This is still a story of the Becoming Monsters universe by Ai Loves, setting used with permission. All canonical and mechanical errors are my own. The yarrb is the exceedingly cute creation of FelisRandomis, used with permission.

  —

  Chapter 43: The Impossible

  For a moment, there was only the increasing roar of rain on the pavement. “I’m sorry, sir, but WHAT?”

  The Marshal looked back at me levelly. “Whatever happens tomorrow, I need you to be there, tell me about it, and do what you must to prevent open warfare from breaking out. You may report back to me on Monday, at the Concve of Major Guilds. You were pnning to attend, I’m sure.”

  I had, in fact, entirely forgotten it was already that time again. In my defense, I’d never had to worry about them before. “Of course, sir. Is there anything else I need to know for tomorrow?”

  Jordan looked at my exhausted group. “Not you, I don’t think. You, though.” He was staring directly at Gloria. “You seem conflicted. I am not sure about what. If it is something your Marshal needs to know, tell your Guild Leader. If it is something a rabbi might be able to help with, though, you may see me after the Concve on Monday.”

  She looked armed. “Sir! I’m… not sure how appropriate that would be.”

  He smiled, then. A surprisingly warm expression. “There are five or six different categories of excuses I’ve heard for that in my career. None apply. I will have time. Now, I must get going. There is a lot to do before sundown. Jeremiah, I hear you may have an IRS auditor incoming. Please cooperate, the st thing I need is for my newest Major Guild Leader to be on her bad side.”

  “The auditor arrived this morning. I left that meeting to reinforce Gloria when the Portal became too much.”

  “Best get back to her, then. The petty details are always the worst. Fare well.” Another fsh and bang, and the man was gone. We were left staring after him in the now-pouring rain.

  Paige was the first to speak. “A very direct kind of man, isn’t he? That’s who you went to see a couple of weeks back?”

  “Yes. He is who I answer to directly, now. Ever since you joined up and we caught national attention.”

  Emily shook out her fur. “Direct, nothing. He’s hiding things. You never said your auditor was a woman, Jay. He knew someone was coming, but also who. Probably what and why. I don’t like this.”

  She was right, of course. There seemed to not be an easy answer to this, though. “I don’t either, but I’ve not known him to be anything other than even-handed and fair. If he wanted me dead, he had plenty of opportunities so far. No. I think he’s being as straight with me as he can be.”

  “He’s a Level 30 force of nature who leads one of the strongest Guild Halls on Earth. What could he be afraid of?” Whitney was ever the direct one.

  “Besides what he told us? All the other Level 30 forces of nature in this country, the people he nominally leads, and the Armed Forces of every nation still standing. I do not envy his position, Whitney. The Sword of Damocles comes forcefully to mind. Come on, let’s gather what we can then get moving. I can’t fly through this muck.”

  It took ten minutes to sift through the area to look for crystals, coins, and globes of liquids for Sarah. Whitney and I stretched out our wings, sheltering Gloria and Nibbles, Emily and Paige. What took us three minutes to fly took fifteen to practically wade through, the rains only intensifying until we were all a sodden mess despite our best efforts.

  Even Nibble’s quills were drooping by the time we got to the elevator, and when he shook himself off the rest of us got much wetter again.

  The first goal when we got home was to get dry and changed. Agnes was still there, along with Lucy, Sarah, and Amber. All three of our Guild who hadn’t gone on the hunt looked at our bedraggled mass and sprang to action. Fetching towels, starting up hot cocoa, helping where they could. Agnes watched in fascination as we eventually came back out in pajamas to inventory our finds and prepare the report to submit to the Office of Public Protection. “Is it always like this?”

  I shook my head. “Today was unusually strong, and fighting Water Elementals in the rain is not something I recommend for anyone. Sarah, anything here you can make immediate use of?”

  She was looking things over. “I’ll have to check. None of these will be useful for the Battery, but they may come in handy for the armor if I can purify them properly. That’s a lot of Pure Water orbs. Even if I drop half the quantity in refinement it’ll be enough for three or four major workings.”

  “Good. We got a lot of Silver and a few Golds there, too. Agnes, may I ask a question?”

  She looked curious. “Go ahead.”

  “Did you notify the local Guild Hall that you were coming?”

  She shook her head. “No. That is usually counterproductive.”

  “In that case, do you happen to know a man by the name of Jordan Shapiro?”

  She ughed. “Yes, I know your Marshal. I call him for advice when I am about to have to come after potentially hard targets. He contracts with us as a consultant.”

  That was a bit of news I wasn’t expecting to hear. “I think he figured out exactly who you were coming to see today. Marshal Shapiro also responded to the same Gate, though he arrived well after we got to work. He… well, he didn’t say it outright, but I think he sends his regards.”

