TALE 15

THE TOWER AND THE TOAD

            They found Ethan one morning by the docks on Wednesday, June 5^th.

            He had come out early to watch some of his commercial ships move out onto the Long Island Sound not far from his mostly completed fisheries.

            He had the Bartlett Fisheries rebuilt as a commercial hybrid system. Half of it was to utilize the old method of using fishing boats to collect saltwater fish in the Long Island Sound just like before Ethan’s granduncle Julian took them down and half was farm fishing. He tore down some condemned buildings beside the fisheries that had not been used in forty years or so and then used the space there to extend out the fisheries to include fish farm tanks that were by then filled with baby trout, salmon and others.

            The cannery to the west had been repaired and re-equipped with new equipment and machinery and only needed a little more dock and building work to be finished before full production. Soon, the two businesses would be symbiotically working together.

            Most of the docks near the cannery and fisheries had collapsed into the ocean in the 1990s around the time Randal O’Brien bought the properties, which had brought up rumors that Julian Bartlett caused the destruction just to spite him. Ethan had rebuilt the docks around the fisheries and the city decided to rebuild the pier, which had also collapsed at the same time.

            The town even had various old rides they were bringing out of storage, such as a locally famed Ferris wheel called “The Magic Wheel” and a rollercoaster called, “The Magician’s Sled.” They were one of those little theme park exhibits found on various docks and piers all over America.

            It was all shaping up rather nicely and Ethan owned a pretty good chunk of all of it.

            That morning was chilly so he wore his black jacket over his dark orange t-shirt and jeans and was strolling down the docks closer to the beach area with Mickey resting on his left shoulder and Paul trotting along beside him with his tongue hanging out.

            “I so love the beach,” Ethan told Mickey as he looked out and saw several young, sexy women wearing tight wetsuits in the sand.

            “It’s okay,” Mickey replied unhappily. “It would be a whole lot nicer without those goddamn seagulls!” Mickey despised seagulls because every time he wasn’t around Ethan and had food, they tried to steal it from him. For that reason, he always encouraged Paul the Labrador to rush into them and bark loudly whenever he saw a group of them together on the ground.

            He was doing that right then, sending the dog across the sand, and barking at the seagulls and sending them flying off in all directions.

            “That’s right,” Mickey said in a low voice. “Fly away, you ugly, white, rat bastards.”

            Ethan smiled, rested his forearms on the rail of the boardwalk some ten-plus feet above the sand in that section and looked up into the early, bright blue sky over the Long Island Sound.

            As he watched the white birds flying up into the air, he thought about the daughters he had when he was Walter Kent. He thought about how they smiled at the English seagulls near Dover, pointing and giggling, and talking to each other about them in their cute little girl voices.

            It was at that moment, he suddenly sensed someone watching him.

            Out of the corner of both eyes, he saw two men move down the boardwalk toward him from his left and right sides. Even though it was broad daylight and he had only seen them in the dark before, he knew exactly who they were.

            When they approached him, he turned around, keeping them in both peripherals and held up his hands. “You know we’re out in the open, right?”

            “We’re not here for that,” the older one told him as he and the younger one stopped on either side of him. The older man still had the short beard when they met in Beechwood and was wearing a long, dark gray trench coat that probably hid a gun. The other man with his curly hair looked so much like his brother in daylight that he was almost his twin and he too was wearing a gray trench coat that probably hid some kind of weapon.

            “Who the hell are you assholes?” asked Mickey.

            They looked half-aggressive, ready to leap if something went wrong, but they didn’t seem as though they wanted to fight. “My name is Stephen Upton,” said the older one.

            “John Thorne,” said the other.

            “I want to talk to you about my son,” said Upton. “Do you remember my son Rory?”

            Ethan was never going to forget the two men who died in front of that tower on his first day in Bartlett Bay or the peculiarly disturbing way it happened. “Yeah,” he said. “Rory Upton and Alan Thorne.” He lowered his hands. “Why the change of heart?”

            Upton swallowed and looked at him in a cold, bitter sort of way that could mean anything. “Paige Waylon vouched for you.”

            “Who?”

            “The Bellator sister you’re friends with.”

            “I don’t know any woman named Paige.”

            “Natalie,” said a voice and he turned to see the woman approaching him, carrying an orange slushy drink in her hand.

            “Oh, hey Natalie,” Ethan said.

            “I thought you were going to let me approach first,” she said to the others.

            “You were taking too long,” Upton told her.

            Natalie had changed from when he last saw her and it made him smile. There was a kind of light around her, as though she was much happier and more alive. Her dark hair was tied behind her in a ponytail with highlights of blond and she wore a dark brown leather jacket with a black shirt tucked into tight jeans. She seemed more herself than she had been before.

            It was that ghost, he thought. That part of her was trapped in the cave. He did not think he would ever fully understand that situation but at least it ended well.

            “I’m Paige now,” she told him. “My real name is Paige Waylon. I found my father and his husband. He was quite surprised. ‘Paige Marie Waylon’ is the actual name on my birth certificate. I’m named after his mother.”

            “Husband?”

            “He’s gay.”

            “Cool,” Ethan said and then he saw that Paige smiled at him a little uncomfortably. “Okay, uh, so what’s happening here?”

            “I understand now you’re most likely not the man who murdered my son,” said Upton uneasily. He sounded like he meant it but he didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

            “What changed your mind?”

            “I got to know her mother,” he said in a cold, bitter way that seemed attuned to him. “Plus, after researching you, I find you don’t fit the profile of a man who would murder my son or his brother without a good reason.”

            Rory Upton did give him a good reason, self-defense, but Ethan didn’t say that. “If it’s not revenge,” he said, “Then what is it exactly that you think I can do for you?”

            “Firstly,” Upton told him, “We want you to tell me exactly what happened to my son and his brother.”

            “You don’t want to know the answer—”

            “Do not fuck with me on this!” he snarled suddenly, rage filling his face as fast as if someone had turned it on like a light switch. “I need to know!”

            “I know you do. I said ‘You don’t want to know the answer to that,’ because you don’t but I’m going to tell you anyway. Anyone hungry?”

 

*          *          *

 

            Ethan told his story over breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box, which was located on Worthington St. a little south of the Red Rabbit Theatre. It was an old 1970s version of the place where they kept the exterior the same, minus the clown, but had modernized the interior.

            He ordered himself and Paige breakfast while Upton and Thorne just had coffee. Upton was doing all the talking while Thorne was very quiet, having not said anything except his order. They sat outside in a corner where no one could hear them, Upton and Thorne on one side, Ethan and Paige on the other.

            Mickey was standing on the table, his face buried into a small box of seasoned curly fries, making happy, munching sounds as he ate. Paul was sitting near the table, having eaten a hamburger and fries quickly using his paws-hands and was drinking some cola at their feet while waiting patiently.

            “So he attacked you then?” asked Upton with suspicious eyes.

            “Yeah, the magic didn’t leave either of us much choice. I’m pretty sure it was a ‘worse than death’ scenario, though. Some of the other victims within the tower screamed out to run but couldn’t help trying to kill me so I’m guessing it did something to their brains making it impossible for them to resist.”

            Ethan leaned back.

            “I don’t understand the magic there,” he added. “It’s wildly intense and vastly beyond me.” He didn’t mention that, for a while, he thought he had a break when he destroyed a volume of the Book of the Damned, but the more he thought about it, the more he came to believe that magic wasn’t the same magic that he saw in the woods that day, and had no relevance there.

            “Yes,” said Paige strangely, her eyes distant. “There’s something unusual in those woods.”

            “What do you know?” Ethan asked her.

            “Nothing,” she replied. “I just heard things back when I was Mary White.”

            “Don’t get on with that again,” said Upton abruptly.

            Paige and Ethan shared a shrug.

            “I’m sorry about your son, Stephen,” said Ethan, “But what else can I possibly do?”

            “You can lead me back to that tower where my son died,” he told him simply.

            “I’m not sure I can find it,” he told him. “It’s also a day out.”

            “Yeah, you mentioned that in your story,” he said and he scoffed. “A day out? Really? In a, what, two mile radius forest?”

            “Oh, you’ll see,” said Mickey. He was using his little hands to hold the box and had just pulled his out his head. He ate a fry quickly, swallowed and looked up at him. “Oh yes,” he said, “You will see and you will not like it.”

            Upton looked at Ethan expectedly.

            “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” Ethan told him.

            “You didn’t like Rory much, did you?” asked Upton bluntly.

            “No offense but your boy and his brother were kind of pricks. It is not as if it was kill worthy or anything, but we weren’t bros. They took their position in the Order of the Autumn Rose as indicative of a superior position, showed me utter contempt and were really hooked on her sister, who really, really, really did not like me. I think maybe they were trying to please her.”

            “All my sisters are incredibly beautiful,” said Paige. “Sally had a habit of using her looks to get men to dote on her even though she openly hated them more than any of the others. She had a way of tricking men into thinking she was slowly warming up to them against her better judgement but she never was.”

            “I just want you to lead me to where my son died,” said Upton. “To this ‘tower’ so I can see it with my own eyes.” Obviously, he didn’t believe it existed, but the mystery of his son’s death was clearly haunting him, and he wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer.

            “I doubt you’ll find anything out there,” Ethan told him.

            Upton leaned forward and in a cold, hard voice, added the words, “At the very least, I’ll find out if you’re lying.”

            “Fair enough. We’ll head out in the morning on Saturday.”

            “We’ll head out now,” he told him. “It can’t be that far.”

            “If you say so,” Ethan replied and then shrugged. He had nothing much else going on. “Meet on the south side of the forest in, what—an hour or two?”

            “An hour or two,” he agreed.

 

*          *          *

 

            Paige went with Ethan and asked to borrow a rifle.

            Ethan had foreseen that sort of thing coming and had purchased himself another rifle in case he went wandering out with Darcy again, who had grown increasingly attached to his Kel-Tec. That was because Darcy’s mother forbade the ownership of rifles in her home, obsessed with the idea that she could still make a proper “lady” out of Darcy, and didn’t want any “mannish temptations” around her.

