Chapter 4: Chapter Three: Within the Glass, the Mirror Cracks

(Moonsilver)

It's such a quiet thing--the crossing of a threshold. A steady walk among suburbs that don't quite look right, along winding streets that run too narrow, through archways stretched twice as high as they should and curved to fit the crescents of the many moons on high. And there are many moons in the City.

Hannah babbles at me as though there's no cause for bad blood between us. I don't know what to make of this bouncy creature. To be near her is an act of acute injustice, heresy at the cosmic scale. No one capable of kindness this sublime should ever be given the chance to exercise it. I know this. I am ashamed. I am shamed doubly, for I accept her kindness anyway.

I learn that the City's far larger than any city of Earth. On, and on, and on it goes, so Hannah says. She spouts the most grandiose lore I've ever heard as if it's common knowledge.

I suppose, in a place like this, it is.

The City has more districts than anyone's ever counted. You can never know which will connect to which. They swap around like tiles, or cubes, or stranger shapes in some huge randomly-generated grid. Sub-shards of the City's macro-reality suturing together at the seams and swapping places with districts nobody's even heard of a day later. A dangerous business to leave a district you've come to call home: you'll probably never find it again if it moves before you come back. Some districts happen to have mayors, like cities within the City. Some are bereft of any direction at all. Growing, chaotic, multiplying beings and buildings sprawling out.

Hannah's not sure whether we can ever leave. But there's plenty to do and no bills to pay, so at least for creatures like us, it's a good home.

"Creatures like us."

"Yeah." I answer that with a timid smile. "I guess so."

I'm still thinking about it when we arrive in the ivy-walled courtyard of a strained stone building with high-peaked roofs. Gothic windows and leering gargoyles glare down. The wrought-iron fencing atop its outer wall of black bricks looks like a warding wall of spears stabbing up into the sky.

"Uh, so... Hannah..." I frown. "This isn't like an insane asylum, right?"

"No," she says. Her tail wraps her, rubbing up and down her calves. "I'm told that folks who stay here, um... like it. The aesthetic. It's not for me, but... I mean, I'm just showing you here--"

"Speaking frankly," I run my eyes up the facade like the candlelight-kissed skin of a lover I've just remembered, "I was sort of hoping it was an insane asylum. An index of unspeakable things sealed behind numbered chambers. Past the squalling and the cold and the self-gnawing, you could find the figure of a wretched and leering thing, skulking deep in her cell, bound and chained... oh, the terrible powers she'd command if ever she were to break free!"

A dim flicker shines out in the back of my mind and dies even quicker than it came. Something about shame, boundaries, things we don't say. Who is that 'we'? It's already fading out of my mind.

I'm Moonsilver, abyssal witch, resident of the City. Nothing that came before has any weight, here. I've no desire to change that.

Hannah's reaction still manages to floor me. A tilt of her head. A glow in the eye she gazes up at me with, side-on. "Hey, look at that... you do belong with us."

I turn to her, curtsey--I practiced this once, in a life before a death before a death--and answer. "Hannah, I'm so grateful for your guidance to this place. If there is anything I can do to aid you, I will do it from gratitude as well as remorse."

"Anytime, Moonsilver." She turns, gives a light wave, and goes on her way. "I'll let you know if I think of something."

I enter, and make myself known to my new hostess. She names herself simply "Hue". Her robes are magenta, her hair and skin are shining burnished gold, and her eyes are empty black pits. She informs me that I've been expected, for a suite grew into being with my name on it about an hour or so ago.

I nod. "Sensible. That's right around the moment Hannah informed me of your establishment."

"It is." Hue does not emote. Her emotions are felt things, known things, concrete beyond expression. She is amused. "Your suite's number is, 'Cauldron's Unreckoned Froth Heralds the Timeless Becoming Old."

I fall into step behind her. "I see. Your grasp of numbers is far more advanced than mine."

She nods her satisfaction. The gold of her squeals and clatters at being made to bend so. "Naturally. I have tended to this place and its residents for many centuries. I have learned much simply by passing the ages here."

"You wouldn't call it life?" Our steps thunk, echo, and sometimes rasp like sandpaper or skates on ice. Always on the same gnarled, scratched, shining dark-wood floors. The lights reflected in them, the lights pooling on our bodies, have no source. They exist only in reflection, refraction, and shading.

I find it all strangely soothing.

