Saints and Spirits

The night kicked off to a wonderful start.

"Wow. You look like a mess, dude."

Doc Worth blinked and suddenly the first realization of the day exploded across his frontal cortex like a hydrogen bomb. He was awake. Ugh.

Morning. Evening? Sensory data.

"What, did Conman kick you off the mattress again?"

Worth glared at him through the one eye that wasn't swollen shut, and gradually started deciphering the sensory data that was flooding his brain—the lurid light smeared across the windows, reddish like the clouds he could just make out the bottoms of, and the nicotine yellow husk of the hulking, rumbling thing they'd called home for more than a year now. Hanna was sitting at the table, maps splayed out in front of him, a mug of something mud-colored and steaming in his hands.

Worth second realization of the evening was that it was fucking cold in here with nothing on but a pair of ragged boxers.

"Yer goddamn runes stopped workin' again," Worth growled, mouth tasting like winter desert and bacteria. "Can't fuckin' sleep fer all the dreamin'."

Hanna did a shitty job of looking like he wasn't holding down laughter. "Doc, I told you to lay off those things. It's just like any other brain-suppressor, eventually you build up a tolerance. The human body is like the coolest thing ever. Give it enough time, and it'll set itself straight against anything."

"'M a fuckin' doctor," Worth grumbled. "Fuckin' lecture me 'bout… fuckin' human body…" He sniffed. "'s that stew?"

Hanna blinked at him a couple times, trying to figure out what he'd just been asked, and then he smiled. "Sure, yeah! I woke up early this afternoon and I did a little foraging. Found some mushrooms. I'm not dead yet, so it looks like I read the guide right!"

Worth evaluated the cup. Smelled good. Well, it smelled like food anyhow, and that was the important part.

"Dead man on cookin' duty?"

Hanna nodded, turning back to his maps.

"We far from the city?" Worth asked, reaching for his coat in the pile of detritus in the overhead bin. Good to have it back after the summer run.

"A couple hours, I think. The signs around here fell down or got eaten or something since we left so I'm having a hard time figuring it out, but don't worry, I'll have us sorted in like half the time it takes to finish that stew. I have my mappin' hat on, see?" Hanna gestured upwards at the ugly beanie crawling off the back of his head, with glow-in-the-dark green continents stitched into blue yarn.

"That hat," Worth grunted, squinting, "…'s stupid."

Hanna spared him one of those looks that people get when they're indulging willful five-year-olds. Well fuck everyone, he was too tired for witty commentary.

He stumbled out the door and down the steps and onto the mulch of the disintegrating campground. Goddamn, forgot about shoes. Stiff corners dug into the scarred and calloused soles of his feet, and he clenched his jaw shut as he made his way across the ground to the fire pit where steam was pouring upwards and draining away into the forest. Smelled promising.

"Oi, Frankenstein, anything in the pot I oughter know abou'?"

The zombie looked up from his novel, long legs crossed over the rotting bench beside the fire. "I believe one of the meat elements is the heart of a deer, if that's relevant. I also believe this is the third time you've called me by that name. Have you ever actually read Frankenstein?"

Worth snagged a mug off the bench beside Nameless McGreenGuy and ladled out a pint of stew. "Sure," he replied, offhand. "High school or summat. Another limp-dick whiner in the fine old romantic tradition. Near ta strangled myself 'fore I finished, if memory serves, but that was back in the day when I gave a shit about finishin' the assignment. Life-sucker, that's what school is. Great big bloody waste of time. "

"Doctor, did you sleep well?"

Worth squinted at him over the white steam of the pot. "Not at fuckin' all. Why?"

"Because you're rambling, and because you just spooned that portion of soup back into the pot."

Doc Worth blinked down at his bone-dry cup. Well. Jesus.

"Maybe you should go back to bed. Unless Conrad kicked you off the mattress again?"

"Aw, fer fuck's sake, you two morons make it sound like it happens every day."

The zombie stood, that odd swinging motion that was always somewhere between ungainly and graceful, and plucked both the cup and the ladle from Worth's hands. He doled out the perfect amount, capped the pot, and returned the cup which Worth accepted back only grudgingly.

He did briefly consider heading back to the RV and shoving his way onto the bed and pulling the covers over his head, damn the time and damn his wheezing, steaming brain too. But looming memories of man-shaped ashes and blue lighters, and the other trapping of what had passed for sleep the last few days, turned him off that option cold. He'd woken up sweating in the darkness, with his fingers white and bloodless around a forearm that wasn't his own, and he had no desire to go back to that.

"It has all of us on edge," the dead man offered, softly, making no move to return to his bench. "You aren't the only one worried."

Worth snorted over the surface of his breakfast. "It's just a city, man. We seen a damn sight worse than one half-burned city."

"It's home," the dead man replied, inexorable.

"Feh. You still dunno where yer home is, and you ain't likely ta ever find out now."

"It's home," the dead man repeated, traffic-light eyes flashing. "It's the first place where we ever felt that we belonged, you or I."

Worth gulped down a mouthful of something that tasted like woods and animal. "Think ya know me alluva sudden 'cause Hanna tol' ya some half-cracked story 'bout my life?"

"No, actually," Frankenstein answered, with a rare quirk of the dry lips. "I think I know you because I've shared a home with you for a year and a half, and unlike some of us, I know when I'm being misdirected."

"Well ain't you special," Worth grumbled.

He could see the yellow and blue streaks on the eastern horizon between twisting branches, when he looked, and he considered the road that wound along under it and towards their destination. The last time he'd driven that road, heading east, it had been slipping into morning and the banks of the highway were dotted every few miles with a light escaping a window at the end of each scattered driveway.

Now they were heading west, away from the fading sunlight, and back into the city that had spawned them all like some bizarre ant-queen popping out new and inexplicable children to patrol her lightless caverns. And when the burrows started collapsing, he'd hopped into his stolen car and hardly cast a backwards glance.

"Hanna hasn't told me any revealing stories about you, you know," the zombie remarked, idly, maybe attempting to make conversation. "I'm under the impression he doesn't know any."

Worth snorted. "Betcher ass Lamont told him a couple. Kid starts gigglin' every time I say 'butcher', I know he knows."

"Ah," the undead man replied, "Maybe I should ask him to tell me one."

-A-

In a way, it was worse than New York. At least in New York, he'd been personally unfamiliar with the scenery. The anarchy and the flame-bitten, trashed city had been unnerving, but at least they had been just as alien as the New York of postcards and movies.

This was his city. There were no fire pits carved into the asphalt, no distant humming motorcycle engines, but the silence was almost as bad. Year-old glass covered the streets, and mildewed curtains flapped in the windows of the inner-city houses.

"Jesus," Conrad hissed, eyes on the blackened building just ahead, "That was where I got my first commission."

The glass shards caught their headlights like a carpet of jagged stars.

"Don't look likely ter get back to ya," Worth observed. "Unless the charred look is in vogue this year."

"Who the hell called us here?" Conrad murmured, appearing not to have noticed the comment at all. "This city is dead. There hasn't been anyone on this street for months and months, not even scavengers. Look. It's abandoned."

Worth shrugged, mostly for his own benefit. "It's pro'ly a trap."

Conrad made a face, stony and jaw clenched, that was best translated as "pretending to be confident." He swerved around a fallen lightpost. "Unseelie can't ambush, and humans can't tap into the summoning system."

"Don't gotta be Unseelie," Worth replied, kicking his boots up on the dashboard. "Might be magicians. Might be, whachacallem, puca. I dunno. Could be anythin', there's plenty'a spooks floatin' around with a grudge fer the guys what slapped a ball'n chain on 'em just when things were loosenin' up."

"You know what I hate?" Conrad muttered, mouth twisting downward. "Broken windows. There's just something about them that makes you feel exposed."

"Eh, whatcha got against exposure anyhow? Goddamn prude, that's what you are."

Rather than listen for a reply, Worth turned his attention back out the window and into the night, at the darkness that rose up around them in huge hollow columns. As they rumbled up the peak of a hill, something not too far in the distance caught the doctor's eye.

"Oi, Speed Racer. You seein' that huge glowin' clock tower over there, or am I hallucinatin' again?"

"Nooo," Conrad replied, slowly, "you aren't hallucinating. This time. Hey Hanna!" he shouted back over his shoulder, "Hanna, we found something!"

A red blur stumbled into the back of Worth's peripheral vision, and the vague heat of a hand centimeters away radiated into his shoulder.

"Whoa, the big glowing circle thing?"

"Yes. That. I think I can get there in a couple minutes if I take Maycomb Drive—you want me to?"

"Totally. Try to avoid… hey, what's that?"

The RV lurched, squealing, and threw Worth chest-first into the dashboard as Conrad loosed a low roar of obscenity in the driver's seat. Hanna's blurry ginger outline toppled down into the space just under the dashboard. They were still.

"Snap my goddamn ribs why doncha?" the doctor mumbled, half his face smeared across the top of a glove compartment.

Conrad jerked the RV into park and threw open his door. The yelling started up as soon as his feet hit asphalt, "Hey, you, yes you, idiot—"

The sound faded around the front of the vehicle. Worth peeled his face off fake leather and looked up, over the hood, to where Conrad was standing with his hands on his hips, chewing out a wide-eyed young man who looked to be about three seconds away from a fatal heart attack.

Worth shoved his own door open and stuck his head out. "Ey, Princess, ya owe me a new face!"

Conrad glared at him, headlights bouncing green and red light off his eyes. "Whatever I broke, it can only be an improvement!"

"Yer a catty bitch today, aincha?"

Conrad rolled his eyes and turned back to the pale-faced stranger, who was backed up against a chunk of rubble with his pupils blown. The line of the vampire's shoulders softened, and he bit his lip.

"Um. Sorry," he said, tucking hands into pockets, awkward now. "Just… watch where you're going okay?"

The stranger said nothing.

"Mebbe he thinks yer gonna eat 'im," Worth called out, grinning. "Hear jaywalkers got a nice tang to 'em."

"Oh sod off," Conrad shot back. Hesitantly, he reached out a hand for the shaking man. "Hey, um, are you alright? I'm really not going to eat you, I swear. I don't kill people."

Worth was going to point out that he did kill people, fairly often even, and did a damn good job of it too, when Hanna pushed his way past and knocked Worth back into his seat.

"You guys, you guys are so bad at this." Hanna pushed his way in front of Conrad and took hold of the stranger's hands, lightly, with small movements that belied the pushiness of his entrance. "Hi. I'm Hanna. What's your name?"

The young man stared at him.

Hanna reached up and grabbed his own lip, tugging down to expose little white molars. "Look, totally human. Just like you. We're not gonna hurt you or anything, okay? So what's your name?"

The stranger swallowed, so you could see his throat contracting around his own dry spit. "Trevin."

"Okay, Trevin, nice to meet you. Now, are you out here alone?"

A pause, a wild glance, and then a nod.

Hanna smiled, reassuring. "So, this place is pretty creepy right? You don't wanna be alone out here. If you want, we can give you a ride back to… wherever you came from. I know hopping in vans with strangers is kinda not kosher, but I can promise you we have absolutely no candy whatsoever, and none of us have ever been to prison. Okay, well, Worth has, but that was for…"

"Acts'a vandalism and public indecency."

"…Kay, well, that last one actually doesn't help me make my point so much."

"And you got yerself arrested that one time. When ya blew up that buildin'? Shoulda gone ter prison. Anybody else woulda."

"Okay, now you're being like the exact opposite of helpful."

There was the sound of a door opening, and Worth glanced back at the driver's seat just in time to catch the tail of a black coat disappearing out into the darkness.

"Hanna?" the dead man's voice rang out, cool and concerned. "Hanna, what is—oh. Well."

The stranger collapsed in a heap of pale skin and sputtering pulse. No one caught him. They all just stared.

"Hey Frankenstein," Worth called, after a minute of contemplation. "Y'know, if you'd read the book we might not have this problem."

-A-

When Trevin came to, it was in the back of the RV on the bench that usually served as Hanna's bed with a face full of ice water.

Hanna sighed. "And now I'm stuck sleeping on ice. Great."

"Least ya don't have ter sleep next ta Priscilla Queen of the Icecicles every day."

"Hold on, he's waking up. I think it worked."

Hanna was perched on the one armrest, back to the rest of the cabin, peering down at their guest with all the bright eyed curiosity of a feral toddler. Conrad snorted, setting down the bucket. He gave it a displeased look, probably considering the hassle that would come from refilling it.

The Trevin kid blinked, and then froze.

"Ooh, that doesn't look promising," Hanna observed, under his breath. "Hey, so, you fainted? And I really didn't wanna leave you on the street so I hope you don't mind? You look super cold. Sorry about that. Prometheus, would you grab him a towel?"

The stranger followed Hanna's glance across the room to where the zombie was standing—awkwardly, Worth was fairly sure—and you could almost see the poor kid's heart stop.

"Zombie," was all he said, muscles stiff, unblinking. "Zombie. Fedora."

The magician on the armrest jumped in. "Whoa, no, hold on, Prometheus is a friend okay? A good friend. Try to be sensitive about his condition."

"Condition," the young man parroted, managing to sound skeptical underneath the terror. "He's dead."

"Yeah, well," Hanna muttered, "so's Conrad. And I …once. But anyways, this RV is a prejudice free zone so you gotta make nice with the dead guys if you wanna stick around, okay?"

The terror melted away, replaced by indignity. "Hey, I didn't ask you to take me in here, did I?"

Conrad dropped into the seat at the table next to Worth. "I liked him better when he was mute."

The Trevin kid scowled. "What, so the dead guy can be a jerk to me but I can't be a jerk to him?"

"Um… yes? But I mean, do you want us to leave you here? You looked pretty freaked out, but, if you'd rather be back out there it's fine with us, you're free to go and all."

The kid turned so white that his skin matched his hair, and his fists mercilessly crumpled the garden-gnome-printed sheets. "No," he said, "no, I'd… rather not."

Hanna clapped his hands together and clambered down from the armrest. "Great! So then, introductions! I'm Hanna Falk Cross, former paranormal investigator and current… what'd we call it? Troubleshooter. That's Prometheus—well, today he's Prometheus, I'm thinking tomorrow he can be Uriel; I'm trying to work through the archangels so I can get to the New Testament—he's my partner and a really great guy, everyone loves him and you'll love him too!"

Their guest said nothing but looked fairly unconvinced. Hanna chose not to notice; instead, he pointed at the table where Worth was busy rolling himself a cigarette and Conrad was looking bored. "Um, the pale one is Conrad Achenleck, he's a vampire but he's not… he's not really good at it—"

"I resent that!"

"—but he's a great driver and he has a really boss tenor. And that's Doc Worth, and you should probably… just not talk to him."

Worth snorted. And how was a man supposed to have any fun if Mother Teresa there kept warning off all the potential suckers?

"So," Hanna went on, looking down, "that's us. Who are you? And what were you running from?"

The Trevin kid frowned, polar-bear pale eyebrows furrowing. "I… don't remember. There were people chasing me, and… and I lost my guitar. Shit. I don't know where I'm gonna get a replacement."

"Who was chasing you?" Hanna pressed. "Do you live nearby? Were they neighbors or something? Did you get run out of… town? Village?"

"No, I was just out in the woods. I was practicing. And I heard this noise like it was really close, and then it got softer, and. Yeah, I don't know. Then you nearly hit me with this thing."

"Try looking both ways before you cross the street," Conrad muttered into his fist.

Hanna loomed absently over their guest, tapping his fingers in uneven patterns on the worn denim of his jeans. "You don't remember anything at all?"

"Maybe… hooves. I guess. I've never heard horse hooves in real life, so I can't really swear to it."

"Hooves… oh, fuck. Conrad, is your phone charged?"

"Uh… yes?"

"Go grab it," Hanna ordered, dropping to his knees to dig through the accumulated detritus under his otherwise occupied bench-bed. Connie's Maid Service kept the RV clean enough, but after sticking a hand in a puddle of ectoplasm under the bench last year, he'd flat out refused to touch the thing ever again. God only knew what Hanna was searching for now.

Conrad grumbled and stalked off to the cockpit, snatching Worth's newly rolled cigarette up as he left the table. Worth glared at his empty hand.

"I only know one thing that gets quieter when it gets closer, and it's something I had really hoped I'd never have to deal with again." Hanna's arm retreated from the darkness with a book marginally larger than a pamphlet. The cover had a deer's skull emblazoned across it.

"Okay Hanna," Conrad called, stepping back into the main room. His battered iphone glowed faintly in the cage of his fingers. "Tell me this isn't for a game of emergency tetris."

"No, I just—what's the date?"

"The date? It's, uh, October thirtieth… Oh, that's going to be a problem, isn't it?"

Hanna hissed, flipping the book open. "Stupid. Can't believe I lost track. We're supposed to be in Nevada for Halloween, put in an appearance at the Seelie court shindig—I thought we had another couple days—but it looks like we're definitely not going to make it. No way we can leave town now."

"What's going on?" Trevin demanded, pulling himself up from Hanna's nest of blankets and pillows.

But Hanna was gone, scrambling out the side door with book in hand, and Conrad shared a skeptical look with the doctor beside him. The zombie stepped forward, hands behind back, and knelt down to Trevin's level.

"When Hanna comes back, we'll return you to your home. Do you live near here?"

"This is where I live, actually."

"What," Worth snorted, "in a storm drain?"

Conrad leaned forward, glasses flashing in the dull yellow light. "This city looks like it could barely house a family of rats safely. Where are you sleeping?"

"Just north of here," Trevin replied, looking vaguely offended, "in the suburbs. The riots here went absolutely fucking nuts, see? We—all the smart people—we left for the suburbs a couple months after the bodies started piling up downtown. We had it bad here. Bad luck. Every time it looked like it was calming down, things just got worse. So last summer, everybody left alive at the college just grabbed their shit and made a run for the closest functioning community."

The door creaked softly as a wind rushed over their dented metal hull.

Worth drummed fingertips against the table top. This place had been the western hub of the supernatural world, and while 'things getting worse when they ought to get better' was pretty much what Worth expected from the world on a daily basis, in this case he could pin the cause for it with very little difficulty.

"I didn't see any corpses," Conrad murmured, glancing out the window with one of those looks that said But I'm not really curious enough to stir up that can of worms right now.

Trevin had already changed focus. Now he was examining the gnome-printed sheets and the fuzzy pink blankets and the mass of pillows with a bemused frown. "How come I'm not in an actual bed? You do have one, right?"

"Yeeeah," Hanna's voice replied, followed quickly by the body as he bounced back through the door, "but that's where Conrad and Worth sleep and, uh, you're better off out here. I can just go back to sleeping in the overhead bunk, since we cleared out that cornmeal we were storing a week or two ago."

Trevin shot Worth and Conrad a weird look, which they both ignored. The doctor snatched back the cigarette Conrad had stolen and wedged it between his teeth, turning back to Hanna.

"So, find out whacha needed ter know?"

Hanna made a disturbing face half way between a nervous frown and a reassuring smile. It looked vaguely like a gargoyle grimace. "Unfortunately, yep."

Worth filched his lighter back from Conrad too, digging around in the startled vampire's pockets for the hunk of plastic. Little bitch had been trying to keep him off the stuff for a week now, since they left the last village, like it made any difference to him whether Worth got lung cancer or not.

"So?" the Trevin kid demanded, sitting forward. "Who was after me?"

Hanna grimaced outright now. "Not so much a who as a what."

"Well then, what?"

"Ever heard of the Wild Hunt?"

"Yeah, sure. Been on a few m'self." Finally locating his lighter, Worth allowed himself an extra moment to pinch Conrad's thigh, grinning at the immediate elbow to the cheek it earned him.

"Yee-aaaaaah, no," Hanna's grimace flattened. "I'm pretty sure we're talking about, like, two totally different things here, bro."

"Just 'cause ya never managed ter bag nothin' on yer nights out don't mean I weren't successful." Flame snapped to life from the mouth of the lighter as Worth lifted it towards the cigarette still stubbornly jutting out between his teeth.

The fact that Hanna failed to dignify that with a response, face once again buried in the leather-bound book, did more to concern Worth than anything else that had happened so far that evening. His fingers tapped on the table top, waffling between the desire to clearly remain unaffected by the quiet, and the need to snatch that damn book from him and find out what the hell was so damn interesting. Maybe it was his way of avoiding talk about sex? Christ knew he had never gotten laid in his life, and neither had Conrad.

Catching a side-ways look from Trevin, he spared the kid a grin, not sure if he was doing so in order to put him at ease or if he just felt more at ease himself by knowing he could still intimidate people who didn't know him.

Would someone ask Hanna what the fuck was going on, already?

"Look. Suspense. Wonderful. Fantastic." Ah, there we go. Thanks, sweetheart. "Could you possibly give up on the mystery and just give us information?"

"Huh-wha? Oh." Blinking, clearly pulling himself back from whatever hypnotic state his readings often dragged him into, Hanna rubbed his eyes. "Yeah, 'kay. Sooooo, the Wild Hunt is uh, kinda what it sounds like but with less of the dirty stuff Worth likes to get on about. Actually, none of the dirty stuff. Worth's just dirty."

Worth grinned at Trevin again and was disappointed that the kid wasn't paying any attention to him anymore.

"Nothing we're not painfully aware of," Conrad grumbled. Worth's grin soured slightly.

"Anyhoo, so like, it can vary? There are a couple of types? All of them are based on that area's own flavor of deities and spirits and all that jazzamarazz."

The book was set aside carefully as Hanna turned his attention back to the living and not-quite-so-living in the vehicle.

"Like, there's a story about this one woman who was all, "If I can't hunt in heaven, then leave me on Earth!" 'cause yeaaaaah apparently she hadn't heard of not fucking with the powers that be. So now she's trapped hunting forever, dragging people in to the hunt with her if they can't escape, standard cursed soul entrapment stuff, but! I don't think we're dealing with her. I think we have more of a standard hunt here." He adjusted his glasses, curiosity and excitement beginning to overcome his earlier concern. "Which means that there's a corrupted soul somewhere around here, and they are after his ass. Or her ass. Or uh, I dunno, whatever gender they are, maybe they aren't a gender. Don't want to be offensive or anything so um, they are after that person? Yes."

"So yer sayin' some dumb bloke's got some angry spirits after his ass? Hey, yanno what that sounds like? Not our fuckin' problem."

"Dude, you always say that. How about this person's loved ones? Or. What if they're running across a bridge we're using and one of us accidentally gets in the way? Huh?"

Worth looked less skeptical and more annoyed, mostly because he was. "The hell they'd want with us?"

"Uh," Hanna hesitated, tongue glancing across his lips, avoiding eye-contact with Worth to instead tug at the growing spread of frayed fabric at the knee of his jeans. "Maybe there's, like, a lot of weirdo magical hijinks up in here sometimes, man, and what with us being... yanno... us, well, like, one of us might fall on the wrong side of "corrupted", and their sights could shift and I'm just sayin' WOW LOOK AT THESE JEANS I SHOULD FIX THEM and are you on the same page with me yet or what?"

"Ya sayin' they might wind up after the princess's ass?" Thin eyebrows raising, Worth slung an arm around Conrad's less than pleased shoulders. "'Fraid I done laid claim ter that bit'a her ladyship long time ago."

There was a brief scuffle of activity as Conrad made it clear that Worth's proffered protection was not exactly to his ladyship's liking. It stopped about the time Worth's nose began to bleed. Quietly, the zombie fetched a towel from the kitchenette counter and placed it on the table. Worth ignored it, choosing instead to lean closer to Conrad, sniffing occasionally and watching the way the vampire twitched slightly every time a droplet plopped off his chin and onto Worth's lap.

"Kay so if you two are done, and I'm pretty sure they are, sorry, Trevinnator, they just do that sometimes."

Trevin tried to look as unaffected as someone can while sitting on the edge of a seat. He scooted back with a roll of his eyes when he noticed how close he was to the zombie.

"So like, yeah, we could do that, the whole helping or getting the fuck out of the way. But," a sigh, "I dunno. Sometimes it's not always that person's fault that they're corrupted, or like, I guess it is but sometimes there are reasons, you know? And uh, anyway, lots of people usually get hurt in the process of the hunt, like I mentioned, and sometimes the hunt can switch to another target, like I also totally mentioned, and if nothing else, I'd rather try to at least prevent as much collateral damage and loss of life as possible?"

The dripping of Worth's nose had lessened, and he took the towel to wipe at the drying remains from beneath his nostrils. "Yeah, sound 'bout like the kinda think yeh'd do."

"Awesome! So you are totally on board! See, Trevin?" False brightness plastered itself across Hanna's face. "We're totally gonna fix this right up. Don't worry about a thing!"

Trevin picked at the chipped edge of the table. "Yeah, you guys seem like you really have it together."

-A-

Somewhere between the edge of town and their destination, Worth slipped into a restless sleep.

It was the kind of sleep that makes your eyes ache, the kind where you wake up infinitely more tired than you fell asleep. And Worth dreamed, in that aching, awful moment carved out between two distant blinks.

He dreamed that the world was a mansion built on a hill, and the spire above the attic was a needle leaving ugly crisscrossing trails of fat black thread across the moon. He dreamed that the graveyard pulled itself up from the earth and forced its way into the mansion's parlor, and the high vaulted windows ran with rust-red water.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked out the passing seconds, each one gathering behind its great brass wings like an army.

And a hand was on his hand as the tiny, curled second-hand drew closer to the final hour, and Lamont was standing at his back with a nervous frown that was so familiar it nearly hurt.

You shouldn't be here, Lamont said

Well fuck, Worth said

A headstone loomed far above the both of them

Ya don't say, Worth replied

-A-

The glare from the swollen, glowing face of the clock tower glinted off of Conrad's glasses, and even Worth was blinded enough by the glare to curve his hand before his brow, squinting in the slight bit of shade afforded to him by his long, knobby fingers. The camper hummed around them, a gentle and constant shake that always seemed to grow more noticeable when they were around an area with active energy at work. It set him on edge, the way it seemed to form its own steady sort of heart beat, quickening and slowing along with the magic around them. Currently the lub-dub was reminding Worth of a light jogging pace, and he had a feeling that meant this wasn't going to be remotely easy.

