The Abigail Incident

Two lions hiked east between the country road and the corn field. There was no one to see them—they had selected this route for privacy—but a hypothetical observer would have had much to think about.

First, of course, was the mere fact of two lions roaming the American countryside. But if the hypothetical observer was well-informed, they would have seen these were not African lions or cougars; they were American lions, Panthera atrox, extinct since the end of the Ice Age, so big that their shoulders were nearly level with a man’s.

They were not identical. One was longer, leaner, and dark on legs, tail, and head, like an immense Siamese cat, though its eyes were golden brown. The other, stockier one had barely any color points and a coat of light fawn. Its eyes were blue.

If not as remarkable as extinct lions in broad daylight, it was still odd that both were wearing backpacks. Certainly as remarkable, or more so, was the fact that the two were marching in cadence together, whistling the “Colonel Bogey” march from Bridge Over the River Kwai.

After the fifth repetition, the blond lion, Gus, asked, “How can we talk and whistle with these lips?” His voice was a husky tenor.

“I’ve no idea,” the dark-pointed lion, Doug, answered. “Want to go back and ask him about it?”

Gus snorted and glanced over his shoulder, back west along their path. He did not bother to say no. Instead, he began singing the Cowardly Lion’s song from The Wizard of Oz:

“Yeah, it’s sad, believe me, Missy,
  When you're born to be a sissy
  Without the vim and verve.
  But I could show my prowess,
  Be a lion, not a mowess
  If I only had the nerve.”

“See?” said Doug. “You sing just fine.” Gus was self-conscious about the huskiness of his voice, and only the boredom of a long trip had got him singing show tunes, privately, with his best friend.

“You’ve been over-exposed to me. What next? That’s the only song I know about lions.”

The dark-pointed lion immediately began to sing, in a powerful baritone:

“In the jungle, the mighty jungle
 The lion sleeps tonight.
 In the jungle, the quiet jungle,
 The lion sleeps tonight…”

“Oh, yeah,” said Gus, remembering. He began singing backup: “Wingle-whip a-wingle-whip a-wingle-whip–”

“What? It’s ‘a-winda-wok a-winda-wok.’ Or ‘weem-a-way’ or something. What’s ‘wingle-whip’? It sounds like a spread made from prunes.”

“Aw, don’t talk about food! Even prune whip. I’m so hungry! But I don’t want to chase anything down. Besides, I wouldn’t trust things from this field. Pesticides. Fertilizers.”

“Oh, hey! You may not have to. Civilization ahead.” Doug tried to point with a forepaw, which made him stumble, so he nodded instead, indicating a grain silo peeking above the corn.

“Great! With a little luck, that’ll be Abigail.” This was the town they were making for.

Soon, the back-county road ended at a T intersection. To the right, at the intersection of the crossing road and a small highway, stood a small building that, from the signage, looked like a restaurant. They approached, skulking behind the corn stalks until they could get a good look at the sign: wooden, flat white, bearing a hand-painted cartoon chicken, yellow and grinning, and the words

Yum Bird

HOME OF CHICKEN THINGS

“Gotta be better than rabbit,” Gus stated.

“I dunno…”

“Underdone rabbit.”

“But–”

“Or gopher.”

“Okay,” Doug conceded. He shivered, rippled, shrank and blanched, and became a young Asian man, big and lean, crouching naked in the corn stalks. Gus, meanwhile, became a sandy-haired young white man, likewise naked.

They shrugged out of their backpacks. From these they removed underwear, jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Doug had long hair; he pulled it back into a high-set ponytail. Gus’s hair was just collar-length; he combed it out with a pocket comb. Both combed out the bushy muttonchop side whiskers they wore. Then they loaded their pockets with wallets and phones, checked for traffic, emerged from the corn, and approached the Yum Bird.

Inside, the high-school girl behind the counter was surprised and giggly and a bit nervous to have two big, male strangers as her only customers during this slack time. She stared a little at Doug. She confirmed that they were on the border of the town of Abigail, then readily produced two buckets of “chicken things.” These turned out to be thighs and drumsticks and breast chunks in a salty, peppery crust—totally ordinary but a big relief from rabbit and gopher.

Gus and Doug ate both buckets and split a third, sitting on repurposed kitchen chairs at a plastic table and reveling in air conditioning. At their request, the girl brought over two bottles of beer. “I don’t think I’m s’posed to,” she told them, giggling again. “I’m under age. But there’s no one else here.”

“We won’t tell,” said Gus, grinning.

“I think those rules only apply if you open the beer bottle,” said Doug, opening the beer bottle.

“The town has a park, right?” asked Gus.

“A little one,” the girl admitted.

“Who would we see about using it for a circus?”

“Circus?!”

“Yeah,” said Doug. “We work in a circus. We’ve been away, training, but we’re meeting up with them in Great Bend. We’re always looking for new places to put on a show.”

“Oh! That’d be cool! With clowns and elephants and things?”

“Well, no elephants,” Doug admitted. “We’re a pretty little circus. But performing dogs and cats, and trick riders.”

“Acrobats,” Gus put in. “And magicians. And clowns, definitely. Hey,” he asked of Doug, “are we clowns or acrobats?”

“Acrobats,” Doug answered. “We’re not funny enough to be clowns.” He turned back to the girl. “Anyway, who would we ask?”

The girl shrugged. “The mayor, I guess.”

“Where’s town hall?”

“Just keep following the highway. You’ll come to that park, and town hall’s on one side of it. You walking?”

Doug smiled a little ruefully and Gus said, “We’ve hiked and hitched all the way from the Rockies.”

“In those?” she asked, a little incredulously, nodding at the flip-flops on their feet.

“Barefoot, usually,” Gus said. “But don’t restaurants want you to wear shoes?”

“Oh. Uh…” She shrugged again. “Get you anything else?”

“What have you got for dessert?” Doug asked.

“Ah. Well, you are in luck. My mom did a big batch of cookies this morning.” These were broad and thick and well-stocked with chocolate chips and peanut bits. They shared a dozen and washed them down with ice water. Then they thanked and tipped the girl, and headed for downtown Abigail.

—

“So far, so ordinary,” Gus remarked.

“Yeah, no big Shadow Over Innsmouth vibe.”

“Just you wait till sundown, when the chicken people come out!”

“And gather at the park to worship Poultrulhu! Ow. First pebble. Why does anyone wear flip-flops?” Doug halted, removed his footwear, and put it in his backpack. He re-shouldered the pack and took out his phone. “Let’s see if we have coverage.” While Gus also divested himself of flip-flops, Doug called the Amazing Madame Theano (Irma Vogel), stage magician, fortune teller, and one of the owners and operators of the Windy City Fantasy Circus. “We’re in Abigail,” he told her, then put the phone on speaker and held it out as he and Gus strolled down the highway shoulder.

“Oh, good. Anything interesting?”

“Their fried chicken compares very favorably with rabbit you’ve hunted down yourself as an extinct lion, then cooked over a campfire but not quite enough. Actually, we were hoping you had some more information for us.”

“Sorry, no. Let’s see. Maybe I could do some horary calculations. Can you say how many people you’ve seen since you came to town?”

“One.”

“How many cars have passed you since you arrived?”

“None.”

“One and zero. Huh.” Theano was a Pythagorean, therefore a numerologist, and extracted unreasonable amounts of information from numbers, but this was little to work from. “Any big buildings?”

Gus chimed in. “What d’ya call big? There’s a grain elevator. One building with three stories; everything else is shorter. Coupla churches with steeples.”

“What kind of churches?” Theano asked, sounding interested.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Gus. “I can’t see from here, but I’ll be surprised if they aren’t just Methodist or some kind of Baptist. We’re not talkin’ about a cult of Dagon or anything.”

Theano sighed. “How about a Masonic hall? Those can be interesting.”

“We’re just on the edge of town,” Doug objected. “How could we tell?”

“Sometimes there are signs at the town line.”

“No signs,” Doug told her. “Can you pull anything out of what we’ve given you?”

“I’ll try.” She changed the subject. “You’ve really gone hunting as lions?”

“We have indeed,” Doug told her. “Practicing how to use the new shapes. And how to take the shapes, too, of course.”

“Saves money on food and lodging,” Gus added.

“What kind of practice?” she asked.

“Running and jumping. Climbing. Play-fighting.”

“While weighing half a ton each,” Irma remarked. “That must be pretty spectacular. Did he ever explain why he taught you an extinct species?”

“Sorta,” said Gus. “He said the ‘animal powers’ wouldn’t mind something extinct, but they wouldn’t want us to copy something alive. When we asked who the ‘animal powers’ were, he just smirked and didn’t answer. Shamans’ trade secrets, I guess.”

“Okay. Something new to worry about. Send us pictures of you as lions, when you get the chance.”

“Okay,” said Doug. “I’d better sign off now. It’s been a while since this phone got charged.”

“Text us,” Gus said, “if you come up with anything more concrete.” All she had given them, so far, was that there was something to investigate in Abigail.

“Will do,” she said, and hung up.

They made their way past ranch-style houses banked up against the corn fields, then through a little gridwork of streets, to the park in the middle. Streets and park were well-planted with trees, the first they had seen since leaving the copse they had slept in.

The park had a swing set and a slide on a patch of bare dirt. The three-story building turned out to be the town hall and police station, and fronted on the park. It was dark red brick and looked exactly like any number of other boxy brick buildings that had apparently been planted all across the Midwest in the nineteenth century. They put their flip-flops back on and entered.

They had seen quite a few more people by now, but the interior of the town hall was nearly empty. The mayor’s office was shut and silent. They settled on the office of the town clerk.

The clerk was a thin middle-aged lady with bright eyes, who was far more interested in the two strange young men than in the work on the laptop before her. Her desk sign identified her as “Catherine Crowell.” “Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’ve got a kind of funny question,” Gus told her. “How do we get permission to put on a circus here?”

She smiled at them and looked puzzled. Doug handed her a business card and said, “We work for the Windy City Fantasy Circus. We were off training, but now we’re meeting up with them in Great Bend, and they asked us to scout around for places where they could put on shows. And we wondered if, say, we could use the park out there.” He pointed over her desk toward the window.

“Oh! Well! It must be a hundred years since the circus came to town, if it ever did. Hm. I think I know which licenses to give you, to fill out, but approving them is up to the town council. The mayor is on the council, of course, but he’s not the only one, though he brings most of the motions before it. But the council won’t meet again until next month, and the mayor is away just now. Maybe you should take the forms with you and mail them back here after you fill them out.” She got up, rummaged through folders, and presented Doug with a small sheaf of papers. He thanked her and put them in his backpack.

“You might have better luck asking to use the school playground, if you’re here in the summer,” Mrs. Crowell said. “Or get a farmer to rent you the use of a pasture. Though I would love to see a circus tent out there.” She looked out the window at the park.

“It’s a little circus,” Gus warned her. “We don’t have a bigtop. Some small tents, and we do as much as we can outdoors.”

“No elephants and lion-tamers?” she asked wistfully.

“’Fraid not. It’s awful hard to get permission for wild animals now, anyway. But we have trained dogs and cats, and trick riders on horseback. And clowns and acrobats and musicians. Jugglers and magicians. Stage magicians.”

“And we encourage locals to sell their crafts and food,” Doug added. “And to put on their own shows.”

“Sounds sort of like a ren-fair,” Mrs. Crowell remarked. “Or an English fête. I wish you the best of luck. What do you two do in the circus?”

“We’re performers,” said Gus. “Stunt men. We put on mock battles—karate, sword fightin’, and stuff—and act as straight-men for the clowns in some of their routines. Act the bad guys for some of the trick rider skits.”

“Sword fighting?” Mrs. Crowell echoed, sounding impressed.

“Yeah,” Gus answered. “It’s the fantasy circus, so the theme is medieval fantasy. We dress up as, uh…” He groped for the words.

“As knights and monsters,” Doug picked up. “Or even monster knights. We fight each other and we pick people out of the audience and play-fight them, too. And we give sword lessons and archery lessons to the crowd.”

“But it’s just the one lesson, and then you leave town,” she objected.

Doug shrugged. “Some people enjoy it. Gives them a taste. Maybe they go on to take it up for real.”

“Kids love playin’ with swords,” Gus remarked. “We got a whole set of rubber ones for that.”

“Mm. When my son was eight… Do you do light-sabers?” she asked.

They laughed. “Wrong franchise,” said Doug. “Maybe someday.”

She fingered the business card Doug had handed her. “Can you give me half a dozen more of these? I’ll pass them out to council members. And put one in the mayor’s door, so he sees it as soon as he gets back.”

“We’ll do it. Where’s the mayor’s house?” asked Doug.

“Right across the park from here.” She pointed out the window. “See the light gray one?”

They thanked her, gave her some cards, and left.

—

“Short commute,” Gus remarked after they made the brief stroll across the park and mounted the two steps onto the mayor’s porch.

Doug nodded, took out a card, and poised his hand over the door, to tuck it into the window frame. But he paused, looked to the left, and said, “Oh!”

“What?” asked Gus, then turned, looked, and also said, “Oh!”

The house to the left had been painted white but it was hardly white any longer. The paint peeled so much that it was better called “speckled.” The curtains of all the second floor windows were drawn. Nothing else could be seen because a tall hedge blocked the view. It was neatly trimmed on the mayor’s side, but the top, beyond a man’s reach, was shaggy.

It was not the appearance that drew their attention, though. The first magical skill they had been taught was detecting magic and recognizing different kinds of it. The house next door rang, reeked, blazed, bristled with it. When you began noticing magic, it came as something between an imagining and an hallucination. Magical items or people working it might seem shiny, or radiating heat or cold, or smelling of spice, or the like. But after a while, it became its own signal.