  Agnes muttered something under her breath. “I didn’t ask him about you, but I suppose that does not matter. Very well, I think we can be done for today. Will you be avaible to continue this tomorrow? I’m sure you’re slightly too fatigued to make proper decisions right now.”

  “In the mid-afternoon tomorrow, yes, with my gratitude for your understanding. I have a meeting at the Guild Hall in the morning that is sounding important. If you are here to see any other Small Guilds besides myself, that would be a good pce to find them.”

  “Curious, but no. The others have been operating within expected boundaries, unlike Shield Against Shadows. I will see you at… let’s make it three in the afternoon. I know meetings, and a buffer would be a good idea.” She didn’t stay for much idle chatter, heading out to take what leisure she might have in the area. If that was even her goal, anyway, she just scheduled a meeting with me to do more taxes for a Saturday afternoon.

  The door had been closed for about a third of a second before Lucy hit me with the gre. The force of this was somewhat reduced by the fact that she was hitting most of the Guild with it. “Alright. Spill it. What you all got out in front of was not just ‘unusually strong,’ we’ve come out of fights with major demons with fewer injuries than you all picked up today. Even with the rain helping them, you’ve cleaned out Water Elemental Portals solo before. And Marshal Shapiro showed up?”

  “Not sure if the Marshal popping up was reted. He was giving me a message directly.” Briefly, I outlined what happened at the Gate.

  “I don’t like this, Jay.” Wow, there was an echo around here, huh?

  “Neither do I.” It was Amber this time, standing with all four arms crossed. “No offense, but I think we’re all going to go to the Guild Hall with you tomorrow. It sounds like we might be needed if things go south.”

  Not sure I liked that. “Only if the Battery project is ready before we go. That’s still my main priority right now, for several very good reasons.”

  Sarah had returned to her desk. “Then we’re going. The st piece of this is going to be in pce this afternoon. If it didn’t need to have pathways set for twelve hours, we could try it tonight.”

  My eyes snapped to the workspace. On it was an incomprehensible sprawl of components, assemblies, tools, and forms. I could recognize some of it, and was proud that I could. Seven Gold Coins id out inside of miniature imbuing circles, each paired with one of the seven demonic materials we had gathered over the course of the st month. The Crystal Coin y nested in a golden ttice, looking almost stretched into a lens form. Dozens of tiny connectors of at least four different colors y gathered by type, glowing faintly. Two bottles of alkahest were there as well. Thing is, that was all I could readily identify, and there were many more things there I couldn’t hope to.

  “Like I said, don’t rush it, but if so then fine. Lucy, you…”

  “Are coming with you no matter what you are about to try to tell me, so just get used to it. I’m still your Sorceress.” The tone brooked no argument. At all.

  “Fine. Tomorrow will hopefully be calm, but if problems happen I’ll be happy to have you. If you all are going to insist?” Everyone nodded. Even Nibbles. It seemed I was outnumbered. “Full armor and regalia. Come armed and on dispy. We are the only Guild considered part of the Major circuit that is invited at all, and there has to be a reason for that. Keep your eyes and ears open while you’re there. The Marshal seemed to think this could result in open warfare at the Camp if things go off the rails. Meeting itself is at ten thirty. We will get on the first bus to get there at nine. Been over a week, anyway, and st time we were there wasn’t exactly time to take care of errands.”

  Understatement of the century, there. My Guild had barely survived the experience. I, personally, had barely survived the experience twice.

  Lunch consisted of leftover soup, served with mugs of hot cocoa. Not exactly a traditional pairing, no, but considering what we were warming up from they were welcome. “Okay, then. Since we’re all going, time to pn. Sarah, I know the Masterwork…”

  “Greater Masterwork.”

  “... apologies, Greater Masterwork. I know it had to soak a ton of your materials. This will be a good time to restock, and maybe network a bit. Lots of small guilds will be around. Gloria, we have the scratch right now to get you a proper weapon, so you should drop by Quiverbow. Amber, same goes for you if you can find more tools for the kit, or secondhand weaponry for your own abilities.” It still felt odd to specify one of my team members, and by far the most flexible one at that, go after secondhand tools. She’d be able to pull on all the use the item had been through before, though, so if anyone found out what she was they’d start charging her more for those than for new ones.

  Lucy looked thoughtful. “We have a stack of Silver Batteries and a couple of Gold ones, mostly around half charge. The Guild Hall sits on a really strong Ley Line, I can get a full mana charge and top all of them off as well. Emily, I think I need you with me, too. You still haven’t integrated into the Camp Medical Team. And… Jay, do you think either Grits or Fischer will be at camp?”