Well of course not. When the hell had anything that got Hanna hopping around like a hare on heroin turned out to be easy?

Conrad turned off the camper, not bothering to pull the keys from the ignition, hands gripping the steering wheel. Normally he would be bitching or getting out and then bitching. Hmm.

"Oi," Worth elbowed the vampire, earning little more than a deepening of the other man's scowl as response. "Wot?"

"Do I have to go out there?"

"Eeeh," he rubbed his chin with his free hand, "reckon Baby Bear get mighty put out if our family outin' don't have both his mamma an' his papa bear with him. Got issues 'n' all that."

"Fine then, mamma bear," Conrad looked at Worth, or at least he seemed too, eyes still hidden by the bright light whitening the lenses of his glasses, "let's head out. I'm sure this will be a fucking treat."

"Oh yeah, bet so." He would let the mamma bear comment slide for now, but he was already formulating belated responses in the back of his head as doorknobs squeaked and the inhabitants of the camper made their way out to the street.

"Oh maaaaaaaaaaaaan! It's like, so bright! Like, totally day glow level, but not like day glo? You know? Just super duper bright and shadowwwwws cannot even be seen 'cause damn that is some hot stuff comin' out of there!"

True to form, Hanna was already babbling and charging ahead, stopping only once he had hit what Worth assumed to be some sort of invisible magic barrier a few yards ahead.

"Thaaaaaaat could be a problem, but totally not for us! Prometheus, can you go nab me some of theeeee," fingers poked at the air before him, "dried sage, nettle, blue chalk and maybe a long sleeved shirt? Uhhhh yeah, definitely a long sleeved one."

The zombie paused, unsure, and when Hanna noticed his furious poking stopped in mid-go.

"Prometheus?" he asked, brow furrowed in a way that made him look his twenty-seven years. "Is everything okay?"

"Everything is fine, Hanna," the dead man replied, blinking like he did sometimes when he was trying to be comforting. "It's just… it feels familiar."

Hanna looked deeply worried, for a passing moment, but Frankenstein had already turned around and so the magician reluctantly went back to communing with the invisible wall. While the zombie headed back into the RV, Trevin leaned against the side of the vehicle, his eyes shifting sideways. Whatever, Worth thought, as he and Conrad moved closer to Hanna. Let the little hipster run off if he wanted. Anybody dumb enough to run off into the decaying corpse of a ghost town the night before Halloween had pretty much already punched their one way, non refundable to the afterlife.

Hanna looked up at them, distantly. "This one's gonna take some work," he told them, "so you might wanna shift off a few feet just in case something explodes. Er. Not that it will, just in case it does in some bizarre off chance that I picked the wrong color of chalk or something okay?"

Having born the brunt of one too many of Hanna's completely-unlikely-honestly explosions, every one left moved to the other side of the RV and waited out the storm in relative safety.

Beside him, Conrad was slowly beginning to rub one of his temples and Worth felt a little tension easing from his own shoulders. No wonder the vampire was acting off. The light from the clock face was artificial, but it was doing a hell of a job obliterating any sort of dark area, even preventing much in the way of shadows at their feet. Not the real thing, but it was close enough to sunlight to be giving him a hell of headache.

"Need ter sleep it off?"

A sigh that had an edge of a groan withered on Conrad's lips. "What?"

"Gotcherself an ouchie, yeah? Wanna go sleep it off?"

The motion of fingers on temple slowed, then stilled. "I...guess so? I'm waiting for the inevitable joke to follow my answer, though."

Worth shrugged, left hand finding its way into the front pocket of his jeans while the right remained on his face to shield his eyes. "Just thought ya looked worse fer wear, sweetheart. Can't a man show a li'l consideration fer his number one girl?"

"You're the mamma bear here, not me."

"Pretty insistent about that bear business, now. Something ya wanna tell me? We finally gonna have ourselves a chat about yer preferences, darlin'?"

"I really have no idea why I ever converse with you. I really don't."

"We don't need no words ter-"

"No."

"Yer loss, love. I got wotcha call "healin' hands'."

"If you are going to try and turn this into a sexual healing joke, I fucking swear, you'll have another spot to check off on your places my nose was broken bingo sheet."

"Oh, nah. Always though I was more of a doctor feelgood sort."

"As much as I hate to agree with anything you say, that one seems rather apt, and, no, before you even ask, I am not interested in your services."

"Sooner or later, everybody takes a turn with Doctor Feelgood. Don't gotta be shy now."

Instead of replying, Conrad stiffened and curled his lip, and whirled on the blond kid lingering at the edges of their unwieldy polygon. Worth realized belatedly that Trevin actually hadn't looked away from them since the first ouchie comment.

"What are you even staring at?" Conrad snarled, probably two seconds from breathing fire. You could just about see the smoke curling out of his nostrils.

The kid just raised his eyebrows, hands tucked into pockets. It was hard to blame him really—until you'd seen Conrad eviscerate a man with his teeth, it was hard to take anything he said seriously. Actually, it was still hard. Worth did have to occasionally remind himself of Conrad's capabilities, every so often, when Conrad decided that a joke had been taken just a smidge too far. But the kid had no way of knowing that, and Worth was pretty sure that even if the clock tower wasn't basically taking a jack hammer to the vampire's spooky hoodoo bit, Conrad probably wouldn't eviscerate a civilian just for raising his eyebrows.

Probably.

"Are you two… like," Trevin started, eyeing them both, "together?"

"The hell we are!" Conrad shrieked. The pitch was probably lethal to certain breeds of small animal.

Trevin slowly raised one hand to his ear and poked at the cavity. "Ow."

"Where'd you get that idea?" Conrad went on, working himself up to the beginning of a truly magnificent tirade. "Where the fuck did you get that idea?"

The kid glanced sideways at Worth, as if to say can you believe this guy?  Worth smiled back with more teeth than was probably necessary.

"For one thing, you sleep in the same bed."

Conrad sucked in one huge angry breath, and then lost his grip on it. It came whistling out like someone had stuck him with a pin. "Oh," he said, smartly. "That. I guess that could give somebody the completely inaccurate and insulting impression. That we might be a thing. Which we aren't."

"There's only one bed," Worth offered, helpfully, "'n Connie's gotta get himself outta the sun don't he? Course, I'm too bloody tall ter fit on the booth or the overhead, so it's to the back with me too."

The dead man nodded gratefully. "Yes, that's—"

"And it makes the sex a lot easier too, eh sweetheart?"

"Worth you fucking liar—"

"Lemme tell ya, kid, dontcha ever try ter have sex on a camper floor, specially not with a buddy sleepin' in the overhead—"

"If you don't stop I will literally rip your lips off and feed them too you—"

"Ya don' even wanna know where poor Conniekins got himself rugburned—"

"Shut up shut up shut up!"

About the time Conrad nearly shoved his whole hand down Worth's throat, Worth finally gave up on finishing the story and went down graciously in a heap of flying elbows. They were still trying to strangle each other when finally Hanna popped in and exchanged a look with Trevin, who was watching the show with a detached sort of interest.

"It's like a dogfight," Hanna observed. "Can't really step in or somebody'll take your hand off."

"My mom was a vet, I've seen dog fights," Trevin replied. "These guys need a bucket of water."

Hanna snorted, and then Worth felt something that was probably a sneaker poke at his momentarily trapped leg. "Hey guys," the magician said. "Guys, not to be a buzz kill here, but the stuff's all set up for us and the hunt isn't exactly getting any further away so I'm gonna hafta ask if we can, you know, step on it? Serious business time."

While Worth did his best to make Conrad's face one with the concrete, the Trevin kid made busy with the cold feet.

"Wait," he said, "you're taking me in there with you? You want me to play Mystery Incorporated with you guys?"

"Well, uh, it depends on who has to be Daphne, I guess?"

"No, level with me here. I thought I was going home. Do you really expect me to go trotting off through some… mystical barrier or whatever shit of my own free will? Because from what I'm seeing here, you people are crazy but you at least have to have some experience and I am really starting to feel like the expendable one around here."

"Only startin'?" Worth wheezed out, having taken a knee to the gut seconds prior.

"Weeeell," Hanna hummed, drawing the syllable out into its own sentence, "not saying I don't understand where you're coming from, honestly, but let me put it like this: you wanna stay in the car?"

"He's definitely Scooby," Conrad muttered, and kicked Worth off of him bodily.

"Look," the kid was saying, "I like a good adventure as much as the next guy, but I am not nearly high enough for this. I actually haven't eaten much in a couple days and I would really just like to go home, if it's all the same to you."

It was at that point that Conrad finally managed to get the doctor face down on the asphalt in a half-assed arm lock, and the two of them finally gave up. Worth attempted not to snort any pebbles while he was down, and the arms of Lamont's cross dug into his collarbone when Conrad pushed himself off.

"Let the kid wait in the car," Worth said into a mouthful of road dirt. "Little bastard'll just slow us down."

"Kid?" Trevin repeated, incredulous. "I'm twenty-one, asshole. Do I look like your little brother?"

"You are fairly young compared to the rest of us," Conrad noted, brushing off his vest with an oh-so-dignified hand. "And as you pointed out yourself, you don't have much experience. Not," he added darkly, "that some of us ever asked to be experienced."

Trevin squinted at Conrad. "You know what?" he said, at last. "I'm going with you, just because you look like the kind of person who screams like a girl and I kind of want to hear it."

Hanna slapped Conrad on the back and the vampire's rage face ratcheted up to a ten on the Richter Scale of unadulterated fury. "He sure has you pegged!"

Before Conrad could reply, Hanna shoved an ugly looking bag at his chest and started up on the exposition.

"So these are our solution to the forcefield problem," Hanna said. "I got a weak point carved out just over there so we just hold onto these and step right through. These will cover you once you're inside too, I mean, they won't protect you from bullets but if I've calculated right they ought to ward off evil eye and stuff which you'd be surprised how often ends up helping. The barrier is the highest concentration of warding but the range of effects actually extends to… well, probably about where we picked up Trevin. What you've got here is someone's last-ditch effort to keep something else out."

Worth considered the bags. They looked like scraggly taffeta or something, and the drawstrings were some kind of cord discolored from countless human hands.

"It's probably going to feel pretty weird," Hanna said, handing them each their bundles, "sorry guys. The supply closet wasn't really prepared for this instance, so entry's gonna be kinda bumpy."

"Bumpy… how, exactly?" Conrad said, suspicion lacing the finely crafted words.

Hanna fiddled absently with the tassel on his own bag. "Well, Worth and the T-man will have it easiest, cause they're good old fashion non-augmented human meat stuff. I'll be a little rougher. You and Prometheus might hafta strong-arm your way through, and he'll have it easier than you. So. Uh. Sorry about that I guess."

Conrad contemplated his bag in the same way a toothless man might consider an apple. The contempt was nearly palpable.

The new kid raised his hand in what was probably meant to be an ironic sort of way, although it mostly just made him look like a tool. "How come?" he asked. "The bumpiness, I mean."

"Excellent question!" Hanna replied, breaking into a grin. He bounced over to the younger man and plucked the charm out of his hands. "What we're working with here is a variation of Santerian fetishes, which means I'm basically doing a chemistry equation where the spiritual value of a given herb is, like, plus or minus its given alignment. Physically, combining this one—" he reached in and pulled out a chunk of bark, "—with this one—" he drew out a finger coated with ash, "—just makes a pouch full of dirty wood. But on a spiritual level, it compounds a positive Protection by the positive Natural State, most often represented in theory by the symbol alpha…"

Hanna trailed off as Trevin fixed him with a devastatingly unimpressed expression.

"Hoookay," Hanna said, and handed the bag back sheepishly. "Lemme come at this a different way. There's a million different kinds of magic. That barrier is using a completely different kind of magic than me, and I'll be honest with you, I don't know what kind it is. It's like I'm trying to use digital magic on analogue magic. Or, um, I'm operating a computer and it's operating a brain. We're both doing the same thing in completely different ways. It wants to keep creepy-creeps out, I want to get creepy-creeps in, and we're coding in completely different languages."

"Oh. Okay," Trevin said, "but what was the shirt for? Do we all need one?"

Hanna grinned and flopped the arms of the oversized shirt like batwings. "Nah," he answered, "I was just cold."

Conrad snorted. "Maybe when everything settles down we can get you a job as the magic theory professor at the Unseen University."

"Do you think there's a branch in Salem? I dunno if I've got the qualifications."

Conrad pursed his lips. "I actually can't tell if you're being sincere or not."

The first of them through the barrier was Trevin. The zombie had suggested that the least-difficult parties go first, so that it would be easier to gauge whether more-difficult parties might need to opt out in a worst case scenario. Worth thought he was being a pussy.

In the doctor's brief moment of passage, there was a feeling almost like running a hand over a rusted propane tank, all the cold and the orange grit, except that it was in his organs and in his head instead of on his skin, and the whole thing made him feel raw and irritated around the edges. The grit grabbed at the twisted memories of his dreams and dragged them across the length of his brain, and something in his gut felt rotten.

"'S fine," he told them, when both his feet were firmly on this side of the barrier. "Don't be such babies."

The rest of them followed quickly after. Hanna didn't look particularly bothered, but Worth knew better than to believe Hanna's looks. Frankenstein passed through jerkily. Conrad stumbled and clutched at his head, and refused to let anyone take his arm while he dizzily struggled with his balance.

"Hangin' in there?" Worth asked, giving Conrad something akin to a gentle elbow in the ribs. "Need that lie-down, yer ladyship?"

"I don't need fucking anything," Conrad snarled. "I'm fine."

Worth grinned at him. "Knew ya would be."

Conrad ignored him. "Hanna," he called over, to where the redhead was currently inspecting the doorless entrance to the tower. "Will I even be able to go inside?"

Hanna gave the frame thoughtful look, running square hands over the pitted mortar. "I guess it depends on if whoever's inside sleeps here. Otherwise, you'll have to wait at the… wow. Deja vu. This will end well. I can literally feel the Hannas of the past trying to warn me."

"Funny, 'cos I can feel the Conrads of the past trying to smack me," the vampire muttered.

"Try it Conrad!" Hanna insisted, gesturing to the doorway like Vannah White in a muddy sweater.

Scowling, Conrad tried it.

One arm, then the rest of him, passed effortlessly through the empty air. The whole company expelled a sigh of relief they hadn't known they were holding, and fell in behind him. The ground floor was silent, save a faint whisper of indistinguishable, far away noise—like static, filling the skeletal hallways. No amount of kicking around could turn up any evidence of human life, and eventually they turned their attention to the upper levels. There were a fuck ton of stairs ahead of them and nobody was looking forward to it—Trevin asked snidely if any of them had some wings stowed away, Conrad told him to can it—but they did eventually start on a long trek to the top-most floor.

Bit by bit, a step at a time, the static resolved itself into something recognizable; somewhere between floors five and seven, it shattered into a distant ocean of ticks.

At the pivot of a stairwell, Hanna and the zombie paused and shared a glance.

"It couldn't…" Hanna started.

"It does seem…" the zombie replied, hesitant. "…Awfully familiar."

And Worth felt a low, sinking feeling begin in the pit of his stomach.

To say that they burst in, guns akimbo, would be to do a serious disservice to Worth's akimboing skills. As a matter of fact, he pretty much took care of all the akimboing for the crew, since Trevin and the zombie didn't have guns, Hanna was too busy being stone-faced and analytical to put up any kind of offense, and Conrad was still on door-kicking-in strike since the last time he tried to kick a door open and got his damn foot stuck in the thing. He did a passable job of backing Worth up this time, though, quietly and with quick, measured movements.

But there was still a substantial amount of door kicking, and by virtue of this, Worth was the first of them to see the figure bent over a work table at the far end of the room.

"Tibenoch," Conrad said, just a step behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Worth spotted his finger twitch on the trigger.

The figure straightened itself. Tibenoch's half-moon glasses caught the green-white light filtering in through the cracks in the floorboards overhead; his head tilted at an interested angle. Something ting-ed on the work table, metallic and hollow, as the man opened his hands and pressed the tips together.

Worth was having trouble pinning his age, in the darkness. Older than himself, by some mark, but it felt detached from the usual human unwinding of time. There was an eerie otherness in the sharp lines of his jagged-cut face.

"Why," the bespectacled man began, in a voice like a professor, "I appear to have visitors, on this eve of Hallows Eve! What an auspicious surprise, and me without so much as a decent table cloth."

"Ples," Hanna said, neutrally, stepping through the space between Conrad and Worth. A moment stretched thin and dangerous around them like twisted a rubber band.

"Oh!" Tibenoch said, and tapped two fingers to the sharp curvature of his cheekbone. "Well this is a surprise. My my. To what do I owe this little interruption, Detective Cross, Ulysses?"

"I'm Prometheus tonight," the zombie said, immovable as stone.

"Hm," Tibenoch replied. "You may well be, at that."

The echoed ticking set Doc Worth's teeth on edge. When no one was talking, every fizzle and click in the room crawled its way up his spine and up his neck and scratched his skin with its endless jerking legs, and he started to think that he'd prefer another one of Hanna's magic theory lectures to the seething unquiet.

"We thought you were dead," Hanna told the man, and the words hung half way between an accusation and a sentencing.

"Yes, well," Tibenoch said, "I'm afraid I've never been a very graceful loser. Is there something in particular that you want, or have you come all the way up here with your serious looking entourage just to pester me for old time's sake?"

"Entourage, he says," Conrad murmured, "like he hasn't seen us before."

"He ain't seen me," Worth muttered back. "Time I got there he was a hand stickin' up outta some rubble."

In the room's faint greenish light, the desks glinted with cogs and wheels and vials of vaguely smoking liquid. On a burner jury-rigged half way across the room, something phosphorescent and yellow boiled.

"Are you here to finish the job, then?" Tibenoch asked, curiously, when Hanna's stony silence dragged on too long. "Did you grow a spine in the last year and a half, Detective, while you were out and about in the big wide world? What a medical marvel you must be. Tell me, did it hurt?"

"I got a dream-summons," Hanna replied. "We thought the source would be here, in this tower."

"Well what a coincidence," Tibenoch noted, expression souring. "Just as well you haven't come to kill me; he's only just managed to clean up the place and a few hours scrubbing blood off the ceilings would get me nothing but an earful."

"Why do you have a barrier erected around this tower?" Hanna asked, gesturing towards the far wall with its plastered-up arched window. "What are you keeping out, and why shouldn't I let it in?"

His laugh was like a gunshot rattling off the shadowed walls. "Is that a threat, Detective?"

"I'm not here to play games, Ples," Hanna said. "Answer the question."

Tibenoch waved him off, turned back to his work table with a neat little twist. "Come now, let's leave old grudges in the past. It's really been quite a long time, and I've been awfully… solitary, of recent months. Tell your friends to put down those nasty looking guns, and I'll give you all the grand tour."

Hanna glanced at Conrad, and then Worth. They both looked back with unimpressed faces.

In the thick silence, Tibenoch peered back over his shoulder.

"Is that a bit of mistrust I'm sensing? Pray tell, what precisely might you have to fear from me? This time, that is."

"Yeah, man, I don't know." Hanna's elbows were cocked slightly, fingers hovering over the pockets of his jeans. Slap a pair of chaps on him and let a tumbleweed roll by in the distance and you'd have the perfect Wild West show down moment. It would have been more intimidating if everyone in the room didn't know that his pockets held Sharpie markers rather than quick-draw flintlocks. But Worth knew the set of the redhead's shoulders well, too well even, and kept his pistol's sight set on Tibenoch. "Maybe the fact that you kinda tried to kill me last time I saw you?"

"Oh, that does put a bit of a damper on things, doesn't it?" He pulled the glasses from his nose, lifting them up above his head, angled them into the light to check for dirt on the lenses. "Pity. We could help one another here, you know?"

"Yeaaaaaaaah, about that. Are you the one who summoned us?"

"Yes, well, yes and no." The glasses were lowered as Ples bowed his head to focus on cleaning whatever smudge he had supposedly spotted. "I did put out a call, but I did not realize I would be graced with the country's very own Paranormal A-Team. Your exploits have become quite the topic of conversation as of late, even out here in the… less trafficked corners of the world."

"Okay," Hanna's fingertips rested on his pockets, "so why are we here? And I don't mean why do you need help, it's pretty damn obvious that the Hunt is after you."

"I can't think of a more worthy recipient of their interests," the zombie agreed. Worth was a little put out that Frankenstein beat him to the punch there.

"But what I want to know," Hanna continued, "is why I should give a flying fuck about helping you."

Tibenoch sighed, sounding like a worn out parent as he slipped his glasses back into place. "I've already said, Detective, that I would be delighted to provide information, but only if your compatriots will lower their weapons."

"And I don't think that you're really in a position to be making any kinds of demands."

"Chemical magic," the scientist murmured, fingers trailing over the inexorably grinding gears. "A fused science: organic and inorganic in equal measure. Impossible things remain impossible only as long as the tools necessary are out of reach, Detective."

"What?"

"If your compatriots shoot, even if their shots connect with me, they run the risk of hitting any number of beakers. Hit the right ones and, ah," he turned again to face them, smiling, "there may be a rather inconvenient explosion."

Worth allowed himself a quick look around the room. Truth be told, he didn't have a goddamned idea what was in all of the glowing, bubbling containers. Crazy fucker could easily be shitting them. Then again, he could be telling the truth. "Awright," Worth said after a moment, flicking the safety on and setting his pistol on the ground by his feet, "gonna go ahead 'n' believe ya fer now. Yanno wot don't explode, though?" From one of the slim holsters on Worth's belt, he withdrew a single scalpel.

Tibenoch made an appreciative sound before clapping his hands together soundly, eyes narrowing. "Well done, doctor. Stainless steel, I assume? No, that will not react with anything in here."

"You. Hands up. Connie. Keep an eye on him," Worth said, approaching Tibenoch. He started on the tricky task of frisking the other man, keeping his own gaze set on the center of Tibenoch's collarbone. It was easier to predict movement that way. He'd known enough men and creatures that failed to look before acting with quick, deadly movements. The eyes might not be trustworthy, but the body would always give you away. He sensed cold, coiling movement beneath clothes, smelled the combination of aftershave, metal, and oil, but found nothing that screamed hidden deadly item to him.

The scientist's pale and waxy skin pulsed sluggishly, rising and falling around his sharp bones. When Worth pulled away, not even a flicker of relief shifted his muscles.

"That was quite...thorough, doctor."

"Uh huh. Makin' sure ya ain't packin' heat."

"I'm afraid you weren't quite thorough enough for that."

"Oh! Well!" Conrad sniped, possibly sounding a little bitchier even than usual. "Aren't you just so terribly fucking clever? I'm sure you and Worth will get along smashingly."

"Sweetheart," Worth said, stepping back from Tibenoch, "don't no one say "smashin'ly"."

"No, you're right. They say smashingly. The entire word. Most people respect the English language and attempt to speak it properly."

"Okay, wow, you know," Trevin spoke up, hovering by the doorway, "I'm kind of starting to wish I had just tried to ride this out in one of the storm drains. What the fuck is with you people?"

A sheepish smile crept across Hanna's freckled face "Oh, uh," he said, "we kinda have a history? And um, like, not a happy buddy cop movie kind of one? Uh so aaaaaaaaanyway." The smile dissipated as Hanna retrieved a sharpie from his jeans and began to scribble a rune on his forearm. "I'll go ahead and trust you for now, even though it's probably a stupid huge mistake, but I kinda want to know what's up. So here's the deal. Guns away, but we each get a protective barrier rune on us. Any attack done to us will be turned back on the attacker times three. So it's no joke in your best interest not to fuck with us."

"You needn't worry, Detective. I believe it's long past the time for that."

"Yeah, 'kay, about that. Explaining time yet?"

"I suppose so, yes." Ples frowned at a loose button on his vest. "Will need to fix this...sometime..." He took a breath, ignoring the drooping button for the time being. "The Hunt, then. Such things never truly disappear from the world, they only retreat for a while, you see, waiting for a new opportunity. A new darkness, a death, a fallen gate... It has been held outside of the northern continent for some time now. With the fall of civilization, it has returned to our wide and glorious lands. And, as it turns out, I'm quite the prize bird."

Hanna gave him a grim once-over. "Split souls inhabiting a single body. You have to get into some mondo dark shit to pull that off."

"Indeed. Of course, I was not aware of that at the time. I was merely," his mouth quirked upwards, "curious. Experimenting. Many of us do, mostly with the more harmless items of the occult, but, ah, no, not me. I had to stumble on the good stuff. And, it was good stuff. Mmm..." His eyes went distant, hazy.

Worth jabbed him with a finger, angling to press between ribs. Tibenoch hissed, holding his side. Worth smiled and wiggled the scalpel.

"Oh, continue, yes. Where was I?"

"The good stuff," Trevin piped up, still hovering near the doorway, casting glances down the dark stairwell.

"Hah! Yes. Well, I've found all sorts of various concoctions in the years since. You may have been asking yourself, since you are quite the detective, Detective, 'why, wherever are all the old bodies that ought to be strewn across the streets?' Yes?" He seemed pleased by the way Hanna crossed his arms, jaw setting, jutting out slightly. "Oh of course. Well, you already found them! Walked right through them, in fact."

Hanna was quiet for a moment, then breathed a single word. "Jesus."

"I highly doubt I could claim such an honor, though I suppose any number of us in this room have died only to rise and walk again. Shame we can't do the water to wine. It would certainly come in handy, wouldn't it?"

"You—you can't do that. That's...that's..."

"A necessary evil. Though I wouldn't even call it truly evil, really. More like eggs. Use them before they expire. Recycling. Very eco friendly."

Things were making just enough sense to Worth for him to start feeling a bit queasy.

"No. God, no wonder they're after you. You're practically throwing up a lighthouse beacon of corruption over here!"