Now, to Doug and Gus, it was as if the speckled house had had signs nailed up all over it, which had then been torn down, leaving behind, not the print, but the meaning. They studied this invisible script for some seconds.

“That’s… that’s a lot of…” Doug trailed off.

“We must be standing—what?—six or eight yards from that house,” Gus said, “and we can pick it up no problem. And whatever’s doing the magic could be a ways inside.”

“Did the magic,” Doug corrected. “I don’t think anything’s running now. Just traces. Residues.”

“A lot of residues! I … think … it’s mostly glamour.”

“Yeah. I wonder, does the house even really look like that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, now we know what Theano picked up on her radar.”

Gus agreed. “Let’s try to get some more information out of Mrs. Crowell.”

Doug nodded. “She seems agreeable.” They walked back, considering.

Catherine Crowell had seen them cross and re-cross the park, and so was not surprised to see them back. “We were thinking,” Doug told her, “about what you said about getting the use of the school playground instead. Could you tell us where the school is? And do we fill out another set of forms for it?”

“Oh, I think you can fit the playground on the same forms with the park,” she said cheerfully. “School’s at the edge of town. Here.” She pulled out a blank sheet of paper and began sketching a map.

While she worked, Gus said, “That’s quite a neighbor Mayor Blakemore has.” They had seen the name on the porch mailbox.

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Crowell. “I think she’s the reason he goes off on vacation so often. Not that his wife and kids object. (What is that road called?)” She turned to her computer to find the name.

“Can’t he, y’know, do something? I mean, he’s the mayor.”

Mrs. Crowell turned back from the computer and wrote names on the map. “Actually, he can’t. There’s no law against letting your house turn into a dump. Another mayor might throw his weight around and pressure Dolores unofficially, but not Ed Blakemore. Not his character, and anyway he knows folks in Abigail don’t like a mayor to throw his weight around. This way, at least, he gets some sympathy. There.” She offered them her map.

“Is this Dolores even there?” Doug asked. “The place looked deserted.”

“Oh, yes. It’s been months since I saw her, but the folks who leave the bars at closing time often see her wandering up and down the main street, looking in store windows.”

“I didn’t notice any bars,” Gus remarked. “Not that I was looking.”

“There are a couple. Every town has ’em, I guess. And every town has a recluse, and Dolores Graves is ours. Gotta say, she doesn’t cause any trouble. Not really. Well. I really shouldn’t be talking like this, but– I guess I was venting. It’s just puzzling. Poor soul should really be pitied.”

“Maybe we can lure her out with the circus,” said Doug. He and Gus smiled and left.

—

They followed the map toward the school for a couple of blocks, then, with one accord, made a series of right turns through the town’s neat little grid of streets and approached the mayor’s neighbor from behind.

“Fake name,” said Doug while on their walk.

“Why do you say that?”

“‘Dolores Graves’?”

“They’re both real names,” Gus said.

“Yes, but ‘Dolores’ means ‘sorrowful.’ Put it together with ‘Graves’ and give it to the reclusive resident of the creepy house, and it smells.”

Gus nodded comprehension. “Name magic?” he asked. Doug shrugged. They knew name magic existed but nothing more.

Their circuit brought them by the house of Dolores Graves’s backyard neighbor. “Wish we’d learned to turn into sparrows, or something like that,” said Gus. “None of our shapes are all that great for spying.”

Doug nodded and did his best to scope out the area without looking conspicuous, as did Gus. There was a tall wooden fence between the Graves back yard and the neighboring back yard. While the neighbor had respectable yellow siding, a mown lawn, and bits of garden, the Graves house from this side showed the same peeling white and curtained windows. Tips of tall weeds barely cleared the fence. The neighbor on the opposite side from Mayor Blakemore was defended by another fence.

“I predict,” said Gus, “that the back yard is packed solid with weeds, and bein’ sparrows wouldn’t give us a lot more information. Unless you felt inclined to fly down the chimney.”

‘You’re probably right. Let’s make ourselves honest and go see the school.”

On their walk, they called Theano again, this time on Gus’s phone. She was delighted when they relayed their experiences. “I don’t suppose you could go back and get her full name? Maybe birth date?”

“Uh… I think that’d be more a matter of cat-burgling than chatting up the town clerk,” said Gus.

“You’re in a better position to cyber-stalk this Dolores Graves than we are,” Doug said.

“I suppose so,” said Theano glumly.

“I got her house number,” Doug offered, and recited it. Theano thanked him perfunctorily.

“We’ll try to figure out a reason to hang around town, at least over night,” said Gus. “That’s when she comes out.”

“And night is your best time,” added Theano brightly.

“Hmh,” Gus grunted.

“Neither man nor dragon-cat nor cave lion is really inconspicuous,” Doug pointed out, “even in the dark.”

“But you can see in the dark,” Theano countered. “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said, with the bright confidence of one who does not have to do it.

They said goodbye and sauntered on to the school. It was a small, flat building between thinly spaced housing and corn fields. The schoolyard had recently been treeless, though three young trees were practicing shading the grounds now. They surveyed the place critically.

“If we did bring the circus here,” said Doug, “there’d be plenty of room. And maybe they’d let us hook up to the plumbing.”

“Kids get a kick from doing un-school stuff at school,” Gus remarked. “If we’re really coming back here.”

“Depends on what’s going on with Dolores, I suppose,” said Doug. “I mean, if she’s building a mad-science super-weapon in her basement or training her weeds to attack on command, and we can’t thwart her, we’ll want to call in the whole gang. Otherwise, I guess Theano and Rook just decide on non-magical grounds if it’s worth a stop.” Professor Rook (Dennis Vogel) was the other owner/manager of the Windy City Fantasy Circus.

The circus was a front. It was a real business and put on real shows, but it was staffed by folk with magical talents, and sought out towns where magical trouble was brewing, as determined by Theano and Rook, using their own talents. The circus folk then coped with whatever they found.

Doug and Gus schemed a little as they made their way back to the park and town hall. There, instead of visiting Catherine Crowell again, they went to the police station, tucked into a quarter of the bottom floor. There they found a middle-aged cop, tall, with little girth and less hair, sitting behind a desk with a sign that said he was Police Chief Grainger Evertson.

He looked at them curiously. He looked a little longer at Doug, since Asians were not thick on the ground in the Great Plains, but Doug detected no hostility in the glance. Nonetheless, he left it to Gus to start: “Hello, sir. We wanted to introduce ourselves. I’m Gus Weisskopf.”

“I’m Doug Cheung.”

“We’re not vagrants, but we’re on a long hike. We’re on our way to Great Bend, to meet up with our employers.” Gus proffered one of the circus business cards.

“You are on a long hike,” Evertson agreed, taking the card. “Where from?”

“A little town up in the Rockies.”

“Very long,” Evertson said, and waited.

“Yessir. So, the thing is, we’d like a little rest. We’d like to stay in Abigail a couple of nights. But, as you might guess, since we’re hiking so much, we’d rather not spend money on lodging. Is there a place around here where it’s okay for us to camp?”

Evertson cocked his head, registering a little surprise. “Hm. Well. Can I see some ID?” They pulled out wallets and produced driver’s licenses. Evertson examined these, then took them over to a printer and copied them. As he returned them, he observed to Doug, “American, then.”

Doug nodded. “Fourth generation. From Chicago. There’s a big Chinatown there.”

“Me, too,” said Gus. “Well, Chicago, not Chinatown. We met on the bus out of Chicago, to Fort Leonard Wood.”

Evertson’s eyes lit, and he nodded. Now he had a category for them: army buddies. And by now, he had had time to think about Gus’s question. “I don’t know of anywhere in town you can camp,” he said, “but that’s in town. You been camping out?”

They nodded. “Not much choice, a lot of the time,” Doug added.

“Well, if you don’t mind camping out again, once you’re outside the town line, you’re out of my jurisdiction, and I doubt the state cops will know or care if you just refrain from stealing chickens or like that.” This last was said with a smile.

They smiled back. “Restaurant food was one of the things we were looking forward to,” Gus said.

Evertson nodded. “Town line closest to downtown is to the east.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Doug.

“What do you do in this circus?”

“We’re performers, acrobats,” said Doug. “That’s why the hair and whiskers. Costuming.” And he repeated the run-down Gus had given Mrs. Crowell.

“Knights and monsters,” Evertson repeated. “And ‘monster knights’? What’s that?”

“In modern fantasy,” said Doug, “the good guys aren’t always human. You know, like Treebeard or that talking raccoon. So we re-use the costumes for the monsters to play monster-knights. People like the novelty.” He tried to keep his tone relaxed and not too glib, but this question was nicely in line with their scheming.

“Want to see a demonstration?” Gus asked, on cue.

Evertson blinked and grinned. “That’s mighty generous of you.”

Gus shrugged. “Makes it easier for you to believe us. It’s a little hard, right?”

“Well–”

“And maybe we drum up a little good will for the circus.”

“All right. You mean to do this outside?”

“Yessir. It takes a lot of room.”

“Is there a men’s room nearby, where we can get into costume?” Doug asked.

“You brought your costumes?”

“Yessir. You see, we were off taking training. We have enough of our costumes for a demonstration.” Doug left it to Evertson to suppose that the training and the costumes were related.

—

A few minutes later, motion out the window caught Catherine Crowell’s eye. Looking, she saw two figures in mottled gray racing out into the park. Given her meeting with Gus and Doug earlier in the morning, she assumed these two were them, but the more she looked, the more puzzled she became.

These figures did not look human, not entirely. They had tails, for a start, long, tufted, and leonine. Their heads had muzzles and pointed ears. The long hair and side-whiskers enhanced the leonine effect. And they carried swords and shields—not that this was inhuman, but it was certainly unusual.

It was the swords, though, that convinced her these must be the two young fellows from the circus. And, bestial faces or not, one was black-haired and the other sandy brown. It must be them. She couldn’t see any more detail from here, but that was readily fixed.

She exited town hall and was reassured to see Chief Evertson standing there, watching with interest but no concern. “What’s going on?” she asked him.

“A demonstration,” he told her. “To prove to me they really are acrobats, they tell me, and to do a little advertising for their circus.”

“Oo!”

Gus hammered with his sword on his shield for attention and roared, “Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!” At least, it sounded like Gus. The sword was short but looked very convincing. The shield was small and round, a buckler, the size of a serving tray, blue with a golden lion on it.

Doug whirled his sword over his head so that it glittered in the sunlight, and thundered, “Ladies and gentlemen! Young and old! Draw nigh and see a demonstration of swordsmanship from the Windy City Fantasy Circus!” He held his own buckler high and pounded it. It was silver, with a red lion on it.

“We are the Lion Knights of East and West!” Gus declaimed. “I am Augustus, the Knight of the West.”

“I am Shengming, the Knight of the East,” Doug declared.

It was the middle of a work day, so there were not many adults in the park, but it was summer, so there were several children. They gathered around readily. The town hall began emptying. People started calling friends on their phones. Doug and Gus circled each other back to back, facing the growing crowd, pounding shields and whirling swords in alternation while they waited for the numbers to max out.

In the meanwhile, Mrs. Crowell and Chief Evertson studied the two “knights,” comparing them to Gus and Doug as they had seen them chatting in the town hall.

Their faces were muzzled—very short muzzles, no longer than their noses had been—and lavishly supplied with cat-whiskers reaching as wide as their shoulders. The ears were mounted rather higher than human ones, had their own whiskers protruding from them, cat fashion, and twitched every once in a while. They were breathing hard, so their mouths were open, showing fangs.

“It must be hell in those masks!” Mrs. Crowell remarked. Evertson nodded silently, still staring. When Gus and Doug had visited his office, he had estimated their heights to himself, out of constabulary habit, at around six feet each, and their drivers’ licenses confirmed this. But now they looked even bigger. Seven feet? It was hard to tell, at a distance and with both moving.

He checked their feet for high-heeled boots. But their feet looked bare. They also looked leathery, scaly, like alligator hide, so those had to be shoes. But the heels were as flat as could be.

Their garments were a bit of a puzzle. “They’re not dressed like knights,” Mrs. Crowell remarked. Each wore loose pants and a short robe—a karate gi, in fact, only mottled gray, not plain white. Where throats, chests, and arms were left bare, the skin again looked like alligator hide, though colored normally. “They could just as well be dragon knights as lion knights,” Evertson remarked.

Mrs. Crowell nodded. “Those costumes must be hell! They look so real! How do they do that?” Evertson shook his head.

Out on the lawn, Doug and Gus were not suffering hell in their costumes because their costumes consisted of nothing but their gi. They were, however, at pains to keep moving and keep their distance, to make it hard to realize how big they now were.

Hammering the bucklers would get old soon. “Do we have enough?” Gus asked.

“As many as we’re going to get, I think,” Doug answered.

“How about those two girls standing together? The gigglers. At three o’clock for you.”

“Sure.”

Gus and Doug broke into a run, straight at the two girls, who both looked about fifteen. Twenty feet away, the Lion Knights dove into a tumble, a series of somersaults, with their bucklers tucked to their chests and their swords held out like axles. They ended two yards away from the girls, kneeling, bucklers before them, swords driven synchronously into the grass.

“Fair maidens,” Doug declaimed, good and loud, “the custom is that knights should fight bearing the tokens of their ladies.”

“May we ask tokens of you?” Gus asked, just as loud. The girls were no longer giggling, but staring open-mouthed. They started to look confused. “Just pick us a dandelion each,” Gus told them in a quiet voice. “That’ll be fine.”

One girl plucked and handed a dandelion to Doug, then started giggling again. Her friend, with more sense of theater, presented Gus with one using a sweeping gesture and pressing the weed into his palm—only then noticing the clawed fingers, the scaly forearm, and the spurs on his knuckles. She blinked but still did a bit of a curtsey, as well as wearing jeans allowed.