"Whether I am living, dead, or lifeless is a question I have no interest in," Hue answers. "Neither does it bore me. I am Hue. I tend to this place and its guests. These things are. 'Life' is a human preoccupation. I am willing to speak more of philosophy with you if you desire. But I prefer substance. There are sights here. Sounds. Scents. Tastes. Touch, too." She stops beside a door marked by a big bronze plate above its frame.

Engraved in the plate is the image of a boiling-over cauldron with inconstant lines. Ten spheres connected by lines form a decagonal border around it. Its fumes are frozen in the moment of breaking through, and the spheres have begun to dissolve into them.

"Hm." I regard it. "There's the frothing cauldron. And I can see where you get timelessness from the boundary of spheres and their breaking. Spheres are embodiments of cycles and domain... still. It's open to more interpretations than that, don't you think?'

"Of course." Hue bows. "But this will depend on what you do with yourself in the future.

She furnishes a key of crawling pink flesh and tongues from beneath her robes. It moans all the way into the lock.

I suck my lips inward over my teeth. "Is that, um... does it have to sound like that?"

"They key is the key." Hue finishes off the door with a twist of her shining hand. She extracts the key and hands it to me. It wriggles against my fingers. Again, she is amused, now at the flat-faced look I turn on this... thing. "You are displeased?"

The tongues lick my palm. "I..." My words fall away as I consider what it says about me that I possess a key like this. Sex seeping into every little area of my life. Oh, no. I'm into this. I'm very, very into this. My voice concludes, "I will consider. Thank you, Hue."

"Of course, mistress," Hue says. "This one is pleased to serve. It's been too long since Metronome House had a witch who wears herself in the right ways."

I curl my fingers over the key. The door--my door--is glossy wood with rose-pink highlights that come to life under the reflections from the non-existent lights of the hall. Like a sphere of glows, melting away and losing its shape. It's hot under my palm, hot like steel left out in the sun, hot like the flesh of another woman.

My blue eyes favor Hue with a calm stare. "Don't place too much hope in me. I'm not sure if I truly qualify as a witch anymore. I might become something quite different from who, or what, you're expecting."

"Of course." Hue bobs. "You have the right to decide what you are, mistress. But you have the feel of those I am accustomed to knowing as witches. This doll observes that a witch can be other things, and remain a witch. It has always seemed to this one that witchhood is a way of seeking, of knowing, of molding the world and the beings outside the witch. It does not necessarily dictate anything about the witch herself, save that she is one who does such things."

I can see myself with sudden, strange clarity. A pale and improbably-proportioned creature with hair of bubblegum pink and eyes the endless blue of deep ocean, in her white gown and pastel makeup. Equal parts ancient and forever, and new and transient.

Or... should that be new and forever, ancient and transient?

"Thank you, Hue." I nod to her again. "That will be all for now."

"Of course, mistress." She bows herself away.

I enter my suite. Three rooms: a kitchen tiled in aquatic blues with lustrous brown cabinets and chairs at a marble island carved in seashell patterns. The ritual circle is in its proper place just inside the door. It's folly to invoke a spirit anywhere further than the threshold of a home. I've known this for a long time.

The circle is plain white stone, smooth, with a black-iron border separating it from the blue tiles. It has a medium-fine grid of grooves shallow enough not to disturb my strokes, like a lattice of inverted scar tissue. Ready to receive any designs and symbols I choose to mark.

I'm very well pleased by its placement. You should never invite any being into spaces you don't want them to feel welcome in. Basements are a ludicrous choice. A place for storing things one will keep without controls for a long time, a place for engines like water heaters and central air that send energies and matter all through the home. Summoning spirits in your basement is barely any better than summoning them right into your bedroom.

Next, a living room with sumptuous couches in red leather and black velvet pillows. And lastly, the bedroom. My bedroom. A floor-length mirror with silver frames filled by profiles of flowing-haired women, heads thrown back in agony or ecstasy. A massive oval bed heaped with golden cushions, pink silk sheets, black velvet coverlet, with a headboard engraved in symbols I... symbols I just about recognize.

Yes. That's the Seal of Telnaiah. A circle encasing a maze comprised of three corridors top to bottom and six side to side, all tightening closer together until they open onto the center. A maze with no way out. Corridors you just find yourself in, wandering, until an end you'll have to come to, sooner or later, no matter how long you walk. I didn't understand then why that idea held such dark allure.