"Oh, well, I was already more than brightly lit on the supernatural radar. That's why they came for me. I merely have used my surroundings to my advantage. The beacon, as you call it, has, well, yes, drawn a bit more interest, but it has also held them at bay. Unfortunately," Ples sighed, shifting from his lean on the table to sitting on it heavily, a metallic grinding as his body hunched forward slightly, "you can only hold off the hunt for so long. Resources have been dwindling. Rapidly. The barrier was holding strong but now it is developing weak points, which you gleefully exploited, Detective, how utterly helpful of you. I do hope you will show me where you've left the gap so I can plug it up."

Hanna shook his head. "No. Right now I'm going to get the gang rounded up and we're hoppin' back in the van."

"Jinkies," supplied Worth, who was getting tired of everyone ignoring him.

"You can do that, certainly, but let me put it this way. Haven't you always wanted to know how your dear green friend operates?"

Hanna's back went rigid, blue eyes darting to the side to look at the quiet corpse in the fedora. "...What exactly are you saying?"

"I did say we could help each other, didn't I? Here, I'll give you just enough information to whet your appetite and prove I'm not, how do the youth say it? Shitting you? We've discussed how I'm powering my barrier—"

The kid in the back kicked at a small cog, sending it pinging across the floor. "Not really. None of this shit makes any kind of sense."

"He's..." Hanna started, rubbing his hands over the legs of his pants with an unconscious persistence, "look, sorry, no nice way to say this. You know all the people around here? Or, all the people who used to be around here, I guess, but, whatever. You know that awful thing we all stumbled our way through 'cause it was preventing us from getting inside? Yeah, that's literally them. He stole their bodies and used them like a glowing corpse shield."

"Mmm, sort of. I used their vitae. Harvested it, siphoned it off. Ground their bones and organs mixed them with a bit of this and that, a bit of a meaty potpourri, if you will, and sprinkled it here and there to add that extra oomph that my barrier requires to keep out the stronger and more aggressive spirits."

"That's—No way. Are you—are you serious?" The kid looked like Worth had felt after his binge at the age of fifteen. Young and sick and lost. At least Worth had managed to down some Gatorade and ibuprofen before relegating himself to the couch for the rest of the day. He had a feeling a little hydration, painkiller, and naptime weren't going to help Trevin in this situation.

"Oh yes," replied Ples. "Would you like to donate to the cause?"

Worth grabbed Ples's vest, shoving him back against the gears on the table, pressing the length of his forearm against the scientist's throat to hold him down. "Reckon he don't. What about you?"

Cold fingers clawed around Worth's forearm, Ples's teeth bared in a snarl. He noted that Hanna hadn't exactly objected to his actions yet. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

"A failed project, stitched together miserably and tossed away," Ples spat, looking over Worth's shoulder, eyes frenzied. "Close to success, theoretically sound, but missing something, preventing perfect union of the scientific with the spiritual."

Worth could feel Hanna behind him, the hesitant press of a hand to Worth's back, and eased up, giving Ples more room to breathe. "Bro, speak English. Wrap this up nice and neat."

Tibenoch glared accusingly at Hanna. "And you are a failed detective. What is it that mortal men have always wanted? The one thing they cannot have. They want eternal life! Vampirism, deals with demons, eating well and exercising. These are not ways to immortality. They're merely delaying the inevitable! We have limited vitae, no matter how hard we try to find ways around it. He," Tibenoch jerked his chin in the direction of the zombie, still looming silently, "however, he was nearly a success! Nearly. But, defective, imperfect. He was one of many attempts at immortality, at extending and drawing in more vitae, life, energy." His voice softened, nearly hushed, as if awed by the possibilities of his next words. "An eternal battery."

From a few feet away, Conrad squawked. "Wait, what? I'm sorry, what? He's not a battery, he's—"

"Correct. A failure." Ples shifted and clunked weirdly beneath Worth's hold. "He is able to draw in energy, but he cannot store it. His battery is always charging and discharging at a nearly constant rate. Haven't you ever wondered, Detective, why it is that he cannot remember things? Why he moves so slowly so often? How distant and distracted and dreamlike his movements and speech are? He's in a constant state of drain. But," a conspiratorial grin, the sort of which Worth knew he had made before convincing Monty to do some seriously stupid things with him on more than one occasion, "my workings on his notes have made better batteries. The barrier holds nearly perfectly steady. I merely must recharge the weakening areas from time to time. I could show you how to do the same with your zombie."

Everyone stepped back at that time, or, Worth assumed they did as well because he had and hadn't bumped into anyone behind him. He knew where everyone's eyes were fixed now, though, because he was looking at them looking, reading their faces and bodies. Tibenoch was smug. Conrad hesitant. Hanna looked like he'd just watched Bambi's mother die for the first time. Trevin, not that it mattered, was back to staring at that goddamned fedora. Eventually, Worth turned to look at the zombie too, who for his part appeared to be staring at the wall behind Tibenoch's head.

He spoke. "I don't like to think what has been said is true, but I find myself having difficulty ruling out the possibility. It would provide some explanation for our experiences."

Beside him, Worth heard Hanna swallow thickly. "If his battery worked properly, that is, if he could hold onto a charge longer and fill up more...would he remember everything? Would his body heal?"

Behind him, Worth heard Ples purr. "Yes."

There was something like fear in the shadowed lines of Hanna's face, and Worth quickly turned his attention elsewhere.

"I...I don't know what to say right now. I think I'm gonna need a minute."

"By all means. The hunt certainly hasn't timed this latest attack to when they are growing the most powerful, and my barrier certainly isn't degrading quickly."

"Oh shove it," Conrad snapped, rounding to shout at Ples, fingers alarmingly close to curling around the triggers on The Twins. "You drop a bomb like that and you don't think he'll need a few minutes to digest all the information? Try to have a little fucking humanity. Last I knew one of the two of you in there was still clinging to a shred of it."

"What, um," another audible swallow from Hanna, "what do you think, Prometheus?"

The zombie hummed, face nearly as placid as ever. "I do not wish for anyone to suffer. If that means I am not able to regain my memories," he inclined his head, "then I will remain as I am."

"Yeah, 'kay. It's whatever you want, bro." Hanna smiled feebly, just like the time he'd gotten off the Tilt-A-Whirl at a nearby Catholic School's yearly festival, trying to reassure Worth and Lamont that he was "totally cool" only to immediately vomit all over Lamont's shoes. He would have hit Worth's, but keen self-preservation instincts had kicked in and prompted him to shove his friend in the way. Take one for the team, Monty. Christ he felt tired.

Ples peered over his glasses, calculating, the deep ugly shadows under his eyes nearly black. "What if I told you there is a way to do it without using others? You see, vitae was already used to create your puppet. He is merely lacking in the correct, shall we say, correct chemical equations. A little of this, a little of that, fine tuning, really, and voilà! From ugly duckling to swan. In a manner of speaking, that is."

Hanna kept his gaze on the zombie. "Call him a puppet again, and I will let Worth slit your throat open. You got me?"

Ples laughed, high pitched and strained. "Still so protective! It's charming, really."

"Is there a way?" Conrad asked.

Ples took a long, deep breath before replying. "I believe so, yes. I may not be able to perfect him, he's lacking too much, not enough finesse in the original design, but I can certainly improve upon him. Chemically, that is, magically. No new bodies or stolen vitae required."

The four of them shared anxious looks.

"Don't do anything you don't want to do," Hanna said, quietly, and it was like the rest of the floor had dropped away around the two of them.

"After so much searching, I wouldn't waste your effort," the dead man replied.

"There will be other ways, you know that, right?"

"There may not."

"I told you we'd do this together and—"

"You've done so much already, Hanna."

A quiet, familiar breath stretched between them; so quiet that it made Worth feel bizarrely, exactly like a beetle scuttling over a wedding dress. The zombie looked up, turned his caution light gaze to the leaning, sharp-eyed madman across the room.

"We'll do it."

"Excellent," Tibenoch sighed, clapping his stained hands together softly. Ink stains ran into iodine stains ran into faint pink burns. "First things first, if you're at all invested in seeing me live through tomorrow morning, we'll have to get that breach plugged up. Detective, if you would?"

"I'm going with him," the dead man announced, immediately, before Hanna could finish opening his mouth.

"Ah." The scientist pushed himself off the table, movements heavy and sluggish. "Far be it from me to stop you. Will the rest of your adoring mob be accompanying us also?"

Worth's first instinct was to say yes, insist yes; his second instinct was to make a crack about Hanna's laughable rockstar credentials. Still, Conrad shot him this serious, quelling look and so against his first and second instincts, Worth kept quiet.

"We'll stay here," Conrad said, shoving hands in worn pockets.

"By all means," Tibenoch replied, waving one careless hand as he strolled towards the door. "My house is your house, Mr. Achenleck. Oh," he paused, visibly delighted, as Conrad gave a grudging off-kilter shudder, "would you look at that. I seem to have invoked squatter's rights, as the saying goes."

And then he disappeared into the lightless hallway, and Hanna spared them all one long, uneasy look before slipping out after him. In the space left behind, the grinding and thudding of gears above their heads took a turn for the deafening.

"So," Worth said at last, "bit flash, ain't he?"

"Oh for god's sake," Conrad sighed, flopping into an abandoned chair that may or may not have been covered in nails. "You are not doing this with Ples Tibenoch, I absolutely forbid it."

"Why's that now? You two ever…"

"If you don't shut your mouth right now you'll find out first hand exactly how explosive this room is."

Worth winked. "Yes dear."

"You know," Trevin's voice cut in, and when he had gotten across the room let alone arm-deep in Tibenoch's writing desk, there was a real question. "I'm either up to my neck in the ticking time bomb laboratory of a grade-A mad scientist, or I'm going to have to take the mushrooms out of the lab back home because this? This is not a normal trip."

"Don't touch that stuff!" Conrad squawked, practically wringing his hands, "for all you know it's covered in corpse piss!"

"Or booby trapped," Worth added, not particularly worried. "Ya lose a hand in there an' I guarantee that loon won't give it back."

Trevin made a face at a sheaf of notes he fished up from the desk. "What kind of chemistry is this? It looks like the nineteen-friggin-twenties. Did this joker never go to high school?"

"I'm serious," Conrad insisted, hands on hips, "put that stuff away."

The kid looked up, his Scandinavian coloring practically luminescent in the greenish glow. "Well if you didn't keep us up here to do some snooping, why'd you keep us up here at all?"

Conrad gave him a dull glare. "Do you want to walk down all those stairs?"

The kid proceeded to ignore him, which was pretty much what everyone did with Conrad when the guy wasn't blitzed out on vampire rage fits. There were more drawers in the desk, and a wooden cabinet full of files, and Trevin looked pretty intent on going through every inch he could get his hands on. Worth took advantage of the moment as best he knew how, and went snooping around in search of weapons. If he found a gun, he was calling Tibby's bluff on the spot.

"I can't believe this is for real," Trevin was muttering, flipping feverishly through a weathered journal, "nothing about this makes any sense. How can you recharge a corpse? How can you adapt a corpse for recharging? Look at this drawing, it's not even labeled right. Hey, I think I used to know a kid named Herbert West. Herbert... No, it was Henry. If Henry could see this crap…"

"Hey kid," Worth started, pausing with his arm shoved inside a broken heater-oven, "when ya say th' lab back home…"

"Myup," Trevin answered. "Still need testers, shit's not stable yet. They better not've tried anything on me, I tell you what."

"Hell, I'm up fer an adventure. Come outta this alive, I'll test anythin' ya got."

"Oh no," Conrad snapped, "no fucking way. You are not frying your brain on whatever pseudo-cyanide LSD substitute his burnout friends concocted in their basement. Not happening."

"Burnout?" Trevin echoed, sounding mildly offended.

Worth just flashed Conrad his warm and fuzziest grin. "Aw darlin'," he cooed. "I know y'd be lost without me, but try ter keep it in yer pants in fronta the kiddie, awright?"

"What—I—Goddamn it Worth, why does every gesture short of outright sociopathy somehow translate as me wanting your dick?"

"I dunno babycakes, but ya might want ter take it up with yer psychiatrist. That don't sound healthy."

"AAAArrrgggffuck, fuck, fuck this, I'm not getting into another fight with you tonight. You two dumbfucks want to go snooping around in Dr. Jekyll's bedroom? Have a ball. I'll be standing right the fuck here if you need me."

Worth blinked at him, a little bemused despite himself. "Well awright, sugartits. Good ta know yer on the job."

And he went back to digging through ever single corner of the room that his expansive reach could cover. He found Tibby's stash of booze tucked away under pretty much every article of furniture—half the bottles empty or full of hospital-smelling chemicals, but still, they used to hold booze, no doubt about the labels. Worth wondered if the crazy motherfucker ever grabbed a chemical bottle by mistake, and then decided it probably wouldn't have been by mistake. He found something truly foul spilled across the yellow diagram of what looked like a stone, and you had to be pretty sloshed to start diagramming stones.

Through all the mumbling and rifling, Conrad stood twitchy and displeased in the middle of the room, kicking vaguely at cogs scattered across the floor.

"How come ya really got us waitin' up here?" Doc Worth asked, after a while of finding nothing but haphazardly cleaned dissecting knives in the far corner of the room. "Ain't about stairs, ya can't fool me."

Conrad shrugged in this irritated way, like the question was an insult to him personally.

"It's just," he muttered, "Hanna and whatshisname probably need a minute to talk this out. Without everybody staring at them. I know I'd want it if I was them."

"What's the deal with them anyways?" Trevin asked, looking up from a folded diagram. "Why the big deal about everything? It's just memories. You want 'em or you don't."

"It's not that simple," Conrad answered, rubbing at one eye with the heel of his palm. "You have to be serious about this. What if the memories are horrible? What if there's something in there he's better off not knowing?"

"That's life," Trevin shrugged. "Everybody else deals with it."

"It's not just that!" Conrad retorted, visibly frustrated. He reached for the paper on the table nearest himself, shuffling hastily through the splotchy notes for something to do with his hands. Eventually he gave up and tossed them all back across the tabletop. "Here's a big fucking philosophical question for you, if your moth-eaten cerebral cortex can handle it. If you were someone different in a past life, and you suddenly remember it, do you start being that person instead? Does the person you are now cease to exist entirely?"

The kid gave him a more thoughtful look. The thudding, grinding gears above their heads rattled through the silence. Dust settled in the half-light.

"I don't know," he answered, at last. "Might be a little like dying."

-A-

Hanna was gone for a long time. At some point the room went flat and empty for lack of anything to say, and Worth settled into a chair as far away from the bubbling chemistry set as he could manage. His eyes ached, deep in the sockets, and days of sparely snatched, restless sleep picked at the knots of his joints, unplugging him wire by wire. In the corner, Conrad scribbled on a blank sheet of paper like he was a machine powered by fidgets.

One minute couldn't hurt. He had this sinking feeling he was going to need the rest.

Worth dreamed:

A forest surrounded him, reaching high up into the belly of the sky and endlessly out, gnarled and lightless and eternally shadow-cast. In the distant hills and ravines there were echoing, thundering hoof beats nothing like a horse's; alike to cavalry or a morning fox hunt in the same way a potted tree is alike to a monstrous, ancient redwood.

And the echoing slipped closer, over streams and under branches, closer, quieter, and the whisper blotted out every sound, and Worth stood in the heart of the forest at the trunk of something terrible that grew from the center of the world, and

Above him, a hand reached down to pull him up, just like it had years and years ago when he was a kid and their tree house had been just… there…

Worth took the hand, swung himself onto the lowest hanging branch

And the thundering whisper faded to nothing.

-A-

"Worth, hey, wake up Worth."

The doctor opened one blurry eye and looked down at the pink hand shaking his shoulder.

"Wer'n 'sleep," he mumbled, fixing Hanna with his best one-eyed stare.

"Right," the redhead replied. The anxious look smeared across his features lightened for a second. "Sure. Look, we gotta talk strategy for a minute. I'm sorry man, I know you're tired."

"Ain't tired," Worth insisted, sitting up. A quick appraisal of the room told him the gang was all here, and all preoccupied elsewhere. "Hanna, this whole thing stinks abou' ten diff'rnt ways. Ya ask me, we're better off packin' up an' headin' fer Nevada an' Tibenoch can fuck himself fer all I care. Tonight ain't the night fer meddlin'."

"We were going to meddle with the Hunt anyways," Hanna pointed out, tired eyes a toxic blue.

"Yeah, an' I wasn't too keen on that either."

"Worth," Hanna said, patient. "We're doing this. You don't have to help if you don't want to, okay? You can sit this one out."

"Fat fuckin' chance I'm lettin' you dipshits outta here without me. Ya ain't got a lick'a sense between ya."

"What about Conrad?" Hanna asked, miming twin pistols in the absolute most embarrassing way possible. "We'd have Conrad."

Worth grunted. "He's probably the least stupid outta the lotta ya. But don't go quotin' me on that, it'll go ta his head."

"You really know how to give a compliment, Doc," Hanna said, almost admiringly. "Now, come on, I've got to give you all a briefing on what to expect from the Hunt. I've got some ideas, but a big brainstorming session is really the only way to go for these kinds of things!"

Reluctantly, Worth heaved himself out of the chair and made his way to the middle of the room, where Conrad was perched on a cleared work bench and Hanna was laying out a sheet of paper on the pitted wooden floor. There was a forced easiness in the air, and it was clear that everyone was trying to pretend Tibenoch wasn't standing by the door, observing everything over the glowing rim of his half-moon glasses.

Worth sat down next to Conrad. Conrad didn't seem to notice. There was sheaf of the same paper Hanna was scribbling on crunched under his boot, and Worth noted with a little interest that he'd covered it in a wild free-hand sketch of what looked an awful lot like a fox hunting crew. Hard to tell for sure under the boot.

"Okay," Hanna started, looking up finally. "Let's make a list of stuff we know about the Hunt. One, It's comprised primarily of Fey and ghosts. Ghosts are basically powerless on a physical level, but you get enough of them at once and they can get all up in your head. Fey are, uh, let's call 'em capricious, and they can fuck you up six ways to Sunday. Ples, have you actually seen this Hunt?"

Tibenoch's lips quirked up. "Not per say. My first encounter was about a year ago, when they were more shadow than substance, and since then I have been especially delicate in my comings and goings."

"Right, too bad. So, let's just assume there's plenty of both. Sometimes you get all-ghost hunts, and the hunt I ran into once was all-Fey, pretty small, but this one is moooost likely both. So, two. Don't ever take anything the Hunt offers you. Just don't. Three, they only ride at night. Or during storms, sometimes? But yeah, soon as the sun comes up they're out."

Hanna paused as he finished the last 'e' in sunset to sunrise. The intensely focused look on his face was a bad sign that his brain was working full revolutions faster than his mouth.

"I don't want anybody to get hurt," he went on, tapping the paper with the capped end of his pen, "and we're kind of in a precarious situation what with the Treaty and all, I'm not gonna lie to you."

A muffled grinding sound came from somewhere in the vicinity of the door, and they all whipped around to look at Ples, who paused and then grinned at them, sharper than before. He circled the room, in wide swinging steps, and came to a stop in front of his desk, noting the scattered papers. He shot Trevin an unimpressed look.

"So then," the scientist said, "what's the big plan, Detective? Are you going to talk to them? Bargain with them? Oh, I know, perhaps you'll drop a roof on their heads. You're so good at that."

Hanna looked down, lips a thin line in his green-white face. "Actually yeah, I was hoping to try to talk to them. I have plenty of negotiation practice with Fey, and if we're lucky they might know me."

"We're never lucky, Hanna," Conrad said, cheek propped on fist.

"Wow, pessimistic. So anyways, I'm gonna try to talk them down, see if we can settle this peacefully. I'll have a hard time explaining to the Council why we killed a bunch of their guys, even if they shoot first."

"And suppose," Ples said brightly, from his desk, "your underwhelming negotiation skills don't cut it?"

"We'll cross that bridge if we come to it," Hanna replied through gritted teeth. He stared a hole in the paper in front of him. "As it stands, we've got the bomb, so we're not completely defenseless."

"The bomb?" Ples echoed, sunken eyes glittering. "What kind of bomb?"

"Yeah, if you don't mind, I think I'm gonna keep that one on a need-to-know basis." Hanna looked up, with an echo of Ples' earlier barbed politeness in his own voice.

"Secrets, secrets," the bastard replied, a thin sneer cutting his lips. "Well I guess that's only fair."

"Maybe if you'd share some with us," Hanna snapped.

"Oh, yes, and lose all my leverage. Why didn't I think of that."

"You know we're doing this for you and your messed up magic stuff, you could at least try to be helpful!"

"I really don't see how it's my responsibility to contribute anything more than I've already promised."

"If you want to see November you better at least pretend like you know how to be part of a team! You wanna send us in blind? Yeah, that'll buy you another, what, maybe a month, while they snack on us, and then you're right back where you started with a fading barrier and no supplies and then what are you gonna do, huh? Start killing off the survivors uptown? Do this endless patch job until you're so old you can't even hold a beaker?"

Ples showed his teeth; you couldn't call it a smile. "Maybe I'll just kill you all right now and patch it up with that."

"That's an empty threat and everybody knows it."

"I think you're underestimating me, Detective."

Hanna jumped to his feet. "You're tired," he snarled, stabbing a finger in Ples' direction. "You're tired and everyone can see it. Have you been sleeping at all, man? When you pass out, does the other guy just pick up and keep on working? You've been running yourself down to nothing and you can't keep it up any more, I know a guy with his back against the wall a mile away. You need us."

Ples sat forward. "You like to think you understand what's going on here. Do you even know who you're talking to?"

Hanna looked at him strangely.

"Oh you have to be wondering! Take a guess! Is good Ples having a bad day? Is bad Ples having a good day? Is he messing with you, having one on at your expense? Or maybe, haha, maybe I don't even know which it is?"

"Doesn't matter," Hanna replied, sharply, "you're both a couple of assholes."

Ples sat back. "Ah," he said after a moment, a smile creeping across his sallow skin, "that's a good answer."

Something in the air crackled and fizzed away, and Hanna carefully sat back down on the floor with his paper and pen. Worth wondered what the hell had happened between the two of them, back in the day, that left Ples so eager to needle and Hanna so short on patience. Most anyone ever told him, there was a chase scene and a laboratory.

Worth was starting to get his own ideas about any laboratory belonging to Ples. The kind of things that might happen there.

The tapping end of the pen caught his attention, and then Hanna was talking and scribbling, glancing up at all of them in quick little flicks, telling them what kind of supplies they were going to need and what their next move would be, and that they were going to have to spend the night here—not here here, but in the RV—because some of the supplies had to be collected in the daylight.

"We'll have to talk to them tomorrow night," Hanna said, uneasily, circling where he'd written "lighter fluid". "Which is something I'd rather not do, but tonight is getting on anyways and we're running out of moonlight. And. I. Well yeah, we're low on time."

Worth took one good look at Hanna and knew exactly what he really meant. Kid was exhausted. If he tried to so much as light a lamp with magic he'd probably keel right over. No point in saying anything about it in front of Doctor Jekyll though.

As they filed out the door, Hanna paused with his hand on the frame, last of them to leave the room. There was something there in the downturned shadow of his face that Worth didn't recognize, and out of all of them he seemed like the only one who wasn't uneasy having his back to Ples.

"You're the split-Ples," he said, without turning back. "You switched when you were standing here, at the door."

And then he left.

-A-

Worth dreamed:

A forest surrounded him, reaching high up into the belly of the sky and endlessly out, gnarled and lightless and eternally shadow-cast. In the distant hills and ravines there were echoing, thundering hoof beats, and the echoing slipped closer, over streams and under branches, closer, quieter, and the whisper blotted out every sound, and Worth stood in the heart of the forest at the trunk of something terrible that grew from the center of the world, and

Above him, a hand reached down to pull him up, just like it had years and years ago when he was a kid. Worth took the hand, swung himself onto the lowest hanging branch, and the thundering whisper faded to nothing.

Lamont looked at him, legs swung over the branch like a saddle. If his face hadn't been so lined and long, he could have passed for the shadow of his pre-teen self.

Looks like it's my turn to get your ass out of trouble, he said, grinning one of his stupid grins that didn't mean anything at all.

Yeah, Worth snorted. Like ya never done me a solid before. Lay off th' false modesty crap.

Lamont made a face, a little annoyed, a little nostalgic. The tree spread its limbs over a shadow of Worth's former college campus.

You know what I mean, Lamont said.

Worth scowled, said, ya know we ain't talkin' about that.

Below them, half-familiar faces trudged down brick colonnades. Towards the dorms, away from the class rooms, following routes that Worth thought he had forgotten.

Did you ever regret it? Lamont asked, looking down at the mishmash of decade old memories.

Nah, Worth said. College life weren't never fer me anyhow. Ya did me a favor, in th' long run.

Heh. Maybe. Still.

And Lamont reached down, through the brick colonnades and underneath the rushing figures, small enough to fit in his hand, and felt for the thread that would carry them away from here, through towns and years and hungry nights and running, running, always running.

At the end of the thread, his back-alley office was waiting.

Come home, Lamont said.

Oi, Worth replied. Ya gone cheesy as fuck on me in yer old age, Monty.

-A-

On Halloween Night, four figures stood in the tangled remains of what had once been a wealthy man's estate, not too far from the corner where the pebble driveway met the ragged edges of an asphalt street. As far from the hollow silhouette of the house as possible. The field stood quiet, and empty, and silver-blue in the moonlight. Round swatches of green lit up the overgrown turf where the party's flashlights strayed downward. Hanna had his knees buried in the grass and his hands spangled with lighter fluid.

"This is such a waste of resources," Conrad moaned, kicking at the trunk of a nearby tree. "You could have at least found us a spot with concrete and done it the normal way."

Hanna shook his head, preoccupied. "Too close to human stuff. Look, it's hard enough to find a spiritually neutral spot, you're just gonna have to trust me when I tell you this is the best we're gonna get on short notice."

It was the four of them, now, alone again. Trevin had offered to wait out the storm in the RV where he was less likely to be used as a blood sacrifice in some bizarre ritual, and Tibenoch refused to set one mincing step over the protective line of his domicile, the fucking coward.