The Lion Knights responded with toothful smiles, leaped up, and dashed back to the center of the ring that had formed, never giving the girls the chance to see how tall they were. They made a show of tucking the dandelions behind their pointed ears, then held swords and bucklers at the ready.

“On three!” Doug barked.

“One!” Gus roared. “Two! Three!”

Swords crashed on bucklers, swung again and were parried. The combatants circled, then clashed again, circled again. To some observers, it looked sort of like a dance. To a few observers, it looked a lot like a dance, and they might not have been surprised to learn that the Lion Knights usually performed this with Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance racing in the background from the circus loudspeakers. They prowled and stalked each other through the violin passages, leaped and rolled as the tympani would have pounded. In the final descant, they were rolling on the grass, grappling, swords and bucklers lost, then broke apart, sitting on the grass, staring at each other, panting.

“Pax?” asked Gus. “Pax!” answered Doug.

They stood, picked up their swords and bucklers, then bowed to the girls who gave them the dandelions. They faced in opposite directions and bowed to the crowd, which was clapping by now. Finally, they sprinted back into the town hall.

Their long trip from the Rockies had given them an experience of public men’s rooms that made them the more ready to spend time as giant cats in the underbrush. But the one by the police offices was quite clean and even included a small shower. They shed their dragon-cat forms—lungmao, they called them—sluiced off, and dried with thin towels from their backpacks.

“Now we’ll see if that works,” said Doug as he bound up his hair.

“Maybe we won’t have to see if it works,” Gus replied. They intended to spend the night poking about, investigating, and might want to use their lungmao forms. They had reasoned that, if people had seen them as costumed performers earlier in the day, there was less chance that someone who spotted them would simply break out in screams or gunfire.

Of course, there remained the question of why they were snooping about at night, in costume. But that wasn’t a necessarily lethal problem.

“Foxes,” said Doug. “If we could’ve talked him into teaching us foxes, we’d be golden.”

“Yep. Some other time.”

There was a rap at the door followed immediately by Evertson’s entrance. “That was quite a show,” he told them, smiling stiffly. “Your whole circus like that?”

“We’ve got several good acts,” Doug answered. “A great trapeze team, trick dogs, trick cats, trick riders. A stage magician. There–”

“How the hell do you work those costumes?” Evertson interrupted. “You look huge in them. And they look– Well, they don’t look like anything real, but they look real, if you know what I mean.” He smiled again as if just remembering to, and looked deeply interested.

Doug looked blank. Gus smiled back, tried to make it look relaxed, and said, “Aw, it’s simple. We just turn into big, shaggy, scaly dragon-cats. A lot more comfortable than rubber masks.”

Evertson’s smile was nowhere in sight.

“Sorry, sir,” said Doug, “but you know the magician never tells.”

“Magician,” said Evertson flatly. Still no smile.

Gus hoisted his own smile more firmly into place. “I mean, not that we’re stage magicians, but same principle.”

Evertson stared at him briefly, apparently trying to think of another question, then smiled again. “Got it. Good show.” He turned to go. “Hope you find some good camping.”

“Thank you,” they both said to the closing door.

Gus waited a few seconds for Evertson’s footsteps to fade away, then said, “He suspects us. But what’s he suspect us of? Transforming without a license?”

“I think he’s seen some weird stuff,” said Doug. “Enough so that he believes it when he sees it again.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s even Sundered. Theano says a lot of cops are.”

If you were Sundered from the ordinary world, your luck no longer shielded you from supernatural events in the usual way.

They hauled their backpacks out into the hallway, exited through a door opening on the street, not the park, and shouldered their loads. They looked around. “So,” said Gus, “was Evertson suggesting we leave town, there at the end?”

“Is Abigail a sundown town, you mean?” asked Doug. “No fays allowed in town limits after dark? Be that as it may, I propose to come back this afternoon anyway, and stay the evening.” He stepped out east.

Gus nodded and followed. “I don’t think he meant anything by it. Nothing serious. If he really suspected us of being monsters, I think he’d use something tougher than a veiled threat.”

“True enough.”

They ambled out of the tree-lined town center, found the highway again, and crossed into the farm country, out of Evertson’s jurisdiction. Near the town line, they turned down a crossroad running between fields, to a small stand of trees near a road sign extolling hybrid corn. There, they hid their packs and headed back to Abigail, this time bound for the library.

—

The library was near the school, made in the same style, of the same tan bricks, clearly meant to form a unit with the school. Unlike the school, it had more trees around it, and a little scattering of cars. They entered into the air conditioning and were greeted with, “It’s them!”

It was the girl who had handed a dandelion to Gus. She was behind the librarian’s desk, just now looking up from her phone, which she was showing to a bright-eyed middle-aged woman rather like Mrs. Crowell, if a little plumper.

She raised her eyebrows and smiled at them. “Are you the gentlemen who put on a fencing demonstration in the park earlier today?” the librarian asked.

They smiled back. “That’s us,” Doug said. And he told about their hike to rejoin their circus in Great Bend. Meanwhile, the lady, Angela Moore according to her desk sign, looked at her daughter’s phone.

“Those are amazing costumes,” she said, to which they said thank you, just as if they had not received those forms as a curse. “And is that actually fencing, or dancing? It looks so … symmetrical.”

Gus nodded. “It’s dancing. It’s actually easier, safer, and looks better if we have all the moves memorized.”

“Yes, makes sense. Well, I certainly hope your circus comes to town. I’m glad Hadley caught some of your performance on her phone. Hadley, can you load this down to our computer at home?” Hadley told her mother it was loading up, and of course she could. “What brings you to the library?”

“We were looking for town histories,” Doug answered.

“Nothing ever happened here,” Hadley announced.

“Hadley,” her mother admonished in an automatic-sounding tone. “Yes, they’re in the reference section.” She rose and led them deeper into the building. “I’m afraid you couldn’t take them out, even if you were residents.”

Doug nodded. “Sure. We just wanted to get a little local color. It could be useful if the circus comes here.”

“Good luck,” muttered Hadley, which got her a side-eye from Mrs. Moore.

It was not a big library. The reference section was two bookcases, and the town histories amounted to two biographies of Civil War officers and one actual history of Abigail, all privately printed. Mrs. Moore dragged Hadley away and left Gus and Doug to look these books over.

Gus took the biographies and left the history to Doug. Some time later, Gus announced, “Neither of these guys lived where Dolores does, or anywhere near, and neither has any ghost stories attached to them, had funny talents, or belonged to any funny organizations. At least, not as far as I can tell. Thank God for indexes. Hope they were thorough.”

“Yeah, and all made with no computers. Well, there’s a smidge in the town history. Back in the Depression, four families moved into Dolores’s future house—way over-crowded, even for that time—claimed as tenants by a guy belonging to one of the families. They made a name for themselves: ‘the November clan.’ Not a good name, either: beggars, bums, drunks, running little cons, suspected of various thefts, involved in bar-fights, rum-running. Just the sort of people you don’t want moving in.”

“Rum-runners? Was this Prohibition?”

“Yeah, the tag end of it. Prohibition and Depression. Really jolly time. Anyway, these November people show up in the history because they got thrown out of town in the only riot Abigail ever saw, unless you count some bar-fights that spilled out into the streets, back when cattle drives came through here. Seems a November girl ‘made a claim on’ the mayor’s son—I wonder if that means she said he got her pregnant, or just that he proposed to her—and one thing led to another—the book doesn’t want to give details—and the November clan was run out of town.”

Gus looked pensive, then asked, “Did the mayor live where Mayor Blakemore lives now?”

“Doesn’t say. I wouldn’t think so. It’s not like that house is a mayoral mansion.” Doug looked at Gus’s expression. “I kinda feel sorry for the November folk. Some fellow feeling.”

“A pack of outcasts kept on the move? Yeah. Me too.” Gus pondered a little more. “So one guy claims the rest of the clan as tenants, so it must have been his house. Was he run out of town too? Out of his own house?”

“Apparently. The book says that the house stood empty ‘to this day,’ which is…” He checked the copyright page. “…1950.” Doug watched with interest as his friend’s face developed a muzzle, the better to snarl with. “Down, boy,” he said quietly. “Not in front of the mortals.”

Gus nodded as his face flattened to human again. “But I hafta wonder if revenge could figure into whatever’s going on here.”

“But nothing much is going on, as far as we’ve found out. There’s just a magic hot spot in the house of the town recluse.”

Gus nodded again and said, “Let’s loop in Theano.”

Soon they had Theano on loudspeaker on Gus’s phone, between them on the table. “The ‘November clan,’ eh?” she mused. “Eleventh month of the year, ninth month of the old calendars. Four families in the clan. Do you have the exact date of the riot?” Doug supplied it from the book. “Any names?”

“The house belonged to Saul Horbinger,” Doug reported. “That’s it.”

“All right, I may be able to start cooking with this.”

“Can you crack into records,” Doug asked, “and find the ownership history of that house? Maybe get some more numbers to crunch that way.”

“Of course. Is there a town newspaper?”

“Yeah, the Abigail Tribune,” said Gus, “but I’ll be surprised if the back issues are on line, and it’ll take a long time to search otherwise.”

“Just look for the date of the riot. See if anything interesting crops up.”

“Will do.”

—

The newspapers had not been digitized or even microfilmed, but simply stacked in cardboard boxes and left in a small storeroom. The ones from the 1930s had passed yellowing with age and gone on to browning. Doug and Gus found the right box, unpacked the fragile contents delicately, and found the paper that reported the riot. Fortunately, the disturbance was front-page news. They located the right day easily and did not need to open the brittle paper.

“Here’s the names of the other three families, anyway,” said Gus: Fowler, Pusey, and Lear. He called Theano and read the entire article to her.

“Very good. I can hope to pull something out of this, by net or by numerology. Did your sample show in the park get any reaction from Dolores Graves?”

“Hard to say,” answered Doug. “It was hard to keep an eye on her house, in the middle of performing. She certainly wasn’t hanging on her gate, watching.”

“And we don’t know what she looks like,” Gus said, “but I don’t think she was in the crowd.”

“Yes, well, I was just hoping. What are you going to do next?”

Gus and Doug exchanged glances then chorused, “Eat.”

—

A little over an hour later, they were on Abigail’s main street, in “Andy’s,” wrapping themselves around club sandwiches, after the buffalo wing appetizers and the creamy onion and potato soups. “And the prices,” Gus remarked, “make Chicago restaurants look criminal.”

“Well… Chicago, after all. But cheap or not, I really don’t care. We’ve saved the circus quite enough money living off the land, and I’m ready for–”

Their phones rang. Doug pulled his out and put it on the table between them. “Hel-lo,” he said.

Just then the waitress showed up. “Care for dessert?” she asked. “We got apple and cherry pie on special.”

“Yes, please,” said Gus after swallowing hard.

“Which?” she asked.

“Both. À la mode.”

“Who gets which?”

“Each gets both,” Gus answered. “Four slices, total.” Doug nodded confirmation while chewing.

“You big guys aren’t gettin’ filled up right,” she opined, and marched off to fix that.

Once she was gone, Theano asked from the phone, a little timidly, “Do we feed you enough?”

“Oh, yeah,” Gus assured her, finishing the last segment of club sandwich and starting in on the remains of his fries.

“It’s feeding ourselves on the road that’s hard,” Doug told her. “If you try to make any kind of distance and hunt and practice, you get behind on one or another.”

“Maybe you should have taken the bus,” Theano said. “You still could.”

“Naw,” said Gus. “We decided beforehand, we wanted to practice the new shapes.” Belatedly, he glanced around to see if anyone was listening. It seemed not.

Doug chuckled. “You don’t want your were-lions hungry all the time?”

Theano answered with a slightly nervous giggle, then changed the subject: “I’ve found some stuff on Dolores Graves and her house.” Her were-lions gave go-ahead grunts as they traded fries and onion rings. “Her house is a little over a century old and has been empty for most of that time. Saul Horbinger moved back in, in 1946, but had to leave the next year when they found his mortgage was a forgery. In 1968, his son Jabez bought it, did a lot of renovation, but couldn’t keep up property taxes, filed for bankruptcy, and moved out. He tried again in 1989 and stayed there until 1997, when he died. Census says there were four other people living there in 1990. I haven’t been able to trace them, but one was a Dolores Horbinger, who is, in fact, our Dolores Graves.”

“Married a Mister Graves?” asked Doug.

“No, she just changed it. So did her brother Agrippa.”

“‘Agrippa Graves,’” mused Gus, tasting the name.

“Compares favorably with ‘Agrippa Horbinger,’” said Doug.

Gus nodded. “But I wonder why he didn’t change his first name to ‘Bob’ while he was at it.”

“Anyway,” said Theano, dragging them back to the topic, “Dolores and Agrippa came back to Abigail five years ago and bought the house from the bank, which had repossessed it by then. (When Jabez died, the rest of the family just moved out.) I have no indication that anyone in Abigail realized Dolores and Agrippa were two of the people who moved out in ’97. Or realizes now. Then, a year after they moved back in, Agrippa died.”

“Of?” Doug asked.

“Anorexia,” said Theano proudly, pleased to deliver a surprise. “And the really fun part is that Dolores collected the body from the hospital in her car—at least, the hospital record says the body was collected ‘privately’—and we know no more of Agrippa. No funeral service. No place of burial.”

“Is this the point at which Dolores becomes a recluse?” asked Doug.

“I can’t tell,” Theano replied. “She’s not on social media now, and she never was.”

“Does she have anorexia?” Gus asked.

“She might,” Theano answered. “I can’t find images of her anywhere, or any medical records. … The. Only. Things. She spends money on are property taxes and groceries. She has the groceries delivered, and it isn’t much.”

“What?” asked Doug.

“Every week the same. Bottled water, beef jerky, some fruit, and bread.”