            His new rifle was an all-black HK416, sleek and new. He added a long-range scope in case of another issue like the one he had with those hobgoblins, a flashlight under the barrel and a suppressor. The last was illegal to use for hunting and he was limited to ten-round magazines but he had gotten the suppressor and thirty-round magazines at a gun show in Hartford, CT, a couple weeks prior.

            It used the same rounds as the Kel-Tec, 5.56×45mm NATO, so he was solid on bullets already.

            Ethan dropped off Andy and Paul for the night with the Coughlans, who he had grown increasingly close to as of late, parked his 2004 Ford Ranger just south of Charlotte Rd on the west side of the Orange River, and equipped himself.

            He had changed into hiking boots, equipped his black tactical vest, both pistols, sword and dagger, and a backpack filled with supplies, and his new rifle.

            “Do you think we’ll have trouble?” asked Paige as Ethan shut the toolbox on the back of t the truck.

            “Oh yeah,” Ethan told her as he jumped down. He handed her the Kel-Tec and some magazines for it, stuck a different magazine into his HK416, slipped it over his shoulder next to his backpack, and added, “That forest is nothing but trouble and you damn well know it.”

            “I do but I so loving playing the naïve girl,” Paige replied in a cute way. “Boys just love it.” She gave him a cute smile for a moment but then became serious and asked, “You trust them?”

            “Not really,” Ethan replied. “But I had brothers and children myself once, so I sympathize, and I figure that if I evade this or make excuses, it’ll only serve to convince them I’m guilty of something.”

            “That’s noble,” said Paige, “but they were with my sisters and mother. I know they’re misandrist psychopaths and you wouldn’t think any man would ever listen to such women but they can hide their nastier qualities pretty easily when they want to.”

            “Pretty much like the grand majority of women,” Ethan replied.

            Paige laughed at that. “I’ll watch your back,” she told him. “Just in case.”

            “Thank you,” he told her.

            As Ethan locked his car, Mickey suddenly landed on Ethan’s shoulder, breathing heavily. “Goddamn it!” he snarled.

            “Getting out of shape, Small Bird?” he asked.

            “No!” he said angrily. “It’s those damn seagulls again!” He had wanted to hang out of the beach for a couple hours and said he would meet them there. “You got the chips?” he asked with a stern look. Ethan tapped on his backpack a bit, making the distinct crunch sound of Cool Ranch Doritos. “Excellent!”

            They crossed the bridge east over the Orange River, the name of which no one told Ethan, and found Stephen Upton and John Thorne were waiting for him by the fence around the south side of the Engelstad, a green 1995 Honda Civic and a black 1999 Toyota Camry parked alongside it.

            There was a third person with them that Ethan did not recognize. “I don’t know her,” said Paige quietly as they approached.

            The woman was a tall, slender woman with almost no curves, a hard, long average-looking face and curly, dark blond hair behind her head. She had a sour look to her, a kind of intense appearance with her lips pressed together tightly as she stared at Ethan with concentration. She was wearing a pair of jeans, black hiking boots, a short-sleeved gray shirt and another gray trench coat.

            All three of them were armed but not as well as he or Paige. They each had Glock pistols and lighter armor than Upton’s son and Thorne’s brother had in the form of hard leather with the same rose symbol on the front under their gray jackets.

            “A little overkill, don’t you think?” said Upton.

            “No,” said Ethan and turned to the woman. “Who are you?”

            “My name is Teri Swenson,” she told him. “I’m here to help verify your story. I’m one of the Order of the Autumn Rose’s psychics.”

            “Born into it, no doubt,” said Ethan.

            “Not a fan, I see,” she said sourly.

            “I don’t like elitist groups,” he told her.

            “Especially ones that don’t share their spells with non-members, I suppose.”

            Ethan let out a laugh that turned into a sigh. “You should use the parking lot back there over the bridge,” he told them. “They might tow your car if it’s left out here too long.”

            “We won’t be here for more than a few hours,” said Thorne.

            “If you say so,” Ethan replied.

            Upton looked at Ethan in that cold, bitter way of his and said, “Do you honestly expect me to believe there is a hidden stone tower in that little forest rising high above the tree lines?”

            “I never said ‘rising high above’ but you’ll see,” Ethan told him.

            “I will,” agreed Upton in that cold way of us.

            Thorne used a small bolt cutter and carefully clipped a semi-circle in the red-rusted chain link fence nearby. The five of them then pushed open the semi-circle like a door and slipped through the fence. At the entrance of the woods, just before they entered, Swenson stopped at it and stared with wide eyes.

            “There it is,” Ethan said when he saw her expression.

            “What is it?” Upton asked her.

            “Nothing,” she told him quickly.

            “If you say so,” Ethan replied and led the way.

 

*          *          *

 

            Ethan found that most of the damage the “troll” had done that led them toward the tower was still there and Ethan could still easily track it. With Mickey’s eyesight and tracking skills added to it, he was making far better time than he had on that first day.

            The men behind him had lapsed into a morose silence where they stared at his back with unfiltered suspicion that grew as the hours passed while Paige had fallen into a deep conversation with Swenson over something ordinary and feminine for a while.

            Around late afternoon, Paige slipped away from Swenson, moved up next to him and said, “I heard you were dating a girl named Becky Masterson.”

            Ethan laughed. “Where did you hear that?”

            “Around,” she replied with a cute, half-smile.

            “So you’re friends with Darcy Hamilton, are you?”

            “We talk sometimes,” she told him. “She says Becky has a mad crush on you.”

            “She does but she’s a little too serious for anything fun.” She was so emotionally involved in fact, that Ethan felt almost convinced he would end up being a situation where it would break her heart if he didn’t fall in love with or marry her. “So, you have two dads now?”

            “Oh yeah,” she replied with a smile. “My father was extremely happy to see me. He could not find me because my mother disappeared and changed ours names and she had been using a fake name to him to begin with. The whole situation is creepy and awkward but he’s a lovely man and I’m very happy.”

            “How is it creepy and awkward?”

            “My father has always been super-duper gay, even in high school, but he’s really good-looking and really smart. He’s a neurosurgeon living in Hartford, CT, although he claims you don’t have to be that smart to be one. My mother always wanted a man like that to breed one of her daughters. We all have different fathers and she aimed for different ones for different things but they’re all smart and beautiful as a prerequisite so we would all be smart and beautiful as well.

            “She thought because my father was gay that he would never have any kind of paternal interest with his child. She used a spell to force him into sex with her, which is super messed up and he won’t admit is rape, although his husband definitely will. She figured he would just flee in the face of heterosexual responsibility and sign away his daughter. She also believed that he would never claim rape because to claim rape from a woman would be humiliating for a man. Even with magic involved.

            “She was only half-right. He definitely wanted custody because he definitely wanted a family and he was gay so he saw right through her looks to see how terrible she really was. He put a bunch of money in lawyers and when it was certain he was going to win, my mother snatched me up and disappeared into the dark, but he never stopped looking right up until the day I appeared on his doorstep.”

            “You staying with him?”

            “Yeah but I feel bad. I do work around the house and I’m trying to get a job so as not disrupt his life too much. We go see movies and hang out at the park and stuff and catch up and it’s lovely. He’s really a very sweet man.”

            “Aww,” said Ethan.

            “Now, here it comes,” said Paige, her hands behind her back, another cute little grin on her face as she walked. She turned her head toward his as she walked through the long beam of light. “Just ask me what you really want.”

            Ethan rolled his eyes with a groan. “Come on!” he almost cried. “We’re both magicians—”

            “You know better than to ask another magician about spells,” she told him.

            “The hell I do!” he cried. “I need—” checked a tree covered in yellowing daylight through an opening in the canopy above, saw the huge scar on it that he recognized to see that he was still on the right path, and then continued with “—I need new spells! The Irish are being colossal pricks about this! All I got from them so far are five spells and they’re super basic!”

            “The life of a hedge mage can be difficult,” she said.

            “It’s a fucking nightmare!” Ethan cried. “Every asshole I meet has dozens or more spells and won’t teach me any damn one of them!” Ethan turned before Upton could grab his shoulder. “What?” he asked.

            “What is this?”

            “I told you,” Ethan retorted.

            “Are you screwing with me?” he asked in that cold voice of his. “Have we been walking around a one, maybe two, mile forest for the last like seven hours in some kind of circle?”

            “No.”

            “Listen, if we’ve been going in one direction, we would have crossed Interstate 95 within like a couple of hours at the most! I know how to navigate woodlands and so do you! I know we’ve crossed those distances several times at least!” His eyes darkened. “What the hell is happening here?”

            Ethan sighed and pointed through the trees. Upton followed his finger toward an opening in the trees to show a series of mountains in the distance with one especially tall one standing out with snow-tipped tops. His eyes grew narrow as he turned to look back at Ethan with a coldly suspicious but otherwise unreadable expression.

            “Does that look like Mount Frissell, to you?”

            He said nothing.

            “Yeah,” said Ethan, looking into his cold eyes. “You didn’t cross that bitch on your way into Bartlett Bay, did you?” Upton’s face still revealed nothing. “We’re out of the purple and into the black so watch your step. The abyss is right below our feet and any wrong move will send us all tumbling on in.”

            “You casting some kind of spell?” he asked softly.

            “Do I look like David Copperfield to you? That’s master-level sorcery there and I was just complaining about how I have only basic ass spells and rituals. I would never be caught walking through this forest with you assholes if I could do what Copperfield could do. I’d opening in Las Vegas for millions a year and banging Scarlett Johannsson right now.”

            “Cute,” said Paige sourly.

            “She is. I agree.” Paige frowned at that and Mickey let a loud “ha” on a tree branch somewhere above.

            “It’s this forest,” Ethan told Upton.

            “We’ll see,” Upton said coldly.
“Oh, yes, you will,” Ethan agreed.

 

*          *          *

 

            The night came before they reached the tower.

            Mickey could see it in the distance when they set up a small camp in a little grove and Ethan had come to a realization that maybe it was all just a little too easy. Everything should have been overgrown, regrown and or hidden by something after a year but it still looked as obvious as it had the year before. That made him think that maybe it was by design. That maybe what he was following were markers meant to look as though they were left by some creature too stupid to know it was leaving an obvious trail in order to quiet the idea that maybe their placement was actually designed to lure people toward that tower like a spider lured a fly into its web.

