and read ‘School weirdness. Red.’ He leaned over to see what was written on Morgan’s, not hiding his interest at all. Her text was from a number labeled ‘Red Oni’, and read ‘Something may be happening. Call?’

“Who is Red Oni, and why is their text alert Heart Miser?” Walter asked curiously as he took his cell-phone and put it in his pocket, striding across the room to reach out and grab a coat.

“Tania.” Morgan answered as she leaned down to grab her shoes, and sat daintily down on one of the high chairs to begin pulling them on. “When we realized cell phones were going to, you know, stick around we made a deal. Rather than picking a ring tone for each other that could be cutting or cause us to fight for a couple of years, we get to pick our ring tone on the other one’s phone. So she is Heat Miser on my phone, and I labeled her Red Oni because it’s a Japanese trope about passion and a lack of reason.” At that, Morgan smirked. “My ringtone on her phone is Let It Go, and she labeled me ‘Ice Queen’.” Having pulled on one boot she started on the other as Walter grabbed his motorcycle boots. “What does it mean that Siobhan said Red in her text?”

Walter smirked at her reading his message as well. “Our own version of Homeland Security color coding we use. Red means urgent, black means stop everything and get here now.” Walter emphasized the last word. “So it mean they probably found something they want me to see, but they don’t feel like they’re about to be killed.”

Morgan nodded and hopped up, moving over to the coat rack where she had left her jacket a well. “Are you sure you’re alright to drive?” She asked as she walked with him to the door.

“I’m fine. If I remember correctly you did most of the wine drinking, and we had a lot of food. It would be a little embarrassing if I got a DUI, I suppose.” He checked his hands before he nodded. “Why, you want to drive the bike?” He asked with a grin.

“No, I’m just happy to be riding it, honestly.” Morgan offered with a wiggle of her eyebrows as she moved to join him.

**** ****

A Harley-Davidson makes a particularly unique sound, guttural and loud and gorgeous. It was a sound that most High Schoolers would have recognized on a near-instinctual level, had they not been inside and dancing. Fortunately the DJ inside was playing particularly loud music, and so only a few of the students heard anything and they paid it no mind.

Antigone, Siobhan, and Ryan paid it mind. They were waiting out near one of the side entrances they had directed Walter to, and all three of them raised eyebrows as Walter and the Faerie doctor both got off of the bike and shucked their helmets, Morgan having borrowed one of the twins’ protection.

“A lot of fathers wouldn’t be thrilled about their free night being interrupted.” Walter teased gently as he came up, unzipping his jacket.

“Which is why we said Red.” Siobhan responded, looking over to Morgan with a raised eyebrow and a little bit of a smirk. “Did we interrupt something?” She asked wryly.

“Well, so there we were having old people sex…” Walter began, drawing an exaggerated chorus of ‘Eww’ from all three of his children, as Morgan rolled her eyes at the family antics. “So what got the Red text?” He asked Siobhan. Now she rolled her eyes.

“Other people in the family can get in to trouble.” Siobhan said, with almost a hint of jealousy. She motioned with a thumb to Ryan, standing in one of Walter’s suits with his skateboard against the wall next to him.

“We were skating, and saw some movie bad guys going in to the back of the school.” Ryan said. When he actually bothered to speak his voice was already quiet low and a little quiet, like he didn’t want to waste energy by shouting. As a consequence of his Coolidge-esque silence, people normally listened, as the gathered assembly did now. “Weird looking guys, too.”

Walter nodded at that, and then looked over his shoulder as he heard another car coming up. And then he raised his eyebrows at the amount of sound coming toward him. The eyebrows continued their way up when he saw the car that she drove in to the lot. It was perhaps the least subtle red convertible that Walter had ever seen, and she even managed to park it in two spaces as she pulled herself out of it.

“The Lamborghini then.” Siobhan quoted dryly. “Much more subtle.”

Without missing a beat Tania tossed Siobhan the keys. “Park it for me and don’t scuff the paint, ‘kay? It’s got a GPS if you need the find the lot.”

“You’re really old, aren’t you supposed to hate technology?” Siobhan asked as she casually started to pocket the tossed keys until Walter snatched them out of her hands, and tossed them back to Tania.

“Why in the world would you think that?” Tania asked glibly as Walter went and started to pull gear out of the saddle bags of his motorcycles, handing some of them over to the others. Tania and Siobhan both stared at them almost disappointedly.

“Tasers?” Siobhan asked. “I’m not sure civil rights are something we should be worrying about, Dad.” She did tuck the taser into her purse. “I wish I had a freaking pocket.”

“I don’t care about civil rights.” Walter offered, pausing for a beat as he considered that statement coming from a cop, before he shrugged. “At least right now. But I do care about some damn answers, which we are rather short on right now. Also you’re not following us but are going back to your dance, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“What!” Siobhan and Antigone both exclaimed, as they began to follow the electricity carrying Walter, Morgan, and Tania into the building. “Why?”

“Because you’re still my fifteen year old daughters, and my fourteen year old son? And I would weep unmanly tears at your untimely deaths? And then probably kill a lot of people out of grief, and be gunned down in the streets by my friends in a horrible stand off? And then no one will be happy, because we’re all dead.” Walter explained with a shrug as they made their way once again through the wheat arch.

“Yeah but we won’t see it, so who cares.” Antigone answered with an immortal shrug of youth. “We left Lacey and Monica watching over the dance in case it got weird…” She began to say before her words slowly died in her throat as they came in to sight of the gymnasium, and the quiet madness within.

Walter Richards had seen a lot of creepy things in his life, things that occasionally reared up in ugly dreams or sudden tenseness and fear during the day. He had seen, heard, and felt terror itself, and after a while hardly any of it stayed with him day to day and night to night. But he knew the sight of a gymnasium filled with the strains of pounding dubstep and the silent bodies of two hundred and fifty unconscious teenagers would have an intense staying power.