At this point, the waitress came with the four slices of pie à la mode. She was a little puzzled that these two excellent eaters did not dig in immediately, though they said “thank you” in somewhat distracted tones. Bad news on the phone, she hazarded, noting it lit up on the table between them. But then the blond one dug in with a nearly ferocious expression.

“’S great,” he mumbled. “Doug, get started.” Doug looked at his friend, looked at his double dessert, then started in. The waitress smiled at them and moved on.

“Austerities, I bet,” said Gus, still mumbling around pie a bit.

“Where does her money come from?” Doug asked.

“Ill-gotten gains, I expect. Deposits by money order show up in her account irregularly, and I haven’t been able to trace them, which is odd in itself. She has things set up with the bank for the taxes and groceries; she does nothing—nothing—to deal with the public. No water bill. No electricity. She is a professional-level recluse.

“Gus, I think you’re right about the austerities. She’s not well-off, but she could eat better than she does. Even if she couldn’t, she could at least vary the menu instead of ordering exactly the same thing every time. So eat your pie without pity.” Mages could boost their energy levels by practicing austerities such as fasting.

“I suppose it could be pure nuttiness,” mused Doug, pitilessly eating pie. “Or some religious discipline.”

“It could be, but it’s not,” returned Theano. “What I told you up to now has been from mundane hacking, with a little help. But we know there’s magic going on. I caught it two states away. You guys spotted it yourselves. Going straight Pythagorean on the data you gave me, I got nothing good. Seven and nine agree there’s negative magic going on. Twelve is not pleased with her.”

Doug and Gus glanced around for any unpropitious listeners, but there were none. They had become used, as far as possible, to their own altered, enchanted natures, but they were not yet used to the way Theano referred to integers as if they were consultants she had spoken to over coffee.

“Any idea what our next step should be?” asked Doug.

Theano sighed. “Not really. Keep on investigating. Keep us informed. Cope with what you find. You are the men on the spot, Teddy Roosevelt’s men in the arena.”

“Your confidence in us is…” Gus paused, then concluded, “…heartening,” just as Doug said, “Dismaying.” “Yeah, one of those.”

“Hm,” replied Theano, apparently not listening. They heard little papery noises as she consulted notes or references. “You want advice, huh? Tip so the check ends in fourteen cents. Go rest.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused.

—

They tipped generously, thanked the waitress warmly, and ambled their way back out of town. They found their packs just where they had left them behind the little stand of trees by the hybrid corn sign.

“Want to draw straws for first watch?” Gus asked as they sat down crosslegged in the grass.

“You sleep. I’ll take first watch.”

“Thanks.” Gus pulled his sleeping bag out of his pack and lay down on it.

Doug lolled back against his own pack and gazed at the sky. Soon, he felt a change in the quality of Gus’s silence, and knew his friend was asleep.

Doug sighed and lolled farther back. The sky looked unmoving, forever deep. Even to a city boy like himself, the corn and the trees and the gravel road looked utterly ordinary. His very body felt ordinary, his senses merely, exactly human.

“What a long strange trip it’s been,” he murmured to himself, softer than a whisper, quoting a favorite line of his grandfather’s—especially a favorite after Doug had come home last time.

He and Gus had served in Afghanistan together, come home together, and found together that they missed army life, or at least some features of it. So, still together, they had gone out to Iraq to seek work among the military contractors. They, along with twenty-five other young men, thought they had found it. But the “contractor” had turned out to be, well, a wicked fairy.

Like the fay folk of old, she stole people, this time thrice nine young soldiers to be fighters in her own wars. She bound them to her, mind and body—minds under magical compulsion, bodies turned into scaly, tailed lion-dragon-men—ogres or trolls, unfit for the mortal world. She dubbed them the Raurhoth, the Lion Host. They had not known what they had become. They spent three years not knowing, or how much time was passing. Then the fay had “died” in battle.

Their captor’s foe was not nearly so callous. He had not taken them as spoils, but neither did he know how to change them back to human form or return them to “Ennorath,” Middle Earth, home. So the twenty survivors had wandered from one world-fragment to another for two years, unsure how many years had already passed, until at last they met, by good fortune, the Grand Normans.

Grand Normandy was an entire micro-nation, existing on everyday Earth but scattered in tiny enclaves and hidden from public notice by the Sundering, the luck that hides magic. For the Grand Normans, though human, dealt extensively in magic (else how could they have been exploring deep in the outer zones of reality, where Doug and Gus and their friends wandered?).

The Grand Normans, or at least the ones the Raurhoth encountered, were generous and compassionate. They had taken them home, equipping them with illusions to look human. At least as important, they had explained what had happened to the Raurhoth. When fays take mortals, they do not just kidnap: they recruit. Doug and Gus were now fays.

A fay is an immortal shapeshifter.

Despite all that—even because of all that—they wanted to go home. So, not so very long ago, Doug and Gus had shown up at O’Hare airport, wrapped in glamour to look human, and had simply gone home.

At first, there was shocked rejoicing. Then they had dropped the illusions and shown their families truth. Joy was mixed with consternation. It had taken some doing to assure their relatives that they were really themselves, really Doug and Gus. But by diligence and luck, they had found someone to teach them the art of shapeshifting, so they had been able to resume their original forms. That had made life much better.

But now what? They were still separated from their families by experience and doom and metaphysics. The answer had been the Windy City Fantasy Circus. There, they joined forces with other magical folk (though all mortal) in tracking down supernatural troubles and coping with them.

As here. Doug examined his fate so far and decided this was, indeed, a worthwhile way to spend time. Possibly a great deal of time. He sighed contentedly, put his left hand behind his head and, with the right hand, leisurely texted his folks and Gus’s. They worried, after all. They worried, perhaps, that Doug and Gus would stop being human, though no one had said so out loud. So both of them touched bases with home often. Whatever the topic of news or gossip, the underlying messages were always the same: We’re still here. We’re still us.

We’re still shellshocked. Doug and Gus had come through their Afghanistan hitch unscathed, but being kidnapped, changed into monsters, mentally enslaved, and lost, lost, lost had been in a whole new league of trauma. Neither slept well now. Both slept better if the other was on watch. Doug watched.

His younger brother Sam texted back, asking how the lion business was going. Doug described the rapture with which he and Gus had eaten ordinary restaurant fare after too many rabbits. Sam suggested he and Gus could do something about the rats in the alleys near the apartment. Doug replied with a series of derisory emojis, then smiled. Being a dixiān yāo, an immortal monster, seemed not too bad right now.

He noted all the different kinds of birds he could see. Five kinds. All the kinds of trees. Four. All the kinds of weeds. He lost count. Were the clouds cumulus or cumulonimbus? Slowly, the afternoon got a little more golden. He began to get drowsy. He checked the time.

When Gus turned over in his sleep, Doug said, “Your turn.” His friend grunted, nodded wordlessly, and sat up. Doug lay down, folded his hands over his stomach, and closed his eyes.

Gus yawned, stretched, and flogged his brain back to wakefulness. Had there been any good dreams? There were snatches of a bad one, not so much a nightmare as a memory:

He was tramping through snow, under starlight, on a mountainside that became thickly forested further up. Pine. Above the pines were stars. He had learned to navigate by stars, but he couldn’t any longer because the stars here were wrong. The pole was in Orion’s belt. The sun and moon were too small.

There was no moon tonight, but that didn’t matter; he could see just fine, because his eyes were slit-pupiled and feline. And his hulking, seven-foot body wasn’t even chilly, under the homespun, the leathers, the chain mail. His ears twitched as the wind shifted. The tip of his tail brushed the snow from time to time. His body was as foreign to him as this place.

He was exiled from his own place and his own shape. The only touch of home was his fellow exiles, especially Doug.

He blinked and looked around at the warm, bright, flat landscape, and at Doug, already asleep. Not a dream worth keeping. He had returned from exile, as far as possible. He was home and he had a job.

He considered the job in hand. Dolores Graves, née Horbinger, is being severely reclusive and doing something very magical in her childhood home, where she returned five years ago with her brother Agrippa, who died four years ago. Dolores took charge of the body, and it hasn’t been seen since. Dolores has barely been seen herself, except for late-night strolls on the streets of Abigail.

He considered possibilities:

Something necromantic? Squirreling away your brother’s corpse and being secretive and nocturnal sure suggested it. But what necromancy, specifically? Was she, for instance, trying to get Agrippa back?

Her house reeked and roared and radiated magic. Mostly glamour, Gus thought, though he couldn’t be sure. Glamour hid things. What was she hiding? Was the house, for instance, in way better repair than it seemed?

And those names. August Weisskopf knew that being “August” or “Augie” was a very different thing from being “Gus” and had had no trouble believing magic was affected by names. Had Dolores and Agrippa been trying something like that? Or was it just to hide their identity?Questions to keep in mind.

The next step was to hike back into Abigail and poke around. Near Dolores’s house? Not during daylight. Maybe at night, as lions, which no one would be looking for. Doug’s goal of fox shape made a lot of sense. Cats might be better still. Sparrows? Flying would be cool.

He thought of calling their families, opened his phone, and saw Doug had already done it. Here was a new text from Sam:

I still dont know what you look like. as lions

Hadn’t they sent pictures? Scrolling back, Gus saw that, no, they had only sent pictures to their parents, not to siblings. He fixed that, sending Sam two images: one of himself as lion sitting next to Doug as man (for scale) and another with Doug as lion and him as man.

A few seconds later, he got back:

Thanks Gus. Holy crap your huge

Gus: About half a ton each, we think. No scales handy.

Sam: It looks like you. The blond

Gus: It IS me.

Sam: I mean the face is the same

Gus studied the two images. Yes, his lion face was squarer and Doug’s more triangular, just as with their human faces, and there was, maybe, some phantom general likeness. It was harder to see than with the dragon-cat, lungmao faces.

Gus: I guess so.

Sam: What cant be cured must be endured

Gus grinned and sent back You little, followed by a string of cuss emojis, ending with a laugh emoji just to make himself clear.

Sam: Gotta go. Thelions are aftermeeee!!!

Gus sent one more laugh emoji and pocketed the phone. He had a home and a job, and he had a family—two, even: his own and Doug’s. He basked for a while in the thought. Arguably, he had been made a monster and no longer human, he had been barred from heaven (through never dying), but he had home and purpose and friends and family.

Family. Dolores’s issues were about family, ten to one. Her brother of course, but Gus wondered if it wasn’t more than that. He texted Theano:

What happened to the other November people? Where are they now?

A minute later, she answered:

Good question. I’ll get on it.

Gus lay back down and let the long summer afternoon wash over him.

The slow afternoon could hardly be said to be an evening yet, but the heavy lunch had worn off and Gus was just beginning to get hungry again, when Doug frowned, then grimaced in his sleep. “Wanna wake up now?” Gus asked him softly.

Doug opened his eyes. “Yeah.” He yawned and sat up.

“Back in the mountains?”

“Yeah. Winter night. Up by the tree line. Lost.”

Gus nodded. “Let’s head back.” “Right.” But they didn’t walk in unburdened this time. Instead, each took a small overnight bag, stuffed with his karate gi.

—

They ambled up and down Main Street, since they had heard that Dolores did that often, then dropped in for supper at “Andy’s” again. Their waitress from lunch was just going off shift, but dragged her replacement over to them and told him to do a good job for them.

The replacement was a high-school boy working one of his summer jobs, and knew about the saber dance in the park. He asked eager questions about circuses and swordsmanship that slowed down his service but he was still prompt about bringing a ground beef pizza and a stuffed chicken breast with sides. They ate at leisure and watched the summer evening creep in.

Theano called: “The November People,” she reported, “have a bit of reputation in the Sundered west and midwest. They’re cursed. It was right after the Civil War. They tangled with some coven or college of wizards over scavenging the goods of some mage who had just died. I’ll save you the particulars. Anyway, the November People—they weren’t called that at the time; the group didn’t have a name yet—but the November People lost big. The other side not only got whatever the goods were, they devoted some thought and energy to revenge.

“They just have rotten luck, I gather, and dribble it around, rubbing it off on passers-by. Some of them have gotten jobs as ‘coolers’ in Las Vegas casinos. And they’re subject to psychic and psychiatric diseases.”

“Like anorexia?” asked Gus.

“Exactly. And phobias and depression and addictions and OCD and like that.”

“Poor bastards,” muttered Gus.

“What about the psychic diseases?” asked Doug.

“Low or absent chi production, doppelgängers, haunt-prone. It can get mixed up with the psychiatric stuff—so, for instance, OCD rituals can become austerities to generate chi and make up for the natural low chi rate.”

“So Dolores may be one really messed-up lady,” reflected Doug.

“Yes, in any of a number of ways.”

“Is it even really her that people see on the street at night?” wondered Gus. “Could it be her doppelgänger?”

“I suppose so,” said Theano.

“And if it is?” asked Doug. “What do doppelgängers do?”

“Nothing much. Disappear readily. Confuse bystanders. Sap chi out of their source. Anyway, maybe they came back to Abigail as part of some scheme to undo the curse.  Magic theory suggests it, what with the name changing.  Or maybe they just wanted their old home back.”

Gus swirled his coffee thoughtfully.  “We don’t really know yet,” he said, “whether Dolores needs to be stopped or helped or left alone.”

“That’s true,” Theano answered, her tone reluctant, “but the signs–”

“Yeah, seven, nine, and twelve don’t like it,” Gus cut in, trading looks with Doug.  It wasn’t that they disbelieved Theano; it was the idea of working on tips from numbers.

“We’re still investigating,” Doug said.  “We won’t be hasty.  Thanks for digging,” he concluded in a goodbye tone.

“Talk to you soon,” said Theano in the same tone, and hung up.

Gus chewed a pizza crust, then said, “So, if we work for Theano and she works for the numbers, does that mean we work for the numbers?”