  “Probably not, why?” The day was specifically chosen so that the Majors would be mostly busy. Grits and Fischer were officers for Flight of Fury and Munin’s Wing respectively, and both of those counted.

  “You still need to talk to them about some of their low-ranking people coming to Shield, and that’s not a conversation for a phone call.”

  “That’s… a really good point. I’ll look for them. Need to put Nathan on the Protectorate rolls officially, too.” A week ago, four junior heroes managed to improvise a rescue when I needed it most. Nathan Nichols was Amber’s little brother, only 15 and already an unbelievably quick and evasive Specter Rogue. Stephen Goa was currently on sabbatical from Flight of Fury, Chaske and Misun were being employed by me despite being a part of Munin’s Wing. All wanted to join the junior rolls of my own Guild, and that demanded certain formalities and courtesies. Especially leading into a major Concve. All had more than earned it, without their intervention Emily would not have had the chance to take down my abductor and get me to safety.

  We had our marching orders. A hundred little tasks, even besides our primary goals. Lunch done, hands no longer shaking from the cold, it was time to get back to the work at hand. Or, almost time. Emily had been off during lunch, not quite herself. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why. Emily Johnson, our Healer, had never been on the losing side of a fight. We technically won today, but nobody there was under any illusions that it wasn’t an ugly kind of thing. It required intervention to a degree that meant we were on the wrong end of the challenge. Even beyond all the injuries she had soaked from the team, that had to hurt.

  As the table scattered to their own tasks, I pulled her aside. “Emily, care to talk?”

  She looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Emily, please. You’re putting on a brave front, but every time you lie to the others you Feed from them and I can see your Aura ripple. Even if I couldn’t, I’d be able to tell you were off.” She defted a bit as we got to the empty bedroom. “I’m going to make some assumptions, stop me if I’m wrong. You’ve never been part of a losing fight before, and today hurt you in every way that matters.”

  Her whole body shook out. “No, that’s not it. Or, not all of it.” If I hadn’t been able to sense her emotions directly, I might have doubted the statement. Instead, I just nodded at her to continue. “I’m just worried, Jay. It feels like everything in my life is coming up question marks. I haven’t found anything either way about the effects of overcharging Hunger energies, especially in the womb or in young children. I haven’t gotten to talk to my Mom in a while, just pying text tag. She’s alright, but it isn’t the same. Especially since I still don’t know what’s going on with the people hunting us in Japan. Add the fight, and here we are.”

  I reached out and pulled her into my arms. Emily was a very touch-oriented kind of person. For someone who had held herself so far apart for as long as she did, who had to lie and hide her true form to even survive, it had to be its own form of slow torture. I could, at least, give her this much. A tight hug, a moment to breathe. And… a promise. “It does occur to me that I didn’t get a chance to meet her through all this craziness. Considering our particur… let’s call it ‘living arrangement’... I think I probably should at some point. You need to be able to give her a hug, too. Is she anywhere near us?”

  “Good bit north of us, near the Canadian border.”

  “Alright. Here’s the deal. You two set up a pce to meet up. The sooner the better, just not tomorrow. We make any excuses we need to and get there. As a family. Understand?”

  Her eyes widened as she did her best to snuggle closer in my arms. “A… alright.” I could almost hear the blush in her voice. It was adorable, not going to lie. “It’ll probably be soon. Ah, I’ll try to call her now?” She zipped out of the room to go make her call. It was, again, adorable. Time to help Sarah.

  When I got back out there, though, another major shock was in front of me. The pile of components was reduced to perhaps a quarter of its previous size and complexity. The Gold Coins were stacked, pathing lines traced, spacers in, the Crystal lens at one end. They were encased and protected by the golden ttice, demonic components nowhere to be seen. Sarah was lightly touching one bck dot between the second and third coin, her stylus glowing slightly as it clicked into pce and held. Lightly, she set down the stylus, stretching her hand and breathing a sigh of relief. Seemingly-random bits of the device were glowing and flickering as she set a gss dome over it.

  The circle drawn around it glowed gently, locking into the gss dome. I recognized the tool. What she had done was now setting. Assembly was completed.

  While we worked the rest of that afternoon on creating the chainmail links, Sarah understandably refused to pce any within the circles to imbue. Given what was settling in the main circle, I didn’t bme her for that. At all.

  We ended the afternoon with more than a hundred and fifty of the tiny loops of metal properly prepared for Sarah to use, inspected to her satisfaction. The fact that our discard pile held almost a hundred of the things itself was something that I was trying to ignore, as I stretched my wrist out and subjected myself to the daily torture of scar treatments.