            As they sat around the campfire, Ethan, Mickey and Paige were on one side with Upton, Thorne and Swenson on the other, Ethan took out two retractable bowls, one red and one blue and poured water from a second water bottle into the blue one and Cool Ranch Doritos into the red one. Mickey stood there and began to eat them the same way he ate his fries.

            Paige reached down and petted Mickey who said, “Oh yeah! That’s the stuff!”

            “No food?” Ethan asked Upton.

            “We’ll be fine,” said Upton.

            “I had a feeling this might happen,” Ethan told him and took out some meal-ready ration bags he had brought for a situation where he might have ended up in that forest longer than intended and tossed one to each of them along with some cheap plastic forks and spoons. Thorne caught his beef and barbeque sauce without looking and stared at Mickey with a thoughtful expression on his face. Mickey had already eaten his dinner after catching something in the woods while they set up camp and was just chowing down on Doritos because he liked them.

            After a moment, Thorne said, “I’m taking some of those Doritos.”

            “The hell you are,” said Mickey. “Get your own.”

            “Make your bird give me some of those Doritos,” Thorne told him.

            “He doesn’t listen to me,” Ethan told him. “Behold.” He turned to Mickey. “Bird. Give Mr. Thorne Doritos.”

            Mickey turned his head, looked up at him and mimicked his tone with, “Human. Fuck off.”

            Ethan shrugged.

            Thorne rolled his eyes and said, “I’m getting some of those Doritos, bird.”

            “You stay the hell away from my Doritos!” Mickey hissed.

            “We’ll be there by tomorrow and back again by evening or so,” said Ethan. “We can live off rations until then.”

            Thorne started to get up.

            “He will peck you viciously and hard if you try and take his Doritos!” Ethan told him. “Do not test him on this!”

            “Why is your pet such an asshole?” Thorne asked bitterly as he sat back down, his lip lifting up over his front teeth in a sneering kind of way.

            “It’s not entirely known to me,” Mickey told him thoughtfully. “I think it involves his parents.”

            Paige burst out laughing.

            “That’s my little bastard,” Ethan said and petted him.

            Time went on quietly for a bit with the only sound being that of chips crunching. As he munched away, Mickey kept his eyes on Thorne, sometimes reaching down, picking up a Dorito, and putting it in his mouth in a deliberate manner. Then he would eat it slowly, making happy, contented sounds.

            Thorne’s lips curled up into a more visible, more hateful, sneer. Ethan thought he saw something of that in his brother the year before.

            “Well, we might see Alfred the Thanksgiving Turkey, if we’re lucky,” Ethan told Paige. “I saw him last time I was near that tower.”

            “That thing on the sign is real?” asked Paige with a dubious expression.

            “Oh yeah. He’s huge and super nice and super gentle and he had a bunch of candy bars for some reason. I don’t know why he was out here but I saw him on the first day. Haven’t seen him since, though.”

            Swenson had been looking at Ethan with intense concentration for a while. It was getting on his nerves so eventually, Ethan had just asked irritably, “What are you doing?”

            “Just thinking.”

            “Exactly what kind of psychic are you?” he asked.

            “My abilities are mostly geared toward ESP, which is short for extraordinary sensory perception. I can tell things about objects, animals and people if I can touch them. Want me to read you?”

            “Absolutely not,” he replied sternly.

            Upton sighed tiredly as if it was all a very tedious argument he had heard before. “They told me you weren’t a believer,” Swenson told Upton. “You actively tried to take me off this job of which I desperate need.”

            Upton half-scoffed, half-laughed and said, “I’m not so exactly overflowing with so much money that I can afford to pay a skinny woman with virtually no combat ability to tell me about the dark and handsome stranger in my future.”

            Ethan let and a “ha” and said, “That one never gets old.”

            Swenson looked at Upton coldly for a moment, then snatched his hand and held it up. “Want to know your fortune, Stephen?”

            Upton frowned, tried to pull away, but she held on tightly. “Let go of my hand, Teri,” he said in a voice even colder than normal.

            She looked into his palm and her face softened with surprise. “Your father was a monster.” Upton’s face shifted but he kept his emotions under such good control that Ethan couldn’t tell what he was feeling. “You swore you would be a better father than he was but your son grew up spoiled. You blame your wife but you are not so sure it is entirely her fault.”

            “Stop talking,” he said in the voice of iceberg with his eyes locked on hers. “Right now.”

            “The death of your son bothers you twofold. You mourn the loss of a son as a father does but you also feel an incredible self-loathing at what you perceive to be a failure to prove you were a better man than your father was. Even dead, he haunts your mind.”

            Upton’s mask slipped enough for Ethan to see that there was genuine hate in it and he finally yanked his hand away hard enough for her to let go. “You couldn’t possibly be more wrong,” he told her in a hard, bitter voice.

            “If you say so,” Swenson replied with an indifferent shrug and turned to Ethan. “Give me your hand.”

            “No!” Ethan said with a sudden viciousness that surprised him.

            She looked deep into his eyes. “Your father was even worse,” she said. “He killed your—”

            “What part of fucking ‘no’ was unclear to you?” Ethan retorted bitterly.

            “Your mother was one of us,” she told him. “Dana Bartlett. She tried to—”

            “Fuck off!” Ethan almost roared. “I don’t need my past thrown back at me! It was bad enough experiencing it the first time and I’ve already got two other lives haunting me!”

            “I can’t see much just looking at your face,” Swenson told him. “Mostly, I only know what I heard from my contacts in California. They all thought Dana Bartlett was insane.”

            “Not that insane,” Ethan replied. “If you want insane, tell me about John Valentine—”

            “Don’t you dare say that name!” hissed Swenson with sudden venom, her face filled with fear. Then she forced herself back to being calm and added, “This is about you, Ethan Bartlett. There is more to you than you are speaking about.”

            “Will you just fucking drop it, already?” asked Ethan, half-angry, half-tired.

            “Okay,” she said but he had the sense she was not finished with him yet.

            “Who is John Valentine?” asked Upton.

            “Someone dead and gone,” Swenson replied in a forced calm way and to that, he shrugged, and no one mentioned that name again.

            After that, things grew quiet.

            When it came time to sleep, Mickey took his medium bag of Doritos and flew off into the trees just in case Thorne got any ideas during the night. Thorne frowned up at him as he lied himself down by the fire.

            Ethan watched with a smile on his face and then lied down with Paige snuggling on the left side of him, leaving the fire to warm their heads. As he drifted into the subconscious, his smile faded, and he mentally cursed Swenson for bringing up his mother. Once thinking about her, he found he could stop, and he once again wondered about what she had been like back before she went mad.

            He could still hear the sound of her laughter echoing around in the chambers of his mind and still see the fire that surrounded them in their old house in Newbury Park, California. He could also see the girl who had appeared once more, the sister he never had but somehow did, staring up at his mother beside him and he vividly remembered the feeling of her hand as he held it. He had actually thought she would still be there when he pulled her out of the house and wept when she was not.

            I am alone now… he had thought, looking at his empty hand. Alone forever…

            As Ethan drifted into sleep, Dana Bartlett’s mad laughter followed him into that darkness and when he dreamt, he dreamt of fire.

 

*          *          *

 

            “You okay?” asked Paige that morning when she saw his expression.

            “Been better,” admitted Ethan. As he stood there, the Doritos bag came down slowly and he took it casually from Mickey’s feet. He slipped them carefully into his pack, got his things ready, and Mickey rested casually on his shoulder.

            The others were already up but Swenson was thoroughly disturbed.

            “What is—” Swenson jerked her head toward his, her eyes blazing “—it?” he concluded.

            “Nothing,” she replied unhappily and quickly turned away.

            “Saw something you don’t like—”

            “I said, ‘It’s nothing!’” she retorted.

            “If you say so,” he said with a shrug.

            They ate some more ration meals, Thorne grumbling about the food for a bit, and then moved on.

            The tower wasn’t very far and they emerged from the trees while the world was still covered in an early, morning mist when the sky was a bright blue but the sun not yet out. To Ethan, it created a vibe like that of entering a gothic horror movie set.

            He made sure to check the runes on the trees, reassuring himself they were still gone and the real magician hadn’t reappeared, before they stepped out into the dirt front area of the tower that acted as its courtyard.

            “Okay,” Ethan announced as they looked around at the base of the tower. “This is new.”

            All around the clearing in front of the tower were the bones of countless dead humanoids. By their skulls, they appeared to be a mix of hobgoblins and humans, Ethan spotting at least fifty of the latter at a casual glance. Some group or groups had battled each other there in some crazed medieval manner leaving swords, axes, spears and the like on the ground with only a few rusted guns here and there, almost all of which were pipe guns.

            “What happened here?” asked Paige.

            “I have no idea,” Ethan told her. He felt something magical, turned his head over his shoulder, and saw Thorne cast some sort of spell on one tree’s runes about ten feet behind them. Ethan was surprised to find the man was a magician as he had cast nothing in his presence at all until then nor indicated he had any such abilities in any way at any time.

            Ethan recalled Thorne’s contempt for him and wondered if it had something to do with his perhaps more talented older brother.

            Page moved up near Thorne and looked at the broken rune uncomfortably, her lips pressed together tightly. After examining it closely, Thorne looked over at Upton nervously.

            “It actually checks out?” asked Upton incredulously.

            Thorne shrugged awkwardly and said, “Yeah.”

            Ethan began to say, “I told you—”

            “Shut up!” Upton and Thorne said at once. The two of them quickly began looking through the skeletal bodies without another word.

            “Over there,” Ethan said and pointed. He recalled their deaths vividly enough and he could see where there remains were still lying in the midst of all that carnage, their bones still a bright and disturbing yellow.

            Strangely, they had not moved an inch.

            As before, he wondered about what spell could transform a person in such a manner and who could cast it. Black Courtney had “powers,” from the Book of Damned, yes, but they weren’t actual spells. When he actually thought about it, he didn’t think she was even a magician, or, at least, not the kind he was. The Black Cats must have had similar “powers” but they never cast anything like a spell either.

            The Book of Damned may have crossed into his sort of magic at times but what it primarily was, wasn’t anything he really understood.