I close the bedroom door. Seal it with every bolt it has just for the joy of feeling all nine of them clank into place. I sink onto soft pillows beneath a black headboard centered by the teenage symbol of my reckoning with my own mortality.

I sleep without dreams, but deeper and more sweetly than I have since I was a little girl. I spend the first three hours of my morning reclining in my living room, toying with the idea of opening my deep red curtains to find out what's the other side.

Any view I want, I suspect. Just about any place in the whole universe.

My refrigerator's well-stocked, so too the pantry. I make myself coffee--I suppose I'm too American a witch to start my day with tea--and some chocolate croissants that are just there, neatly encased under a glass cover on my counter, the moment I decide I want them.

Once I'm ready, I step out. I'm too busy musing on my moaning flesh-key and its squishy, dripping intercourse with my door's lock to react the way I should at the sound of running feet. When I turn to look, startled, my left hand drifts out towards the sound by instinct.

That's how it comes to meet a metal shine and the cry of dismay that follows it.

It's such a quiet thing, the crossing of a threshold. It can be as silent and inevitable as deciding that you're open to whatever you find on the other side. As somber as the accidental bite of a long knife through a white sleeve and the off-white wrist beneath. As tranquil as the shining rivers of silver blood, turned dark at their uneven borders by hallway reflections, that poor down the wrist I hold up before my eyes in bemusement.

I should be violently ill. It's not a matter of willpower. Ever since college, I've suffered from violent vagal responses to the sight of my own blood. Even a few drops would put me on my knees or on my side. Blanched. Trembling. Sweating. Holding back my vomit.

Wound me and I became more helpless.

Now that response is nowhere. Amaranth Dawson, the human girl, her mother's hapless Millennium Child, is dead. I am the witch Moonsilver. At some point I may cut open my own skull to take notes on my brain. For the present, I'm just pleased to be free of human brain tissue and its stifling pre-programmed responses. What a useless instinct it is to be sickened at harm to one's self! Isn't that the moment when it's most vital that we are calm?

The flaws of human instinct are the strongest argument for souls. At long last, that insight is as easy to hold as it should be. I watch, calm but for a little whisper of arousal tickling in my belly, as hot streams pour down my skin and stain my gown's sleeve.

"I'm so sorry!" the doll babbles. I know it's a doll before I see its segmented joints, and the odd quirks of the blushing pink plastic under its bob of blood-red hair. A witch knows a doll's presence. These things simply are, just as it simply is that I know them.

"Calm." I motion to it. "Just take that same knife, cut off the hem of your dress, and use it to wrap my wound. A cut crosswise to the arm like this, right at the wrist, won't be the death of me. It looks worse than it is."

It quivers, but obeys. The fine edge hisses at the wavy white lice until it's all sheared away from her black apron.

"Do you have anything to use as padding?" I ask. "A clean washcloth you were taking back to a room, perhaps?"

"Y-yes, mistress!" it rifles through the contents of its cart, finds a little hand-towel, and hurriedly wraps my wrist. "I-is this really sterile?'

"No." I grin. "But I have the gift of unraveling. Tearing open the cell-walls of a few million bacteria is no great challenge. Though I doubt they could do much harm, anyway, to a witch of silver blood." I trail off, contemplating that. Silver's power against monsters seems more like a human superstition than anything else. There's no sense of practical sympathetic magic to it, nor any power of intent to give it real weight. It's a rote practice. Something people do as to not be afraid.

Still... it feels like an ill omen.

"Why were you running with a knife in the halls? Why didn't you put it on your cart instead of carrying it in your hand?" The doll wilts under my gaze.

"Forgive this one, mistress," it whimpers. "It... it panicked. Head Doll Hue says that the House has told her there needs to be a big dinner to welcome you, and introduce you to the other witches, and our guests, and... and Slivers was really upset that her knife wasn't cutting the meat well enough, so doll yelled at this one to hurry and sharpen it... this one was afraid that the edge would get damaged by the cart, somehow..."

A dinner? For me? A dinner just to welcome me and make me feel at home? That's too good to be true.

After all, this doll's already extracted a blood sacrifice from me in exchange. Albeit accidentally. Oh, but look at the poor thing. It's carrying too much pressure. It's not the doll's fault.

"I forgive you." I pat its little head. "Get that knife to the kitchen and make sure you clean it--oh." I fill myself with that pressure. I feel it thrumming between my clasping right hand, filling the envelop of space I make between them to pass the knife's blade through. Particles of my blood collapse into dust and then disintegrate entirely. "There. Now, rinse it well with lots of soap and water just to be sure. I won't lie to Hue about what just happened, but I will pass her my opinion that doll lost control under pressure."