  We ate together, we cleaned up the kitchen and workspaces, and tried to not hover over the settling project. Sarah told us that the project would not be complete until tested, and it was not ready for that yet. There would be time the following afternoon. For now, we ughed together, and settled to bed with a hundred thoughts and goals for the following day.

  In the night, I once more emerged onto the onyx pins.

  The light from the ground was dimmer than I remembered. No longer purple fmes, but the sullen glow of embers. Whether this was a good or bad thing, I did not know and had no way to readily discern. No time to waste, I set off at a trot for my next target area. More to clean, more to retrieve.

  Really, I felt like I was a child again, and not in a good way. Like I had made a mess of things, and a cosmic hand was shaking a finger at me to put away the toys.

  This time around, the area was not quite as randomly shattered. Scored and scarred, certainly. The shards of silvered gss and patches of fme were still evident. Still a lot to recover, to restore. After a long and lingering effort, my hands were full of mirror shards. I gnced down and saw my shattered reflection in them.

  My point of view suddenly skewed.

  The smell of sea water hung heavy in the air, and I was looking at myself on the ground in the corner of that little metal room. Window barred and grated, ears echoing with recent gunfire. I felt the weight of the heavy pistol in my right hand as it snapped forward, pointed between the eyebrows of the me in my vision. A version wrapped by my favored Lightning Net spell effect.

  I understood, then, what I was about to witness. And from whose point of view. In the space between the trigger pull starting and finishing, a shining silver form intervened with crossed batons, intercepting the bullet and saving the life of the Incubus on the ground.

  Paul Mann, disgraced and formerly of the SPD’s elite. Office of Public Protection, SWAT team, and levels climbing fast. Gone in an instant, out for revenge. I felt every one of the dozens of strikes as the young man before him attacked with a relentless will and stunning speed. Felt the recoil as the next shot went wide, the desperate pain as the backup pulse weapon activated to drive him backwards.

  I knew what was coming. The click of an empty chamber, the dropped magazine, the sparrow diving in through the window, the sudden tornado of golden fur. Of fangs and cws. I felt the searing pain in my body as the healer vioted her oath, as arteries severed and flesh was rent asunder. Watched with hopelessness as the Jeremiah in front of me impossibly escaped again, as my body was unable to complete the st command it was issued. The creeping coldness as shock and blood loss finished the job.

  Why was I being shown this? Reliving it? I had long since had to make my peace with what had happened there, in that damp and salty room. Though he felt his life was ruined and was exacting revenge, it all stemmed from a cause he should never have been caught in. Associating closely with the Seattle Mob, particurly one member of it who had tried to kill me and came closer than any other attempt to date.

  That… had a lot more points of comparison than I wanted to think about. Paul’s abduction had come in close second.

  No. What led to the event, along with the event itself, wasn’t what was holding my mind here. On cue, my mind rewound to a frozen image some seconds before. Emily’s face, full of desperation and rage, which would ter be repced with near-suicidal depression and remorse. So, too, was the injured and shining mercury form of Nathan Nichols, only fifteen years old, undergoing the moment that might still define the rest of his days.

  It was my effect on others. Those bound to me, under my leadership. Those who, without my command, had realized something was wrong and acted completely without hesitation, who had given no quarter to the one who threatened my life. Who had risked their lives and suffered wounds to their spirits as grievous as any they had inflicted on the enemy’s body. What was I doing? What was I creating? How many lives would I ruin?

  I had to consider this. I had to consider the bance of my life, and those under me. Seven wonderful dies, four more recruits who had made their own choice. They chose to pay this price. The question was, then, what I was doing with it. That was a thankfully simple answer. My people didn’t hunt monsters for wealth or fame. That those came to us was besides the point, we did it even when we could barely scrape by. Every creature we took down was one that could no longer harm the people of this city. From scorpions and skeletons up through greater demons.

  Paul Mann wasn’t a monster. He could have been a hero, often had been to other people in other pces, but he chose the course of his life poorly. Built his castle on pilrs of salt, and when he allied himself to the worst the city had to offer, stuck by them after being given the opportunity to correct the course of his life, the pilrs melted and the castle fell. He pced himself in the crosshairs of those who swore to protect me, as I swore to protect them. It was up to me to make sure the good we did was worth the price my subordinates paid.

  That is what it meant to be a leader, no matter the scale. When I snapped back to myself, I was once again standing before the shattered mirror, releasing the shards I had gathered to return to their rightful pces. Once again, I felt the pain recede, ever so slightly. Once again, I turned to go and cleanse the field further. The fires had receded further, the shattered and scored nd closing up more. I was healing, even if painfully slowly. Emphasis on pain.

  It was unfortunate that I only managed to complete one more trip before two in the morning, when Nibbles woke me up. Something was wrong in the House of Kithkin.