            What happened around that tower was simply a ludicrously more potent version of Ethan’s type of magic and unlike Courtney or the Black Cats, he was certain that the caster was not limited to a book for their power. Therefore, any face-to-face confrontation with such an individual would surely equal Ethan’s death.

            Swenson had approached the tower and stared up at it strangely. She had stepped around the small groove where the orb exploded and stopped in front of the still open wall, which was still filled with those yellow-boned skeletons with shades of remaining blue on them. Aside from the dust that had accumulated, they too had not moved from when he left them.

            Ethan suddenly thought about the cave had entered with Darcy and Paige before and the piece of that orb that was there. He lowered his eyes down toward the groove where it had exploded and was not surprised to see that there were no pieces of the orb anywhere. It had not occurred to him then, although perhaps it should have, that the pieces of that orb might have been quite valuable to a magician.

            That’s it, he thought. Armies came for the pieces of that orb, fought to the death over them, and one of them got back to that crazy witch doctor.

            In his stupefied shock, he had also forgotten Upton and Thorne’s weapons, which might well have been enchanted. Looking around, he did not see the sword or axe they had wielded among the weapons lying forgotten in the courtyard, although that didn’t mean they weren’t there, somewhere.

            Upton had found his son’s breastplate, the shiny silver-like sheen was gone and replaced with rusted redness, and took it over to his son’s bones.

            He stared at them with a face that fought misery with coldness and then he then reached into the breastplate without looking, ripped out something from the interior, a slender bronze medallion, and tossed the breastplate down.

            He looked down at the medallion with a cold, hard face that only barely concealed deep misery.

            Dog tags, thought Ethan. The medallion would have Rory Upton’s name, information, and the symbol of a yellow-orange rose.

            “This is goddamned weird,” Thorne told Upton. “I’ve never seen any magic like this. Never even heard of magic like this.”

            “Terrible way for a man to go,” Upton said bitterly and his hand tightened over the medallion. “He was only twenty years old.”

            “Alan was nineteen and a half,” said Thorne as he looked at his brother’s medallion found in the same place in his armor. He looked as though he wanted to cry but was holding it in. “I swore to my mother I would protect him. It didn’t matter about the money. She never trusted the Order. Believed it would get us both killed just as it had our father.” His face turned very bitter. “She’s never going to forgive me.”

            “Listen,” said Ethan. “I’m no good at this but—”

            “Shut up,” Upton said offhandedly. His left hand was squeezing the dog tag so tight he was almost bleeding and stared at what was left of his son’s skull with a savage intensely. It was yellow like the other bones, unmoved from where it landed near a tree, and Upton looked at it as though it was staring back at him.

            The normal bones there had been scattered everywhere and most of them were probably missing but Rory Upton’s and Alan Thorne’s were exactly where they landed one year ago just as those in the base of the tower were.

            Animals won’t touch them, Ethan thought.

            Upton and Thorne began collecting the bones of their family members, putting them in large black garbage bags they had brought with them. They said nothing as they worked, Thorne torn between rage and tears, Upton looking very cold and very bitter.

            “Upton is far sadder than he appears,” Swenson said softly to Ethan.

            “What was that?” asked Upton savagely, his head jerking in her direction. “What did you just say?”

            “Nothing,” she replied.

            Upton half-sneered, half-frowned and turned away. “Fucking psychic!” he snarled.

            “Our kind is not so much loved in the world,” Swenson told Ethan. “Although witches are wildly different from ourselves, it was our prophecies and insight that they often called ‘witchcraft,’ and we the ones they usually burned.”

            “Cry me a fucking river!” Upton almost roared at her as he turned his head back. “You didn’t predict this, did you?”

            “I didn’t know him,” she replied simply. “Macy Wallis was his group’s psychic but he didn’t ask her to read for danger or to come along, did he? Costs a bit of the reward but it might have helped, don’t you think?”

            Upton’s face twitched, intense rage trying to get out, and then turned back to his work.

            Paige moved up behind him. “You going to—”

            “Leave me alone, Paige,” he said but in a markedly kinder tone than he had used with the others.

            “Okay.”

            Ethan said nothing else. He just watched for the next half of an hour as they checked the bones and made sure they had all of them, which wasn’t as difficult as one might think. The smaller bones such as those within the hands and feet were still connected by that blue slime which had dried to an ugly, sticky paste. They placed them all carefully in their bags and when finished, they took out some black nylon with tying hooks, which they could slip over their shoulders, tied the bags shut and then placed them alongside the tower.

            The armor that they had worn was probably too heavy to carry and ruined, so they just left them there.

            “Were their weapons enchanted?” asked Ethan as they placed the bags down, feeling better as the sun came up.

            “Yes,” said Thorne. “Why?”

            “I should have grabbed them,” Ethan replied with a sigh. “They’re probably in the hands of some hobgoblin right now.”

            “You say you killed the witch who did this?” asked Upton.

            “No,” said Ethan. “I killed the sorceress in that tower, who was definitely in on it, but I don’t believe she cast whatever spell transformed your son.”

            “Why?”

            “Well, frankly, if she could that sort of magic herself, there would be no way in hell I would have gotten out of here alive.”

            “Fair enough,” said Upton. “Show us her body.”

            Ethan led them inside. The tower seemed untouched and her body was still there too, still appearing a thousand years old, but someone had come in, put her body on an elegantly carved wooden altar back first, and folded her arms over her chest. They had also placed various flowers all around her, such as roses of all colors, including blue, lilies, carnations, and others Ethan did not know but were bright and colorful. Someone had also placed down bowls of food as well, most old and rotting by then, but one filled with still ripe oranges and another filled with old, copper coins that Ethan did not know the origin of.

            It looked like the leavings found on the grave of a saint.

            “I think her name was Agatha Cane,” said Ethan. “I heard some hobgoblins talking about her much later.”

            Upton nodded soberly, stepped forward and looked down at the corpse with that cold expression of his. Then his face suddenly distorted in a raging snarl and he yanked her corpse off with his left hand, tossed it on the ground near the balcony, and stomped his foot down her head as hard as he could, shattering it to dust on impact. After that, he ground what was what was left of her skull into the floor with his boot, his lips pulled back revealing his teeth.

            As Upton, Thorne and Swenson began searching the tower, Swenson specifically looking through the books, Ethan slipped outside. By then, the sun was up high enough to make the world bright and sent long, yellow beams of light shooting through the trees across the misty air.

            Mickey landed on his shoulder and was uncharacteristically quiet.

            “So,” said Paige as she moved up behind him. “They just exploded?”

            “Yeah.”

            “I’ve seen magic like somewhere before,” she said. “I can’t remember where, though.”

            “Not particularly helpful,” Ethan said and then called out, “Hey! Upton!” Thorne appeared above on the balcony after a few moments. “I’m checking out back, okay?”

            “Whatever,” he said. “Just don’t wander off too far.”

            “No problem,” he replied.

            “I’m going to check over there,” said Paige. The enemies had come through the east through a large opening in the trees where there were more bones and she readied his Kel-Tec as she went off in that direction. By then, they were almost certainly all gone, but Ethan supposed it was better to be safe than sorry.

            Ethan wandered around the tower’s back area for no particular reason, getting wet from the dew on the bushes too close together for a path, their branches touching his arms, neck and head. He had not really expected anything to be back there and was genuinely surprised there was a dirt path that led through an aisle of trees straight north from the tower’s back. Although it was heavily overgrown, it was clear the trees were planted to create a canopy of branches similar to a great hall similar to the entrance roads sometimes seen in plantations.

            Anderson Greenwood’s Georgian home was like that, Ethan thought, remembering Thomas’s visit to Greenthrush Manorthere before the Civil War.

            There were more bodies on that path, scattered around the trees or across the road. He could see arrows still in a couple of ribcages and one dead hobgoblin was stabbed into a tree by a spear and the spear was still stuck in his chest, although his lower body, arms and head had fallen off from decomposition. He only knew it was a hobgoblin because the head was resting on a tree root right below the ribcage.

            Ethan emerged from the path and found himself at a crossroads by a flowing river. The road went left and right onward into the woods like some fairy tale trail to Grandmother’s house while straight ahead it crossed the river via a stone bridge four people or so side with a road beyond leading through an open meadow for about three hundred feet before it meandered into a heavily forested series of hills.

            There were remains of an unknowable amount of bodies on the bridge, most or all human judging by the skulls he saw there, with dried blood turned black and splattered almost everywhere across the gray stone. As he walked forward, he started to hear the sounds of gunfire and men screaming.

            “Oh God!” Ethan gasped softly, his eyes growing wide as the vision started to come. He sounded calm but some part of him wanted to start shrieking. “The blood! Oh God, the fucking blood!” He couldn’t stop seeing the dead men in the ditch, the rebels having no choice but crawl all over them, on to their stomachs and shoot at Nathan’s men as they pushed forward.

            They moved forward, the guns fired and men exploded like water balloons. Forward again, the guns fired and more men exploded. Over and over again, it happened, and though it couldn’t have been long but it sure felt long. It felt like an eternity that would not stop.

            Blood was everywhere! On the ground, on the trees, in the sky, flying up like fountains with each volley fired, looking to Ethan like men doing the wave in a stadium all at once!

            Mickey landed on the stone bridge’s thick, stone rail and said cheerfully, “Oh boy, oh boy, you have fun now, Doctor Who.”

            “Oh yeah, sure, it’s a real blast,” Ethan told him in a voice far calmer than he felt and he fell to his knees. All became much clearer and he could not stop hearing the sounds and the screams of the battle that was three battles near Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862.

            It grew so intense that it seemed a miracle he hadn’t started shrieking at the top of his lungs.

            He saw Nicodemus Walter screaming, covered in blood, and falling down into the ditch on top of the rebel he killed. He was the last from the Bartlett Bay regiment to die that day. The battle slowed down there and men were shrieking into the sky in death throes and that ditch; the endless, slaughter in the ditch that ended the lives of men he had grown up with, was finally over.

            But not the battle, no, because there was still the bridge but it was the ditch where the Bartlett Bay regiment took its losses and men Thomas Bartlett had grown up with died. Ethan remembered all of it so vividly and the endless river of blood that flowed down the ditch like a flood, practically drowning the men buried alive under their comrades.

            The battle was a human meat grinder.