"It would just be nice if I didn't have to wade through knee-high bug infested grass."

"Yeah," Hanna sighed, "yanno what else would be nice? If I could do the usual double bind summoning thing."

"Well. Why can't you?"

Hanna shrugged one shoulder, the other preoccupied with double-dousing the ring. "Dude, I'm adapting demon-grabby magic for some kind of fairy troupe, if I tried to keep them in a circle - heh, if I could even make a circle big enough - they'd probably just think it was cute and, I dunno, burn down the meadow or something. Best I can do is jack up some protective business around us."

Conrad squinted, luminescent green predator's eyes flashing in the darkness. "I thought you were 'so not about the demons on leashes, bro'." He made quoting fingers around the phrase. "Did you have a sudden change of heart or something?"

"Oh, nah," Hanna replied, standing at last. He swayed a little bit on the way up, which told Worth he'd been right to be suspicious about earlier claims that circle drawing was easy peasy. "I mean, I don't do it myself 'cause it's like having a pet orangutan right? He's your bro for years and then suddenly bam! Just asking to have your face ripped off. Like, what'd you think you were dealing with?"

"Wow."

"So yeah, I don't do it myself. Seen stuff, you know? Still, it pays to learn." Hanna paused, hand tapping erratically on his thigh. "Just in case. But anyways! Everybody load up in your circle, grab a match, I'll be in the summoner's circle right there. When I say go, Doc, you light up the ring, okay?"

Doc Worth grunted. The whole plan sounded stupid and vaguely suspicious to him—Hanna hadn't told them nearly enough about the specifics, and an unspecific Hanna was an untrustworthy Hanna. All the rushing around trying to find ingredients had to be smoke screen for something, but damn if he could figure what for. Hanna turned back to them, somebody's flashlight flaring summer sky blue in his irises for the pin point of an instant.

"No matter what happens," he cautioned, suddenly as sober as the plague, "and I'm serious, no matter what happens, what they do or what I do or what I say do not leave that circle."

Conrad made a face. "What do you mean—"

"Party time!"

Hanna lit his match, and the grass flared yellow around his feet, hot and crackling and coughing brownish soot. Worth followed his lead a second later, cursing under his breath. Too late to back out now, too late to worry about instincts. There was a salt ring just outside the sinking rim of fire, and even if the double protection should have made him less antsy, what it actually did was make him more.

Hanna's side was illuminated in shades of sickly orange, and he spread his feet like a man slipping into a fighting stance. An ember lit and died in his hair.

"Saluete," Hanna intoned, "Ferus Venatus, si veniatis hic ille bonus, enim habeo rem litigere voscum atque doleatis non donatis meo temporum explicem. Sum dicendus…"

"Latin," the zombie observed, the first thing he'd said since they unloaded from the RV ten minutes ago.

"Non desidero minor esse, sunt..."

"Dumb fuckin' dead language," Worth commented, stabbing a dying ember with the point of his boot. "Worse'n French fer a waste'a time."

"Well of course you would say that," Conrad sniped, "you can't even speak proper English."

And Hanna was still going, only now it sounded a lot more rhythmic and foreign and he must have switched to some other language, the syllables tumbling out like some thick smoke in curling waves down his chin, and it didn't sound much like any language Worth had ever heard. It made the hair on the back of his neck slice right up—made the thin skin on the curve of his throat itch something fierce.

"Recognize that one?" the doctor asked, thumb flicking uselessly at his empty lighter.

The words seemed to climb out of Hanna's mouth on their own power, jerking his chin upwards, a magician unraveling an endless scarf from his assistant's mouth. A choked laugh bubbled up in Worth's lungs, like a cough.

"No," the zombie replied, and there was a thinness there that might have been resignation, might have been fear. "No, I don't."

Flashlights died. The blackened circle of grass around Hanna's feet sprang up summer sky blue—electric blue—each blade of surviving plant matter blazing with its own tiny strip of neon lighting. Underneath Hanna's sleeve, the vague outlines of runes flared to life. A wind whistled through the field, low to the ground, serpentine as it wound its way around the edges of their circles and left the hair-thin tips of the grass around their legs untouched.

The whole ground outside of their two unmoving bubbles rolled like an ocean.

Barely intelligible strings of words were still twisting their way out of Hanna's mouth, but far across the field something else was building, like a fog between the trees. An autumn fog, familiar, thin and hazy and no different from the thousand before it that had rolled over this patch of grass. Worth's blood recoiled in his veins.

In the gathering haze, the first shapes that rolled out of the silver chaos were low, less than a man's height, and they swished and bounded across the grass like a wave, across the empty expanse that used to be some rich fucker's endless lawn and right up to the edge of Hanna's blue glowing circle. Silver-white and transparent, their hulking shoulders and countless paws rounded the edges. The second circle flared orange like a sunset where a thin snout brushed it, just past Worth's feet.

And then the riders came.

They broke across the grass like a hurricane, thundering and flashing, each face a little less defined than the one before it, one massive galloping clash of teeth and hooves and starless, empty eyes. Bipedal figures flickered in and out of sight; a carriage drawn by beaked creatures loomed over the line of half-formed faces. Their mounts dug into the turf with great clawed hands and delicate cloven feet, and one like a monstrous, earless goat looked at Worth with narrow human eyes.

Worth looked away. Something about that carriage kept tugging at his attention.

Hanna hacked up what might have been blood—it was hard to see, in the dark, could have been something worse—and swiped at the black stain with one sleeve. "Who speaks for the Wild Hunt?" he called, over the wind and the hooves and the creaking carriage.

There was a rustling, mounts chomping at their bits and shoving out of the way, and then one Fey pushed through the crowd, solid as anything, with a hard-edged face as black as stone.

"That would be me," the Fey announced, all-pupil eyes liquid and curved like a horse's. Worth glanced down. Well, he knew who'd been riding the goat monster anyways.

"Uh, hi," the redhead said. He gave an awkward little wave. "I'm Hanna."

"Hellequin," the Fey replied, dipping his head slightly.

"Nice to meet you!" Hanna grinned, clapping his spotty hands together eagerly. "I know you're busy crew, so, I'll get right to the point. There's some heavy business going on in town tonight and some friends of mine were wondering—I mean, I was wondering—that is, would you guys, uh, mind not doing the whole Wild hunt thing tonight?"

Hellequin looked down with his liquid black eyes for a long minute, and then the whole company broke out into screeching laughter, the kind of undulating shrill noise that claws right down to your bones. Hellequin's mount tossed its massive white head.

Visibly a little put off by the laughter, Hanna eyed the company, and then the Fey, a question sparking in the tilt of his head. When Hanna was curious, his whole body turned into a question mark, and the Fey—well, Worth had never met a Fey that wasn't drawn to a question like lightening to an umbrella. Hellequin tossed the reins from hand to hand. "What are you wondering?"

Hanna chewed on his lip, and then apparently gave up trying to sound eloquent. "Are you seelie or unseelie?"

Hellequin gave the distinct impression of raised brows, despite having none. "Oh, you poor, near-sighted witch-boy. You understand so little."

"That… really isn't an answer."

"We are the Hunt. The Wild Ride. The terror of stormy nights and the depth of winter, the Leaf Chasers and Frost Bringers, the vengeance and the caprice; we are the dark heart of the forest and the shadow at the crossroads."

"Um."

"Courts are wriggling infants playing at kings. They live an insect's score of years and think themselves wise, find dust and think themselves rich. There are hunts and there are Hunts, child, and that you cannot see a difference betrays your smallness."

"Wow. I, um, I'm kind of feeling pretty insulted right now."

"That also," Hellequin remarked, "betrays some smallness."

"Yeeash," Hanna muttered. His blue runes flickered up his arms like candles tossed in a low wind. "Look, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but let's be reasonable! Lots of traditions are changing! All across the continent the Moonlight Races are cooperating with humans. There's a village in Tennessee where Woodsprites are recognized legal entities, towns where Fey have permanent homes. Werewolves have charted territory lines! Vampires are paying for blood! Uh, some of them. The point is, it doesn't have to be this same old story, you versus us, year after year after year."

The hunters chittered, a hundred vague faces spewing crackling giggles like a wild fire raging silver-white across the field.

"People get hurt!" Hanna went on, almost pleading now, "people get caught in the crossfire, people who did one bad thing half a lifetime ago, made one stupid mistake, people who had to make hard decisions! You have to have other things you can do with your time, why meddle with human problems anyhow?"

Hellequin smirked, a one-sided quirk of the black gash that served as his mouth.

"I know better than some stupid folk stories!" Hanna nearly yelled. Frustration skewed his features. "I know you're not a bunch of faceless motiveless monsters! You must want something, you must have reasons, you must feel something!"

The leader of the hunt opened his mouth to reply and then stopped, flashed a look of quiet surprise, glanced over his shoulder curiously.

Specters shifted, parting in a flurry from the carriage, revealing its spindly, arched expanse. Blue moonlight glinted off the metal of ornately wrought wheels. Something about that struck Worth as wrong, fundamentally off, but it didn't seem all that important when there was a monstrous being unfolding itself from the black angles of the carriage. It moved like-and this was stupid, he hated that he'd thought it, but the words had scrawled themselves across his frontal cortex before he could stop them-it moved like the storm, and for a cold moment Worth remembered dark clouds sinking over a valley.

Who dares speak words with no sense?

And the voice came like a whirlwind, and for a moment Worth thought that he had sunken into another of his dream somewhere along the way here. But Hanna recoiled, physically. He had heard it too.

"Who are you?" the rune mage called out, over the swirling wind that was gathering around their feet.

I am the Wild Hunter, the Thing replied, and it looked at them with the empty sockets of a deer's skull.

Hanna paused, confusion overriding everything else, as always. "But I thought, he was…"

"I am the leader of the hunt," Hellequin answered, "but there is only one Wild Hunter."

"Oh. Uh. Well then," Hanna turned his attention to the Hunter. "Listen, I'm just trying to talk logic with you guys. You don't have to do this, there's no reason you can't spend your big night doing something else—there's a Revel in Nevada, and it's gonna be scary amazing, or you could throw your own, or you could just hunt something that doesn't have a family or friends to cry about it?"

Who are you to tell the rivers they run too far? The Wild Hunter answered, colder than the hard core of winter. His cloak went unshifted in the rising wind. When did you ever give the dawn its orders, or assign the rising sun its post, to take the corners of the world and shake the wicked out of it? Where were you when the Earth was founded?

"What does any of that matter?" Hanna shouted. "It's just not fair, that's all I'm trying to say!"

Do you know the road to where light dwells? And the darkness, where does it belong? You must know, for you were born long ago, so many years have you counted! Where is the path to where lightening forks, when the east wind scatters it over the ground? Who are you to say that justice can be delayed, that it is given incorrectly, that any arm reaches too far? The wicked are denied their light, the haughty arm is broken. Who are you?

"Nobody, I guess," Hanna answered, uneasily, and then some of the steel went back into his shoulders. "But I don't care how old or how cool you are, you're not gonna ride here tonight."

"Oh?" the Hellequin replied, lips splitting over teeth in a rictus grin. His mouth was a mass of curved, ivory knives. "And you think you can stop us?"

"Yes," Hanna said. There was nothing in it but sound, no confidence and no quavering worry. It suddenly occurred to Worth that Hanna didn't know—couldn't possibly know—that whatever he was about to do would work. And here he was going to do it anyhow, damn the consequences, because for some reason Worth would never understand, this stupid quest was more important to him than his own life. "But I'm willing to bargain."

"Bargain!"

"Bargain."

Hellequin looked from Hanna to the rest of them with his liquid black horse's eyes, his passing glance picking apart each other in turn, laying out the pieces like a hunter gutting a deer. He tossed the reins over the curve of his saddle and stepped down.

"What's your bargain, then, witch-boy?"

The gathering of half-shaped spirits, riders and hounds and flickering unmounted specters, let out a whirling hiss. The Wild Hunter stood as implacable as ever.

"Run me instead."

Worth's blood pressure shot up like a champagne cork.

"Hanna you can't do that," Conrad was saying, eyes nearly rolling with restrained horror, and the Zombie was right beside him quietly but forcefully requesting that Hanna step back and speak with them for a moment and Worth, Worth felt a white-hot onrush of pure, unmitigated fury starting behind his eyes.

"Hm." Hellequin took another step forward, leaned in, ran one too-many-jointed finger along a grossly familiar zigg-zag down Hanna's chest. The edges of the protective circle sparked and flashed, and died away into nothing, and Hanna visibly bit down on a flinch.

"Oh, you are a rotten hollow shell of a boy," the Fey sighed, at last, "but you're far beyond our jurisdiction, I'm afraid."

Hanna did flinch at that. "What?"

"We don't have rights on you," Hellequin clarified, stepping back. "You're under protection, you've moved past the realm of sin and vengeance, you're too far rotted to count—take your pick of answers. There will be no bargain."

Hanna stiffened. That look was familiar, fuck was it way too familiar, Worth knew that look a million miles away. That was a look that said something was about to irreparably wrong—that the stakes were about to triple. That was Hanna's Plan B look. No way was he sticking around to find out what idioticy Plan B involved.

"What about me?" Worth said, instead.

The magician whirled on him.

"You?" Conrad demanded, aghast.

"You?" Hellequin echoed, tilting his head with a jerk.

"Worth," Hanna hissed.

The doctor squared his shoulders and stepped over the line. It flared and fizzled around his boots.

"Am I on the menu?" he asked, marching up closer than was probably safe to the sharp-toothed fey. They stood at the same height.

Hellequin sniffed delicately and grinned. "Yes doctor, we've hunted murderers since the dawn of Murder. Mundane, but still on the menu."

"What's he mean murder?" Hanna hissed, about as furious as Worth had been minutes before.

"Long time ago—" such a long time ago, god it was far away now, "—Monty got himself in trouble. I got 'im out. The end."

"What?"

"The end, Hanna."

"But-"

Worth turned back to the Wild Rider, curled his hands into too-tight fists. "So here's yer bargain, then, Bozo. Ya hunt me, I run. Catch me before sunup 'n we'll give ya Ples too. Don't catch me, an' ya find somewhere else ter hunt. Sounds like a fair bet, eh?"

Conrad cut in, grabbed Worth's shoulder, bloodless features twisted up near-grotesquely. "Worth, be reasonable. Nobody has to do this! Ples is a creepy sleazeball and the world will probably shit rainbows for the sheer joy of getting rid of him, and the dead guy's done just bloody fine without his memories up until now, you ask me I don't think he even really wants them! Forget the bargaining! Let's go home!"

He said it like it was obvious, like no one else understood something so simple. Like he hadn't seen the look in Hanna's eyes and he hadn't heard the steel rod in his voice and didn't know—same as they all knew—that logic or no, Hanna thought this was necessary and Hell itself couldn't stop him from trying. Or from dying, trying. Worth wasn't stupid. He knew.

"Do we have a deal?"

Hellequin half-turned, looked at the Wild Hunter with his huge glittering eyes. Wind whipped through the field, smelling like decay and time unwinding, and the first hissing threat of winter, slipping through the tears and edges of Worth's clothing. The Hunter dipped his silver horns.

We have a deal

Hellequin looked back at him, grinned his angler-fish grin.

"You have a two hour head start," the Fey told him. "Try to make it worth our while."

And the Hunt was gone in a whirlwind of hooves.

They had an hour and forty-five minutes left after explaining the situation to the tag-along and driving as far from that misty neighborhood as they could reasonably go. That put them somewhere just near the edge of the nastier side of town, and somewhere not too terribly far from the ever-glowing clock tower. While Hanna was busy flipping through his Grimoires, looking for a loophole to back everyone's collective asses out of Worth's slapdash handiwork, Conrad cornered the doctor behind the RV. It was a heartfelt overture for the ages.

"You dumb fucking shit," he hissed, slamming a hand into the dusty metal in front of Worth's face. "You useless wanker."

"See yer gettin' back ta yer roots there, Connie," Worth said. He could spare a second.

"No, you don't get to say anything right now! What kind of shit-for-brains scheme do you think you're trying to pull here?"

"Ya want me ter answer that one? Cause I'm gettin' some mixed signals."

"Fuck you and fuck signals! Just tell me you've got some plan up your sleeve that doesn't involve taking on the Wild Hunt single handed. Please."

"Would if I could, sugar."

Conrad's face twisted up. "Jesus," he spat, "do you even realize what you've done to us?"

"Aw, but Connie—"

"But nothing! No, I'm not hearing any of it! You're one lone man taking on a pack of eldritch psychos, what do you think's going to happen? You go up against them and they'll pulverize you! They'll drink your mealy little soul out your corpse with a bendy straw!"

The amount of detail in that prediction was positively touching. Too bad he was wasting his air, as usual.

"Well," Worth replied, "ain't exactly alone, by my reckonin'."

And Conrad paused, off kilter, blinking out the Morse code for 'help, my vehicle has temporarily lost traction'.

"What do you mean," he said, "you're not alone?"

The doctor turned around, made his way to the backmost storage bank under the RV and popped the latches. "Here," he grinned, pulling the thing open, "I got the arsenal, don' I?"

Inside there was a catch of black cheesecloth-wrapped treasures, and he flicked the covering open on each of them rapid fire, exposing a case of specialty bullets here and a jar of sea salt there, handguns with silver scrollwork and alien, chunked-off rifles with wicked curved iron ends—a heap of salvaged weaponry under the yellow flare of his flashlight.

"Are you kidding me?" Conrad gaped. "Are… Worth that storage was for personal items!"

Worth grunted. "These are pers'nal items, moron. What, ya think I been keepin' my ten volume diary down here this whole time?"

Conrad clutched at his forehead, white fingers pushing the bloodless skin into rolls. "I did not just see a lead tablet. I did not. Nor did I see a stick doll, which Hanna specifically asked you to burn. Repeatedly. God, what is… I thought you didn't even buy into half this stuff."

There was a particular box of bullets that caught his eye, and even if it was down to half its original half dozen content, it was top on Worth's shopping list.

"Don't trust it," Worth replied, "seen enough ter know it works. Big difference there, Darlin'. Knew a day like this was gonna come round sooner or later, pro'lly a couple more up ahead if I live that long, so I've been packin' off the useful lookin' bits. Used to have more stashed in the clinic, but we left town travelin' light."

"But you can't use weapons on the Hunt!" Conrad nearly howled, fingers making strained clawing motions at the empty air. "It's a Hunt!"

Worth snorted and broke a handgun open for loading. "Who fuckin' says so, huh? Ain't nobody said I had ter run around barefoot an' squealin' till the sun came up."

"You—I—"

Conrad turned around and literally beat his forehead against the siding of the RV. After a long minute of steadying breaths, he looked up again, mouth grim and shoulders set. "I'm going with you."

Worth scowled and turned his attention back to the pistol. "Connie, don't be a fuckin' spoiled brat. Y'll only slow me down, and I can't exactly afford ter slow down this time."

"No, don't you even try that with me. I'm going."

Worth's eyes narrowed. "Face facts, Sugarqueen, 'fore ya get yerself hurt. Yer a useless sack'a broken nails in clown shoes, and we both know it."

Conrad flared his nostrils, but instead of spinning on his heel and stalking away in a rage he leaned close and stabbed Worth's chest with one impressively maintained nail.

"Yeah, let's face facts, you son of a bitch. Fact one, I'm a faster runner than you and your sorry ass smoker's lungs. Fact two, less than a month ago I shot a fucking apple off somebody's head and you saw the whole fucking thing! Fact number three, I happen to have a load of superpowers that come with the unfortunate condition of being dead, and if you weren't an utter cunt, to borrow your own incredibly apropos word, you would USE THAT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!"

The last few words came out in a screech, and Conrad stood there shaking with deep, technically unnecessary breaths for a couple quiet seconds. Worth said nothing. The nail in his chest seemed sharper than before.

"Fact number four," Conrad went on, at last, when his voice and claws appeared to be back under control, "if we lose you tonight, Hanna won't last six months and you bloody well know it, so let's cram the macho BS and do what needs to be done. For gods sake, I told you a year ago I'd help you if you'd just let me."

Worth raised both brows. "So then," he said. The loading chamber of the handgun clicked shut in his hands. "Should I get the invitations printed, or are we just stoppin' by Vegas on the way outta town?"

Conrad retracted his stabbing finger, surly. "Yeah yeah yeah. Call me a faggot or whatever you want, I'm not doing this for you."

Worth shrugged. A wind slipped through the parking lot, cold and sinuous, and he glanced back at the RV. Running out of time. "Awright," he said, adjusting the furred collar of his coat. "Try 'n keep up, Darlin'."

Conrad squinted one eye. "That's it? You're just letting me come?"

"Well shit, if ya wanna go who am I ter stop ya?"

"Oh." Conrad looked nonplussed, and then for the flicker of a second, almost pleased. "Okay… then. What's the plan?"

The doctor fished in his pocket, pulled out a crooked cigarette. It settled perfectly between his teeth. "The plan?" he repeated, lighting up. "The plan is ya run fer it, and try not ta get in my way."

-A-

Along the way, as dictated by Worth's vague directions while tires squealed around forgotten heaps of glass and metal, Worth was mentally building several possible scenarios. Get cut off here or there, turn down this road. Find them waiting at the end of that one, cut through another building and duck around the corner. He was hoping that they wouldn't be spotted too often, though. Actually, he was hoping they wouldn't be spotted at all. Either way, setting up booby traps, blocking off certain areas, intentionally opening others, leaving a winding trail for them to follow, that was the goal now. The more he thought on it, the more one particular plan seemed to be the best one given the current situation.

Easier if he didn't have Conrad. Just about everything that should harm or block off the Hunt would probably do the same to Conrad. Fuckin' pain in the ass.

They stopped off at a photo and then hardware store. Fortunately, panic had gripped people enough that most of the items Worth was interested in were still on shelves or strewn about the dirty linoleum floors. He sat his bag down on a counter, disrupting the film of dust, ignoring the complaining creak of cracked glass. "So yer wantin' ter be helpful?" he asked, clicking on a flashlight and immediately searching through the bags of nails conveniently pre-sorted nails hanging in one of the aisles. "Grab a hacksaw," he selected a bag and yanked it from its hook, "an' cut these down ter jus' th' tip."

With surprisingly little complaint, Conrad sourced a hacksaw from another aisle and set to work across a check out lane. Metal on metal made a decidedly less than pleasant set of screeching noises as he worked. Worth wasn't sure if he preferred the typical screeching from the vampire's mouth. Maybe he did a little bit. The silence in the city that had once been overrun by the throb of humanity and then the vermillion of fire was beyond unnerving. It was wrong. It was cold and hard and every slight rustle of long forgotten paper skittering across pavement made his head snap up and around, wondering if their time was already up. While Conrad was distracted, Worth picked up some quick drying super glue, extra rope, and a shovel.

Lamont's crucifix across his chest hung like a spike of ice through two layers of cloth, heavy and distracting.

They drove up and around the streets, taking a few detours before Worth directed Conrad to park at the intersection of Pacific and Davis. Conrad complied, turning the engine off and leaving the vehicle to ding its way to sleep beneath the dead traffic lights. Exiting the vehicle, the man and the vampire pulled bags and tools, gripped them in pale hands. Worth lit a cigarette nearly immediately and led the way through the park to their left, up the winding staircase, and across the foot bridge leading to the inside of a rather fancy set of stores, topped with apartments. On the inside was something of a courtyard, complete with dirt, trees, grass, and benches. The man dropped his cigarette slightly off to the side of the dirt path and continued to another set of steps leading to a second walk way.

The footbridge took them across Davis and into a twin shopping area, though the walk ways here were narrower. Pausing to light a new cigarette, Worth squinted up at the swollen moon. "Nothin' like a full moon on Halloween, eh, Connie?"

Behind him, there was no sound and Worth shrugged, continuing on. "Really sets th' mood, 's wot I think. Hanna says it's when ya see all th' candy in stores, but they put that shit out come September. Did, anyway. Christmas shit gets on th' shelves come Halloween. That kid's jus' got himself too much of a sugar tooth." He rounded a corner, walked to the far side of the area and set his bags down. The second cigarette was discarded and he shuffled in the bags to pull out various items. "Ya sure are talkative tonight."

"You've just penned us in. You have led us through a goddamned maze of buildings and we are stuck with only one way to get out of here."

"Doin' yer lineage a disservice by failin' ter count proper." He pointed his left hand without looking, using his right hand to pull a lamp from a bag. "There's another footbridge south a here. Goes over Pacific."

"Okaaaaaaaaay, so then you've still penned us in because they have two fucking ways to come at us!"

"Naw. 's real hard fer them ter come in via th' Pacific footbridge. We'll go that way if shit goes bad, but then we'll well 'n' truly be stuck unless we kin get down inter one a th' parkin' garages 'n' get out that way."

"Well that's bloody fantastic. I'm feeling simply marvelous about this plan!" Conrad threw his bags down, fuming. "Do you want to tell me just what the fuck you're doing here? Are you actually planning to just get yourself killed because, if so, well bloody fucking bravo, you quack. You're doing a great job."

Worth sat on a bench and gave Conrad a look. "Ya didn't even ask me 'bout th' lineage statement. 'm upset."

"Oh fuck you, like I can't see a Sesame Street joke a mile away."

"Heh." Grinning, Worth tossed rope at the vampire. "Yer right. I got us in a helluva maze. But, thing is, that means I'm gonna get them in a helluva maze, too, don't it? They're gonna follow th' trail, come in here 'n' have a gay ol' time scamperin' through a few booby traps. Not," he added, "that it's th' same kinda gay time yer familiar with."

"Ha. What the hell am I doing with this? Hanging myself or you?"

"Tie it ter trees. Zig zag pattern if ya can. We'll hang some chimes 'n' bells from it 'n' scatter a couple a bombs around. I'll be makin' th' bombs, thanks ter yer help with th' nails."

"Shouldn't you be hanging rope? You're the tall one here."