A final pat. "On your way now, little one."

It squirms. "Y-yes, mistress! Thank you!" The doll hurries back on its way, leaving me to the stinging in my wrist and the mystery of what to do with today.

I learn straight away that Metronome House does a lot with impossible space. Every corridor I walk shifts aesthetically away from the previous ones. A stately Georgian sitting room gives way to an older Renaissance bathhouse. That blends, in turn, into an off-kilter fusion of a gothic cathedral's many-pewed hall and a Victorian opera house.

I've never studied architecture. I just know these styles. The right names come to me out of the air... oh? Is this, too, a form of unraveling? Sometimes I can just take hold of the strands of ideas and pull them into me?

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True witches are so much more powerful than I ever dreamed. I am so much more powerful than ever I dreamed!

The old social justice corner of my brain makes some whiny sounds about living somewhere this opulent while people back on Earth are starving and bereft of healthcare. You know what? That's such a strange idea in a place like this that it's just the sort of question a witch should ask!

The next time I spot a doll--our paths crossing in a region of shelves and shelves and shelves stocked with just a few cardboard boxes containing nothing, which I'm pretty sure is part of the back rooms--I pull her close by her clattering ceramic arm. Right up against me. "You." I feel my cheeks splitting open, bleeding silver at the raw broadness of my grin. "You are a servant of Metronome House, yes?"

"Y-yes?" she babbles. "Where else would we b-be?"

"Ha!" I grin even wider. Scalding streaks of tearing flesh, aching stabs of cracking teeth, run back across my face and inside my jaw. Fleshy squelches fill my ears while hot silver dribbles down my jaw and spatters on my breasts and gown. Oh, it hurts so sweetly! Looks like all that self-shaming didn't quench my masochist streak one bit. Just buried it deep. Glad to have it back!

After holding this silence, and the doll, for much longer than a human would find comfortable. My response comes through manic-fracture teeth and trickling pink gums. "Where else would we be? You don't want to know!"

"M-mistress, please," the doll whimpers. It's a cold shock back to my senses.

"Oh." I release her. "I-I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me--"

"N-n-no!" she clarifies, waving her pretty tan-painted hands. "That's not what I meant! J-just... this one has many chores to tend to... p-perhaps you c-c-could ring for her, later?"

"Ohhhhhhh." I grin again. Now I get it. "You're a very good doll, you know that?" She quivers. I reward her with a pat on her little blond head. "We'll have plenty of time, little doll. Take care of your schedule. I'm not in the mood for that sort of play just yet, anyway."

My eyes settle on one of her hands. I point to it. "You can get those replaced, yes?"

She quivers. "Y-yes, mistress. We have an in-house repair doll."

A long, salivating tongue curls over my many-split lips. Loose drops spatter on the concrete floor, hissing and bubbling. "Can I have one?"

She squirms. "I... I would like that very much, mistress--n-not that my opinion matt--"

I interrupt her by seizing her hand, dragging it to my mouth, and severing it with a single lecherous crunch. She screams in ecstatic pain, quaking, dropping to her knees.

I chew, relishing the little slices her ceramics make at the insides of my cheeks as I grind them up, and finally send the mass of shards to disintegrate in my belly with a throat-carving swallow. "Ahhhhhh." I wipe the blood from my lips and brush it off into her hair. A last head-rub in reward. "That's a good doll. Go get yourself fixed up, then finish those chores."

She makes a mewling sound, bows while trembling so violently she rattles, and darts away. I continue my explorations.

For a witch, or at least, a witch who thinks like I do, it's pretty easy to figure out some fundamentals. If I pull my room key out and walk with it, the next corner I turn will always bring me back to my own hallway. I make a mental note that this is exactly the sort of rule that always falls apart at the worst time, so if there's ever a crisis--a shadowy force attacks the place, for example--I should assume this won't work anymore.

I learn that there are powers other than witches and dolls moving in the depths of Metronome House. At one point, my passage across a cozy hotel corridor--complete with golden lighting and just-cleaned carpeting--is prevented by marching ranks of soldiers. I'm no history buff, but I've seen enough to know these are World War One-era German uniforms. Lots of them. It doesn't take long before I notice the first leering, burned flesh around jagged teeth in the cavern made by a ripped gas mask.