            Oh, how Ethan remembered it all so clearly then. He shut his eyes and saw—

 

*          *          *

 

            —hell looking back at Thomas Bartlett once more.

            Days after the battle, Thomas found himself still staring at the blood-splattered bridge over Antietam Creek with wide, stunned eyes. He would see the sight of dead men in butternut and blue until the day he died and beyond, no different from any dead Scotsman or Frenchman he had seen as Walter Kent.

            All dead soldiers were alike: young men from some farm, town or city somewhere drawn into a conflict over some issue they had no say in and were then killed for that issue. The names, reasons, and propaganda always changed, but the dead were always the same.

            And I’m going to have to remember this forever, Thomas thought bitterly.

            He turned his head and saw Nathan approaching him on his reddish stallion he had called Firebrand. “We’re going to see him now,” he told him in that cold, half-dead way that had become a part of him since Shiloh.

            Thomas nodded soberly, turned his horse Chestnut around, Firebrand’s brother, and the two trotted off into the makeshift, medical camp where they met up with the remaining members of Nathan’s closest friends.

            Thomas had unexpectedly become one of them, slipping in the day after Shiloh like a button slipped into a shirt and he had stayed there just as tightly.

            The Bartlett Boys, as they were called back home, consisted of Nathan Bartlett, their leader, Alexander Thomas Hamilton, named after the founding father but relation debatable, his younger brother Morris Hamilton, Robert Masterson, the Anderson twins, Terrance and Tristan, William Wellington and Frederick Pennington.

            They reached the awkwardly thrown up tent city of little tents where the men were being treated, the screams of pain and misery still filling the air even days later, and not just from wounds but from disease and dysentery, which made the medical section of camp spell like human feces.

            The surgeries had not stopped, day in and day out, and they weren’t done yet and even those that were often had the nightmares that came awake, the kind that just hit like a punch in the face, and they would too scream as if they were being shot at still. The doctors called it “sunstroke,” and confided that there was no cure but time.

            As they rode toward their destination, they came upon the Queen of Nurses, as Tristan called her, wringing something out from the bottom of her plain dress.

            “Sweet Jesus!” Frederick Pennington half-cried when he saw that she was wringing out human blood. There was so much in the lower skirt of her dress that had she not done something about it, walking would have been dragging a weighted ball and chain behind her.

            The woman was named Clara Barton and Thomas had liked her from the instant he first saw her. She was almost certainly the bravest woman he had met in that lifetime with that strange leader-quality unique to women who could be leaders without sacrificing their femininity.

            Clara reminded him deeply of Catherine of Aragon. She had formed her own personal army of men and women to serve the needs of the injured while running vast supply chains of medical supplies all throughout the north from camp and personally worked on the most grievously injured men without fear.

            “What a woman,” Thomas said as he dismounted.

            Frederick was the last to dismount, still staring at Clara in dumbstruck shock. He had been reared by a mostly female, and by association feminine, household. The ladies of his life thought mud on their skirts or dancing badly at a ball was a catastrophe.

            Clara Barton’s hair was straight and dark, parted in the middle, and tied behind her head and her face, average with some degree of cuteness even remaining in middle age that lent itself well to her since she was actually quite small and petite. She couldn’t have topped five feet and a hundred pounds yet she waved through blood and gore like the boldest of sixteenth-century physicians and commanded grown men who obeyed as though she was their queen.
Catherine was small like that too, Thomas thought.

            When she saw them, she had been washing off her hands in a bowl of water on a nearby wooden table. She took her hands out and started toward them.

            “Hello Clara,” said William with a smile he thought quite suave as she approached.

            Clara gave him a highly unimpressed sidelong glance that lasted about a second indicating that he had tried, and spectacularly failed, in one of his infamous flirtation attempts with her.

            William elbowed Tristin when he started to chuckle.

            Clara’s face turned serious and she said to Nathan, “He’s taken a turn for the worst.”

            All of their faces fell into misery. “But he was doing better,” said Frederick miserably. “The doctor said he was doing better.”

            “Infection,” she told him and they all understood. There was nothing that anyone could do about it and it seemed no one could figure out how to predict it either. It came and went like the wind.

            The battle had been a nightmare. It ended with a toll that they were saying was over twelve thousand Union men, in one day, and that was to include Alexander Thomas Hamilton. He was shot right off his horse in the first of the three battles and then his leg was broken when his horse landed right on it.

            He was lucky one of their men nearby kept his cool, a man named Arthur Simms who lived on Fisher St. and worked for Thomas’s father. Simms was able to grab him and haul him out but all for naught, it seemed.

            The first part of the battle was in a cornfield. Major General Hooker launched the fight across a twenty to thirty something acre cornfield to take out some Confederate artillery Stonewall Jackson’s men controlled. It seemed easy enough.

            It turned into a slaughter.

            The entire field of corn was cut down to where there wasn’t a stalk left standing and they had to drag Hooker out when he was shot in the foot with some saying he had lost his wits. That came as no surprise when it was said he saw his own men exploding as though they were waterskins filled with red wine and pieces of them were landing all over the place like confetti.

            The Bartlett Bay Regiment was only marginally involved there but they still lost Alexander and a dozen men.

            It seemed by the time Alexander was dying on his cot, the second part of the battle was already starting. The fight in the ditch-road had been the more brutal on Nathan Bartlett’s men. They gave as good as they got, the ditch-road soon filled with dead Confederates three or four bodies deep, but the Bartletts’ regiment lost thirty percent of their men and the battle still wasn’t over.

            The third part was on that bridge and was yet another insanely bloody affair. Major General Ambrose Burnside successfully took the stone bridge over the Antietam but only by pushing wave after wave after wave against the Confederates who held the high ground on the slopes above the bridge and fired down upon them as though they were hunting ducks. It seemed to have cost almost as much in men as the cornfield and all for what?

            The battle was won or so Thomas was told and something could have happened afterward, sure, but nothing did! Nothing at all!

            Major General George B. McClellan did not proceed onward and the Confederates were left to unmolested and then escaped. It was becoming clearer and clearer to even the stupidest of green recruits who couldn’t read or know right from left that unless battle required sitting around and doing nothing, McClellan was going to make a hash of it.

            Frederick took off his hat and asked Clara, “Is there a chance?”

            Clara looked at him sadly, shook her head and touched his shoulder. “If you have something to say, I’d say it to him now.”

            She then hardened herself and walked fearlessly right back to the surgery area where the screams were the loudest and the ground as red as ripe cherries to continue that bloody but good work of hers.

            “They say she has them call her ‘Mother’ before they pass,” said Tristan. “So they don’t die miserable and alone.”

            “Just come on!” said Nathan coldly and they followed him maneuvered around the little tents on the ground. Nathan lifted up the tent flap from above and found their friend right where they last saw him and it was obvious he was worse and dying. What hope they may have felt rapidly drained away.

            A quick conversation with the incredibly overworked doctor on duty confirmed that his shoulder wound had indeed grown infected. Thomas had tried magic before and did so again but it didn’t work very well against wounds as deep as his and or infections. Hit and miss, mostly, and it was mostly miss. Especially with healing spells, it seemed.

            Magic is dying in the world, he thought as he looked at Alexander’s pale face and lamented his inability to have gone to England. He had meant to go and collect Walter Kent’s spell book from his secret vault, if it was still even still there, but he never had the months to do so.
Walter Kent had some vague healing spells in early forms that he found in Germany that might have contained the ability to heal Alexander but Thomas doubted it. Walter was never able to do any better healing than Thomas was.

            “Hey,” Alexander said weakly. “You fellas may have to win the war without me.”

            “Yeah,” said William and then several of his friends started to whack him.

            That made Alexander laugh. “Oh God, I needed that,” he said painfully.

            At least, he’s in good spirits, thought Thomas. In two lifetimes of war, he had learned that was typically not the case, and Alexander didn’t usually have a sense of humor. He had always been the “serious one.” Looking at him then, Thomas thought he should be miserable. He was lying practically on the ground, grass rising up near his eyes, in a tent so awkwardly low its flap was practically a blanket.

            “Is McClellan finishing this?” asked Alexander.

            “No,” said Nathan and they looked at him. “I’m not going to lie to him now. McClellan doing what he always does. Nothing.”

            “Yeah,” William said. “Remember the cigars.”

            “We’re not talking about the cigars here!” stated Nathan in a hard voice.

            William only shrugged in response.

            “What’s this about cigars?” asked a nearby man with a ragged beard and shaggy dark curly hair hanging around his eyes, his right leg amputated below the knee.

            “See what you just did?” Nathan said angrily.

            “What’s this about cigars?” asked the man again, his lips curled back over his teeth in something like an embittered sneer.

            “Nothing,” Thomas told him. He had no interest in accidentally starting a mutiny and then being shot for it. “It’s a private joke between us.”

            “Give us some space,” said Alexander. “I need to talk to Nathan alone.” They all stepped back a bit as Nathan stayed and looked down nervously at his friend. Alexander saw they weren’t moving far enough away, he made a weak gesture to go farther and then they all just stepped away completely.

            “He wanted to be an architect and build fancy plantation houses in the south,” said Frederic sadly.

            “Don’t talk about that,” said Terrence bitterly.

            “It’s an old story,” Thomas told them. “The details change but it’s the basic story of every man who dies in war.”

            “Stop talking,” Terrence told him.

            “Did we really think this war would be over in like a month or two?” asked Frederick.

            “Seriously, everyone, just shut up!” said Terrance almost in a snarling voice and they did.

            When Nathan stepped up a bit later, he looked deeply disturbed. “I’ll tell you later,” he said bitterly and then they all went their separate ways for a while, doing whatever duties remained to them for the day, which wasn’t much since they had drifted into the “nothing happening” stage of their war.

            When they came back in the evening, some grouped together, others as individuals, they each learned that Alexander Thomas Hamilton had died within the hour of that final conversation. He had drifted off into a sleep of which he never awakened and was gone.

            He was twenty-five years.

            Richard I died from an infection in the shoulder over six hundred and fifty years ago, he thought when the doctor told him in an indifferent “I got things to do,” kind of voice. You’d think we’d have found a way to cure that by now.

            Later, Thomas found Nathan in his tent, deep in thought and staring at nothing. That thoughtful quietness that had never been there before had become very much a part of his character.