“I don’t know that she works for them,” Doug replied.  “It’s not like they have an agenda.”

“They have opinions, or Theano talks like they do.”

Doug sighed.  “This is too weird for a pair of garden-variety lion-ogres like us.”

Gus smiled sideways and snorted.  But…  The whole issue of immortality rose up before him again, at a new angle.  Given enough time—and there would always be enough—would he find himself at the edge of reality someday, all the weirdness in the universe behind him, looking into what came next?

“Well, it should be interesting,” said Doug.  “And I’ll be there with you.”

“Thank you, zhījĭ,” said Gus, neither he nor Doug noticing that Gus had never voiced his thought.

—

After one more round of coffee, they ambled up and down the street through evening light, then returned to their starting point.  Next door to “Andy’s” was a place labeled “Bar and Grill.”  It might have been “Andy’s Bar and Grill,” though the sign didn’t say so.  In any event, it stayed open later.  They entered and ordered beers.

Staff and customers were all men.  None had been present at the demonstration in the park, but many had heard about it, and a few even had scraps of video on their phones, relayed by their kids.  Being strangers in town, Doug and Gus were already the center of attention, and it wasn’t long before someone asked them, “Are you two the guys in this?” and showed them the video clip.

After that, they fielded a long series of questions about their costumes, swordsmanship, whether the fight was rigged, whether the swords were real, the circus, life in the circus, life before the circus, life in the army, their hitch in Afghanistan, and so on.  They managed to leave out the bits about kidnapping and magic.  Eventually, it all settled down, lots of guys went home, and Gus and Doug were left nursing their second beers in a quiet bar, the windows finally dark with unambiguous night.

They settled their bills, went on nursing beers, and waited for closing time.  By now, the bartender knew they had only a roadside camp ahead of them, and, kindly, was in no hurry to throw them out.  Anyway, they had been good for business.

“There she is,” somebody said, and the bartender waved and smiled at the window by the door.  Doug and Gus looked up, but the window was now blank.

“Night watch,” said the bartender, still smiling to show he was joking.

“We got a hermit,” said the customer who had spoken first.  “She don’t show herself, except to walk around at night.”

The bartender frowned, not sure if he liked the term “hermit.”  “No harm in her,” he said firmly.  “Awful shy, I guess, but wants to get out sometimes.  Window-shopper, I guess you could say.”

Doug and Gus nodded back and looked blank.  Behind the non-expressions, they were feeling for the time they could leave.  Go too soon and it would be obvious they were stalking Dolores.  Wait too long and she would be gone.

Three minutes.  Five.  Seven.  Seven was a buddy of Theano’s, right?  “Well, we gotta get back to camp sometime,” Gus announced, rising.  Doug followed.

“Coming back tomorrow night?” the bartender asked.

“Maybe,” said Doug.  “Would like to.  But we’ve got to get a move on to Great Bend.”  They brought their mugs back to the bar, nodded their farewells, and strolled out into the night with all the nonchalance they could muster.

It was not enough.  The man who had spotted Dolores at the window frowned to himself for a few seconds, then began dialing his phone.

—

“We don’t even know which way she went,” grumbled Gus.

“As lions, we could track her by smell.”

“We don’t know what she smells like.”

“It’ll be the fresh trail.”

Gus went on grumbling: “Too dark to spot Dolores with human eyes, not dark enough to hide a ton of lions prowling the street.”  Abigail’s main street had very few lights, and none of them illuminated any other pedestrians.

“Lungmao, then,” said Doug.

“Guess so.”

They turned down the next alley, found a dumpster, and hid behind, emerging each in his camouflage gi.  A moment after that, they were seven feet tall and cat-eyed.  They stepped out of the alleyway and found the scattered streetlights more than adequate.

“And there she is,” said Doug.  He nodded at the only other person in sight, a female figure in a white dress, three blocks away.  She was staring into a store window.

It was darkest in the middle of the street, with zero traffic at this time, so that was where they walked.  

Gus heard a car, faint and far, and turned his head to check down the road for lights.  At that moment, Doug nudged him with an elbow.  Turning back, he saw Dolores was still staring into the shop window but now wearing a blue dress.  He went on gazing, and the dress turned red.  Now, knowing what to look for, he felt the twinge of magic.

“Different kind o’ window-shopping,” he said softly.

“She changes the cut, too,” said Doug, as the dress turned back to blue and the hem and neckline both lowered.

“Well, now we know for sure she does magic, and we know what she looks like.”

“Given that the magic is glamour, I’m not sure we do know what she looks like.”

“Put up your hands and turn around.”  It was neither Doug nor Gus, but Evertson, speaking low.  Doug sighed as they both obeyed, and Gus muttered, “Damn!”

Evertson was standing on the other side of the street, gun drawn.  He stood in his sock feet, his boots beside him; this explained why they had not heard him coming.  His face was tight and blank, his eyes wide.  “Come over here,” he ordered, in the same low voice.  “You make a move toward her, and I find out if you’re shootable.”

“And yet,” said Doug to Gus as they obeyed again, “he orders us to come to him, not knowing if we’re ‘shootable.’”

“Brave man,” said Gus.  With Doug, he stopped two yards away, still standing in the street.

“Keep your hands up,” Evertson ordered, then, with his free hand, pulled a pen-sized flashlight out of his uniform pocket.  He played it over their faces, lingering over ears and eyes.  “Cat eyes,” he said.

“You can get all kinds of cool contact lenses,” Gus offered, with no real expectation of success.

“But you didn’t,” replied Evertson.  “Say ‘ah.’” Silently, they opened their mouths.  He examined their fangs and tongues.  “What are you?” he demanded.

Doug sighed again and answered, “We started as two regular guys.  We really did.  But we got enchanted.”

“Hell’s bells, did you ever!  Enchanted into what?”

Gus grumbled, “Nothing to do with Hell,” while Doug answered, “They made this shape up.  We call it lungmao, Chinese for ‘dragon-cat.’”

“Who made it up?”

“The evil elf who kidnapped us.”

“So are you working for him?”

“Her, and no, she died in battle and we escaped.  It’s kind of a long story.”

“We really do work for the Windy City Circus, now,” Gus said.

Evertson snorted.  “They hire lung-men, do they?”

“Lungmao,” said Doug.  “Yeah, they do, though we’re the only two they have.  There are twenty-five others, scattered … well, all over.  The elf didn’t make many.”

“Huh.  So why are you stalking Dolores Graves?”

Doug opened his mouth, shut it, then murmured to himself, “How to put it?”

Gus knew how.  “We’re doin’ detective work.  I know that sounds weird, but it’s not as weird as standin’ in the middle of the road at midnight talkin’ to a couple of monsters.”

During this exchange, Evertson’s face had registered terrified determination.  Now, this started to thaw into a more thoughtful expression.  “Okay, that doesn’t take much more believing, but what has Dolores Graves–?”  He broke off and stared over their shoulders.

“She just changed the color of her dress, didn’t she?” asked Doug.  He had felt a twinge of magic, too.  Evertson nodded slightly, still staring.

“So you see,” said Gus, “she is in our jurisdiction, so to speak—the weird side of the street.”

“Can we put our hands down?” asked Doug.

Evertson looked at the hands, scaled, spurred, and taloned.  “Change back first.”

Slowly, so as not to startle him, they shrank back down to human.  Tails and muzzles and ears pulled in.  Their robes loosened.  When he was done staring at them, he glanced over their shoulders again.  His eyes tracked to the right and they inferred Dolores had moved on.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s talk.  Come with me.”  And he holstered his gun.  Progress!

He put his boots back on, then led them to a police car parked on a dark side street.  At his direction, they got in the back, which had a thick plexiglass window separating it from the front.

At the main street, to their surprise, he turned left, not right toward the park and town hall.  Dolores was walking away from them on the next block.  Evertson pulled up next to her as Doug and Gus exchanged looks of bewilderment.

She turned—whirled—to the car, shock on her face.  She was short and very thin; Gus and Doug could easily believe she suffered from anorexia.  But despite that, she looked pretty, even glamorous.  Cheeks were soft ivory, face was heart-shaped, lips were rose pink, doe-like eyes were lustrous and elegantly mascaraed.  The dress was white again, but longer, and neck, sleeves, and hem had deep ruffles.

Doug and Gus didn’t believe any of it.  They could feel the magic she was running.  Gus checked her reflection in the store window behind her, to see if it matched.  It did.  Doug kept a careful eye on her for blurring or rippling, in case the distraction interfered with the spell.

She was certainly distracted.  “What’s wrong?  Is there something wrong?” she asked.  “Chief Evertson, isn’t it?  Am I in trouble?”

“Not at all.”  He switched on the car’s dome light.  “You know these guys?”  She stared at them in confusion.  They stared back, reserved and neutral.  “You got anything against these guys?  Or know of anything they have against you?”

“N-no?  Nothing.  They’re complete strangers.”

“Very true.  Well.  I just wanted you to check ’em out for me.  They’re vagrants.”

“Oh,” she said absently, continuing to stare.  She gazed in confusion at two young men in karate garb.  Then bewilderment changed subtly to puzzlement, then alarm.  Her eyes widened.  She lifted a hand, starting a repelling gesture.  Evertson studied her closely, and so did not see Doug and Gus widening their own eyes.

“Don’t you worry,” Evertson said.  “They’re just leaving.  Good evening.”  He doused the dome light and slid the car away into the night.

Gus and Doug consulted by exchanging exasperated sighs, then Doug said, “So, Chief, I guess you’re the kind of guy who likes everything aboveboard.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Though I notice,” said Gus, “that you didn’t tell her, ‘I picked up these two shapeshifters, and I know you’re a mage.’”

“Still figurin’ that stuff out.”

“Well, here is some more information for you,” Doug told him.  “She knows we’re magic too.  When she suddenly got scared?  That’s when she realized.”

“And how do you know that?” Evertson challenged.  “Maybe it was just sinking in that there were a couple of thugs around tonight.”

“We know that,” Doug answered, “because we can feel magic too, and when she lifted her hand, it wasn’t just nerves, she was trying to disenchant us.”

“Nothin’ happened,” said Gus, “because our shapes are real, not illusions.”

“How about your other shapes?”

“They’re real, too, while we have ’em.”

Evertson turned off into a side street.  “Of course, I only have your word for this.”

“Right,” Doug acknowledged.  “But you saw her dress change.  More than once?”  Evertson didn’t answer.

After another turn, Gus asked, “What other weird stuff have you seen?”

Evertson was silent for a bit, then replied, “What makes you ask that?”

“You got suspicious of us as soon as you saw us performing in the park.  We could tell when you came in to talk to us.  Most people would just say, ‘Wow, that’s some costuming they have!’ and let it go at that.  That’s what happens in our circus jobs.”

“But you,” said Doug, “were willing to entertain the idea that we really turned into lion-men.”

“So what weird stuff have you seen?” Gus asked again.  “Since we’re bein’ so aboveboard.”  He wondered where Evertson was taking them.

The policeman was silent.  Finally, he said, “Dolores had a brother.”

“Agrippa.  Right,” said Doug.  “She moved back here with him five years ago, and he died a year later.  We found out by regular, mundane detective work.”

“Okay.  Well, I’m the one who drove him to the hospital.  Me and Bob Davis are EMTs, and we have a station wagon made over into an ambulance; that’s all the emergency medical support we have.  So we were the ones to drive Agrippa over to the hospital next town over.  He looked terrible!  Like a shrink-wrapped skeleton.  Barely conscious.  Weighed nothin’!  Wasn’t at all surprised when I heard he died.

“I was surprised to hear Dolores took the body home.  You hear about that?”  He glanced in the rear-view mirror and they nodded.  “Well, I was uneasy about that, of course.  Several people were.  But that was nothing compared to when I was running an errand on a county road one night a few months later and, uh…”

“There was Agrippa?” hazarded Doug.

“Yeah.  He was staggering along in the middle of the road.  Barefoot.  Nothing but a bathrobe.  He turned and stared into the lights with his mouth hanging open.  I swear to God, he looked even worse than the last time I saw him!  I think I screamed.  I know there was a corner of my mind wanted to run him down.  

“But I stopped and got out.  Tried to talk to him.  He didn’t say anything but he let me steer him into the car.  Never talked.  Never blinked, either.  But he fussed, thrashed a little when I started up, until I said, ‘I’m taking you home.’  That seemed to help, so I kept repeating it.

“I turned around and headed back to Abigail—the errand could wait—and met up with Dolores walking along the side of the road.  She was dressed normal, at least.  Carrying a forked stick, like a dowsing rod.

“She was all kinds of relieved when she found her brother in the car.  Cried.  He said nothing, didn’t even blink, never closed his mouth.  I asked what was up, and said I’d thought her brother was dead.  She got flustered and said oh, no—this was her cousin Claudius that she was taking care of.  There was a wasting disease that ran in the family.  

“This ‘Claudius’ just slumped in the seat with his mouth hanging open.  He stared so blank, I took to watching, and he never blinked at all.  And his eyes never moved and had, like, no luster.  In the end, I decided he never breathed, either.  When I helped him into the house, he was cold.  I asked Dolores any number of times if she wanted me to drive ’em to the hospital, but she said no.  So I left ’em at home and that was the end of it.”

“So you found a dead man walking on the back road?” asked Doug.

“Well… Well, it sure looked like it.”

“Where was he headed?” asked Gus.

“Nowhere obvious.  Just west on the county road.”

At this point, the last houses fell away and the headlights illuminated fields of corn.  “Where are you taking us?” Doug asked.

“Out. Of. Town,” Evertson said firmly.  “And you’re to stay out.  I got a lot of thinking to do.  You and Dolores, between you—but especially you two…”  He started over: “She and Agrippa started tipping my world, but you have downright flipped it over.  I gotta think.  I don’t need a pair of shape-changing monsters in my town while I do it.”