"I could. But I dunno if I really want ter risk you blowin' off one a yer hands." They stared at each other in the silence before Worth decided to say a little more. "Yannow. Makes it real hard fer ya ter give a happy endi-"

With a disgusted snort, Conrad stomped off, throwing rope over branches, cringing as the chimes in his bag clinked and tinkled. Damn he was glad he'd thought to toss a few of those in his bag. Always better to have it and not need it than need it and be fucked. Worth turned on the camping lamp beside him and tilted his head down to begin his work. Bells were bells, no matter what the size. More effective if they were iron and big, but up close, any Seelie was going to be unhappy to hear it. From what he could gather, a bell tone was something like a cross between nails on a chalk board and having your ears boxed. To be honest, he felt the same way about them when he was hung over.

His knobby fingers made short work of placing and gluing the shortened nails to the bottom of the film cartridges, thin lips set, holding spare nails between them. He would have to be careful where he placed these. They were small and would only work if they were stepped upon directly. Hell, were these ghosts? Maybe they'd just step through them and, shit, that would be one hell of a disappointment. Worst case scenario, they went with the molotovs. Christ. He really didn't want to throw any new fire in this burned out shell of a city.

Over his shoulder, Conrad shouted. "How do you even know all this...this...stuff?"

"I could tell ya, but then it'd ruin that air o' mystery, now, wouldn't it? Jus' pretend I'm th' big action hero 'n' yer my sweet, nubile damsel in distress." Worth felt rather than saw Conrad's withering glare. He did, however, spot the complete lack of movement on the vampire's part. "Oi, them chimes ain't gonna hang themselves, sweetness."

"Tell me how you know, and I'll get back to work."

"Ain't that jus' th' way?" He sighed, shaking his head and tutting. "Man's always gotta do everythin' himself."

"Cut the shit, Worth. This is a serious fucking situation and I'm just as serious."

He sighed again, this time an irritated blast of steam from his nostrils. "Fine. Look, when yer in th' line o' business I used ter be involved with, ya wind up with a lotta spare time on yer hands. Ya kin pass th' hours lotsa ways. One'a th' ways is readin'. Yer hands ain't movin' yet, an' I ain't sayin' no more till they do."

Slowly, Conrad returned to tying pans and bells to the ropes above.

Nodding, Worth paused in his bomb building to rub his slightly chilled hands together. He was glad he'd worn a coat, but wished he'd fished out some gloves to complete the ensemble. Shame Conrad's fashion sense hadn't kicked in there to correct his woeful oversight. He should probably have wandered around to find some work gloves back in the hardware store.

"Mont," he hesitated briefly, swallowed thickly, feeling like he was betraying a friend, even if that friend was nearly two years gone, "had some things ter deal with. Got in th' wrong way with th' wrong people. Got real inter boobytrap buildin'. I helped him out with it at first, mostly ter make sure he built shit smart 'n' didn't blow off his own goddamned head when he got home. Later," another pause, and Worth's fingers were back to work, "he stopped lettin' me help. Didn't see him 'nless he came 'round mine with a delivery or somethin' we could use ter get wasted."

They were both quiet, working on their own projects. Worth felt odd, open, and kept glancing over at Conrad. Eventually, he grumbled, "Anyhow, thass how I know this shit. That 'n' Boy Scouts."

Conrad's laughter was immediate and delighted, like a fireworks display. "You? You? My God, you were a Boy Scout?"

"Shove it up yer ass, love. Came in real handy later on when I needed ter tie some knots."

"Yes," the vampire was outright grinning now, "I can see how well that worked out considering you wear slip on boots."

"Not them kinda knots, precious. Get back ter work."

There was a snort, but Conrad complied. "What, then? You were planning on tying women to railroad tracks and cackling on the sidelines, waiting for the 3:10 to Yuma? Actually, that does rather sound like you. I'm surprised I never put that together until now."

Worth popped his back, checked his watch, then forced a smile. "Oh, th' tyin' up women part's right on. Not s'much th' railroad part."

Conrad's back stiffened as wave of distaste washed across his pale features.

"Jealous? I kin always introduce ya ter th' finer art o-"

"I'm not interested in shibari," he said in clipped, icy tones. "Thanks so very much."

"Suit yerself. Offer's on th' table 'n' I kin be, too."

It took Worth a full two minutes to realize Conrad's little information slip. It took another five for him to decide whether or not it was too late to bring it back up. Fortunately or unfortunately, fists on hips, Conrad spoke first. "Everything is hung. Now what, Scoutmaster?"

Christ, Worth hoped that nickname wasn't going to stick.

"Now we get ter dig us a real nice, big hole, set a few bombs out, 'n' then sit back ter wait."

A shudder worked up Conrad's back as he crossed his arms. Worth didn't have to ask the reason for it. "Ain't like last time. They'll be goin' in this one, not you."

The vampire nodded and snatched the shovel. "Where am I supposed to dig?"

"Other side a th' rope maze. Ain't gotta be too deep. Wider is better'n deeper." From his bag, Worth pulled out a cardboard container of salt and popped open the pour top. Carefully, he placed shotgun shells within the film canisters and poured salt around each shell. While Conrad dug, Worth finished each of the bombs and placed them, concealing them beneath bits of paper and dead leaves, doing his best to scatter them under as many already existing bits of debris as possible. He would put bombs in the small pits, too.

By the time he finished placing most of the bombs, Conrad had finished his pits. Worth looked at them appreciatively, then lined them with the bombs and scattered leaves and papers across and around the area. Taking care, he moved sideways along the edge of the pit and made his way over far enough to drop a healthy line of salt near the foot bridge. Finishing with that, he secured a rope in the middle of the zig zagging overhead pattern straight across the path and up to the rope above. Once they hit that, it would set off chimes all along the upper ropes. After a quick test to the tautness of the rope, he returned to Conrad and sat back down on the bench.

Sighing, he pulled out a new cigarette, smoking it slowly. He didn't tell Conrad time was up, had been up for a good fifteen minutes, that the Hunt had already begun to move towards their location. No reason to worry him, he figured. Ash flaking off the end of his rolled tobacco, he spoke. "So here's th' plan. They're gonna come here 'n' work their way along our predesignated path. We'll knock off th' ones we can. See all them piles o' trash? Don't step on any of it. Some got bombs buried in there. We'll lead 'em back through here. We'll split up, you go over th' Pacific bridge, I'll go over Davis 'n' leave a nice batch o' fresh salt fer them ter deal with. We meet back up at mine. 'm sure ya remember how ter get there."

He had a feeling. Just a feeling, mind you, a gut instinct, but every stage of his life from gutter crawling at the university right on down to riding the ruined roads in this fucked up little enclave of survivors had taught him to trust an instinct. Wasn't something he relished explaining, though. He was relieved when Conrad didn't press the subject, instead zeroing in on the practical application.

"Riiiiiiiiiiight," the vampire drawled. "And how exactly do you expect me to get there? You already said there's no exit except the garage."

"Well ya got a few choices. Ya kin jus' bash yer way through th' parkin' garages. Or," he tapped ash off the end of his cigarette, "ya kin go bat."

"Have you lost your fucking mind? I'm not going to be running around here naked."

"Got yer bikin' shorts on, don'tcha? I kin take yer clothes with me. Ya kin put 'em back on when we meet up. Or," he looked back up at the moon, heard a howl far closer than he liked, "ya kin jus' fly back ter th' car 'n' get outta here."

"...I'm not stripping till I see the whites of their eyes."

"Don't think they got 'em."

"You know what I mean."

"Afraid I'm gonna be overcome 'n' take ya right here 'n' now?"

"What? I—no!"

"Afraid I'm not gonna be overcome 'n' take ya, then?"

"Keep it up and the Hunt will be the least of your worries."

"Sounds like fightin' words, Connie," he flicked his cigarette and pulled out his rifle. "I like it."

-A-

They arrived with the fog, thick tendrils curling out before them, silencing footsteps and the scrape of claw and hoof across concrete. Worth and Conrad watched them, saw the smoke twist and blanket across the earth, the eyes glittering like snakeskin in the moonlight. The man took a breath, popped open his holster, kept his sights around the corner as they crossed the bridge. Demon dogs sniffed at the salt line, snapped at one another as they shrank back from it. They lifted their oversized, boxy heads to the sky, scenting out the prey.

"Last chance, Connie," Worth said, shoulder pressed against the cool brick of the building to peer around the corner. They were too far to get a good shot yet, and he wasn't about to waste ammo. "Gonna have a harder time runnin' with me than on yer own."

"Oh fuck you," was the predictable response from behind, soon followed by "Well, fuck, there are more of them than I expected."

Behind the dogs were riders, all alike and unlike Hellequin in myriad shifting ways. They were younger, perhaps, with less of his form, more human in some places. In the middle of the dogs one figure stalked on foot, ears pointed, nose wrinkled, that same old and inhuman cut that Hellequin shared. If Worth squinted, he was fairly certain he could make out a criss crossing pattern of twisted black wire through its lips. The hounds weren't quite bounding, but even at the distance, Worth could see the twitch of muscle in their hides, the quiver of anticipation. They seemed to be waiting for something.

"Mmm hmm," was all the doctor said.

Princess Achendick made an irritated sound before launching into a slightly subdued but obscene litany, barely louder than the shift and bunch of his clothing coming off. In the creeping quiet, the zipper on Worth's bag sounded like a gunshot to his ears. Conrad stuffed his newly shed clothing in the bag and took the safeties off his pistols. "This is fucking stupid," he said, close to Worth's ear, close enough that Worth could feel the press of a bare, ivory arm against his coatsleeve. "I hope you know that."

"It always is. Don't fire till ya see th' whites of their eyes."

"Their eyes aren't even white."

"Think we already went over this, earlier. Wanna have another go at it?"

"I'd prefer clothes and a hot bath to an argument over the color of some stupid fucking fairy's eyes."

"How 'bout we split th' difference an' jus' get that bath?"

"How about you keep yourself from getting killed?"

"Well, I do aim ter please."

"You're an incorrigible liar."

"Ain't I jus'."

And with that, they fully turned the corner and fired.

It didn't stop the dogs, but it did take out two of the Riders, caused confusion as their mounts panicked. One mount charged forward, trampling whining dogs, while other backed up, blocking the footbridge. Worth was only mildly surprised to see that there wasn't any blood from the Riders, only more smoke, much like the mist at their feet, but blue and black, with an almost iridescent quality to it like oil. Conrad darted across the footpath, back to a tree while Worth hung against the building. Conserve ammo. Make the shots count. Give your thanks to Remington.

It doesn't matter if you're mundane or spiritual. A hole in the head is a hole in the head.

Of course, it doesn't hurt when the ammo you're using has an iron core that explodes into shrapnel on contact with the target. Shame it was so damn hard to find, but Worth had been carefully building up a box full of the stuff for the last year. This was about all he had to his name. The rarity meant that he and Conrad were limited on the total number of shots they could take.

Though the moon was unnervingly bright, clouds would temporarily cover the low hanging beacon, plunging them into a murky darkness. Worth had to carefully time his shots. Conrad did not. Worth's hands were shaking slightly and he wasn't sure if it was that very real risk of death high or the unusual cold in the air, stinging his lungs like small needles each time he inhaled too quickly.

The weight of Lamont's crucifix was a frozen spot below his collarbone.

Ugly whining clawed at his eardrums, oozing and shrieking up from the thrashing frenzy of nearly-canine bodies. Something must have exploded in the middle of the pack, because across the pavement heads were tossing and spines twisting away from the epicenter of some chaos Worth couldn't make out.

He reloaded, continued to fire, counted his bullets - more habit than conscious thought. Five shots left on his end. Worth peered around the corner and did a quick head count. The backed up mass of bodies, dog, fey, goat-horse-what-the-fuck-ever, had diminished considerably, but was by no means small enough to sneeze at. He should have counted Conrad's shots. He hadn't. Mistake. Stupid mistake. Choking down the urge to ask how many Sparklepants had left, Worth took two shots in quick succession. He briefly wondered why the dogs were still scrambling stupidly among themselves.

That, he decided, face hidden behind brick, was a question he could ask. "Oi! Fuck's wrong with them dogs?"

"Trust me, it's not for lack of being able to smell you." Conrad sounded smug and bitchy as ever. "My first shot was to the dog guy."

"Fuck ya mean, dog guy?"

"The guy in charge of the dogs, genius."

Worth took a shot, feeling a warm trickle of satisfaction as a Rider's head disintegrated into ash. "So what ya really mean is the master of th' hounds."

"Yes, Worth, this is the absolute best bloody time to get particular about terminology about a mythical hunt!"

"No need ta get all testy, Princess. I'm only tryin' ter educate ya."

"Oh, like you would know? I'm the one who killed him, I can call him whatever I bloody well like! Next time you kill him, if you want to go around making up stupid names."

Now probably wasn't the time to get into an explanation of his sister's long ago fox-hunting escapades. Actually, there was never going to be a time for that. Worth scowled. "How th' fuck'd ya know which one it was anyhow?"

"Oh, I don't know, Scoutmaster." Oh Christ, it was going to stick. "Probably because he was the one the dogs kept looking at? Also," Conrad loosed another shot, and Worth knew his ears would be ringing for days after this battle, "he had a stitched up mouth. It looked stupid."

"Great time fer yer sense o' style ter come inter play, Precious." Turning again, focusing through then past the sighs on his revolver, and back, Worth took two more shots. "Might wanna get back over here. Unless ya got a ton more ammo I don't know about. Or ya ain't so keen on me providin' a li'l cover fire?"

The back of his neck prickled, that weird feeling he got these days when he knew Conrad was looking at him, really looking and considering something, some course of action or rebuttal that Worth wasn't quite able to predict. "Fine."

White motion from the corner of his eye and Worth took his last three shots in wild succession, backing up, and then turning, picking up the duffel bag at his feet. Howls rang out in unison, low and then piercing, shaking through the ground, popping in the ears. Shouts from riders, squeals of horses. Time to get the fuck out.

They ran, heading in as close to a straight line between the buildings as possible. Conrad shoved one of his pistols in Worth's back pack, complaining in staccato hisses as the bag Worth held in his left hand smacked and rebounded against his thigh and knee. He fumbled a spare clip from the holster he had dumped along with his clothing into the backpack and it slipped into place with a satisfying click. "Keep going," he shouted over the howls and thud of hooves.

Worth, of course, stumbled to a halt. "Th' fuck?! That ain't th' plan!"

"Go, you stupid knob! I'm faster than you are." And a better shot, too, when standing still, anyway. That went unspoken, souring in the air between them where Worth couldn't dispute it.

Conrad was taking his time aiming, picking off one more Rider and three dogs. Worth hesitated until the first dog stepped on a bomb and exploded in a mass of white salt and inky smoke. The rest of the party staggered to the side, setting off another bomb. The salt shrapnel rained down on Rider and dog alike, slowing them as the pellets burned and hissed their way through ethereal flesh.

It would also burn through vampiric.

Worth grabbed Conrad's forearm. "C'mon! No showboatin'! Ain't got time fer it. That salt ain't gonna do ya no more good 'n' it's doin' them."

With clear reluctance, Conrad pressed the safety, removed the clip, and put the gun back into Worth's backpack. The Riders shouted, another bomb exploded. The bombs and bullets had delayed the party, but only briefly. They were surging forward again, sending Worth and Conrad forward, toward the pit. A dog tripped over the rope, jerking on the ones tied to the trees above. Chimes tinkled merrily from the motion while the Riders hurled a volley of pained shrieks. Conrad groaned, shook his head, but kept pace with Worth. Worth had little trouble clearing the pit with a wild leap, feeling an ankle twist uncomfortably beneath him where he landed. Conrad relied on speed more than leg length, darting around the edge to the other side.

The vampire hesitated long enough to watch Worth pull a canister of salt from the bag in his hand, as dogs fell into the pit, howling and squealing as bombs and salt destroyed their bodies. The Riders, however, had little trouble clearing the obstacle. Worth threw down salt in a zig zag pattern as he darted across the footbridge. That would stop their pursuit even if they backtracked around the preexisting line of salt. He was sure they would find a way around it, though, so he wasn't about to stick around and wait to see. The dagger that sang its way past his head as he scrambled down the other side of the bridge was enough reason to keep going.

Down the stairs, around the corner, arms pumping, legs pumping, the drain of lactic acid, burning away at muscle. Adrenaline was growing stale, was not going to keep him going forever. He ran down the winding, wheel-chair friendly ramp and headed towards his right.

Two blocks of running, sprinting, backpack slamming against kidneys, nylon bag handle rubbing up fresh skin in his calloused grip. He didn't look up, he didn't look around, he only looked ahead, looked at where he was going, where he needed to go. Around dead cars and blackened, burned out shells that used to be bustling industrial buildings. Feet skittering out from under him, free hand slapping and dragging against asphalt to keep him from falling down. He could see his alley up ahead, legs wobbling, heart aching, clawing its way up his throat. There was the door, past the hole in the wall rug store that was the most obvious front in the history of fronts, after the broken, twisted fire escapes, into his old office.

He entered, slamming the door shut behind himself, legs giving out as he slumped against the dented metal door until his ass was on the ground. Despite the cold, he was sweating, rivulets trickling down the sharp angles of his face, soaked into his undershirt. Hands shaking, he pulled his arms out of the backpack straps and then wriggled his way out of his coat.

There had never been any working windows in his hole in the wall. They'd come boarded up, the blockage probably older than he was, and that was how he had liked it. Made an adventure out of leaving the place. Never knew what he was walking out into. Unfortunately, in this most distant and unforeseen apocalyptic night, it also meant he couldn't see a fucking thing inside the place.

"Connie?" he croaked. "Ya here?"

A huff from the darkness, and Worth felt the last bit of strength and strain drain out of his body.

"Yes. You know what might have been nice? A little warning. Also, my clothes."

"Yeah, yeah. In th' bag. Ya could turn on a light fer me, ya know."

This time Conrad snorted and Worth felt the thrum of the vampire's body beside him, the short, quick zip of the backpack. "You don't exactly have electricity in here lately, I'm not sure if you noticed."

Something heavy and cold dropped unceremoniously into Worth's lap and he grunted, fingers wrapping around it, brain recognizing the shape as he twisted the base of the flashlight. Weary, thin light emitted from the bulb, illuminating Conrad's legs and the desk's legs and Lamont's legs lying still and crumpled on what remained of the couch.

Oh. Christ. That shouldn't have been there. The last time he'd seen his office he'd lit a few books on fire by the sofa and tossed a lighter into the flames. The place should have been left in ashes. Instead, here it was still standing, a functional if smoke-stained set of rooms. Fucking anti-climactic as hell. He took a deeper breath, not sure what he would say, but with at last the intention that words of some sort would come out. Instead, he coughed, rasping and deep for lingering moments until his bronchial tubes finished their spasming.

"You need to stop smoking so much."

"See now I'm real confused. First ya tell me not ter die," a brief cough interrupted him. He was doing his best not to look at the dust covered, half-melted loafers draped strangely across the couch's exposed coils. "An' then ya tell me ter stop smokin'. Ya jus' mad 'bout that whole naked thing back there? Tell ya wot, we kin cuddle away th' cold. Ain't got no bearskin rug, but I got some things we kin burn fer that romantic cabin feel."

With the fist sized circle of light wobbling vaguely across his chest, Conrad flinched—just a little, mostly in the jerk of his lips—and turned his flashing eyes to the nearest empty wall, where Worth's old pinup had slipped off its mooring and to the floor.

"I can't believe you just...just... just left him here."

Ah, back to the elephant in the room that Worth was trying so hard to ignore. Exhaustion was setting in, grating and glaringly obvious in the jittering of the flashlight beam. His head lolled against the door.

"Didn't really have no time ter bury him. Set a fire."

He'd laid him on the couch, covered him with a sheet. It hadn't felt right leaving him on the decrepit and defiled lumpy mattress with mildew covering one corner. At least the couch had been free from mold and Worth had never vomited or fucked on it. Despite what others might think, and did think, he had tried to keep the front office at least a passing level of decent. Hell, he hadn't even pulled the couch out of a dumpster. That had been a freebie from one of Lamont's quick move-and-destash paranoia events.

God he'd been heavy. Bodies were so heavy sometimes, but there'd been something extra with Lamont. Fuck him for not being around so Worth could call him a fatass again.

"No accelerant," he breathed, head feeling hollow, "didn't think 'bout needin' that. Jus'...set it 'n' left it. Figured it'd jus' be an' empty bit o' concrete left." Just lit and ran and refused to look back, and if he'd ever let himself think about it he would have realized before now that he'd fucked the whole thing up.

"Well," Conrad said after some time, sitting primly on the edge of Worth's cold, steel desk, arms crossed, "what the fuck do we do now?"

"Wait."

"Wait? For what exactly? For them to come here?"

Worth blinked his eyes open. He wasn't completely sure when they had slid shut in the first place. "Look around. I got some things here 'n' there. Back bedroom oughter have a real nice li'l cache from one a 'Mont's unfinished deliveries. Held shit fer him sometimes. He never did pick that one back up." Lazily he picked his coat back up, draping it over his chest and arms. "Might be some supplies wot ain't expired."

"My God, are you—you're going to sleep?"

"Yeah," he said, taking time, thinking, concentrating on the words. "Think so. Figure I'll wake up if anythin' excitin' happens."

"That or you'll be dead."

"Mmm."

There was quiet in the shadows of Worth's office, and then the softest sigh the human had ever heard.

"You're a bloody lunatic," Conrad said, voice dull and far away. "And also a magnificent pain in the ass."

But Worth didn't hear him, because he was already slipping under into a silence so black and cold that it echoed with the ancient ripples of prehistoric swimming things.

-A-

Worth dreamed.

Worth dreamed that he stood in a stone circle, towering and curling in over his head, firelit and empty. Worth dreamed that he took hasty, tumbling steps backwards out of the ring, his hand searing ice and numbness where it knocked into the outermost stone. Ink and frost raced up his veins from his fingertips, surging towards the inevitable destination of his heart.

Worth dreamed that he clawed open his chest with blunted fingers and spilled black sludge onto the grass.

Orange light reflected in the darkness slicking his hands. Worth dreamed that he looked up, searched for its source in the shapeless night, and found a jacko'lantern grinning down at him.

The frost and darkness receded.

Unsteady steps carried him closer, up the steps of a familiar porch and to a door with warped glass in the windows. Blue television light flickered inside. Doc Worth looked back over his shoulder, one last time, across the street where the swollen moon was speared on the weathervane of a crumbling mansion, and he stepped inside the house.

His shoes kicked up the dust and the litter of the Toucey's den. With all Lamont's siblings, it never stayed clean for long. Near the television, the backlit shape of Lamont's father filled up the recliner—he never went out on Halloween, not once in all the years Worth had been coming over. But down the hall was the room Lamont shared with his older brother, and that was where he'd be at this point in the night.

The edges of the tiny house stretched out away from him, distant, and he picked his way through the shadowy length with narrow, wary eyes.

The room was empty.

The bed shoved in the corner was made, the floor clean—where the walls ought to have been covered in posters and playboy rip-outs there was only bare wall, dingy and empty. Worth toed the lopsided mattress, gave the room one last look, just in case, and stepped back out the door and into the street.

Of course Lamont wouldn't be in his room. He hadn't lived there since he was nineteen.

Worth followed the road, winding through the park where hoofbeats echoed faintly from the crepe myrtle branches, down to the apartment where Lamont had spent the longest span of adult years, when he hadn't been passed out on Worth's dorm room floor.

The door creaked in the wind, open and empty, with its gaping black insides spilling shadow down the stairs. Worth shuddered and carried on walking. No, he wouldn't be there. Lamont hadn't lived there since the old days, back before the nervous laughter and the lead-heavy keys and the sound of idling engines in the dead of the night.

And the winding road took Worth away, between the skyscrapers and down into the forest of broken and flickering streetlights just past the edge of downtown.

Down through the alleys

Down through the empty lots

Down through the jagged fields of cracked pavement

And down the sidestreets to the door he'd opened too many times to count, hidden behind a dumpster and shadowed by a broken fire escape. He'd wait here. It was no good tracking Lamont, not since the greasy bastard split his trail years ago and left Worth behind, here. Waiting.

Well, he'd keep on waiting then, if that was what it took.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The place was exactly as it had always been—perfect and unchanging, the crystal clear snapshot of what it had been and would be and somehow that was wrong but not worth thinking about, not right now—and Worth slipped into his place like a key sliding home. There was the dead tree Hanna had brought him, so long ago, and there was the medical bag lying by his desk, with its bright red cross untouched by desert sand or asphalt skids. There was his calendar. There was his couch. His windows, with diamond shaped screen over the blacked out glass.

Worth settled into his chair, and the purple shadows in the corner gave way to Lamont's slouching figure.

Welcome home, he said, arms crossed, sideways smile flashing an incisor. I've been waiting, y'know.

Worth kicked his feet up on the desk, the rubber curve of his heel slotting seamlessly over its edge.

Ehh. Here now, ain't I?

About a year late, sure. You sure took your sweet time on the way.

Lamont moved across the room with a weird swinging gate, itchingly familiar, a kind of graceful and ungainly motion that glowed orange like a jacko'lantern. His blue-white eyes were unblinking.

A year, Worth repeated, trying the words out in his mouth. Whaddaya mean a year?

Well, if you want to get nitpicky it's more like a year and a half. Eheh. But I'm willing to give you the half for free, since you were halfway across the country.

And then the past came slipping in like water leaking under the door in a rainstorm, filling in the gaps between now and now, and Worth remembered the heat-warped springs exposed on the frame of the couch, and the smoke-blacked ceilings, and the fist-sized hole in the drywall that ought to be just behind his head. He remembered March. He remembered the end of the world.

A gash opened up across Lamont's forehead, wide and curled and tyrian purple over a sliver of exposed bone.

So how's the hero business treating you? Lamont asked, grinning, creme-white teeth and blue-white eyes and glittering, violet-crimson blood. I can honestly say I never saw that one coming.

Nausea hit Worth like a fist breaking through plaster.