            Nathan had changed since Shiloh and not just in how he acted. The man he had become was nothing like the spoiled child that he had been before. He had become everything his father thought he was which led Thomas to believe that Nathan Sr. might not be as foolish as he appeared. He had seen something that existed in Nathan that Thomas had genuinely not.

            “He forgave me,” said Nathan bitterly.

            “You don’t sound particularly happy about it,” Thomas said as he sat down beside him.

            “I’m not sure I deserve it.”

            “That was Shiloh,” Thomas told him with a shrug.

            “He said he understood. He said that Morris would have been killed just the same as if I hadn’t run off. You had taken control so nothing had changed but if you hadn’t covered for me, I might have been run out of the military.”

            “It was Shiloh,” Thomas said again and then he added, “And you wouldn’t have.”

            “I might have got his brother killed,” said Nathan bitterly. “I lost my nerve on the field and good men are dead. How does a man live with that?”

            “I don’t know,” Thomas told him honestly. “Don’t let it get to you, though, because it does happen and often and to the best of us. You heard about Hooker, right?”

            “William’s best friend?” asked Nathan with a weak smile.

            “Yeah, they would like each other,” Thomas said. “They could get together and spend the entire Masterson fortune on the brothels of Louisiana over a single weekend.”

            Nathan laughed at that but it was a weak laugh. He then held up a letter with his left hand and Thomas took it.

            He unfolded it, saw it was a letter from Nathan’s wife Anne, and read it quickly. It made him genuinely smile for the first time in a long time. After Shiloh, he did not think he would ever smile again. “You have a son,” Thomas said. “Congratulations. The Bartlett line goes on. What are you going to name him?”

            “I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “I, uh—I don’t know.” He looked at him. “How can I face my wife, Thomas?”

            “Women never learn the full details of war,” Thomas told him but he knew what he really meant.

            “I promised her I would protect her little brother,” he told her.

            “You did.”

            “He’s dead, Thomas.”

            “He died of pneumonia. Not battle.”

            “Yes, he died of pneumonia, but only after a minor but easily treated wound on the thigh at Shiloh. If he wasn’t in that tent, he would never have gotten pneumonia and he would still be alive.”

            Thomas sighed and said, “You need to stop killing yourself over this. Your men need you to get over this. I took control of the situation in a manner that would be no different from you having taken a bullet in the shoulder.”

            “You and I both know that’s not true,” Nathan told him and his face grew even more bitter.

            Thomas quickly looked around and then said softly, “If anyone is to blame for the death of our men, it’s McClellan!” Nathan looked at him. “We were nine miles, nine fucking miles, from Richmond, and he did not attack! We found three cigars wrapped in Lee’s battle plans and he does nothing for like twenty hours! He could have ended the war over and over and over again! Alexander is dead because of him because if he had played this game properly from the beginning, this battle might not have even happened! Shiloh might never have happened! We could have crushed the Confederacy in its infancy!”

            “I suppose,” Nathan said but he didn’t sound as if believed him.

            “Did you know that the Twelfth Massachusetts lost like three hundred out of its three hundred and fifty men in that cornfield?”

            “That can’t be right,” he said but he knew it was. Thomas could see it on his face.

            “Oh, it’s right,” Thomas replied and then added, “Don’t hog all the guilt brother. Before this war is up, there’ll be plenty of muck ups on both sides to make your small failure of nerve in one of the worst battles in American History look as though you went to market and forgot to purchase that extra cheese Mother wanted.”

 

*          *          *

 

            “Oh fuck me, was I right!” Ethan said aloud and then, for a flash, it looked as though the bridge was covered in blood-soaked soldiers wearing butternut and blue. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, blinked, and, to his relief, they were gone. “The ‘Bloodiest day in American History’ is goddamned right,” he gasped.

            “How was the journey, Mr. Wells?” asked Mickey from a new spot on a nearby tree on his side of the river.

            “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,” Ethan told him. For some reason, his mind seemed most locked on Clara Barton’s face, perhaps desperate to cling to one of the few good things he could find there. “‘The Angel of the Battlefield,’” he mused.

            “Uh, yeah,” said Mickey offhandedly, no longer interested now that it had turned into something too serious to laugh at. “Well, why you were humping memory lane and banging Anne Boleyn or jerking off Abraham Lincoln or whatever, I kind of noticed something over there in that grove.” He gestured with his head. “Up there in the hills above the meadow.”

            Ethan cast the spell to look through his eyes and saw Mickey glancing into a heavily shaded grove at the top of a nearby hill, the trees so thick that it was difficult even for Mickey to see between them. In the center, there was a small fire pit, the kind for cooking meals, and three human beings. Two were women, dancing around the fire, and one was a man sitting on a rock playing some kind of lute too softly to be heard down by the bridge. All three were dressed in what appeared to be handmade cloth and leather from some earlier age.

            Against a slope-like wall to the north, the same direction the bridge pointed, there was a shabby-looking old hut with skeletal heads of hobgoblins put on sticks on either side. That was interested but what really got Ethan’s attention was what was opposite the shack, a cage of thick wood, with something inside that Ethan did not seem real.

            “That’s—different.”

            “I know, right,” Mickey said. “You know, the hills around here are full of old campsites and bones but that’s the only one with anyone in it. I think they were maybe where the soldiers for that tower battle slept. There are pathways all leading down there but most are totally overgrown so I guess no one has used them for a while.”

            “Campsites for battle sounds about right,” Ethan pondered. “I wonder what they were fighting over. A tower no one bothered to take over when defeated?” He felt disgusted with himself. “It must have been that fucking crystal. I was the only thing of value there and the only thing that is no longer there. I should have fucking taken it when I had the chance.”

            “So what about those people?” asked Mickey.

            “I’m not sure.” He debated getting the others but there were only three and he didn’t see any guns. He was much better armed and a magician besides and so he wasn’t worried about them but it was really that thing in the cage that really made him want to go up there. “Want to check it out?”

            “Oh yeah!” said Mickey happily.

            Ethan cracked his neck around, shook off his vision, and then crept across the bridge and meadow toward the hill below the camp quietly. He followed the road to the hills and then slipped west up a fairly steep slope quietly. It wasn’t a hard climb although it was a little slippery with wet grass and steep enough at points where he had to walk on all fours.

            It wasn’t long before he heard the music clearly, a jaunty rhythm that would sound medieval even to Walter Kent’s ears. It was being played quietly but eloquently and he could hear the high-pitched feminine laughter.

            The camp was built very close to the slope on the east and south, and when Ethan moved behind a tree nearby with his rifle in both hands, he was only about a foot or so from the slope.

            The grove’s roof-like canopy was almost fifty feet in the air and it was so thick he made it so shadowy that it was almost dark and that the early morning sunlight looked like beams shooting across the campsite like a window in an old unlit attic. In addition to the three people that he had seen before there was also a goblin hidden from his view from below by sitting against a tree.

            Everything was just as he had seen. Both women were young, slender, fairly attractive and athletic with waist-length hair, one a blonde, the other a brunette, both dancing like teenagers, both wearing plain, beige, single fabric dresses with short sleeves. The brunette was wearing homemade leather shoes but, strangely, the blonde had a pair of brown hiking boots with pink laces.

            The man was dressed in a male equivalent, the top half a boring, beige tunic of cloth with short sleeves and thin, brown linen pants. On his head was a strange, long, cap that would have looked like a pointed wizard’s hat except for that it bent over and hung down by the right side of his head. He was decently attractive as well, somewhere in his thirties maybe, with straight, thin, light brown hair that was chin length with one lock hung forward from underneath his cap to hang over his right dark brown eye and hung down past his chin.

            The goblin was just a regular goblin, green-skinned and leaning up against a tree with one leg curled, the other straight, with black, slightly curly hair hanging down around his ears. He was wearing a kid’s blue t-shirt with Link from The Legend of Zelda on the front, black shorts, and mismatched old white and gray sneakers without socks.

            Zane noted he was the only one with a firearm. It was a pipe pistol revolver expanded to be some sort of rifle but it would still only fire pistol rounds of some sort from its revolving cylinder. It had an awkward hand-made stock and a scope made of a soda bottle while most everything else was pipe, brass and wood.

            The girls were armed with daggers and the man didn’t seem armed at all.

            What he came to see up close and set in a wooden cage that looked just as medieval as the people, was a giant toad the equivalent mass of a man. It was a vibrant, almost glowingly, brown with big, blue eyes that looked very sad, staring at the women dancing with obvious misery. There were buckets nearby, probably filled with water to throw on the creature when it got dry.

            Ethan cast his Sense Magic spell and sensed a huge amount of magic radiating from that toad.

            The musician stopped playing instantly.

            Fuck, thought Ethan and then he cast his Magic Armor spell over himself, tinting any clothing that he had capable of being tinted toward orange.

            The magician placed his lute down and then stood up. He couldn’t have heard Ethan cast, he was too far away, there was music being played and Ethan knew how to cast quietly, so that meant he sensed it.

            Magician, thought Ethan.

            The women had both stopped dancing. They said something that sounded like “What is it” but with an accent so thick and weird that it was hard to understand. Ethan found he did understand it but only just barely and he sensed that it was because it was English-accented English, of which he only personally understood because once upon a time he had himself been an Englishman. He felt almost absolutely certain most Americans would not have understood a word.

            “Someone just cast something,” said the man bluntly.

            “Who?” asked the brunette.

            “What’s going on?” asked the goblin in a high-pitched normal American English that sounded almost like a child. He did not seem to understand what they were saying.

            “Shut it,” the man said in a highly accented English that an American would understand.

            “Someone looking for this biccen?” asked the blonde with a gesture toward the toad. Ethan wasn’t sure but he thought “biccen” meant something like “bitch.”

            “Who would?” asked the brunette. “She was alone.”

            “Come out,” said the man in his American English, his hands held out in the telltale sign of a man preparing to cast a spell while facing the exact tree Ethan was hiding behind. When Ethan didn’t move, he added, “I know you’re hiding there.”

            Ethan debated his next course of action for a moment and then came to a decision.