There was no more conversation for some minutes, until Evertson said, “I guess this is far enough.”  He pulled over onto the shoulder.  “Okay.  This is the main highway.”  They nodded.  They had seen the road signs.  “You just get out now and keep on heading for Great Bend.”

Gus got out and kept the door open while Doug got out on the other side.  “Chief,” he said, “you have called us monsters, and we have called ourselves that, but a friend of mine likes to say, ‘Monstrous is as monstrous does.’  You are causin' us a lot of inconvenience and may be causin’ yourself or your town a lot of trouble.  I am pretty annoyed about that, but I am swallowing it.  Doug?  You?”

“Same,” said Doug, now out of the car but holding his door open to encourage Evertson to stay and listen.

“I want you to remember that, if we run into each other again.  Remember we are reasonable men.  Reasonable people, anyway.  If we meet again, don’t just let fly with bullets or holy water or whatnot.”

“Well,” said Doug, “feel free with the holy water.  It’ll just waste your time and get things damp.  Now, here’s my advice: Yes, your picture of the world has been turned upside down and you need to re-think it.  When you do that, realize that it’s going to stay upside down.  You are now what’s called Sundered.  Ordinarily, there’s a turn of luck that keeps most people, unSundered people, from getting involved in magic.  That luck is called the Sundering—the luck that hides magic.  But it’s not foolproof.  Agrippa got past it, so you spotted him.  After all, he wasn’t too inexplicable.  But you noticed all the little odd things and let yourself get freaked out.  Then you noticed us and got suspicious enough to track us down tonight, and see us monstering away on Main Street.  Well, if you weren’t Sundered before, you are now.  Before, magical stuff would pass you by.  No more.  So keep your guard up.  There’s lots worse things than us out there.”

The open doors had kept the dome light on, so they could see Evertson’s expression, tight and wary.  “Won’t hurt to say thanks, I guess,” he said, “so thank you.  Good night.”  They shut the doors and he did a U turn and headed back to town.

Gus watched him go, hands on hips.  “I wonder if he realizes he just left us here in our pajamas, or as good as.”

“I think he’s preoccupied.  Lion or lungmao?”

“Lungmao.  It has better stamina, and we can wear our gi.”

“Right.”  A moment later, they were cat-eyed giants, jogging through the night.  “Do you think,” asked Doug, “that he realizes we mean to go back?  From your talk about meeting again?”

“Prob’ly.  When he stops to think.”

The shapecaster who invented the lungmao shape had intended them to be strong and fast but mainly tough.  They jogged.

—

They saw her well before she saw them: a slight figure in a white dress.  Soon, the obvious guess was verified; it was Dolores, walking along with a dowsing rod held before her.

“Let’s try to talk with her,” said Doug.

“Sure,” Gus agreed, “if she’ll let us.”  He turned human as he jogged, and Doug followed suit.

It was much harder to see Dolores with merely human eyes, but they themselves were hard to spot, in camo robes, on bare feet, only half-expected.  They could see her clearly by the time she spotted them.  They heard her gasp and saw her dive sideways into a cornfield.

They moved from jog to sprint and raced toward her entrance point.  “Dolores!” Doug bellowed.  “Dolores Graves!  It’s okay!  We just want to talk!  You don’t even have to come out!  …  Dolores?  Answer, please!”  After some seconds’ silence, he said to Gus, “You try.  Maybe if the white guy…”

“Aw, gimme a break.”  But he sat down on the dark highway, to look less intimidating.  A karate-ka running down a dark road in the night needs to work on this, especially if he whiffs of magic.  “Dolores!” he called.  “My name’s Gus.  This is my friend Doug.”  Doug sat down beside him, making a show of puffing and panting, to look reassuringly exhausted.  “We know something weird is up with you—lotsa magic.  We need to know what it’s about.  If it’s a problem for you, maybe we can help, or get help.  …  Dolores?”  Gus talked to the dark air for a while longer, then gave up.

“I’m goin’ cat,” Gus said.  “Maybe I’ll see something.”  “Me too, then.”

They stood as lungmao and surveyed the cornfield.  “I can’t even see where she ducked in,” Gus said.

Doug nodded.  “There’s a fence,” he remarked.

“Huh.  I don’t think I saw her jump over it.  And I’m sure she didn’t climb it.”

“No, she didn’t,” said Doug, shedding his jacket, then pants.  Gus followed suit, and in a moment there were two horse-sized lions prowling the highway.

They sniffed through the grass and weeds between road and fence, then back along the road.  “Nothin’,” proclaimed Gus.  

“Just hot rubber and oil,” Doug confirmed.  “So she was not here at all, not physically.”

“She didn’t feel like a–”

A multiple yell broke out.  Several men ran out of the cornfield—six, all in swim trunks.  They had no weapons, but beat on the lions with bare fists.  Four more ran out, then six more, then two.

The lions crouched, folded back their ears, and snarled.  The fists did not hurt much, but there were a lot of them, and if this went on for long, it could get concerning.  “Back off!” Gus roared, but men who were willing to attack giant lions barehanded, naked, on the highway, in the middle of the night, were not put off by the lions being able to talk.  Gus swiped.  His target screamed and developed crimson cuts, but did not bleed.

Doug swiped at a couple more, with similar results, then deliberately batted one with the flat of his paw.  The man went tumbling down the highway as lightly as a soccer ball.

Seeing this, Gus slapped one down onto pavement and held him there.  He pulled on the guy for energy.  His victim looked surprised, then groggy.  He lost color, became translucent, foggy, misty, gone.  “Ha!” Gus shouted.  He reached for another.  Doug did the same.

The fact that their fellows were disintegrating did nothing to slow these guys down.  Which made it easier to grab and rake and bite.  They had no taste.  They weighed nothing.  If mortally wounded, they evaporated.  Or you could suck them down for a dollop of chi.  The chi made up for some of the energy expended in fighting them.

When they were gone, the two still stood in the middle of the road, lungmao now, panting.  “As I was sayin’,” Gus continued, “she didn’t feel like a ghost.  Neither did they.  No death vibe.”

Doug nodded.  “Know what else acts like a ghost but isn’t?”

Gus nodded back.  “A shaman doing astral projection, like Dr. Greathouse or Mr. Ouray.”

“So Dolores is backed up by a whole squad of shamans?”

“Seems unlikely,” said Gus, heading back down the road, though only at a mosey.  “Shamans aren’t a cooperative bunch.  And there aren’t that many white shamans.  They were all white.”

“Yeah, and male and all about twenty.  And in swim trunks.”  Doug fell in next to him.

“Fantasies of hers, you think?” asked Gus.  “So they were seemings or tulpas or like that?  And she was able to throw almost twenty of ’em at us, and pumped each of ’em full of enough chi to punch.”

“Formidable,” agreed Doug.

“A formidable shaman who doesn’t like us.  Great.”

Doug laughed.  “Oh, well, next time we meet her, just chuck your jacket.  That ought to distract her.”

Gus gave a twisted smile.  “You chuck yours!”

“Nah, she goes for white guys.  We saw.  Likes all the hair, I suppose.”

“I’m–!  We’re–!”  Gus sputtered.  “Aw, stuff it!”  

Doug laughed again.  “Let’s go get our swords,” he said.

“Right.  If she can whip up a squad of dream-goons on the spur of the moment, she might get something much tougher once she stops to think about it.”

They jogged on, their recent battle leaving not a trace.

—

Chief Evertson sat in the police car, staring into the dark without seeing it.  He had just hung up on his wife after uttering reassuring vagueness, and now realized he either had to keep a secret from her permanently or get her “Sundered” too.  Then he got out and went back to pacing Main Street.

Why should he believe this “Sundering” stuff? Well, it was no stranger than men who turned into lion-monsters at will. Hell and damnation! Here they were again!

Gus and Doug walked toward him, trying to look peaceable despite wearing karate gear and sword belts. They tried smiles, though these were somewhat tired.

“I told you to leave,” Evertson said.

“You did,” Doug agreed, “but it’s not clear you have the authority for that. We have been civilians, soldiers, slaves, and mercenaries. Makes you careful about what orders you take. Anyway–” He pointed over his shoulder toward the alleyway. “–we had to come back for our street clothes.”

“What’s with the swords?” Evertson demanded.

“We were attacked,” Gus answered, “by Dolores Graves. Her and her minions.”

“Minions?!”

“Or maybe weapons. Creatures. She can do more magic than change her dress.” He and Doug told Evertson about their recent attack. “And we still got business with Dolores Graves,” Gus concluded. “So that’s why the swords. Self-defense.”

“Why not guns?” Evertson asked.

“Guns get you in more trouble. And we already had these. From when we were soldier-slaves. Take a look.” Gus shook his sword out a few inches and presented the hilt to Evertson over his forearm.

The police chief hesitantly pulled the sword a few inches further out. The hilt was tightly wrapped in sweat-blackened straps of leather, with a round metal pommel, much scratched. There were no jewels or runes or goblin-detecting fire. The blade was just straight, a little over three feet long, with a businesslike polish on its edges. It looked worn, not in the least crude, but also not machine-made.

“O’course,” Gus went on, “we don’t know that what she throws at us will be cuttable, just like you didn’t know if we were shootable.”

“Still don’t,” Evertson muttered.

“Well, we are,” Doug told him. “But we heal a lot, and fast.”

Evertson was still looking at the sword. “From when you were ‘soldier-slaves.’ So you got this from that elf?”

“Yes,” said Doug. “Along with our boots and clothes, including pants with a fly for the tail, and all our gear. And the shape, of course.”

“Where was this?” Evertson returned the sword to Gus.

“Nowhere on a map. Speaking of where, where’s Dolores?”

“She wasn’t here when I got back,” Evertson replied cautiously.  He was busy wondering what to believe.  Elven swords from beyond the world?  The town recluse doing, uh, battle magic?

“Well,” said Gus, “there’s a logical place to look for a shut-in.”  He turned around and headed back the way they had come, Doug beside him.  Evertson drifted after, still wracked with uncertainty. They paused at the alleyway to duck in and retrieve the overnight bags containing their street clothes, then marched briskly back to the park. Evertson followed.

—

Despite Gus’s logic, Dolores was not at her house. She was next door, on the mayor’s porch. The light had come on automatically, so they could see as well as hear her pounding urgently on the door. “Mr. Blakemore, please!” she cried, her voice almost a squeal, reminiscent of a finger on the rim of a wet glass. “It’s Dolores Graves from next door! I need your help!”

The porch light also let them see her change. When she knocked and cried, she was the creamy-skinned model in the ruffly white dress. When she would leave off, to catch breath or slump in discouragement, she … was not. Hair vanished entirely. Eyes sank into dark holes. Skin faded from ivory to yellow-white, so tight on her skull and arms and hands that it was easy to believe she was the sister of the walking dead man Evertson had encountered. The dress shriveled to a remnant of white rags.

In the dark outside the porch light, Doug leaned near Evertson’s ear and murmured, “Now do you see why this is a matter for Sundered folk?”

He nodded and asked, just as softly, “How can she dance around and yell like that, when she’s skin and bones?”

“Magic, just sheer magic. More of it than her brother had, maybe.”

Gus leaned in and murmured, “Maybe she’s not as dead yet. That’d help. We still don’t know if she needs helpin’ or stoppin’ or leavin’ alone. We’re scary, in any shape, but she knows you. Go do your job.” Gently, Gus pushed Evertson between the shoulder blades.

He lurched a step forward, then slowly walked into the light. He cleared his throat. “Miss Graves–”

She did a shriek on the inhale and spun to stare at him. A view of the mummy flickered away and she presented the magazine-cover girl.

“Miss Graves,” Evertson continued, “the mayor’s away on vacation. You look like you need … ah … what kind of help do you need?”

“Oh! Uh… It’s my– my family. When I– When my brother and I moved here, we were trying to get away from my family, but now they’ve caught up with us.”

“What happened?” asked Evertson.

“They… sent men after us. Me. Those two vagrants you showed me. I saw– found out they were hunting me–”

Doug and Gus each took two strides forward, into the light. Dolores gasped. “Your family did not send us,” Doug told her. “We didn’t even know about you or your family until today.”

“But you,” said Gus, “are blastin’ out so much magic, people can pick it up east of the Mississippi, and they did. They sent us to investigate. Just investigate. We might even be able to help you.”

“Are you on the run from your family?” Doug asked. “And if they’re as magical as you are, what could the mayor or Chief Evertson do for you?”

“The mayor’s no mage, is he?” Gus asked Evertson.

“Not … that … I know of,” Evertson answered, keeping his gaze fixed on Dolores.

Her eyes flicked from Gus to Doug and back, but she addressed Evertson: “They’re not human!” she said in a breathy squeak.

“That can be argued,” Doug replied coldly.

Evertson grunted. He was no longer very sure of Dolores’s humanity, either.

“Stuck around to see the fight, didja?” asked Gus. “Well, we didn’t start it. We just came here to figure out what you’re doin’.”

“We meant to be quiet about it,” Doug said, “but Chief Evertson here is too observant. So here we are. So let me just ask: What’s all the magic about?”

“Is it anything to do with your brother?” Evertson asked.

“I should have known!” she wailed Then, skin and bones or not, she gave a hyper-balletic leap from the porch, over the ragged hedge, back into her own yard.

Doug cursed as he inflated into lungmao and dashed around the hedge after her. “Nice move, Chief,” Gus shot over his shoulder, following his friend.

Evertson followed as quickly as a fit but middle-aged man could. He found the two hammering at the door, promising help. “Turn human, idiots!” he yelled. But then the door gave way and light flooded out. Doug dove through and Gus followed. Evertson lunged after and collapsed on the floor/

—

/staggered, finding his feet in a strange, brightly-lit space.