Bullet wounds, throats so shredded that I can see spinal columns bending behind what's left of skin and meat. All marching somewhere as though I don't exist.

"Uh, excuse me?" I step back and forth along the line of march. They're packed so tightly I can't see a way through. "Gentlemen?" I take a deep breath. Thank you, studying abroad... "Soldaten!" I bark. Their faces snap towards me but the march does not stop. On and on, the dead legion's ranks pass me by--grinding themselves to dust against the halting problem of the question, 'What's the price of a mile?'

I sigh and unfold my hands towards the far side of the hallway intersection. "Darf ich? Bitte?"

The next rank to approach the intersection slams to a dead halt with a single thunderous step. It echoes back through all the ranks behind them, going and going and going. The rank ahead marches on for five steps--enough that the extra space they leave makes me doubly conscious of how close the back rank is. They stand, every dead man staring straight ahead without a sound or the slightest shift

"Vielen danke," I breathe, scurrying through. I'm pretty sure I could take a few ghosts. Maybe ten. Maybe even a hundred. But there are so, so, so many.

Wearing down a super-powered being by raw attrition... I'd never even thought of that before. The idea tugs uncomfortably at my mind. Things to unpack there, later.

By the time I round the next corner, the dead still haven't resumed their march.

I'm so hung up on what just happened, and the implications it might or might not have for the social order of this bizarre City, that I walk right past another figure as she hurries in the opposite direction up the hall from me.

She and I whirl to face each other at the same time. She's hunched, low, wearing a patchwork of human skins. I realize now that the only thing which ever bothered me about such things was knowing how much I'd be shunned if humans knew they didn't bother me. Her face is asymmetrical, mouths stretching vertically up it where one of her eyes should be while the other side is a miniature mountain range of bony knobs.

The center of that face is an entire ridgeline of noses, their tips pushed down and blended together so it's all just nostrils and creases. Her hair is a swirling, many-spoked corona of glimpses at grey skies, winter-bare black branches, and red brick walls.

"Thank goodness," I breathe. "Another witch."

She squints at me. "You're new to this, aren't you, dearie?"

"Oh, no, I fully expect you to fuck me over the literal nanosecond our interests clash," I say. "This is an empty spaces kind of thing, right? We're those sort of witches?" I pat my chest. "I grew up on Twitter, you know. I've already been fully trained."

She looks me up and down. "The bird, eh? I've heard rumors of that accursed dimension. Explains a lot about how you got here." She turns. "Seems you've got the right idea, then."

"Hopefully!" I agree, feeling pretty chipper. "My name's Moonsilver. I'm the witch who just got here last night. I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm pretty sure that'd be a threat at this stage in our relationship."

"Quick learner!" she laughs. "I'm Brixy. The elder witch of Metronome House. Now eldest, I suppose." She cocks her head. Her eye-mouth contorts as though narrowing. "Affiliated with silver, are you?"

"Yep!" I hold up my bandaged wrist. "Doll made a stupid mistake earlier. Very cute. So now I know I even bleed silver."

Brixy nods. "Intriguing. That's ill-omened."

I sigh. "Yes, I thought as much."

She turns. "Come on, then. Let's walk 'til we reach that little dinner for your honor. Pass the time in talk." I fall in behind her as a mutter follows on. "... not sure what that empty spaces business is about, haven't heard something that strange since that extremely racist dreamwalker kept trying to tell me my name was Keziah Mason--"

"Oh my god!" I clap my hands to my face so hard I almost don't notice how sharp my bones have started to feel. "You met H.P. Lovecraft! That's fucking hilarious!" I draw even with her and nudge her shoulder. "Hey. Be straight with me. You think he was some kind of screwed-up egg?"

She side-eyes me without breaking stride. "I think that's the sort of fool assumption made by someone who's definitely an egg."

The admission I've been dancing around since my chat with Hannah finally billows up and enters my voice. "Yeah, uh... I think I'm some kind of demon egg. A demon... another demon? Suggested as much, and I feel like it fits, so..." I trail off.

She pokes my shoulder. "Shouldn't have told me that."

A roll of my eyes, a dramatic toss of my head. "Calm down. I can take care of myself."

Brixy turns and stops, suddenly enough I almost bump into her. "Look, little witchling. I've been where you are. I know what it's like, getting a taste of true power after being muffled and chained and starved by your birth-world all those long and hateful years. Not social power, not monetary power, not even the proxy-power of a sharp edge or shot and shell. The realest kind. The kind where you don't tell things to change. You want change, so you make changes. Simple. Clean. Inevitable."