            Since he was already caught, he simply gripped his gun tighter and slipped out from behind the tree. The moment he did, the goblin jumped to his feet, eyes wide and full of fear. He pointed his finger and in an ugly, angry, hiss, he shouted the word, “You!”

            “Hello beautiful,” said the blonde and both females swooned.

            Both women appeared to be the same age as the man, in their thirties or so, but something about their body language told Ethan they were younger than that. When the blonde suddenly smiled at him, her teeth were straight but bad, most of them brown and or black and missing here and there, but the brunette’s, though crooked, were perfectly white and healthy. It didn’t match the other parts of her at all and her overall disheveled look was no different from the blonde’s. Both women’s faces had no makeup and looked worn down from very hard lives but their eyes were shining and filled unbridled lust.

            The eyes of the man hardened behind that single lock of hair that hung down. “What are you doing here?” he asked Ethan.

            “What are you doing here?” asked Ethan.

            “This is a sacred place,” said the blonde, putting her hands on her hips and bending her back in a way that “accidentally” showed off her figure. “We are the Chosen of the Mistress of Life we are her lords’ caretakers.”

            “Your sacred land?” asked Ethan.

            “Traitors came to steal the gifts that belonged to us,” said the brunette as she pretended to rub her knees so as to show him the tops of her breasts.

            “Is that what that old battle down there was about?” Ethan asked.

            “It was,” said the blonde. “We got most of most of what was lost but—”

            “What are you doing here?” asked the man bluntly.

            Ethan looked at all of them and, despite his firearm, only the armed goblin really looked afraid. “Where do you people come from?” They sounded and looked to him as if they had stepped out of medieval York, England. That was what Walter Kent’s memory was telling him but two lifetimes later, he couldn’t be sure.

            “Did you come to rob the Mistress of Life?” asked the man. “Come to interrupt our rituals and steal the blessing that her spirit bestows upon us that is our right?”

            “That’s rich!” the goblin stated. “He’s—”

            “Shut it!” snarled the man again.

            “Just kill him!” hissed the goblin softly. “He’s the—” He stopped when the man raised a hand.

            The girls just smiled at Ethan and, after a moment, Ethan saw the man’s eyes narrow suspiciously. The blonde cupped her breasts at him, shoved them up, and made kissing gestures toward him while the brunette spun around and wiggled her backside at him as though performing a dance.

            “Are you all crazy?” cried the goblin. He didn’t reach for the gun, eyes locked on Ethan, sensing full well Ethan would kill him if he did. “He—”

            The man held up his hand, which silenced the goblin instantly, and, said, “Did you come for the girl?”

            “What girl? One of these?”

            “I knew she wasn’t alone!” hissed the blonde in that weird accent of theirs and lowered her hands. “Did I not warn you she was not alone?”

            “She was alone!” snarled the brunette back and there was something in her snarling voice that sounded oddly animalistic. “He doesn’t know her! She doesn’t speak our language or his!”

            “A person can speak more than one language!” the blonde retorted.

            The man’s lips curled up in a wide sneer that revealed mostly rotting teeth. “The frog is a boon to our people. She serves a greater purpose. You cannot have her.”

            “That’s a toad, not a frog,” Ethan replied.

            “Why are you telling—” The goblin shut up with a hiss when the man raised his hand again, very nervous by it.

            Ethan looked into the man’s eyes and saw a killer looking back at him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that but he could see it there somehow. The goblin knew it too, which was why he stopped talking instantly when the man told him to.

            When the man looked back into Ethan’s eyes, he saw something he didn’t like either, and while that sneer remained, it slipped a little toward something that looked cautious.

            The man nodded soberly, his fingers twitching with the anticipation of casting a spell in a manner not too dissimilar to that of a man preparing to draw a gun in a duel.

            “What are you doing here?” asked Ethan. “Like, for real.”

            “This is a sacred place!” the man said coldly. “It is ours! We bled for it! We all had a council, we agreed on who should have the spoils and blessings, but our servants came to take it for themselves! They betrayed us and our shared ideals!”

            “So we had a great war with the lesser people!” said the brunette.

            “A civil war?” Ethan asked.

            “We won the war and purged them from the world as was right,” said the blonde. “The sacred tower remains in the hands of the faithful.”
            “We regularly come to this place for a moon’s turn to honor our fallen mistress,” said the brunette.

            “She’s dead,” Ethan said coldly.

            All three of their eyes darkened.

            “She found us long ago,” said the blonde. “She granted us great power and to some great and worthy individuals, a second chance at life. The others were jealous of our bounty and sought to rise above their status as mere servants. She had showed us special favor and now that she is gone, they sought to steal what was left of that favor for themselves.”

            “We no longer have a mistress,” said the brunette, “But we honor her all the same.”

            “That explains the flowers—”

            “You entered the tower?” cried the man incredulously. He sounded deeply offended.

            “I heard from someone who did,” Ethan replied and the man calmed a bit but only a bit.

            They seemed genuinely sad about the situation. At least, the humans were. The goblin was indifferent to it, watching Ethan closely and had not yet made the mistake of grabbing for his gun. When it was clear no one was going to say anything for a moment, the goblin held up his hands and said, “Willem,” in a soft voice.

            The man said nothing, his eyes remaining on Ethan.

            “Willem, listen carefully,” said the goblin in that same voice. “This is Ethan Bartlett. I saw him at the tree with the Frozen Man. He is a magician and he is a killer—”

            “Is he?” asked the man, his eyes locked on Ethan.

            “He is more than that,” said the goblin carefully. “He is the one who killed Agatha Cane.”

            The temperature seemed to drop to freezing and all their eyes turned to ice. All playful sexuality vanished from the females and they straightened their backs and faced him as though they just discovered a cute dog they were playing with had rabies.

            “Murdered the Mistress of Life, did you?” asked the brunette.

            “There was a belief that our servants had murdered her,” added the blonde. “We should have known that even with their hobgoblin alliance they would never have the nerve to truly raise a hand against her. They were loyal in their own inferior way.”

            Willem said nothing. He just stared at Ethan like a husband who had just discovered the man who had raped his wife.

            “Willem,” said the blonde in their version of English. “Let us have him for a while. We’ll kill him when we’re done with him.”

            The goblin looked like he wanted to scream. “Do not underestimate him! That rifle can—”

            “Squiggly!” snarled Willem and the goblin became silent. Willem swiveled his neck around, several cracks being heard, and said, “Who are you? Are you truly a man to murder the Mistress of Life and for what reason would you even do so?”

            There was no answer that he could give which would satisfy them and Ethan didn’t think they would believe his lies. So instead, he asked, “So what’s with the giant toad?”

            “I was named after the Mistress of Life,” the brunette told him coldly. “They call me Aggie in her honor. It is a great honor.” She sneered. “Murderer.”

            “So, nothing about the toad?” asked Ethan and they just stared at him. “Tell me about the pieces of the sphere that were left behind then?”

            If leaving quietly was Ethan’s goal, he had just made a critical error. They had not mentioned the sphere’s broken parts and he instantly understood his comment just solidified their belief that he was Agatha Cane’s killer.

            William jerked his right out and cast a spell at stunningly fast speed.

            Ethan raised his gun at the same time, pulled the trigger, and got one shot off before his gun suddenly glowed brown and a burst of pain went through his hands as if his gun was red hot.

            Ethan tossed his gun down with a cry as Willem cast something over Aggie, a brown glow covering her skin under her clothes from head to toe. She jerked toward Ethan the instant after, her body bending over suddenly with a crack and her clothes ripped off as she leaped into the air on all fours.

            He saw her face start turning canine in midair, her nose and face growing a long snout while her human hair slid into her skin as shining brown fur formed all over her body.

            Ethan punched her in the face with his left hand as hard as he could, the former human female letting out a yip sound as she went flying to his right, hit a tree, and then went rolling down the slope, what was left of her clothes flying off from her as she did.

            Ethan grabbed for his pistol, cried out as it burned his right hand again, and heard a mocking laugh from Willem while the blonde pulled out a knife and charged at him.

            He grabbed for his own dagger as the woman rushed at him, felt pain yet again, but moved at the same time and dodged the woman’s stab.

            As she went by, he grabbed her and spun her around in front of him almost exactly as Squiggly raised his revolver-rifle in both hands. The first shot went across Ethan’s thigh while a second later she was maneuvered as a shield but Squiggly unloaded all five shots in a panic, all of them ending in the blonde’s torso and, continuing that panic, he was still pulling the trigger after it was empty.

            “You fool!” cried Willem.

            Squiggly turned and fled away in a full, terrified sprint.

            Ethan tossed the corpse away as Willem turned to him with a smile. “Let’s see you fight a man without your special—” he grunted as Ethan’s orange Lightning Bolt went directly into his chest, his eyes wide with shock as he stumbled back. His left foot caught on the rock he had been sitting on and he fell backward over onto the ground with a thud, a cloud of dirt bursting into the air.

            Ethan cast his Absorbing Sphere into the air in his left hand, appearing above the fire as a very transparent, orange-tinted ball and then, as Willem started to scramble up, recast his Lightning Bolt spell in his right hand.

            He screamed as Aggie bit down over his wrist just before the spell went off, the orange lighting shooting down into the ground harmlessly and creating intense static about for about five feet that made the fur on the wolf stand up on end. Ethan tried to pull his arm out, felt his flesh scrape along her fangs in her vice-like grip, and then she jerked him violently around.

            Ethan lost his footing and was yanked around and over the slope, his legs pointing down to the trail below.

            He looked up at the dark wolf’s manic-viciousness, her human blue eyes full of red-hot hate and her teeth attempting to grind through the protective spell he had put on himself with all her might.

            Ethan formed another spell awkwardly using only his left hand, taking an extra second, and then threw the Firefluid ball right in the wolf’s face.

            Aggie shrieked at the top of her lungs like the howling beast she was and then stumbled back shrieking and shaking her head. As Ethan scrambled up through the tall, wet grass, he noticed his gun still glowing brown half sunk in the blades nearby and knew he couldn’t grab it or any other weapon.

            Willem finally stood up without his hat, still in incredible pain with his hair sticking up everywhere. There was a hole in his shirt on his chest revealing a black and red spot with veins spreading out and he started to cast brown-colored fire spells manically. He threw them with each hand like a man throwing baseballs, quicker and faster than Ethan could, but instead of flying toward its target, the fire tilted away and shot into the sphere instead, each spell making the sphere less transparent and more brownish-orange with each casting.