He had never been in the Graves home, but this was certainly not it. It was a single vast room, looking big enough to hold the entire house. The walls were mainly blue, the floor a checkerboard in black and white marble. A ballroom, done in baroque style, to judge by the other occupants.

The nearest occupants were Doug and Gus, still monstrous but now looking surprisingly companion-like to Evertson as they stared around in the same bewilderment as him. Beyond them were people that fitted more in a ballroom: women in high-waisted dresses and tall white wigs, men in red, blue, and black military jackets of a 19th-century cut, sabers at their sides.

But the center of attention was Dolores, standing at a door on the far side of the ballroom, in her beautiful guise, pointing at the intruders and screaming in terror. All the soldiers drew their sabres.

“Dream?” asked Gus.

“Let’s find out,” said Doug. He raised his left arm and was suddenly bearing his silver buckler. “Yep. Dream.”

“Right.” Gus summoned his blue buckler, covered himself in chain mail, and stretched his shield out to a large triangle. Doug did the same. They side-stepped toward each other, forming a minimal shield-wall. “Get behind us, Chief,” Gus said.

The soldiers were already rushing at them in a mob, yelling. They attacked without science, flailing almost blindly with their swords, but there were dozens of them. After a few seconds of beating them back, Doug yelled to Evertson, “Shoot!”

“What!?”

“Shoot into the crowd! Anywhere! It won’t be a crime, I promise!”

Evertson compromised and shot over their heads. The soldiers executed a sort of mass flinch and paused for half a second. In that moment, Doug nudged Gus and glanced up. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling, huge, absurdly glittering and bright. Gus gave a little nod.

Neither stared at the ceiling. After all, the soldiers were renewing their attack. Still, chandeliers rained down on the mob. Soldiers ran, or lay flat under the crystal wreckage, or simply vanished like popped bubbles. The women screamed. Gus and Doug ran to the right, skirting the glittering heap. Evertson followed.

They dashed through the door that Dolores must have exited through, and again there was a burst of light. Doug and Gus pivoted, back to back, swords drawn, but Dolores was not in sight. Neither was any building that might have contained a ballroom. There were only grassy dunes, sunlight, and the sound of waves in the distance.

The two vanished their shields and armor but not their swords. “I don’t think she’d have a bolt-hole ready,” said Doug.

“No, but she works fast,” Gus replied. He continued to stare about warily, but saw nothing. Finally, he sighed and relaxed.

“Time to stop and think,” said Doug, already relaxed.

“Time for some answers!” Evertson exclaimed. “Where are we? Did you say we’re dreaming?”

“If only,” Doug answered. “We are in Dream, the Dreaming, the Dreamworld.”

“But I’m not asleep” Evertson insisted. “Am I?”

“If you were, you could escape just by waking up. It’s not that simple.”

“You mean if we don’t get out, we’ll just vanish?”

“We will,” said Gus. “You won’t.”

“What? Why?”

“You aren’t here in the body. We are.” Evertson looked baffled. Gus sighed. “We weren’t just enchanted.”

Doug interrupted: “What you need to know are the rules here.” Gus began scanning the crests of dunes. “This is a dream. Her dream. She made it, knows all about it, can change it, control it.”

“So we’re screwed,” said Evertson.

“Not entirely. We can imagine too, like when we made our shields and armor, and pulled down the chandeliers. You can do that, too. And there are three of us, and only one of her. But this is her home ground, and she’s got a lot of power. I’d really rather talk to her, but you see she’s trigger-happy.”

“’Nother thing,” said Gus. “Just ’cause you’re not here in the body, don’t get cocky. If she smashes you here, you could end up in a coma or vegetative back in the waking world. On the other hand, if she starts to mess you up, you can imagine against it. And if she decides to just quit the dreaming and try something else, you’ll just wake up on her floor.”

“But don’t be surprised if we’re not there,” Doug added.

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“Different rules for us. We’re here in the body. Our bodies can never be separated from our souls.”

“What happens if you die?”

“We don’t.”

Evertson looked baffled again, and incredulous. Gus sighed. “You know what happens when fays steal people? They turn ’em into more fays. We’re fays now. Fairies. Not the cute little bug-types, obviously. But we’re not mortal.”

“And if she decides to just turn off this dreamscape,” said Doug, “you get snapped back to her house in Abigail, where your body is probably lying unconscious on the floor, but we get dumped into the local dreamworld, somewhere.”

“We can get back,” Gus said, with what Evertson recognized as a “reassuring the troops” tone, “but we don’t know how long it’ll take.”

“If we get separated,” Doug said to Gus, “try for the Gate of Horn.”

“Yeah, sounds good.” He scanned the dune crests again. “Let’s start lookin’. We need to find her just to get out of here, whatever else we do.” He started up the dune over which the sound of waves came. “Let’s see if there’s really any water over there.” He trudged up the dune, followed by Doug and, at a greater distance, by Evertson.

“The beach boys again, I see,” said Doug once he reached the crest. “With a beach this time.”

Gus nodded. “And Dolores as beach bunny,” he added, pointing. She stood in the midst of her man-pack, in her pretty aspect and a modest white one-piece bathing suit. Behind them was a short stretch of sand and then sunlit waves stretching to the horizon. They all stared at the intruders on the crest of the dune. Gus waved. No one waved back.

“I recognize some of them,” Doug remarked.

“She can just keep sendin’ ’em back,” Gus replied. “They might be tougher here, too.”

“You think? What would they have to be tough about in dream? Why waste the chi?”

Gus opened his mouth to answer, but then Dolores spoke. Despite being many yards away, her voice was as clear and distinct as if she stood before them. “You said you wanted to talk to me,” she said. “So talk.”

Doug sat down in the sand and wrapped his tail around his ankles. Gus did, too. Evertson stood, but ventured a nod at Dolores when she met his eyes. “We don’t want to be enemies,” said Doug. He did not bother to raise his voice; clearly, she could hear anything said in this dreamscape. “We just came here to find out what all the magic is about. We work for a team of magical troubleshooters, and one of our bosses noticed you, so they sent us.”

“So what is all the magic about?” Gus asked. “You freaked out back there, when the Chief asked about your brother. Is it about him? Are you tryin’ to bring him back?”

Dolores stared up at them, silent and blank-faced. After half a minute, Gus shrugged. “Okay. Take your time. We’re in no hurry.” He leaned back on his elbows.

Doug looked up at Evertson, still standing. “Have a seat. This could take a while.”

Evertson sat gingerly. He studied Dolores, far down the dune on the shore. This was the first time he had seen her by daylight. Of course, it was dream daylight and this was a dream appearance, but he thought she looked the same as when he had seen her at night.

Her swimsuit seemed very modest, if this was her personal fantasy, with her boy harem and all, but maybe she would dress—or appear to dress—differently when alone in her dream.

He looked over Gus and Doug. This was the first time he had seen them as lungmao close-up in daylight, and presumably these were real appearances. He could see the human faces beneath the muzzles and ears.

They were discussing Dolores: “She’s talkin’ to her boy-toys,” Gus remarked.

“Maybe they represent different points of view,” Doug suggested.

“That’s kinda schizo.”

“Yep. She’s not listening to us now. Or she doesn’t mind us calling her schizo. Or she’s too busy dithering.” Doug’s ears went back, and he thumped his tail on the sand impatiently. “Make up your mind, sister.”

If they told the truth, Evertson reflected, they had been cursed with these forms, like werewolves or Beauty’s Beast, then managed to find their way out of them. Did they tell the truth? If they lied, to what purpose? Well, their tale was no stranger than sitting where Evertson now sat.

He considered where he now sat. Sand was usually lumpier to sit on, wasn’t it? And, come to look at it, it was not in four or five different colors of grains mixed together; it was all just plain sand-colored. The dune grass was simplified, too; no broken or bug-bit blades.

And the sky was absolutely solid blue. No clouds. No paleness near the horizon. The horizon was a perfect line, of course… but it wasn’t.

“She made this place up, right?” he asked the lungmao.

“Probably,” said Doug, looking at him. “Why?”

“Well, I was noticing that everything looks a little too plain and simple. But there’s that.” Evertson pointed to the horizon directly ahead. “See that little bump?”

They did. “Let’s take a closer look,” said Doug. He stared. The air before them wobbled and a circle started to deliver a zoom-in image.

“How much magic do you guys know?” Evertson asked.

“Not much,” Doug answered. “Three shapes and feeling for chi. This isn’t magic. We’re in dream. This is just imagination. And here’s the island.”

“And it’s inhabited,” said Gus. He pointed to a tiny figure. Doug zoomed in further. The figure lay face down on the sand, near the water line. At first, it could be taken for a skeleton, but it still had tightly stretched skin. Gus turned to Evertson. “Agrippa Graves?”

Evertson shrugged. “I suppose. He looks even worse than he did four years ago, on that back road.”

“Does he have any flesh between his rib cage and his pelvis?” Gus wondered.

“Let’s zoom in a little further,” said Doug, doing so.

The skull raised.  The mummy rolled over and gazed back at them with empty sockets.

Doug swore and vanished the image.  “I should’ve known!  The easiest ESP is the feeling you’re being watched!  Any soldier should know that!”

The view of the skeleton on the beach returned.  The skull stared back at them.  Down on the beach, Dolores screamed.  She knew what was up.  Doug and Gus felt the chi draining out of them.  They resisted, but it was like toddlers fighting a karate master.

A shot went off behind them and their shock was doubled as Evertson dove through the window.

The chi drain stopped.  With what was left, Gus turned into a cave lion and followed Evertson.  “Dolores!” Doug bellowed.  “Get your ass over there and help!”  Then he too lionized and jumped.

In the fractional second of the jump, he wondered which side Dolores would help.

Doug landed next to Gus, out of the portal a few feet in the air.  Evertson was holding his revolver on the presumed Agrippa and talking loud and fast—perhaps trying to arrest him—but neither Doug nor Gus bothered to listen.  They were sizing up Agrippa.

If this appearance matched the physical reality, he was not just starving; he was dead.  Arms and legs were mere bone with shreds of dried meat on them.  Bare spine connected shrink-wrapped pelvis to a rib cage wrapped tight as a drum in thin leather.  The skull was just a skull.  Dead.

Or, more exactly, undead.  The lack of vital organs did not stop Agrippa from standing, staring out of empty sockets at the prey that was fighting back.  He looked back and forth from the cop to the lions, decided the man with the gun needed to be attacked first, and stretched out a fleshless hand.  

Evertson gave a wheezing gasp, blurred, and vanished.  At the same moment, Doug leapt, batted the skull off the spine with one paw in midair, landed, and batted the skull into the sea with the other paw.  Meantime, Gus landed on the rest of the skeleton, crushing the rib cage.  He severed the spine with a blow just as the bones blurred and vanished as Evertson had done.

“That won’t help.”

It was Dolores, in pretty mode and swimsuit.  She stood on the shore with them, staring up at the giant lions. She looked grim and not at all impressed by them.  It was, after all, just a dream—even her own dream.  “That wasn’t really his body,” she told them.

“Yeah, but it was a solid piece of real trauma,” Doug answered.  “It ought to keep him down and buy us a little time.”

“So answer,” said Gus, “while we have time:  What the hell is going on here?  He wakes up, attacks us, and you scream.  So you and he are at odds, and maybe you now believe we’re not on his side.  Right?”

“I… guess.”  Then: “What are you?”

Doug sighed.  “Fairies.”

“Elven knights,” Gus specified.

“Like I said,” Doug went on, “we belong to a team of magical troubleshooters.  Your brother attacked us on sight, unprovoked, so I’m guessing he’s the trouble.  Right?”

“No, wait,” said Dolores, looking suspicious.  “What are you really?  You don’t feel like ghosts, and you were too solid for too long.”

“We’re fays,” Gus insisted.  He sat and curled his tail around his forefeet.

“You think all fays come from ghosts?” Doug asked. “Some do, but others are born fay and others are made over from mortals.  That’s us.”

“We’re regular guys,” Gus said.  “Or we started that way.  Long story.  But we’re still human.”  He looked down at his paws.  “Well, we can be.”  He reared up and shrank to human, complete with karate gi and sword, summoned from the dunes across the water.  He spread his arms.  “The original me.”

Doug changed as well and said, “So about your brother?”

Dolores looked them over slowly, perhaps consulting some arcane senses, then nodded slightly to herself and began:  “My brother and I moved here four or five years ago. Moved back, really. Our family used to own the house.”

Gus nodded. “You got run out of town back in the Depression. Raw deal. We read about it.”

Dolores blinked at him and nodded again. “Our family needs a place. We’re a bunch of drifters—we don’t like it —homeless, some of us. Agrippa and I and a few others thought this might be a good place to try. It was cheap, and we had some claim on it. That can make a difference to magic. And we thought—we hoped—we could maybe change our luck here.”

“The Curse of the November People?” Doug asked with deliberate melodrama. “We heard about that, too. I’m guessing you didn’t have much luck at changing luck.”

She gave him a sour look. “Right. We didn’t. We tried. We do know something about using magic for luck, and about fighting magic with magic. But we got nowhere. Agrippa said we needed to work up a big blast of magic, so we set ourselves to sacrificing.”

“Sacrificing to who?” asked Gus.

“Do you mean austerities?” asked Doug.

She shrugged. “To whoever passes out extra magic, I guess. What’s ‘austerities’?”

“Doing hard or uncomfortable things to build up magic,” Doug answered.

“We call that sacrifices. It works. We got more power than we’d ever had. But it was pure misery. And it’s walking a razor. Too much and you– Well. It happened to Agrippa.”

“He starved himself to death?” Doug asked. “Only not really ‘to death’?”

Dolores squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and stared at the beach sand. Gus noticed there were no waves; the water stood flat and still. Doug noticed the wind had died. Was she forgetting to keep this place running?