She presses a gnarled finger and its spiraling nail to my collarbone. "'Tis intoxicating, I know. But don't forget that you're still a young thing and a small, and the universe is old and immense and full of old immense things. Among humans, aye, you might be close enough on invincible. But out here, you're still fresh meat to most." She lowers her hand.

"The things you say on impulse, the things you think are too meaningless to be used against you, tend to be the deepest and truest--things so vital it's hard to explain them even to yourself. So if you don't know yet what you're doing with an idea, why it calls to you, don't be putting it out whether others can see. They're like to twist it, and you with it if you're not careful!"

I reflect on that, and choose not to ask her the dumb question I had bubbling in the back of my psyche--that is, whether or not Azathoth, or something like Azathoth, is real.

"Thank you, Brixy." I risk a small smile. "I think you might just be a good witch."

"Aye." She looks away. "Fought it for a long time. It's made my days a living hell, often as not. But... better to spend every day in hell than try to be something I don't want to."

"Yeah." I sink further into my thoughtless, self-unknowing self, and the sounds of our footsteps thudding gently against the carpet.

Finally we pass through a doorway of fine, dark-finished wood into a dining room with green floral-print walls, cabinets full of pretty porcelain--and one disassembled doll for flavor--and an old-fashioned radio playing Moon River. Hepburn's original, of course.

The witches' dinner in my honor is an understated affair, but quite satisfying. Hue is there to attend us, as is the pink-and-red doll that wounded my wrist. I'm introduced to the middle witch of Metronome House, Tandra Pentam. She's quaint, British, and largely invisible beneath heaps and heaps and heaps of ragged black cloth. Anyone layer would be see-through, but with so many together they're totally opaque.

Only her lips--at least seven intersecting pairs of them, all full of crystalline-green needle-teeth--are visible through the hazy aperture made by the single layer covering her jawline.

I know straight away that she's the one who'll betray us all if it comes to it. Accordingly, I fall deeply and irretrievably in love with her on the spot. I love being a witch so, so much!

Dinner's quiet, but ample. The dolls place one dish after another in front of me, and this is how I find out that my stomach is effectively infinite. I inhale a plate of lamb in gravy over potatoes mashed full of butter and chives, bread stuffed full of cheese and salami and rosemary and garlic, seafood pasta in a sweet pink sauce, so many glasses of wine from Chardonnays to Rieslings to Pinot Noir--my alcohol tolerance hasn't changed, but there's no longer a limit to how drunk I can get before I get nauseous.

Being a witch is the beeeeeessssst...

I finally settle down with a round of deserts. First, strudel! It's sweet, crispy, fresh out of the oven. It doesn't have to scald my mouth, but I want it to, so it does.

"Newspapers exist here?" I ask Brixy, who's reading one.

"In Metronome House, aye." She turns the page. "They just appear on their own in the mailbox out front. Written, paid for, and delivered by no one. Never have figured out how the House gathers knowledge to it. It's full of odds and ends from many worlds. City news is the focus, of course." She frowns with every mouth. "Those fools out of Gravada are trying to make some harmony again, are they? Best of luck to them. Hope their deaths are quick and no more painful than they can enjoy."

I keep eating, quietly. I accept a cup of lavender tea from a doll along with a plate of assorted cakes.

"You all know that great dirty barrier sealing us off from the old human Earth?" Brixy asks.

"The great unmaking?" Tandra intones.

"The death of dreams?" I supply.

"The end of abyss?" Tandra follows.

"The--" I begin.

"Yes, yes, that!" Brixy snaps. "Just have your sexually-charged rivalry already, you young fools!" She flaps the newspaper to put it back in shape. Her finger raps the pages. "Well, anyway, says right here that it just ended."

"It could, of course, be a trap." I punctuate my observation with a slow sip of tea.

"Aye. It quite well could," Brixy agrees.

"Indeed." Tandra takes a sip of her own.

Silence descends. I place another delicate bite of cheesecake between my lips. Chewing softly. Letting it melt in my acid saliva. I swallow. Sigh happily. Dab my lips with my napkin.

All of our chairs slam to the floor at the same time as we bolt for the door. My excited power burns all the alcohol right out of me. In this, three witches have an accord: if the spheres are converging at long last, then our place is right in the middle of it.

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