Hanna's th' hero, he squeezed through gritted teeth. I ain't done a damn heroic thing in my life.

No? Okay, well, I thought that one in Florida was pretty, heh, classic, but hell. What do I know about it?

Worth's shoes came off the desk. Now wasn't the time for posturing—not here, not with this.

Now there's a question, Worth managed, glaring out the one eye he could stand to open. What do ya know, Mont? Cause I'm startin' ter get the feelin' ya know more'n I do, and considerin' this whole song'n dance routine is my production, that's some shit deserves explanin'.

Lamont sat down. Worth didn't think to wonder how. Chin in hand, the red-smeared ghost of Doc Worth's best friend looked across the desktop, contemplating the wall with unfocused eyes. Nausea resurged and then slunk back down. That was a familiar look, the same look he'd had decades ago, just before he tried to explain film noir for the first and thankfully last time.

You know you're dreaming, right? he asked, at last, switching his smoky-opaque stare back to Worth.

And suddenly Worth did know—not like he'd known it before, in a vague kind of uncomprehending way, but in a real, visceral awareness of his awareness. For the first time he noticed that he had no peripheral vision.

Sure, he replied. Ya think I'm a fuckin' dumbass?

Okay, Lamont said, holding up his free hand in a conciliatory sort of gesture. You've been wearing my crucifix.

Yeah?

Lamont shrugged. Never could get rid of the damn thing.

Monty, if ya don't stop talkin' out yer ass right the fuck now I'm gonna bust yer lip, figment 'r no.

Christ have I missed you, Lamont replied, grinning into his palm. It's nice to have a real conversation again. You know, your dreams are pretty fucked up, Luce. I have a hell of a time piecing together what's going on. Is Casimiro still around? Slippery bastard still owes me a hundred bucks.

Worth frowned deeply. Wot?

Lamont rolled his eyes, the glassy-grey pupils swirling. Alright, he owes the Toucey estate a hundred bucks. Since you're my sole beneficiary—or, I guess, you would be if I'd had a will—I guess that means he owes you a hundred bucks. Next time you see him, try to collect on it.

Ya got three seconds ter talk sense or I'm gonna dream yer dick zipped up in yer fly, Worth announced, long fingers fluttering high speed taps across the desk.

I'd be feeling a lot more threatened, Lamont replied, if you were dreaming me instead of me dreaming you.

And then Lamont stood up, graceful-eerie, and spread his palms. The nicotine-stained walls twisted up into gnarled curls, dripped greenish-gray leaves, broke open over a sky the color of smoke and orange streetlights. Barely hidden in the knotted grass to Worth's left, springs and coils glittered like desiccated ribs in the darkness.

See, this is the good part, Lamont said, shoving hands in pockets. Always arm your enemies with double edged swords. You're in trouble tonight because it's Halloween, and that costs you the home field advantage, right? Suddenly it's anybody's game. But what they don't know—Lamont winked, the bruised and sunken flesh around his eye flashing—is that you just happen to know somebody on the other side. You've got connections.

You, Worth said, skeptical, not quite managing to make it a question.

Me, Lamont agreed. I've been hanging around for a while, keeping tabs on you. Not that exciting but hey, I'm dead, what else am I gonna do.

…How? Worth asked, squinting across the length of his desk.

And then there was no desk, had never been a desk, and it was just Lamont leaning over him, tapping the iron crucifix that hung around Doc Worth's neck.

Never could get rid of it, he repeated. Ahahaheh. Heh. That's irony for you. I couldn't get rid of it, now it can't get rid of me! You get used to stuff like that after a while. Of being dead, I mean.

Worth squinted up at him, measuring the facts as well as he knew them. The echo of memories, dream-imprints of Lamont built up in his subconscious over the last eighteen something months. A thousand nonsense conversations.

The bad thing about dreams is, Lamont's ghost told him, smile slipping thin and distant for a flickering second, there's this kind of current to them. Like a river. They follow their own course down the path of least resistance, and they'll drown you if you try to fight them. I can watch, but I can't act. Well. I get a snippet of conversation here or there, when you're thinking of me. But mostly, I—

Wind raged through Lamont's forest, shaking leaves and snapping stalks of grass, for just as long as it took him to blink. First blink of the night. A modicum of strain unbent the curve of his grin.

Why? Worth asked, after the whirlwind had settled to something manageable.

Oh, you know, Lamont shrugged. There's an apocalypse out there, makes for a pretty decent soap opera, gives me something to do. It's better than going the way other ghosts go.

Nah, Worth replied, not that why.

Oh. Why'm I still around, that why?

Worth nodded. The warped black springs tangled up in the grass glinted, greenish stalks withering around them and falling away like rotten flesh. Lamont looked. Worth looked. The wind wavered ominously.

I'll give you points for trying, the dead man said with an awkward half-giggle. But I didn't exactly get laid to rest, see?

The browning grass crumbled into nothing, a ripple of death spreading across the ground, around Worth's shoes and deep into the lightless forest floor. Uncovered dirt shifted faintly in the breeze.

Besides, he added, eventually, had to stick around to keep watch. You were always saving my ass. Maybe this'll even us up, eh?

Worth felt his lips tighten, teeth pressing closed with a thin grinding sound. For a second, the world flickered dark and light, pavement and streetlights and the ghost of blood on Worth's hands. He remembered, but it wasn't his memory. Then the forest snapped back into place and Lamont rubbed at the back of his head with that same awkward half-giggle.

Not always, Worth snapped, and the next flicker was the familiar dingy hollow of his office. Fuck. He didn't mean to do that.

Eheheh, uh, whoa, Lamont said. Okay, let's talk about something else. I haven't had a real conversation in a long time and I'd kind of rather do that than get into one of these weird pity-fights over who's the bigger fuckup again. I always feel like a tool.

Yeah, Worth snorted, probably 'cause ya always are one.

Wow, snappy comeback. So give me the run down, who's still kicking? There's only so much a guy can riddle out of your brain-damaged nightmares before the whole thing turns into a bunch of melting clocks.

Worth gave him the run down.

Heh, Lamont said. That's better than I expected.

Lamont threw an arm around Worth's shoulder and pulled him down into an exaggerated stoop, led him off down a path opening between the trees where the crawling mist hummed purple around their shoes.

So how far have you gotten with Achenleck? Lamont asked, in the same voice he'd once used to ask Worth whether his sister was still single. He'd nearly lost a tooth that night.

Oi, Worth snarled, warning, ya keep yer greasy snout outta my business, Mont.

You forget—Lamont reached over with his free hand and tapped Worth on the forehead, hard—I basically set myself up a summer house in your business. Nice location, bet I can turn a profit on it when the market turns back up.

Worth scowled, knocking away his friend's stocky fingers. Forget Conrad, he said. Ain't nothin' gonna come of what we got.

You're so fucking terrible at romance, Lamont cackled, lips splitting over white teeth for the first real smile of the night. Christ, Worth. You know this is why you're always single.

Ya gonna tell me somethin' useful or are ya just gonna be a smug sunnova bitch all night?

Dunno. I'm kind of enjoying being a smug son of a bitch at the moment.

Roit. Fuck you, I'm ready ter wake up.

The forest had grown darker as they walked, branches above their heads tangling together into a thick wooden canopy. Pale green lights flickered through the distant depths.

Where ya takin' me now? Worth demanded, cocking a brow at the darkness.

Lamont shrugged. Eheheheh. I wasn't really paying attention. Looks like one of the roads to the other side, more or less, but this is about where I always get lost so I couldn't tell you for sure.

Worth regarded the gloomy distance with some skepticism. Kin see why ya ain't passed on yet. Road looks sketch as yer mum's panty drawer.

Run that by me again, Worth. We'll see who's the figment with the busted lip.

Pale green lights flickered and faded. Something made Worth turn around—a shift in the wind, a moan in the treetops, he wasn't sure—but he looked over his shoulder and caught sight of the moon, hanging monstrous and yellow through the void over the road's distant end. A weathervane silhouetted against it spun faintly.

Don't go in there, Lamont warned him, following his gaze with hard, unsmiling eyes. You don't belong there.

A new wind howled down the length of the wooded road, insistent and sinister, and Lamont tightened his hold on Worth's boney shoulder.

Awright, Worth growled, what's that?

Somebody—somebodies—trying to get in after you. Lamont grinned, too many teeth, the bones of his neck and face green lines in the moonlight. Let 'em try. They never met a guy who can set up a perimeter like me.

Ya got that kinda firepower?

You're goddamn right I do.

Well shit, guess yer good fer somethin' after all.

The friendly smack on Worth's shoulder left a hand-print shaped bruise behind it. For a blinding second, it was almost like nothing had changed. But the deep sunken circles under the dead man's eyes looked darker than before, maybe, despite his renewed patent smile—sharper bones, dark, waxy ripples starting over the backs of his hands. The beginning of a sinking feeling slithered through Worth's gut.

This ain't gonna last all night, huh?

Lamont shrugged. I can give you a couple hours maximum. After that, you're on your own. I hope you've got a plan, Worth, because when I say you're on your own I really mean it.

Yeah, Worth answered, scratching his chin, reckon I got an ace 'r two shoved up my sleeve somewhere.

Lamont gave him something that amounted to a dubious leer.

Let me give you a couple words of advice, he said. Free for repeat dumbasses. One: spirits get confused pretty easy. Trust me, I'm talking from experience. The less you have to do with the real world, the less it makes sense, so a little distraction goes a long way. Throw a wrench in the works and you'll have 'em scrambling for the rest of the night.

Fair enough, Worth shrugged. The faint stirring of an idea fluttered at the back of his head. What's the second word?

Nobody has ever actually been seduced by dick jokes. That one's less personal experience and more years of watching you strike out at nightclubs.

Thanks fer that, I'll remember ta have another dream chat next time I want tips on how ter be a greasy ingenuous asshole.

You wouldn't know genuine if it bit a hole in your right testicle.

Ya callin' yerself some kinda font of emotional sincerity, Monty?

I'm saying I could do a better job picking up Achenleck while blindfolded and I'm dead. Take some advice and be grateful.

Doc Worth scowled what might have been ranked with the greatest of all history's truly great scowls. Oi, did I or did I not just tell ya that's a goddamn dead end? Stop amputatin' on the dead pooch.

Eheheh, Jesus, that's an awful metaphor. Casually, Lamont swung a thick leg and nailed Worth across his Achilles tendon. Look, all I'm saying is you're being a massively embarrassing coward.

Too late in the game t' worry about that, Monty, I got a reputation ter uphold. Sides, cowardly served me a pretty good run this far, ain't it? Brave bludgers don't live this long.

It's funny that you'd say that.

Behind them, between the knotted treetops, the glowstick moon swallowed up the sky and left them walking on the jigsaw pattern of its shadows, a visible and invisible path in equal measure. Something glinted up ahead, warped metal, and Worth wondered if they hadn't walked full circle, somehow, after all.

Lamont contemplated the darkness, the couch springs, and the briar-tangled ground for a long minute. In the places where green moonlight struck the brightest across his skin, there was the faint almost-shade of his skeleton under the skin, the same faint ominous purple as the rims of his eyes.

Now come on, Lamont said, all teeth and creeping viridian burns, tell me about the world. We've got a couple hours and with the afterlife I've been having, you're almost decent company.

-A-

Worth woke up to the sound of muffled cursing.

The world shifted back into focus slowly, first location and then detail as Worth's brain spun wildly on its tracks, trying to evaluate his surroundings for any kind of threat that might be waiting. It found nothing but dusty floors and sooty walls. And Conrad, but if anything he tended to file Conrad somewhere below soot on the list of threats in any given situation.

"They find us yet?" he called out, speech slurred a little with clinging sleep. His tongue felt unusually heavy.

"No!" Conrad shouted, stumbling into the back room in a whirl of off-balance one-footed jumps. "I slammed my fucking toe on your fucking trash!"

Doc Worth grinned blearily at him. "Good ter know yer gettin' yer money's worth outta that nightvision."

"I swear to god if you don't get killed by the end of the night I'm going to bury you in your own refuse and leave you here."

"'S that fair?" Worth replied, stretching carefully to wring out the worst of the knots. "I ain't even lived here since Congress was in session."

Conrad mumbled something angrily, but since he spent about forty percent of his life mumbling angrily eventually you came a point at which you had to stop giving a fuck what he was mumbling about. Worth's desk was cleared of all its old papers and detritus—must have been Conrad's doing, then, because in their place was a neatly laid out inventory of what appeared to be all Lamont's last contraband delivery.

"I found the stuff," the vampire called from the other room, head stuck in some box from the sound of it. "Want to tell me why there's a box of chocolate mixed in with all the hand guns and the cocaine?"

Worth shrugged, out of habit. It wasn't like Conrad could see him. "I dunno, didn't ask too many questions. Think it might have bloodthorn in it, though, they used ter do that fer easy transport. Better keep yer mits off it till this whole night blows over."

Conrad stuck his head out of the back room, expression a conflicted mix of disgust and interest. "How could we know for sure?"

"Short'a you takin' a bite? Hanna could tell ya, probably. Why, finally takin' some interest in real livin' after all this time, Sweetcheeks?"

"Jesus no. We trade, Worth. We're traders. That's a thing we do sometimes, when we feel like eating."

"Well, yer eatin' once removed but I'll let the technicalities slide this time."

Doc Worth dug into his desk, ripping the drawer open and shoving aside the accumulation of pens and the unopened saltine crackers that would have been his dinner months ago if the world hadn't gone heels-up in the interim. His skinny fingers settled on the edges of scrap paper.

A triumphant hiss escaped his lips.

"What?" Conrad asked, wandering closer. "What's that?"

"Our ticket outta this clusterfuck," the doctor replied. A faint yellow sheen glinted across the paper. "First runes Hanna ever gave me."

"Oh," Conrad said. The gears in his head were visibly grinding, trying to piece something—maybe a couple somethings—together. "Does it kill Fey?"

"Nah," Worth answered. "Well. Guess it might, but that ain't what it's for."

"Then what does it do?"

And Worth grinned, first at the papers, then at Conrad, splitting his chapped lips down the middle. "Fire, Sweetness," he said, "fuckin' disco inferno. There's enough spark power in these little bastards ter burn down the whole buildin', concrete 'n all."

Conrad leveled him with a stone cold glare. "Why is that a good thing?"

"I happen ter have it on good authority that a little chaos goes a long way."

Skeptical, Conrad plucked one of the scraps from the human's road-burned fingers and regarded it with pursed lips. The ink shimmered gold where lamplight bounced across it. "Okay, even provided that I'm willing to believe this won't end with miserable backfiring failure, how come you didn't use these last time you were here? You know, considering..."

Conrad looked across the room, at the shadowy mess of fabric and soot and ruined flesh, and for the first time Worth realized that he'd left Conrad alone in his office with the corpse of a—maybe not a friend, probably, but at least an acquaintance—for the last two hours. Conrad, squeamish straight-laced Conrad, alone in the darkness and the ashes with Lamont's grotesquely ruined remains. And Conrad hadn't said a thing about it.

Something snatched at Worth's throat, but he had no desire to examine it this late in the night.

"Last time," he replied, instead, "I was in a kinda hurry, see?"

"A hurry," Conrad repeated, doubtful. "How long does it take to light those things?"

Worth reached over and yanked the rune out of Conrad's hands. "Oi, ya wanna waste a little less time chattin' it up? Don't got much more time ter waste."

In the dim yellow lamplight, all the little contours of Conrad's face became caricature grooves of thick black ink. He scowled and his whole face warped.

"Is there something weird about them?" he asked, looking pointedly at the jigsaw paper shapes. "Do you have to have a second person to light them? Is there a… blood sacrifice or a chant or something? Are they explosive?"

"Nah," Worth replied, preoccupying himself with a case of bullets on the desk. "Set a trail 'r summat an' light that just ter be safe, 'cause it goes up fast an' ya want some distance, but all ya really gotta do's set the paper on fire."

"So why didn't you use it last time?"

Worth looked up, glared, looked down—couldn't settle on an expression so soon after waking up. "Jus' fergot," he grumbled. "Been years since I thought about these. Me 'n Mont had us a matchin' set, in case the wrong fuckers came snoopin' round the place. Ain't needed 'em once in five years."

Conrad made this face like he was coming to some private kind of conclusion, and after a moment of screwing up his features he eventually settled into a softer kind of look. Familiar, and unfamiliar. Worth wasn't sure what to make of it. Conrad watched as he stumbled across the room, snapping at the lighter which had been stiffened by cold and disuse. A spark caught, and he let it go out. Hanna's rune felt odd in his hand, like the ghost of a burn, dull and heatless. He still remembered how Hanna had shoved it into his hands for the first time, years ago—near skeletal, teenage Hanna, standing between Worth and the door, blue eyes frantic as he insisted that some kind of payment was in order.

Maybe not now, he'd said, but someday, you're gonna wonder why you keep patching me up and I heard you talking with Lamont, I know you were looking for something like this, just take it—

Worth's finger slipped on the lighter wheel. Too many memories in this office.

And Conrad watched him slip the first rune under the twisted remains of the sofa.

"You were really shaken up when he died," Conrad murmured, "weren't you?"

There was a stifling nothingness in the air, tomb-cold and silent except for the sound of paper between Worth's fingers. His breathing rattled softly through the near-darkness. There had been a time when he wouldn't have considered telling—but no, it was still that time, really. Nothing had changed. He certainly hadn't changed. Worth fixed Conrad with a hard stare, the sort usually reserved for when Hanna was rambling and avoiding dealing with reality. He sucked on his teeth once for good measure, waiting for that sheepish look to drape itself across Conrad's shoulders. It wasn't coming. If anything, Conrad was just looking stonier. Eventually Worth gave up.

"Course not. Tol' ya," he grunted, pulling out a bottle of isopropyl alcohol and some cotton swabs before shoving the drawer closed, "was kinda in a hurry. Who d'ya think I am, anyhow?"

"You know," Conrad replied, so quietly it would have been lost under a single sigh, "that's a really good question."

The warped coils of the couch glittered. This time Doc Worth cleared his throat and let the dusty beam of the flashlight drift its way across the collection. His eyes lit upon a particular shape and the split in his lip grew as he felt something close to delight. "Well lookee here."

"It," Conrad hesitated, suddenly awkward, "looked like it might be useful. But God only knows if it's had any upkeep before all of this clusterfuck. It might be worthless."

"Oh no, this one's a keeper." Worth grinned to himself, running an appreciative hand down the barrel. "Right. So, here's th' plan."

"Marvelous!" Arms crossed over Conrad's chest as he resumed his prissy perch on the corner of the desk. "God knows your last one was a total success! I simply can't imagine how you'll top yourself! Maybe you'll have me blindfold myself and throw knives at you."

"We're still alive, ain't we? I even got a nap. Not half bad, if ya ask me."

A snort. "Well, I'm certainly not ask-"

"Grab her. I ain't got rifle ammo on me, but we might be able ter find some somewhere."

There was a shift in the shadows hanging over Conrad's skin as his head turned towards Worth. "I did. Three bullets in a box."

"Heh. Friends in high places. Or limbo, 'r whatever. Right. We're gonna send up a li'l distraction an' fuck off ter a better spot. Yer night vision better kick in fer this ter work." He rubbed his face once, pinching his tear ducts to remoisten his scratchy eyes. "Fuck time issit?"

"Six? If not, then it's close to." Conrad tapped at his wrist watch. The night glow feature had worn out several weeks earlier and the Queen was still pissy about it. "You were asleep for nearly three hours."

"Oh~, it's a magic number~ Yes it is~."

"Did...did you just try to sing?"

"Mebbe. Wot? Not used ter gettin' serenaded?"

"I ...suppose so. There were neighborhood cats mating on my fire escape once. They sounded an awful lot like you just now."

"Well now my feelin's are hurt. See if I try ter be romantic again."

"Oh shove it."

"How ya like it, then? All rough 'n' rugburns?"

"Keep that up, Worth, and I will go outside and drag the Hunt right back to your doorstep."

"Babycakes," he said, scooping up his bag, "that'd be th' plan."

"Wh-what? What? Have you lost it? Have you truly lost it?"

"That'd be implyin' I, at one time, had it."

"You! I—Oh."

And then there was nothing. Worth looked up, unnerved by the sudden silence, and found Conrad regarding him with the same thoughtful, familiar look as before. "You want me to argue with you again," Conrad observed, shrewdly. "This is supposed to distract me from what's happening."

"Yep. That," Worth turned the doorknob and felt the sharp slice of cold wind against his face, "an' yer jus' s'damn cute when yer angry."

"Don't do that! We're actually—Jesus! It was safe here! Why are you going out?"

"Temporary safety, Connie. Had a li'l...help here." In spite of himself, Worth cast a glance backwards into the murky darkness holding his oldest friend. "But three hours was th' max. We gotta move."

For a second, Worth thought that he was going to demand an explanation, stop them mid motion and try to reel out the whole story. But apparently even frustrated and anxious and confused, Conrad knew better than to waste time that they didn't have. So rather than argue, Conrad just stalked out, shoving Worth's shoulder unnecessarily as he passed through the threshold and into the alley.

Worth laid down the second rune in the doorway, smoothing out the miniscule wrinkles before unscrewing the lid on the rubbing alcohol and running a trail of it from the doorway and down the alley till it ran out. "Soon's I light this, don't look back. Jus' fuckin' run."

Feeling tension roiling in his stomach, Worth squatted, and flicked it to life just above the liquid shimmering in the pale moonlight. The liquid wouldn't burn, but the vapors would, and that was all he needed.

The moment he saw the spark flicker to life, he whirled and ran, his and Conrad's footsteps echoing against the brick and metal and glass of the long forgotten alley. They didn't get far before the flames reached the rune and then all they heard was the high pitched whine of tinnitus as the explosion rocked the ground beneath them.

-A-

At maybe six in the morning, maybe a little before, Worth's clinic went up in roaring fire.

A few minutes later, the perfect coldness that had seeped into the crucifix around his neck started unfrosting, for what he thought might have been the first time since he'd put the damned thing on.

They ran.

They ran, and they kept running, even while the fire swallowing up the clinic spread from building to building, chewing up every board and abandoned chair gathering dust inside.

They ran while the Wild Hunt ricocheted off back-alley labyrinth twists, a cloud of agonized whinnies and furious shouting just out of sight.

They ran until Worth spotted a particularly beautiful set of obstacles and a building with a convenient fire escape, whole, unscathed, and easily scalable right to the top of the building. He grabbed Conrad's arm, holding him back, pointing up and nodding. No words, no sounds could be made for fear of alerting the hunt to their new position. Conrad had fixed him with another of those newer, harder to read looks before gazing at the graying horizon and climbing his way up the building's creaking metal ladder.

That was when they stopped running and started waiting.

-A-

Worth's heart hammered in his chest, a steady burst of activity he could hear drumming in his ears. He was sitting on a manhole cover, cheeks and chin dusted cherry blossom pink with the rising creep of morning light. His back rested against the hood of a car lying dead upon its crunched steel side, and he was staring at the solidifying shadows of what remained of The Wild Hunt.

"So. Looks like ya caught me."

There was a slight tilt of Hellequin's head, snapping it sideways in something that resembled far too much of a right angle for Worth's stomach to take. "So it does. Finally. I remember telling you to make this an interesting chase, but I admit, I had not quite expected what you gave us. Perhaps thanks are in order, but I do not feel particilarly appreciative."

"Mmm hmm. Well," thin lips peeled back from Worth's teeth as his chin dipped low towards his collarbone, "like ter think of myself as a real giver."

The fey on their goat-horses looked like they'd all taken a bite off of a lemon. Hellequin looked particularly sour.

"Noticed yer a bit light handed here." He made a point of looking around at the small party of remaining Riders. "Don't see no dogs nowhere."

"Unfortunately, without a clear leader, they dissolved into a state of confusion and in-fighting. They have since," Hellequin's neck snapped upwards to sit straight between his shoulders again, "wandered off. They will return when we have a new master for them and we sound the call of the hunt once more."

Worth tsked and shook his head. "Now thass a right shame. Say," his eyebrows furrowed, eyes going slightly distant, "help me out here. Wotcha call that dog fella, anyway? Yannow, his official title."

After taking what Worth assumed was a breath, Hellequin replied flatly, "Master of the Hounds. I sincerely hope you are not dragging out this inane conversation in order to try and buy yourself more time."

"Naw, jus' had a bit of a bet goin'. Provin' a point. Yannow how it is." He wasn't sure if he could pick out a slight hint of light from a nearby rooftop or not. It was still too murky to know for sure.

Without looking anywhere but Worth, Hellequin posed his own question. "Where is your friend? Has he abandoned you? He seemed far too," eyebrows raised in that knowing way that made Worth want to punch someone right in the goddamned nose, "invested in your well being to do a thing like that."

Unable to punch, Worth settled for scowling. "Ain'tcha noticed yet? Sun up's here. Don't exactly get on well with her ladyship's condition. Don't suppose this means hunt's gettin' called off on account a sunshine, though."

"The dawn has not fully broken; the sky is merely in the red. We have until a gold halo breaks across the sky. Ample time. And so we have succeeded, as we knew we would."

Doc Worth hummed, the breath blowing from his nostrils mimicking the steam rising from the coats of their tired mounts. He was counting eight Riders. More than he had thought would show up here. Oh well, it wasn't like he hadn't had to improvise before. At least the dogs weren't a part of the festivities any more. "Wot if ya don't get me by then, mm?"

"Clearly we already have. You would have made a last stand if you thought it possible, wouldn't you? You are without ammunition, or else you would have continued to shoot us earlier, or would be shooting us now. Lacking usable guns, clearly even you have recognized the hopelessness of your situation. Yet, there you are and here we are, and as the day rises and spreads its heat across the land, so shall we spread the bounty of your veins."

"Aww, that's real poetic like. 'Course, I wouldn't really recommend comin' any closer. Ya kin declaw a cat, but that don't mean it won't still bite."

"In this situation, I fear you may have lost both nail and fang."