“That’s right,” she agreed, her high voice pinched still higher, a short step from weeping. “He died but he wouldn’t move on. It must be hell. But that’s the sacrifice that gives him the power to keep… alive, or whatever it is. Keep goin’.”

“I’m sorry,” Gus said softly.

“Where did that leave you?” Doug asked.

“It’s where it’s left him!” she countered. “He’s crazy, has been since before he– well, since before he died. He wants outta the house, wants to go rampaging all over town, eat his way through the grocery stores, eat all the stray dogs and cats and … other stuff, raise a wall of fire around our yard, or around the whole town. Silly stuff. Crazy stuff. Gonna pull the bones outta the graveyard and set ’em to workin’ for us, fightin’ for us.”

Her fair form was wearing thin along with the polish on her English. She looked undernourished and exhausted. Her hair was getting wispy. She waved a hand in disgust and dismissal. “Crazy stuff. Worse stuff. But he couldn’t do any o’ those things.” Doug and Gus both relaxed a bit. “Can’t even eat, now. But he wants to get out, and if he does, he’ll have his rampage. No tellin’ what he’d do, but it won’t be good.”

“So you have to keep him in,” Doug inferred.

She nodded. “It’s kind of a ritual, now. I fight him, spell to spell, all day and half the night. Asleep on my feet, half the time. Then he gives out, and I can eat, sleep for a while, maybe sneak out for little walk, remember there’s more to the world.”

“You must be stronger than him,” Doug said, “to beat him every single night.”

She nodded, then shrugged. “He’s got more magic, but he has to use a lot to keep goin’. And that gets in the way of some of the other magic he tries. I’m alive. I am alive!” she insisted, though no one had contradicted her. “And I can fuddle him with dreams and mirages. Used to be, he could dream too, but now he’s so tight fixed on gettin’ out, he don’t dream no more.” Her voice rose in pitch through the last few words, broke, and became weeping. Then: “Oh, I wish he’d die! Ain’t that a terrible thing to say ’bout your brother?”

“Not under the circumstances,” said Doug softly.

“It’s three against one, now,” Gus told her. “We can help. We’re no spell-slingers, but we got the physical side covered.”

“Four to one,” Doug said, “if you can get Evertson going again.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Dolores. “All that strength he took out of Chief Evertson! And you, too! He’s up! He’s awake early!”

“Get us there,” Gus urged her.

If the previous shifts of scene had been bursts of light, this was a burst of darkness. More than half ready to take battle form anyway, the two sprang into lungmao shape; their slitted pupils flared wide.

They stood in a bare room. Opposite them, before the open door, Chief Evertson lay face down on the floor. Crouching over him was the skeleton from the dream-beach, looking exactly the same.

“He’s got out of the kitchen!” Dolores shrieked. “He’s almost out of the house! Grip! No!”

The skeleton raised its skull and gazed back, still poised over Evertson.

“It’s already got all his chi,” Gus muttered to Doug. “What else’s it want?”

Doug recalled the talk of eating up stray cats and dogs. “Meat,” he answered.

“No.v” A giant lion, Gus flashed across the room and landed forepaws first on Agrippa’s ribcage. A heartbeat behind, lion-Doug arrived and swatted the skull off the spine, just as he had done in the dream minutes before. The skull caromed out the door.

Gus bit down on the ribs and shook them like a terrier with a rat.

He made a discovery: He and Doug had been careful to cook the rabbits they caught because they had found that, as lions, raw rabbits tasted good, and this worried them. Gus now found that bones, even dry ones, also tasted good. He flung them away with a final head toss and worked on spitting out splinters.

Doug padded out the door, into the night. Dolores had been shrieking and was now just wailing, her head in her hands. Gus decided it was a good time to turn human again and put his gi back on.

While he did that, he spotted a pack of water bottles on the floor. He took one to rinse his mouth, then headed out the door to spit. He met Doug coming in, human, naked, holding the skull in his hands. He looked revolted.

“Picked it up with my mouth,” he said. “Mistake. I wasn’t thinking. It, ah, it…” Gus gave him the water bottle and spat out into the yard. Doug thanked him, drank with the skull tucked under one arm, and spat in turn.

They went back in. Doug put the skull down and got dressed. “That was a cute trick with your gi, by the way,” he said to Gus. In the background, Dolores continued to wail.

“What trick?”

“When you jumped on Agrippa, you just sort of squirted out of your gi, like toothpaste out of a tube. Lion-paste. I figured if you could, I could, so I did.”

“I never even noticed.” Gus looked at the cranium on the floor. “Where’s the jaw bone?”

Doug looked around, then pointed to it, on the floor near Evertson’s feet. Gus gathered it and all the other bones and fragments into a single pile by the Chief’s head.

“Is he gone?” Doug asked him.

Gus regarded the bones carefully for some seconds. “I think so. Tell me what you think.”

Doug joined him, stared a while, then nodded. “No chi, no presence. Dolores,” he called, “he’s just dead now. We’re pretty sure.” She went on wailing.

Doug went over to where she huddled on the bare floor, near a doorway. He peered in. It was a kitchen. He looked down at Dolores. She was not quite as haggard as her mummy shape had looked. She had some hair. The white dress was rumpled but not rags. He lifted her up, then led her, half hugging her as they went, to Evertson and the bone pile.

“Look,” he told her. “He’s dead. Just dead. I think he may be getting better treatment now than he gave himself. And there’ll be no rampage.”

Her wailing died down and was replaced with a softer sobbing, in which they heard notes of relief.

Doug sat down next to Evertson, placed a hand on the back of his neck, and tried to push a little chi into the man. Immediately, he felt dizzy. Agrippa had pulled more out of him than he had realized. And now all that chi had gone up in smoke.

“Let me try,” said Gus. He sat down on the other side of the man, touched the neck, and promptly wobbled where he sat. Evertson began to snore.

Dolores had stopped crying and now just stood, staring at them. “Dolores,” Doug asked, “do you have any chi—any strength—to spare? Could you give Evertson enough to wake up with? Otherwise, he’ll be here until dawn.”

She shuffled over timidly, knelt, and touched the back of his head. The snoring stopped. She held her hand in place as the Chief came gradually back to waking. “Don’t you have any?” she asked Doug and Gus.

“Tiny scraps,” Doug answered, sighing.

“But how can you change shapes like that? That’s big-time magic! The biggest I ever saw!”

“Practice,” Gus answered. “It’s the only magic we do, really, and we do it a lot. We get good at it, so a scrap of chi is all we need. Good thing. Chief! Hey, Chief! Show’s over.”

Evertson coughed, sighed, and pushed himself up. He looked around, taking in presently-human Doug and Gus, Dolores in the flesh for once, and the thoroughly disarticulated human bones. He sat up and looked around, scanning the bare room and the open door letting in dim street light. “What–?”

“We won,” Gus told him.

“You’ve only been out of a couple of minutes,” Doug said. “Dolores had fought Agrippa to a standstill, the way she’s been doing every night, but then he roused again when we dropped by, all full of tasty chi. So he drained us—including you—then she and he started at it again. We are not at all in Dolores’s league for raw magic power, but she got us back here, and we handled it on the physical level.” He gestured at the bone pile.

“You killed him?” Evertson asked, confusion and worry blending in his tone.

“Does that look like anything that was alive tonight?” Gus asked.

Evertson stared at the bones for a second, then turned to Dolores. “Miss Graves? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, as one does. Then, “Really. I just– just…” Doug grabbed her as she bent over, then collapsed and sat on the floor, crying again.

“That’s a No,” Doug told Evertson. He sat down next to Dolores and put an arm around her shoulder. She did not react.

Gus sat down on the other side, stared for a while at the pile of bones he had been chewing just now, then said to Evertson, “She’s half starved, or more. Maybe she has anorexia. She is so run down, I don’t have words. She’s just dropped a load of hell. That’s great, but there’s rebound, you know.” Evertson nodded.

Gus contemplated the bones for another while. Dolores stopped crying, at least out loud. Finally, Gus asked Evertson, “What’s your wife like?”

“What?”

“Is she kind? Is she level-headed?”

“Yeah, sure. Plenty. More’n me. Why? Oh. Do you–?”

“She needs help,” said Gus. “All kinds of help. No job. All she has in the world is this empty house and an uneven dribble of cash from her family. She prob’ly oughta be taken to the hospital, but I don’t know who’d pay for that.”

“Did I sayv I wanted to move in with the Chief and his wife?” demanded Dolores. Annoyance probably made a pleasant change from her earlier emotions.

“No,” agreed Gus, “but you need help. We all know it. You deserve help. You’ve saved this town from your brother’s one-man zombie invasion, every night for four years. You need rest and food and time to think. After we leave, Chief Evertson will be the only one who knows what’s going on. Him and, ah…”

“You think I should get my wife mixed up in this Sundering stuff?” the Chief asked in no friendly tone.

“Yeah, we do,” said Doug. “We don’t have wives, but we have parents, and brothers and sisters. When we got back, we had to decide whether to show them or not. Yes, it could wind up being dangerous, but it’s that or keep a big, fat secret the rest of your life. Or try to and fail. You want to pay that piper?” Evertson shifted his gaze uneasily. Doug decided to tighten the screw. “What kind of marriage do you have?” he asked.

Evertson stared back coldly for some seconds, then said, “Get out there on the porch, the two of you. I need some privacy.” Dolores struggled to rise with them, but Evertson said, “You stay here, miss.” He pulled a phone out of his pocket and, as they exited, they heard him saying, “Hi, honey. Sorry to get you up. It’s… strange. And important.”

“You know what I think?” said Doug as they sat down on the porch steps.

“What?”

“I think he wouldn’t exactly mind if we ran off into the night, but he wants to hang on to Dolores, privacy or not.”

Gus nodded, then stared out at the night. Ordinary night, solid, mundane, containing nothing stranger than himself. He sighed his relief, then asked, “What’ll we do with the bones?”

“Not our problem.”

“Neither was Agrippa.”

“Well… Okay, when you put it that way…” Doug pulled out his own phone and woke up Theano, far away in Great Bend.

—

The Chief had insisted Gus and Doug come home with him. “You’re going to show Carol your tricks. Otherwise, why’s she going to believe any of this?”

Carol Evertson had believed, with only one shriek and a short burst of hysterics. Then she had listened carefully to their biographies. And Dolores’s. And the tale of the Abigail Incident. Then she had put everyone to bed until 10:00 AM.

At noon, Dolores was still asleep upstairs, in the bedroom vacated when the Evertsons’ daughter had gone to college, while everyone else was in the kitchen. Mrs. Evertson was making stacks of sandwiches while Doug and Gus helped. “Stop eating rabbit,” she commanded. “You’ll get worms. And it’s no good. It’s too low in fat. You can starve on a diet of rabbit. Probably why you stuck your heads into buckets of chicken as soon as you came to town.”

“Yes, ma’am.” “Happy to, ma’am.”

“I hope she’s really sleepin’,” said Gus, glancing upward toward the spare bedroom, “and not getting’ into trouble over there.”

“Nothing we can do about it,” said Doug. Then he said to the Evertsons, “Be sure to call that number Theano gave you as soon as you can.”

“I will,” Evertson promised, “though I don’t see how one pastor’s funeral service can be more ‘effective’ than another’s.”

“I don’t know details,” said Doug, spreading mayonnaise, “but Theano said he’s a ghost hunter as well as a pastor. If Agrippa hasn’t already left, this guy’ll sniff him out and knows how to force him out.”

“You can force ghosts?” asked Carol Evertson.

“There are tricks,” Doug answered. “We know a couple. This guy must know more. He’ll probably teach some to you. You might need them, now that you’re Sundered.”

“Sorry about that,” Gus muttered, tucking a sandwich into a plastic bag.

“I needed to know,” Carol said firmly, slicing ham. “Promises are important to fairy-tale creatures, right?”

“Promises are always important,” said Gus the fairy-tale creature.

‘Well, there’s the one about ‘for better or worse.’ I don’t know if this is better or worse or just sideways, but I’m sticking with it.” The Chief got up from where he was sitting, took her in his arms, and kissed her full on the mouth, ignoring the very strange strangers.

When they eventually broke the clinch, Doug coughed gently and said, “Remember to ask the pastor about keeping Dolores’s family curse off you.”

“Well, okay,” said Carol, “but I don’t believe in luck.”

“Bet you didn’t believe in elf-knights either,” Gus remarked.

“Well, random stuff happens,” said Doug, “and there are people who can use magic to make the randomness swing their way. Most people call that luck magic. And someone laid a bad case on Dolores’s family over a century ago. Maybe this minister can do something about it, or knows someone who can.”

“Start making contacts,” Gus advised. “Carefully, of course. You can start with this pastor.”

“And you’ve already got Theano and the circus,” Doug added.

The Chief drove them out to the cornfield where they had stashed they backpacks. Carol insisted on coming too. She politely observed the corn while the two got back into their street clothes, then surprised them by giving each a firm kiss on the cheek. “No more rabbit,” she reminded them. “I’m sure that nice Madame Theano will pay for a few restaurant meals.”

“Right.” “Yes’m.”

Chief Evertson pumped their hands. “Sorry I was so suspicious.”

“Why wouldn’t you be?” “Very natural.”

“I hope your circus does come to town. Sometime soon,” he concluded. Then he and his wife got in the cop car and drove away.

Doug and Gus slipped the swords into their packs, shouldered them, and hit the road for distant Great Bend. Doug sighed in relief. “Well, the rest of the hike should be quiet.”

Both their phones rang.

Gus cuffed Doug on the shoulder. “You jinxed it,” he said.

⇦ And Join the Circus
Return to Stories
Return to Inkliverse
Return to Wind Off the Hilltop

Copyright © Earl Wajenberg, 2025