He shrugged, hoped the mild shaking in his hands looked like fear and chill rather than the spark of adrenaline. Slowly, Worth reached in his jeans pocket for his last cigarette. "Come 'n' get me then, ya fuckin' fairy. Ain't got nothin' ter lose, yeah?"

The master of the hunt's eyes narrowed and he remained on his mount. "I will give this honor to the one who picked up your trail." With a nod, another of the Riders dismounted, pulling a blade as it approached Worth. Knives, it was always knives with these assholes. Get in close, cut, make them bleed. They used to say that the steam rising from a dead man's body was his soul on its way to the afterworld. Who knew? Maybe they were right. Worth watched his approach, sliding the battered cigarette between his dry lips, head tucked low, shoulders up by his ears.

Suddenly, the Rider shrieked, dropping to the ground mid-stride. He held his left thigh, something like heavy blue smoke curling its way out of the dark hole that had appeared in the limb.

Hellequin's eyes widened, weight shifting in his saddle. His horse's back hollowed, head raising high as it took a few quick steps backwards. Around him, the other horses shifted, pranced under their own riders' anxious hold on reins. On the ground the one rider continued to writhe, alternating between howls and whimpers. He seemed to be shriveling as the smoke dribbled out of him like dry ice from a science experiment.

"Whoopsies. Looks like someone got himself a boo boo." Worth grinned around the cigarette, hawkish features briefly lighting up as match scratched across box and sprang to life.

The hunt master's look of surprise was quickly replaced by a scowl. "Clever. I'm not certain how you did that, precisely, but all it's done is buy you a little ti-"

It was his turn to wheeze as a hole appeared in his chest. He looked down, dropping the reins, right hand raising and twitching a moment before his body doubled backwards, head striking his horse's rump, startling it into darting forward. The flopping, thumping body on its back only served to heighten its fright as it ran past Worth, a quick stumble on asphalt sent Hellequin's body slipping off the horse and lying motionless in the street where it smoked slowly down to nothing.

The remaining riders were stuck between action and calming their own spooking horses. No huntmaster. No one to direct the hunt. No one to claim the quarry. That had been two down, but five remained. Well, six if you included the one rolling on the ground.

And then another bit the dust, body going rigid, then collapsing across his horse's neck. The animal stood stock still, legs splayed wide, and Worth blew out white smoke to mingle with the now quiet and quite officially dead Fey's blue essence. It curled gray and purple with the brightening horizon. He only needed to hold them off for a few more minutes, but they had also only had shots numbering a lucky three.

Unfortunately, the lack of any new falling and shrieking seemed to have alerted the remaining riders to this information. Their worry and fear was shifting to determination and razor-toothed fury. They were dismounting, moving forward, pulling at their daggers.

"It appears," one of the riders hissed, "that your help from above has run out."

Worth sighed and took one last drag on his cigarette, looking up to the slight shadow darting overhead. He rose, gasped once, hand fluttering at his chest. "Oh, oh please!" he breathed. "Please don't hurt me!"

The riders stopped short, pulled clearly unimpressed (and maybe a little disgusted) faces. One of them spoke. "Is that really supposed to convince us to leave you? Do you honestly expect that will stop us?"

The doctor grinned and flicked the spent butt of his cigarette at the closest rider's chest, as a naked-save-for-those-ridiculous-biker-shorts Conrad dropped down from above, spearing a Fey clean through with one of his elongated fingers. "No," he gurgled, body caught in an uneasy shift somewhere between human and demon, "but I might."

Taking advantage of the second moment of shock, Conrad pulled his talon free and hurled himself forward, slashing at another rider. Worth didn't waste his opportunity to attack, either, dragging a scalpel from his belt pocket, sinking it into the side of a Rider's throat, not sticking around to watch steam and smoke shoot out of the wound. He moved, jumping back slightly as a rider to his left slashed at him wildly. The blade whistled through the air right to left, past his face, and the rider brought it back the other way. Worth crashed into the rider, using his own body to pin the swinging arm against the rider's chest as he thrust his scalpel forward and upward, plunging it into the valley between collar bones. The Rider coughed, choked, stumbled, and Worth hit the Rider hard across the back of the neck with his forearm, sending him falling to the asphalt, a plume of curling blue billowing out from beneath him.

Worth paused only long enough to steal the blade from the Rider's hand, dual wielding scalpel and ancient, humming weapon. He turned, teeth bared, no longer feeling the cold of the air, only feeling the thumping drive of blood, of adrenaline, of pure heartbeat to heartbeat motherfucking life coursing through him. He was ready to stab some more of these fuckers in their goddamned faces.

Conrad however, it turned out, had already stabbed all of these fuckers in their goddamned faces, and had already slid completely back into his human form. He looked quite put upon, shielding his eyes from the golden glow of sun.

"It's too fucking bright," he said. "Daylight. God, how did I ever enjoy it? And I ripped my shirt with all this dumb fucking running and hiding. I liked that shirt. Why is it always ones I like? Though I guess it doesn't even matter because I had to leave everything on the roof with the rifle. Speaking of, that stupid fucking gun got grease on me. I can feel it but I can't fucking see myself in a mirror to clean it off. I have dust everywhere and I want a warm fucking shower. A very long one, at that, to get the memory of this complete cluster fuck of an evening out of my mind and off my body." He huffed, kicking disdainfully at a withered hand that was apparently offending his delicate sensibilities. "Are you ready to go yet or what?"

"Sweetheart," Doc Worth replied, looking at the strange way the bright light seemed to filter through and around Conrad, still feeling the thrill of death gnawing at his heels, "ya ain't never been more beautiful."

Hanna found them covered in dirt and smelling like screaming smoke, dragging their bags and weapons down the ruined streets. A salt bomb popped underneath his converses—more duct-tape than sole at this point—when he vaulted over a stack of years-old trashbags. His hands glowed faintly, swinging as he ran, and his jacket arm was torn at the shoulder seam.

"Holy shit you guys," he yelled, stumbling and losing momentum on the shriveled corpse of something that was probably once a pet. "Gross, ew. Guys, are you okay? Both in one piece?"

"Two pieces," Conrad snorted, adjusted the strap on his bag of reclaimed contraband. "If two of us were in one piece, then you'd have something to worry about."

"Oh," Hanna panted, hands on thighs, "yeah okay, fair point. So what happened? We saw fire and I came running right away, but Victor wouldn't—"

Worth reached over and smacked Hanna on the back. "Doncha worry none, Hanna. Me 'n Princess Peach had 'em on the ropes."

"You—" Hanna sucked in a breath, "—you wha?"

"We got 'em good," Worth elaborated, waving a hand. "Don't reckon a single one got the slip on us. Ain't like ter brag or nothin', but y'won' never see a headshot like her Ladyship here pulled off tonight."

Conrad readjusted his bag and looked everywhere but at his companions. "It wasn't really that great," he muttered.

Hanna frowned, made a T shape with his hands. "Time out, hold on. Are you telling me you shot at them?"

A look passed between Conrad and Worth, pursed lips and arched brows.

"Well," Conrad replied uncertainly, "we also blew some of them up?"

In the time it took Hanna to close his mouth, Conrad had switched his bag to the other shoulder, checked his holster, glared at Worth, and settled into a prickly slouch on the edge of the curb. Hanna closed his mouth.

Hanna grinned.

"What was I even worried about," he said, throwing an arm around Conrad's shoulder. His whole body leaned into the squeeze. "You're crazy. You're crazy people."

"Have a little faith in us," the vampire muttered back, like any of this had been his idea at all. But hey, that was alright—share the credit share the blame.

Hanna jerked Conrad off the curb and led the way back through downtown, headed back the way he'd come.

"The council's gonna have a freaking conniption," he laughed, as Conrad stumbled behind him. "Man, I don't even know what I'm gonna tell them. I mean, don't get me wrong I am so totally glad you're both alive but wow, this one isn't gonna look too good on paper. Holy crap. How did you get rid of the Patron?"

"The Patron?" Conrad echoed.

A thin, trifling wind whistled down a nearby alley.

"The Wild Hunter," Hanna clarified. He mimed a rack of antlers with both spread hands. "The honcho. The boss. Mr. Path-Where-the-Lightening-Forks. What'd you do about him?"

Worth snapped his gaze over to Conrad, who was staring back with a look verging on horrified. When had been the last time they saw the Wild Hunter? Before Worth's office? On the street? During the summoning?

Hanna's grin faded. "You didn't take care of him, did you?"

"I can't remember seeing him all night," Conrad admitted, worrying a pale lip with his fang. A thin well of black blood started around the tip, but he didn't seem to notice. "I shot Hellequin and the dog guy, and Worth took out most of the front runners—"

"I ain't seen the fuckin' carriage all night," Worth grunted. The need for a cigarette reared up and crashed down his throat, and he hurriedly patted down his bags and pockets for a carton. "When y'were up on that buildin'—?"

"No, nothing," Conrad replied, threading a white hand through his hairline. It looked like he was tugging at the roots. "Fuck. Is he a shape shifter?"

"I don't think so," Hanna answered hurriedly, "but don't freak out, okay? Remember the terms, you said till sunrise and…" The magician twisted around to gesture broadly at the yellow sunrise, indistinct and blinding where its rays burst between the hills and buildings. His fingers stretched out and down, dark against the blond, foggy dawn.

"You made it to sunrise," he finished. He smiled, hesitant, and Conrad's word's from so many hours earlier struck Worth again. If there was no Doc Worth… Hanna looked at him, and there was a blazing moment when he felt that maybe—who knew, maybe—he wasn't the most expendable person on the team, after all.

-A-

"So," Trevin said, examining the unfinished skeleton of one bomb they'd run out of material for, "did you work for an anarchist sect before the plague?"

Worth paused on his way to the RV cockpit, unpleasantly cold towel mid-scrub across his face. "Wot, me?"

"Yeah you," the kid said, "unless Elvira Queen of the Night has a secret past with the British resistance. I feel like I should make a V for Vendetta joke here. Can I do that? Is it too soon?"

"Eh, we'll let the studio audience judge this one."

Trevin propped up his cheek on his hand. "I missed all the good parts tonight, didn't I."

"Yeah, reckon ya did."

"Hanna literally spent three hours sorting through the wreckage of some rickety apartment building while you were gone. I don't think he found much—the place looked like it was fit to collapse. The, uh, the dead dude was pretty pissed off. I think."

"He'll do that."

"When do I get to go home?" Trevin asked, looking serious again. "I tried to get Hanna to drop me off at the neighborhood while we were driving around in circles uptown, but he just ignored me. I've got this creepy feeling I'm never gonna get off this bus again."

Worth shrugged. "Figgur you can hop the train soon as he decides the adventure's all nice'n done. Hanna's got this bad habit o' pickin' blokes up and carryin' 'em along fer the ride; kid's a fuckin' twister an' he ain't stoppin' tell he hits Oz. Conrad never did manage to hop off. Count yerself lucky if ya don't end up like him."

Trevin chewed distractedly on his bottom lip, and it looked a lot like he was ripping off dead skin with his teeth. Christ.

"Look, ya wanna go back so bad, I'll get Connie ter drive us up now. No sweat. Don't get yer pannies in a twist."

"No, no," Trevin said. "It's okay. To tell you the truth, I'm kind of curious how the whole… Tibenoch thing is going to end."

"OH FUCK!" Hanna's muffled voice piped up from the back room. There was some banging around and then he burst out into the main room like a redheaded bullet. "I forgot all about Tibenoch!"

Trevin frowned. "Were you listening…"

"Ohmygod we gotta get going—Conrad, Conrad can you get us moving right now?"

"No, really," Trevin asked, "how much of that were you listening to?"

"Where's Victor, has anybody seen Victor? Is he still—oh, yes! There you are! Perfect, load up, we got places to be. Conrad, launch status?"

"Gimme a minute, General," Conrad snapped. "It takes a minute to start this thing up and do you even have the doors closed?"

"Uh, wait, okay yes all the doors are closed!"

"How about cups, anything on the tables?"

"No, nope, just books!"

"Is everybody sitting down?"

"Everybody except Worth!"

"Perfect."

And Conrad hit the gas before Worth could grab for a seat.

Ten minutes later, Worth was still lying on the floor, having decided that he'd done plenty fucking enough tonight and the floor was alright with him. Above his head, Hanna was carrying on a onesided conversation with the room in general while Trevin tried not to look uncomfortable and completely weirded out.

"So we ran the intestines up a flagpole," Hanna was saying, chewing animatedly on some apple jerky, "and wouldn't you know it, the wolf came right out of the woods. Like clockwork. You'd think it would work eventually but that was what one minute tops, maybe forty seconds, but after Conrad went missing I was just sure they were in the middle of some kind of epic royal battle—no wait—"

"Battle Royale," the zombie offered, fingers steepled over the tabletop.

"Yes! We were hoping that the smell would distract it long enough to get Conrad an opening 'cause you know he's a really good fighter when he puts his mind to it, even though nobody really wanted to see him rip out another wild animal's throat with his teeth—"

"Oh and it was so much more pleasant for me!"

"Right yeah, basically nobody had fun that day and hey is that Ples's building that looks like Ples's building!"

"Yes!" Conrad shouted back, brows scrunched up in the rear view mirror. "But sit down!"

Hanna grinned, reached across the table and grabbed the dead guy's hand. Dead guy looked down at his black glove, frozen in a half-open movement, and then up again at Hanna's chapped smile. The fingers closed slowly around Hanna's.

"We're gonna do this," Hanna told him, flashing blue and white at the bright center of the world, "this is it. You ready, bro?"

Hesitation. Worth wasn't certain if Hanna saw it, but it was there—a pause in motion longer than the dim serenity of the zombie's usual movement could account for. Some word left floating bodiless in the air around his lantern eyes. Hesitation. And then an upturn of dry lips, and a soft "Ready".

They pulled into the street in front of Tibenoch's tower, and either nobody noticed or nobody pointed out that Conrad had turned them so the nose of the RV was aimed at the road out of town. Hanna bounced down the steps, dragging Frankenstein along arm-first in his wake.

The barrier tore like spiderwebs around Hanna as he went running across the pavement, fizzling thick and yellowish like sooty candle light where he threw himself through it. The rest of them followed more carefully, and Worth brushed off strands of clinging magic on his way through the breach. Huh. If Hanna tore a hole like that without even trying, the Hunt would have taken the whole building down to rubble.

It was decaying pretty damn fast. What was the damage on that beaker-sniffing pooft anyhow?

"Ya wanna put yer money on radiation poisoning?" Worth muttered without looking back to see Conrad, a step or so behind.

"What?" Conrad asked, sounding nonplussed.

"Tibenoch. Bugger looked 'bout one palpitation off a full collapse. My money's on mercury overdose, where's yers?"

"Oh," Conrad replied. He let out a shallow hissing breath. Worth turned his head just in time to see the vampire viewing the tattered barrier critically, neck craning up to follow the sickly ripples of light rolling up away from the tear. "I don't really want to bet on a man's life and death, even if it is a man who once shot me in the head."

"Th' head," Worth echoed, immediately interested. "Brain damage, wazzer?"

Conrad's lips pulled back from the right side of his jaw in a snarl so deep Worth could see his round white molars.

"No," Conrad said. "It just took off one of my ears. Obviously it grew back."

He squared his shoulders and started back to walking, gaining a pace or two on Worth before the doctor got moving again.

"Din' notice," Worth mused. "Lost track'a you lot after the house went down."

"Yeah well, you missed half the fun you lucky bastard. You and Lamont went skipping off on your merry way down the lane, and nobody bothered to help us with the gasmask musketeer crawling out of the lake. What a fucking long night that was. Almost as long as this one."

"Yer gonna hafta tell me the story then, eh?"

"Oh no."

"Wot?"

Conrad wrinkled his prodigious nose. "Hanna and I swore up and down not to talk about anything that happened that night. As far as I'm concerned, I have convenient amnesia of the whole affair."

"Amnesia's a fuckin' fairy fart urban legend, slick."

"So's your doctorate, Doc."

Up ahead, Hanna peeked his mussed head out of the doorway. "You guys comin' in or what?"

Worth shrugged and stepped on in. The dark rooms stood as absolutely quiet and empty as a mausoleum, the dead man's eyes up ahead twin pinpricks of orange light cast against a doorway. Two times now they had come walking through the dark into this ungodly ticking tower, two nights they had—

Wait.

Worth gritted his teeth and broke into a run.

Around the curve of a doorway with its drywall peeking through, over a desk with its once neatly sorted inbox gathering dust on the flooring, through the stairway entrance and up a flight of stairs, organs strained and exhausted and sinking down to his shoes.

"Worth!" Conrad yelled after him, "Worth where the hell do you think you're going?"

"Shit," he hissed, and the sibilants rattled up and down the endless soaring flights. "How 'bout them vampire ears, Connie, ya hear anythin'?"

"No," the undead man huffed, "you jumpy bastard, I don't hear a fucking—"

The penny dropped.

"Shit," Conrad echoed. They shared a tense glance. "I don't hear anything."

"Dunno if I can run all that after the night I had," Worth admitted, scowling so deeply it nearly hurt. "It's a long way up."

Conrad dug the heel of one hand into his eye, fang bared. "We don't have time for that anyhow. You keep walking, I'm going on ahead."

Worth's vision went momentarily null as he caught a sweater to the face.

"Shit shit damn," Conrad was muttering, ripping off items of clothing haphazardly, "leave my good stuff on a staircase yes like I'm ever getting those shoes back…"

"Whoa, hold yer horses there Casanova, I'm all outta dollar bills."

Conrad paused with one leg of his jeans around his ankle, just long enough to give the doctor a deeply suffering glare. "If this was a normal night I would deck you. Since I did in fact spend tonight trying to make sure your repulsive ass stayed alive, do me a favor and shut up before I have to undo all my hard work."

"What's going on up there?" Hanna's voice called up from the ground floor. "Guys?"

Conrad ripped his foot free with a renewed and startling vehemence. "Watch my stuff, okay? Matching socks are hard to come by lately."

And then he was gone in a faint poof, his blue and white silhouette dissolved into the darkness and a flutter of wings. Fluttering was mostly something reserved for eyelashes and birds, but Worth could make allowances for his ladyship.

A staccato of clanging footsteps preceded Hanna as he jogged up to the second floor landing. He paused, hand on the railing, just behind Worth and squinted through the darkness. "Uh, night vision is failing me here. Where'd Conrad go?"

Worth just pointed upwards.

"Nooo, my night vision still hasn't kicked in, which finger is that?"

Worth gave up and shoved his hand back in his pocket. "Index, nimrod. Conrad went bat."

"Oooh, gotcha, scoping the scene for danger and stuff, right," Hanna said. Then he peered a little closer. "Dude, are you holding his pants?"

"Sweater," Worth answered. "Yer standing on the pants."

"Oh!" Hanna hopped off like he was springloaded. "He'd probably stab me for that."

Worth grunted.

"Soooo," the younger man started, craning his neck up towards the dead air spiraling up above them, "where did Conrad go?"

In the middle of formulating a response—had Hanna noticed the silence, if he hadn't noticed then was it better not to tell him, should he say something—there was the faintest of cracks followed by Conrad's ever-audible shrieks. Worth was half way up the building before he noticed he was moving.

At the top of the staircase, Worth threw himself through the doorway to Ples's workshop, hands slamming against the frame to catch his balance as he rocketed past. When he screeched to a halt inside the room, Hanna tripped straight into his back and they both went stumbling another couple steps forward.

Conrad—in one piece, apparently uninjured and barely dressed—had squeezed himself into a corner and was clutching at his left wrist, holding the palm away from his chest.

"I touched it," he squealed, "I touched it I touched it oh my god it touched me oh my god Worth, kill it."

Bemused, Doc Worth turned his attention to the pan laid out on the work table across the room and noticed for the first time Tibenoch, smiling faintly next to the twitching, severed hand laid out beside him. Its waxy greenish flesh looked only marginally healthier than the sallow scientist presiding over it.

"Rule'a thumb," Worth said at last, after fully cataloguing the scene, "ya don' gotta shake hands if the hand ain't attached ter nothing', Connie."

"Trousers," Conrad hissed, making a snatching motion in Worth's direction.

Worth considered just keeping them for a moment, and then decided that having Conrad walk around in the mad science lab without pants was just asking for more inelegant screeching. He'd had too long of a night to really enjoy that now.

"What's, going on in here," Trevin pitched in, unevenly, apparently just now having scaled the stairs. Nobody bothered to look back at him.

"Ples was working on a science experiment," Hanna answered, nostrils flaring, "while we were out, you know, trying not to get killed."

"Apologies," Tibenoch replied, sounding the least apologetic of anyone Worth had ever heard. "I was on a bit of a time crunch with this one. Freshness is key, I'm afraid—nothing else will suffice. I hope you'll excuse my pragmatism."

Hanna snorted. "I knew you weren't just keeping that barrier up, I freaking knew it."

"A man has to have his hobbies," Tibenoch shrugged. "Care to explain to me, any of you, why barging in like escaped cattle was necessary? My work is delicate."

Conrad stopped staring at his hand in horrified anguish just long enough to shoot Worth a questioning look. He didn't need to bother.

"Ya turned off the clocks," Worth said, simply. "Or wotever gizmos y'had tickin' around up here. Thought ya mighta skipped off on us, or got the antler end'a some spook we missed."

"Ah," Tibenoch answered. He looked satisfied, for some reason, or maybe gratified, but who the hell could tell for sure. "In that case, I suppose you'll be wanting me to hold up my end of the bargain now? Judging by your uniformly animate condition, I gather that your venture was successful."

"Plen'y," Worth snarled. "No thanks ta you."

"Never offer more than you've arranged to give, it's just bad business," Tibenoch demurred. He slipped oddly—wildly—discolored gloves off with a smart snap and tucked them into a vest pocket. "Step into my parlor, won't you?"

"That's not ominous," Trevin muttered, still behind them in the doorway. "Isn't he too old to know about that book?"

"It's actually quite an old poem," the scientist remarked, striding across the room, "at least in comparison to an eighteen year life span."

"I'm twenty-fucking-one, what is with you people."

"Moving right along," Tibenoch said. "I'd like to get this done as soon as possible, if it's all the same to you."

He moved jerkily, taking long steps across the floor to the anteroom like a windup toy. In that condition, Worth doubted the bastard was in a state fit to perform any kind of surgery, magical or otherwise. Tibenoch disappeared for a moment and reappeared with a non-descript white mug in hand.

Worth sniffed. "S'that coffee?"

"Yes, yes, it's not very stereotypical is it, but I've had a long night and we have a ways yet to go."

"Nah, I was thinkin' more…"

"Nobody's had coffee for nearly a year," Conrad cut in, clipped tones verging on outraged. "We traded our last can for the life of a small warlord."

"Ah," Tibenoch replied. He looked amused. "Well there are certain perks to living in the heart of an abandoned city, one of which is the scavenging. Or, at least it was, until lately. I have perhaps another few months left in the stock, with some careful rationing."

Conrad's eyes did not shift even slightly from the mug.

Tibenoch lifted his eyebrow. "Would you like some, Mr. Achenleck?"

In the three or so years they had been riding together, Worth had seen Conrad cry exactly once. For a second, he was certain that number was about to double.

"Vampire," Conrad mumbled, "can't drink it."

"Well I want some!" Hanna piped up, oblivious to the intense pain every cheerful syllable caused his miserably handicapped friend. "There's no way I'm sleeping while Victor has brain… magic… surgery stuff. I could defs use the caffeine."

He sounded cheery, yeah, but even a cursory evaluation could tell you the redhead was grinding down to nothing—a night of racing around and magical overtax and stress was taking its inevitable toll—and Worth could easily see him collapsing mid-sentence in a couple hours. It wasn't anything unusual, even on a fairly normal night. What he needed was some goddamn sleep, not coffee.

"Hanna," he warned, brows furrowing.

Hanna waved him off with a disinterested flick of his purplish fingers. "Would you mind, Ples?"

Tibenoch pursed his lips. "Of course not," he said, after a moment, "I do endeavor to be an excellent host, after all."

Worth elbowed Conrad, whispering, "'s that what they're callin' it these days."

But Conrad just stared mournfully at the madman's departing back, without so much as a disapproving snort, and Worth sighed though his nose. "Oh, fer chissakes," he said. "Here, Tibenoch, gemme some too. Lucky fer us I happen ta be an expert in tamperin' with drinks."

"Ah," said Tibenoch. And then he disappeared into the side room.

When he came back out there were four mugs—one thing you could say for the guy, Worth guessed, he caught on pretty fast—and passed them out first to Hanna and Trevin, then to Worth, and then with a sly half-smile to Conrad.

"What?" Conrad said. "Vampire, didn't I just tell you I was a vampire?"

Worth just reached over and popped the drink out of his hands, setting it beside his own drink on the work table. "Ya got any sterile?" he asked the scientist, tapping the rim of one cup idly.

"Afraid not, Doctor. Few of my subjects complain about hygene."

Worth grunted. "Fine. Use my own."

In a flurry of quick movements, Worth drew his scalpel, tipped out a few drops of the rubbing alcohol he carried in his hip flask, and slit his left palm down the fleshy mound at the base of the thumb. A thin hiss seeped through his teeth.

"Oh god, what do you think you're doing?" Conrad demanded, hands spasming like he was trying not to wring Worth's neck on the spot.

"Celebratin', ya prissy twat," Worth replied. He held out the contaminated mug of coffee with a jaunty little bounce. "We survived the night an' kicked motherfuckin' ass. Yer gettin' some goddamn coffee whether I gotta pour it down yer throat or no."

"Oh," Conrad said, looking conflicted. Gingerly, he accepted the drink. "I suppose… you've already ruined it for anybody else…"

Worth rolled his eyes. "That's the spirit."

While everyone was taking sips of the vaguely metallic tasting coffee, Tibenoch directed them to the operating room. It was easy to tell that it wasn't intended for operation on living things—the mess and the lack of sanitation supplies gave that away, if not as much as the preserved specimens tacked to the walls. Something phosphorescent leaked out of a cupboard.

"This is mostly where I do my dissections," Tibenoch informed them in an offhand sort of way, as he cleared off the table. It had straps. Worth felt suddenly doubtful about the whole situation.

"Are those restraints?" Hanna questioned, giving Tibenoch a deeply reproachful look. "Why would you need restraints?"

The scientist slapped his hands together, ignoring the inquiry. "Well, if we're all ready to begin—"

"Mr. Tibenoch," the dead man cut in—he'd been pretty quiet, quieter even than usual—"why are there restraints?"

"Well," Tibenoch said. He paused with his hand on the table, thumb brushing over a tarnished buckle. "I'm about to perform a highly delicate procedure on the most fundamental components of your very existence—everything from the way you move your limbs to the transmittal of kinetic energy in your muscles—will be stripped down to bare equations and laid out under my fingers."

"Um," said Conrad, looking uncomfortable.

"When you tap a reflex point on a human, they kick," Tibenoch went on. "What I'm doing is so much more intimate. Consider that, like Shelley's monster, perhaps you have a strength beyond the capacity of your earliest flesh."

The zombie flexed his hand, peering down at it with a kind of surprised expression like he wasn't sure when it had gotten there. "I'm still not entirely certain what this procedure entails," he said at last. "I do still feel some measure of pain, after all."

"Really?" Tibenoch responded, looking back interestedly. "Do you?"

The dead man inclined his head. "I do."

"Fascinating," Tibenoch replied. "Well in any case I don't yet know how far we'll need to go. We will see what's necessary and what isn't, hm? If you would," he gestured toward the table.

Worth took a gulp of his shitty coffee and then spat it back into the mug. It seriously tasted shittier and shittier with every passing minute. Fuck the apocalypse, fuck it six ways to Sunday.

Frankenstein loaded up, and Hanna bounced nervously from foot to foot like he had half a mind to snag his buddy and get the hell out of dodge before things got any further. Worth understood the sentiment. Still, it was the dead guy's call and he seemed like he was braced for it, so whatever. Honestly he was wondering if Tibs would really open something up and take a look around—Worth hadn't gone into medicine for the money, after all. That curiosity was still in him somewhere, bobbing around on a sea of distrust and exhaustion.

Everyone settled in eventually, while their host sorted meticulously through his cabinets in search of everything from stoppered flasks to tiny screwdrivers, pausing to tip the zombie's chin up for a better look at his stitching. Conrad looked back at Trevin, who had shoved himself into a corner and was watching the proceedings with a vague sort of queasy look.

"Do you want to go back to the RV?" Conrad asked him, quietly, as if there was any other conversation going on in that wide silent room. "I can give you the keys, if you promise not to drive it off."

Tibenoch paused in the middle of pouring out something bright red.

"No," Trevin answered, "uh, thanks. But when am I gonna get the chance to see anything like this again?"

Conrad shrugged, apparently having used up all his social graces at that point. He looked like maybe he wanted to say something else, but as ever, he wasn't spitting it out.

Tibenoch started by testing Green's memory, which—although it made plenty enough sense—managed to surprise Doc Worth. First boring little things, basic history, who fought what war, and then weirdly specific things, like police procedural formula and local pre-anarchy laws. In his chair, Hanna yawned hugely and then looked unhappy with himself. About the same time that Tibenoch started swabbing things and mixing samples, Hanna slipped down into his chair and fell asleep. Conrad looked at the limp magician with a kind of resigned envy.

"Sun's been up for a while," he muttered. Hanna's head lolled to one side. "Suddenly I'm remembering that caffeine doesn't work on me."

"You can sleep," Tibenoch suggested, preoccupied with a vial of clear liquid. "Detective Cross is already lost to us, you needn't feel guilty. As it happens there's a bed in the side room…"

"A bed," Conrad repeated, dubious.

"Technically mine," the scientist explained. "But unused for all of that."

Conrad looked at him. You could see his eyes cataloguing the scientist's dark circles and jutting bones, and the sallow lightless skin.

"Well," Conrad said. "It's either that or the floor, I guess, and if I don't find somewhere to pass out soon I'll probably brain myself on the way down. Worth, do you have my jumper?"

"I had yer pants. Sweater's still on the stairs."

"Fuck. Well I'll see you all tonight, I guess."

Conrad left the room like a shadow, hunched into himself and quiet. Tibenoch watched his retreating back with his burning copper eyes, unblinking and narrowed. In the silence left behind, the faintest ticking noise slithered through the room.

Tibenoch's eyes snapped back to the dead man laid out over his dissection table. He smiled.

"So," he said, "can you tell me what your earliest memory is?"

The dead man looked away for a moment. "A graveyard," he said, slowly, "a graveyard in the spring."

"Was it your graveyard? I mean to say, were you at any point buried there?"

Below a weathered leather cuff, gloved fingers tapped the table. "I don't know," the zombie said. "I have no memory of ever being interred."

"Hm." Tibenoch dug his gloved out of his pocket and snapped them on, one then the other, movements swift and precise. "But how did you get there? Surely someone who had put so much effort into your creation wouldn't simply leave you wander after all that."

"I suppose they might have had generous motives."

"Generous?" Tibenoch repeated, shadowed eyes glittering. "Hah. I put it to you that you are, in fact, a failed experiment. Perhaps cast out of some rural laboratory after your progress fell short of the mark."

"I—"

"Do you really imagine your existence is the result of anything other than sinister purpose?"

"Oi, leave the fella 'lone," Worth interrupted, forming the words with some difficulty. He was determined to stick it out through this whole affair, but Jesus he was tired too.

Tibenoch tipped his head back, the angle striking Worth as just a degree short of truly unnerving. "If you insist," he replied, half-moon spectacles glinting. "I'm simply making conversation."

He laid his hands over the bright orange fabric of the dead man's shirt, fingertips searching for something.

"Ah," he said. "An incision." His fingers traced a wide Y across his subject's torso, the echo of an autopsy cut. "Would you mind terribly if I opened you up and took a look around? I have so much to learn."

"Will it hurt me?"

"I shouldn't think so," Tibenoch replied, already unbuttoning the brightly colored cotton. "The only thing holding it together is stitches—ah, my, very neat stitches—so I doubt you'll feel a thing. The flesh is already severed."

Worth gave some thought to sitting up straighter, trying to get a better look at what was happening, but his limbs were feeling pretty heavy and shit, moving seemed like a lot more effort than he wanted to expend right now. From here he could see just over the green curve of the zombie's ribcage. Maybe he would move, in just a minute. He was reasonably sure that Tibenoch was too intent on gathering information to attempt any kind of sabotage, but… reasonably sure wasn't sure enough.

And how would he know it, if Tibenoch did try something on the sly?

Behind him, Worth heard the soft sound of Trevin giving up and slipping down to sit on the floor. Maybe the vivisection full-view was a little too interesting.

"Oh," the scientist said. "Well. I admit I was expecting something more… artificial."

With a smile that was all half-quirked lips and unblinking eyes, he slipped one discolored glove into the peeled-open cavity. The dead man opened his mouth, made no sound, and snapped his hands into fists.

Tibenoch looked up. "Pain?"

The dead man was quiet for a long moment. "I'm not certain," he answered, at last.

"Hmm."

"How will you know when you find the problem?" the zombie asked, blinking rapidly. It was surreal to watch.

"Oh," the madman replied, "that will be the difficult part. But I think… I recognize the handiwork…"

"Whose?"

"You wouldn't know him. He was Herbert's, quite the non-entity that one. Face like a sliding glass door. How fitting that a Watson like him should produce a Watson like you."

"But what was his name?"

Tibenoch shrugged, one hand still fiddling through decayed organs. "I honestly can't recall. I came into a few of his notes, after he passed. I don't think he signed even one of the things. Oh! What's this…"

The scientist lifted his hand, and it came up shiny and black. His fingers came together and parted with a sticky resistance.

"This one's still moving," he murmured, then louder: "Did you see my little side project earlier? Of course you did. I've been working on something freelance—I should thank you, I suppose, since in a roundabout way if it hadn't been for you imbeciles dropping a house on me and leaving me to die, I never would have met her."

"Please don't touch that again," the zombie said, politely as you please.

"Can't make any promises," Tibenoch replied.

Something zinged nastily in the back of Worth's head. The moment struck him wrong—something was wrong, something was off—he could feel it in the itching under his skin. He went to stand up, to either wake Hanna up or drag Tibenoch off by himself, and there was nothing. No response.

He leaned forward, barely, and the room swung wildly around his useless body. What—

The coffee. The goddamn coffee. And he had just walked right into it, like a fucking idiot, like a goddamn old fucking man. Had he really just let that happen and had he really gotten that stupid?

He must have made a noise, falling back into his chair, because Ples looked back at him, his wide white teeth the center of a world that was spinning eerily into blackness. Tilted into shadow, with his sunken eyes and his grinning mouth, he looked like a skull.

"Still awake?" he asked.

Worth struggled to stand. His bones were shot full of cold lead.

"No matter," Tibenoch sighed. "You won't be moving from there any time soon."

"What's going on," the zombie demanded, his dry voice heavy with warning as formidable as a rising hurricane.

"Can't you guess?" Tibenoch asked him, leaning in close. "I drugged them. Much neater this way. I'll be needing to leave once I'm done with you—places to go, research to debrief, you know how it goes—and I really don't have time to muddle through mire of moral ambiguity with you all. I've been penned in here much too long."

Somewhere, a clock chimed.

"Now," Tibenoch began, as blackness swallowed Worth's vision, "let's see about that heart…"

-A-

Worth dreamed, if you could call it a dream.

He was the darkness, and the silence, and the featureless everything that shifted inside of it, and the light that burned, and the void that whispered,

"A failed project,"

"stitched together miserably,"

"and tossed away."

-A-

When Worth woke, it was in the same way that you swim up to the surface of a lake—with lots of struggling and without handholds, and then a snap as you break the surface. The room was dark, almost perfectly so except for the phosphorescent glow of whatever sick science project Ples had left in the cabinet. Worth's hand shook slightly as he pried himself up into a standing position.

"Oi, dead guy," he managed, voice coming raspy and dry, "say somethin'."

Nothing.

"Shit," he hissed. He did not bother to ask himself why there was no orange glow lighting twin circles on the ceiling.

Hands groping wildly in the darkness, the doctor went searching for Hanna in the emptiness to his left, toes swinging a wide arc in search of chair legs. There. He went down, knees first, and ran one hand over Hanna's chest while the other pressed unsteady fingers into his jugular. Pulse. Thank god. No wounds, as far as he could find—no blood, or any other fluid, no inflammation in the face or elsewhere, fingers cold but not dangerously so—

Hanna was alive.

Worth stood up, a little steadier for knowing. The operation table had been directly in front of him, if he just moved forward he could probably—yes, he could barely make out the outline. He stumbled over to it, feeling for the neck (head still attached, good, Christ, well that was the worst avoided) and then the exposed chest, searching the cool skin for the pinned corners of flesh.

His hand slid between two flaps and grazed something oily and plump. The zombie's whole body spasmed, and then two slits of amber light seeped through the darkness.

"Hanna?" he asked, sounding far away.

"Hanna's fine," Worth replied, tersely, fumbling with the restraining straps. "He din' touch him. What's yer damage?"

There was a shifting sound, and a movement through the body like the dead man had shaken his head. "Physically," he said, "I am… functional. But I am not. I am not okay."

"Shit," Worth said, for the second time in as many minutes. "Well who the fuck would be. Hold on, I'm gettin' these motherfuckers loose for ya."

The second the straps popped open, the zombie was pushing himself up and off the table before the leather even touched the tabletop. Worth grabbed him by the shoulders, catching fist-fulls of open cloth, and held him still.

"Siddown," he said, "ya want yer spleen on the floor? Christ, I dunno if I kin fix that kinda damage."

"Organs don't work that way, and we both know it. I have to see him."

"Yeah, human organs don't. Ya don't know shit all about how yer insides work."

"I have to see him."

"I tol ya he was alright!"

"With due respect, doctor," the zombie replied, granite and steel, "I need to see for myself."

Worth let him go.

"At least lemme unpin that skin," he mumbled, hands flying. "Y'can hold it together yerself if ya really gotta move."

That turned out to be pretty easy. Torso secured, the dead man swung to his feet and started across the room, but Worth didn't see it. He was already fumbling for the door, anxious to get out of there and into the main room, where there was light filtering down through the cracks in the ceiling and blood slicking the floor—Fuck, god fuck, he didn't have time for that. He'd come back.

Around the corner and into the side room where the stillness in the darkness could have meant anything, searching for the bed, Worth banged his shin on the table and didn't notice until hours later. His hands found a whole, lukewarm body wrapped in sheets, and. And.

Worth's forehead was pressing down on Conrad's and he wasn't sure how that had happened.

Okay, alive, everyone was alive or some approximation thereof, except…

Worth dragged himself away from Conrad, head feeling hollow as he made his way back out to the operating room. Though he had slept, had been a false sleep, forced, and he didn't feel rested. His limbs still maintained an edge of disjointedness, forcing him to concentrate on his movements. He passed the bloody smear in the main area with a slightly longer look this time, long enough to confirm his suspicions.

When he stepped back into the dissection room, the zombie was standing beside Hanna's small form, one of his hands palming frizzy ginger curls, and the other still clutched at his own chest. Inky fluid was dribbling its way down leather covered fingers. Worth grunted, and the zombie's eyes flicked over towards him briefly. "Tol' ya he's fine."

A hum of a response. "Perhaps fine is a relative term, doctor."

"He ain't dead."

The corner of an olive mouth twisted. "Perhaps dead is also a relative term."

There wasn't much Worth could say to that, so, instead, he said, "Sit yer ass back on that table. Yer leakin' everywhere."

The zombie blinked and looked down at his hand. "So I am. I hope you'll be understanding if I would prefer to lie elsewhere."

"Wherever. Ya kin take th' floor fer all I care." Worth had long ago learned that appearing to ignore someone often led to them doing what you wanted. As such, he turned and began rummaging through Ples' assortment of torture instruments, looking for specific tools. Forceps were goddamned everywhere, and he tried not to think about that for the time being. While his fingers moved, he grumbled. "Ain't havin' ya drippin' an' open when Hanna comes to."

Light scuffing of shoes informed Worth that the zombie had decided to move. Good. It was about time someone started listening to him. The hand that had briefly been within the zombie's body was giving off an odor, medicinal and vaguely familiar, but there was something else within the chemical concoction that he couldn't quite place. He yanked a drawer open, finally finding a spool of thread. Now to just find a goddamned needle. "He say anythin' ter ya?"

The zombie sighed, a sound that was somehow wetter than the sort he usually made. "He said... many things."

"He say anythin' about actually fixin' ya?"

"I...believe so. I'm afraid I did not fully understand all the things he was saying. He seemed to switch personalities several times. Strained. Frantic. I do not know what was scientific, what was arcane knowledge, and what was merely the ramblings of a deteriorating sanity."

"Sounds like a drunk Hanna."

"I prefer a drunken Hanna, doctor. The worst he has ever done to me is cry on my shoulder."

"So he jus' leaves th' vomit cleanin' ter me." The next drawer was full of strangely shaped tools Worth didn't understand. His hand brushed against something that felt like it touched him back and he slammed the drawer closed. "Gonna start chargin' him double."

It took opening a tall cupboard and dumping out the contents of the boxes contained within it with harsh, rattling clangs onto the surgical table before Worth finally found his proverbial needle. Fucking finally. Threading the needle in the dimly lit room wasn't the easiest, but he managed well enough before approaching the zombie, who had apparently taken Worth's off-handed remark to heart and had actually decided to lie on the floor beside Hanna's chair. Sitting beside the zombie, Worth gently pried the gloved fingers from the desiccated flesh and peered at the inside of the zombie's chest cavity.

"Gotta be honest here," he said after a few moments, "I only got a general goddamned idea of wot I'm lookin' at."

"Ah. Well. That would be a much better goddamned idea than I have."

In spite of himself, Worth snorted a laugh. "Anythin' feel—Christ, I dunno. Broken? Painful? Placed wrong?"

"For lack of a better word, I feel sore."

"Doubt a cold compress an' a painkiller'll help much."

"I'm in agreement. Though I am not opposed to trying."

"Eh. Gonna...sift around I s'pose. Wanna be sure he didn't stick nothin' in there b'fore I sew ya back up."

Glowing eyes rose to inspect the ceiling. "Of course."

Worth's hand slipped inside. He recognized some of the anatomy, skeletal structure was where he expected it to be, for example. Other parts, the ones that made the zombie jerk when his fingers rubbed across them, those he didn't know. It felt intimate and somewhat awkward, the zombie splayed open to Worth's probing fingers and he was suddenly glad he'd never pursued his oft joked of interest in gynecology. He was about to comment on that train of thought when he felt something that definitely should not be inside a body, and the zombie's hands instantly gripped Worth's forearm.

"That," he said, eyes as wide as Worth could remember seeing them, "Please don't touch that."

"Was it there before? Issit wot he was," Worth hesitated, careful with his next word, "messin' with?"

The usually blank canvass of the zombie's face broke—too human, too delicate, it looked up at him with something verging on panic, and again Worth was struck momentarily dumb by the moment. "Yes."

From what his hand could gather, the thing in his hand was made of fabric, some sort of cloth bag with irregularly shaped things residing inside it. He had seen them before, though he never knew the specifics what was inside. Various herbs, twigs, metals and bones - Hanna was always vague when Worth had shown an interest. Grisly bags, he had called them, or something like that. What little he'd gathered was that contents varied depending on what one was using the bag to do. Hell, they'd run into this damn place wearing freshly made ones the previous evening, though he had a feeling the one he was holding was something far more powerful and dangerous. A pulling ache was growing in his hand, in his tendons and joints, slowly stretching from fingers and palm up through his wrist and into his elbow. He swallowed. "If yer sure it oughter be there..."

"Yes," the zombie's grip loosened. "Please."

"Right," and his hand released the wet, lumpy thing, pulled itself free of the body beneath. Sludge clung to his skin, dull and dripping slowly off his fingers like molasses. It was odd. He'd always assumed if the zombie was dry on the outside, he must be dry on the inside, too. Well, that was magic for you. Never worked quite the way you figured; always left a stain. Worth stood and looked about quickly. Near the operating table there was an apron, stained and stiff looking, but it was better than nothing. After grabbing it and wiping his hand and arm off, he brought it with him, dropping it by the zombie's feet before sitting down beside the reanimated man once more. "Gonna try ter use th' holes that're already here. Don't see no reason ter add new ones."

"Thank you."

Two pairs of thumb forceps slid comfortably in place in his hands. Gripping a flap of skin with one, he lowered the needle with the other, wriggling it through leathery holes as he began to carefully pull the body back together with a running lock stitch. "Thank me after we get ya closed up. Been a long time since I worked on cadavers 'n' ya ain't exactly got th' kinda stretch in yer skin that I'm used ter." The motion was familiar, one he had performed time and time again.

"Then I shall withhold my appreciation until you deem it appropriate."

Worth frowned slightly, hunched over his work. Lift one side of skin, pull needle through. Lift the other side of skin, pull the needle through. Loop. Knot. Repeat. "Not sure if yer tryin' ter get sassy with me here or not."

"A mystery for the ages."

"Don't sass th' man with th' needle." Loop. Knot. Repeat. "I might stitch a surprise on ya."

"Of course, doctor. My sincerest apologies. A surprise piece of cross stitching is certainly what I'm most concerned about right now. What did you have in mind?"

Pull through. "Figured I'd go traditional." Loop. "Home, sweet home." Knot. "Classy an' a classic." Repeat.

"I see. I can appreciate that, but might I suggest going with 'brains, sweet brains' instead?"

Repeat. "Ya don't even eat 'em. How d'ya know they're sweet, mm?"

"A valid point."

Repeat. "Mmm hmm."

"Doctor."

Repeat. "Yeah?"

"What should we do about Trevin?"

Needle paused as Worth's brow furrowed, jaw tensing. "Ain't much we kin do. Hide wot's left of 'im." He took a breath and finished the last few stitches and knots.  "Sit up 'n' see if th' stitches are holdin'."

The zombie sat up and touched his chest, fingers splaying wide, hand sliding up and down the knit flesh. "It appears that which is inside is remaining there. Again, I give my-" his words stopped short as Worth's fingers felt along his back. His head bowed slightly. "These weren't Ples' doing. They are from before."

The lines beneath finger tips were clean, and there were several. The skin had been sewn together, sealing the wounds. Post-mortem; the body hadn't healed on its own. He pulled back. "D'ya remember it?"

"a few hours ago, I did not. Ples, however, was helpful in bringing back those memories. I would have been content for them to have remained hidden. Also, a name. Church."

"You?"

"No, my apologies. It was a name I heard shortly before my death. A woman. Miss Church. I do not know how she is involved. Ples seemed most interested in her. I believe he may know her or know of her. She is connected to...how I came to be. The actual makings of me are still a dark void. I have some memories of the time before," he blinked, " and more after. The strongest, most vibrant memories are those I have gathered over the past years."

"Yeah, well," Worth pushed himself up and off of the grimy floor. "Put yer shirt on. I wanna get this taken care of b'fore anyone else wakes up."

Wordlessly, and in that strange, swinging way of moving he had, the zombie rose and retrieved his neon orange shirt from beside the surgical table. The two walked together to the body, and together, they lifted the shell that used to be known as Trevin by arms and legs, carrying him to the side room Ples had used to make drugged coffee. Through an unspoken agreement, they positioned Trevin's body in a corner behind the table holding the coffee maker and covered it with a sheet from the surgical room. Neither addressed the gaping hole in his chest, or the missing eyes. Some things, Worth had learned, were better to simply not talk about.

Task completed, the zombie passed through the main work room and resumed his silent watch over Hanna while Worth attempted to reenter the back room to check on Conrad. However, as he reached for the doorknob, the doorknob moved and the door opened. Suddenly face to face, Conrad made a strangled "Ooof!" sound and slammed the door back in Worth's face.

Hands on hips, the doctor sighed. "Somethin' th' matter, yer ladyship?"

Sleeping Beauty pulled the door back open, and shoved his way past Worth. "I just...you startled me. I had a good sleep and suddenly there's your face."

"Uh huh."

Conrad cast a baleful glance over his shoulder as he continued to walk through the work room and towards the operating room. "You look like shit, by the way."

"Uh huh."

That made him pause and turn around fully, just steps from the surgical area's open doorway. "Stop 'uh huh'ing me."

"Awright."

"Ugh, of course." Conrad ran a hand through his hair in what Worth assumed was an attempt at reducing the imagined bed head issues. You didn't get bed head when you didn't move in your sleep. He hadn't exactly ever explained that to Conrad, though. "I wake up in something resembling a good mood and you've gone comatose on me and why does it smell like blood?"

"No reason."

Red eyes narrowed "As if that wasn't the biggest crock of shit I've heard."

Worth responded by looking as bored as possible. "We're in some crazy asshole's clock tower full'a dead bodies. There some fancy reason why it oughter smell like blood?"

"Well—" arms crossed over Conrad's chest, eyes remaining narrowed as he clearly gave the question thought, "—it's just that it smells fresher than I remember."

"Good sleep'll do that ter ya. Colors are brighter, smells smellier."

A bit of the suspicion lifted. "Smellier?"

"More odorous or wotever." Worth waved one of his hands dismissively. "Yer up. Let's get Hanna up an' get out."

"Yes, good, but, wait." He looked around. "Where's Ples? You didn't mention zombie. Did—oh God did something happen?"

"I'm afraid things did not turn out as expected."

Worth looked from Conrad's face through the doorway to where the zombie was speaking, helping a clearly groggy and mumbling Hanna to his feet. "No, no pancakes, Hanna. I am sorry."

Some relief lowered Conrad's shoulders a fraction. "How 'not as expected' are we talking?"

"Yeah, wait," Hanna murmured, "mojo. Did he mojo you?" The heel of a ruddy hand rubbed at his right eye, pushing his glasses askew. "Did he mojo your jojo?"

"No. It was unsuccessful. Ples has left, and I think it is time we make our leave of this place as well."

"Wait, left?" That seemed to have roused Hanna from most of his drug-sleep induced stupor. "Not cool. No way. Left left?"

As if on cue to be the biggest pain in the ass possible, Conrad's eyes sharpened again. "Where's Trevin?"

"Left, too." Worth responded, feebly.

"Left? Like uhhhhhhhhhhh what?"

A leather gloved hand cupped Hanna's shoulder, gently but firmly steering him out of the surgical area and towards the exit. "With Ples. He left with Ples."

Conrad's considerable nose wrinkled, nostrils flaring in queenly indignation. "Why on Earth would he do that? Why would anyone do that? We're clearly the safer group to be with."

"He wanted ter get outta here, remember?" Now Worth was doing the maneuvering, a hand on the small of Conrad's back. It earned him a quick flailing elbow to the gut.

Nearing the doorway to the long staircase, Hanna twisted in the zombie's grip to look back at Worth and Conrad. "Yeah, no, that's totally—" he stopped, eyes going flat as they fixed on a spot just beyond the man and the vampire. Worth mentally swore. "—No bueno," he finished, quiet. Helost his resistance, allowing himself to be turned the rest of the way around, suddenly far more complacent under the zombie's guiding hand.

The look hadn't been lost on Conrad, who turned as well, gaze drifting over by one of the work benches. His body stiffened and Worth didn't have to ask what it was that he saw. "Oh, I didn't smell fresh blood for any particular reason. I'm sure there's no particular reason right fucking there." His glare turned itself on Worth, hard and cold. "And Trevin went with Ples."

"That'd be about wot we said."

"And when do you think you'll tell me what the fuck actually happened here with Ples?"

Hospital reeking hands shoved themselves into the front pockets of Worth's jeans as his shoulders slumped into a familiar hunch. "Mebbe about th' time ya tell me wot happened with you 'n' Ples."

Without waiting for Conrad's reply, he walked out of the room and made his way down the stairs, Lamont's cross warm against his chest.