            Willem screamed desperately as he cast and Ethan fired another bolt of lightning. He knocked it aside with a spell used in his left hand somehow, that deflection spell being too close and too personal to be absorbed by the sphere, and then he threw yet another fire spell.

            The Absorbing Sphere had finally overflowed and exploded into a cloud of orange and brown glitter-like dust.

            Ethan cast another lighting spell and Willem used the deflection spell to knock it aside again but that time he actually caught it instead, his left hand seemingly absorbing the spell as Ethan’s sphere had in some similar manner. The lightning then spun around in Willem’s hand, turning from Ethan’s orange to Willem’s brown, and then he shot it back at him.

            Ethan jerked aside, his own lightning flying by his head, and Willem formed his fire spells in both hands.

            And then Willem began to scream as Mickey landed in his face and began scratching. Blood poured instantly down his cheeks and he tried to slam his fire spells into Mickey with both hands but the instant before he did, Mickey jerked out of the way, and he burned his own face and shrieked loudly.

            He stumbled back, his face half-melting and one of his eyes gone and reformed both spells just as Ethan cast one more Lightning Bolt spell. It shot out, flew across the distance in one long, orange electric bolt, and hit William right in the forehead.

            Willem jerked, his one remaining eye glazed over and he fell backward with a thud.

            Ethan heard something behind him, spun around, and the wolf leaped at him with her partly hairless, heavily burnt face, her eyes wide with berserk rage.

            He blocked with his mostly uninjured left arm, the only option he had on instinct, and Aggie grabbed a hold of it, bit down as hard as she could and shoved him backward. He cried out as fell over onto his backpack and felt her weight on top of him. Her front feet began scratching madly at his chest, raking the fabric there and if he hadn’t been wearing some sort of armor there, her claws would have likely torn his chest to his ribbons.

            He awkwardly reached across his lap with his right hand, her paws slashing into his arm as he did, and the moment his hand touched his dagger’s handle, he knew the spell to burn his hand on his weapons was no longer working with the caster dead.

            With a cry, he shoved Aggie over with himself on top, pulled out his blade and stabbed her right through the ribs.

            Aggie gasped suddenly and let go.

            Ethan kept the knife in, pushing hard, and watched her face shift and change. He could hear the familiar sounds of her bones moving around, almost identical to that of Judy’s transformation, but her voice wasn’t adding to it.

            She was dead. Aggie’s transformation turned her from a dead wolf to a dead woman.

            “Damn!” said Mickey from a nearby branch. Ethan looked up and watched him toss the eye away. “That was intense.”

            They both laughed, uncertain of why, and Ethan pulled out his knife, stood up, and looked down at the corpses all around him. “‘Boy, that escalated quickly,’” Ethan said, mimicking Will Farrell as his character Ron Burgundy. “‘I mean, that really got out of hand fast.’”

            “Yeah,” Mickey replied. “But why did they do it, though?”

            “I done fucked up,” he told him, all joking gone. “I mentioned the broken sphere and then they knew I was involved. They hadn’t mentioned it so I guess they figured only the killer, their ‘treasonous’ enemies or whoever stole the piece that ended up in the cave that I told you about would know about it.”

            He looked at her arms, especially the right one that Aggie got to first. It was bad but nowhere near as bad as it would have been if Ethan had not used his Magic Armor spell. He felt almost certain Aggie would have ripped his flesh right down to the bone if he hadn’t.

            “That looks really painful,” said Mickey.

            “No, it feels awesome,” Ethan replied sarcastically but with a smile and he reached into his knapsack, got his healing potion, and drank it. Immediately, his arms felt better and when wound fixed themselves. The skin wasn’t damaged very much so it more or less looked smooth and unbroken. “Fun.”

            His mind suddenly went back to Thomas Bartlett with a thought.

            If I had this in eighteen-sixty-two, Alexander Thomas Hamilton would survived, he thought. A lot of other good guys too.

            “Dogs can be fucking mean when they really try,” Ethan told Mickey as he shook his right arm. He looked at his dagger, the blood having magically dripped off, and then sheathed it. Then he grabbed his rifle, threw it over his shoulder, and went over at the weird, brown toad that matched the magician’s spell color.

            “I’m not going anywhere near that thing,” Mickey told him as he approached, probably imagining himself being eaten like a cartoon fly when the thing’s tongue shot out.

            The toad looked up at Ethan with intelligent and unhappy eyes that were filled with desperation. After a moment, he saw tears fill up in those eyes.

            “I don’t think tears are normal in an amphibian,” Ethan said.

            “Maybe she’s like a familiar,” said Mickey. “I mean, I can’t cry, because I’m male, but I have heard some can.”

            Ethan laughed. “It’s a possibility but she’s pretty big for a familiar.” Ethan sniffed, smelled urine, and then looked into the filthy water and saw that it was full of piss. “Gross,” he said and then reached into the cage, touched the toad, and it let out a groaning, miserable, pitiable sound. When he pulled his hand back, it was covered in gook and he shook it off and added, “Also gross.”

            “What do you think?” asked Mickey.

            “I’m not sure.”

            Ethan looked at it for a moment, thinking about what Willem and his women said, recalling they called her a “girl,” then shrugged, and pulled out one of his blue Remove Spell potions from his knapsack. He then lifted up the toad’s top lip with his right hand, which it didn’t resist, and then poured the potion down its throat with his left hand.

            The toad jerked and suddenly expanded so quickly that Ethan jumped back thinking it would explode. It throbbed there for a moment, veins pulsating and eyes wide in agony, and then it started to deflate. It expanded again suddenly, the toad squealing as it did, but it didn’t expand as far and when it shrunk back, it had shrunk more than its original size.

            As it continued that trend, Ethan started to hear bending, shifting, and snapping sounds from within its body so violent it made him cringe.

            Like Aggie, it also looked like what happened with Judy but in the toad’s case, it looked far more painful and hideous. As the creature shifted between frog and person, he thought of the movie The Fly from 1986, and when warts exploded and puss and disgustingness popped out in tiny geysers all over its body, he genuinely thought he was going to be sick.

            It took a solid five minutes before the toad-like flesh became like skin and he was deeply relieved to see she was actually turning into a girl.

            When finally finished, he saw she was close to Ethan’s age with pale skin, dirt brown hair that went down past her shoulders, and bright blue eyes, lying in a pool of toad-esque slime and dirt. She was naked, unharmed, and athletic in very much the same way that Judy had been when he last saw her transformed, but it seemed more like a woman had just been tortured, lying on the ground in a fetal position and shaking violently.

            She was actually quite beautiful under all that gook and when she looked up at him, she looked at him with wide, shocked eyes on a slender, angular face. In her face, he noted that she was not emotionally broken even though she was thoroughly disturbed.

            Ethan looked around for a key briefly with his eyes, realized it could be anywhere, and then shrugged. “Cage isn’t enchanted,” he said and moved aside, took out his right pistol, and waited for the girl to scoot to the back of the cage before he destroyed the lock with one shot.

            As he opened the cage, the girl scrambled to her feet and out, wrapped her arms around him, and burst into tears. She shook like a leaf in his arms and then kissed him in the cheek, which left something on his face, and said something into his ears that he did not understand. She obviously meant “thank you” but it wasn’t in English or that weird other language they spoke either.

            “Was that German?” he asked incredulously.

            She pulled back and looked at him just as incredulously.

 

*          *          *

 

            “Was that English?” Emilia Schön asked and then added, “Why is this happening to me?” It was something she had asked over a thousand times over the last year and out loud ever since she had been so alone and driven half-mad by loneliness. She had developed a series of problems that just kept getting worse every single day starting with one stupid idea that her stupid boyfriend had one stupid day.

            Let’s go backpacking into the Schwarzwald, he had said. What could possibly go wrong?

            One weekend-long backpacking trip with her boyfriend and a few friends in what English speakers called “the Black Forest,” down in the state of Baden-Württemberg near the city of Schiltach had turned into a nightmare that never ended.

            For some unknown amount of time, she wasn’t sure how long but winter had actually come and gone so it was close to a year at least, she had been walking steadily east. She and her friends assumed with the simple logic of common sense that a town near the eastern edge of a forest wouldn’t be far from the eastern edge of said forest. Walking in that one direction, but any direction really, should have invariably led to the forests’ end where a road or town near civilization would be waiting.

            The Schwarzwald was not that long.

            She clutched the man tighter, trying to knock the horrors that took her boyfriend and friends one after the other out of her mind. Weird, cultist who spoke some dialect of German she could barely understand, goblins, various monsters she couldn’t name, and the weather, all killing her boyfriend, each of their friends, and Anne, her best friend, one after the other. Last, alone, she had stumbled into a new village of crazies speaking a completely alien language. She wouldn’t gone anywhere near it, she had learned that lesson from the cultists that seemed so long ago that it felt like another life, but a child playing outside had seen her and alerted them.

            They chased through the forest for literal hours and eventually she was caught hiding under a long bridge and carried back kicking and screaming over their heads like a sports hero to that Willem fellow.

            At first, she was just a prisoner but then came that dominatrix hobgoblin woman. She did something to her, Emilia couldn’t say what, but afterward, Willem could transform her any time he wanted to almost anything he wanted. He transformed her every day and every night, usually ending as a pig, so they could feed her scraps. Why he did that or what purpose it would serve, she could not say, but he was taking her somewhere, stopping at that encampment for weeks, before he got to the actual place he was intent on taking her.

            “I love you so much!” she told the stranger but in the Schwarzwald, nothing came without a price, and it turned out the price of meeting the first genuinely normal human being from true civilization was that he was going to be a goddamn tourist who didn’t even speak German.

            “My life is a nightmare,” she whimpered and leaned onto his shoulder.

            He clearly did not understand.

            “Why did I not spend more time learning English in school?” She kissed him on the cheek. “Do not leave me.”

 

*          *          *

 

            The girl pulled away from him and walked into the hut. Ethan followed after casually.

            All that was within was a few sleeping rolls with blankets, several sacks, a set of bow and arrows that looked medieval, a few cloaks, a chest and a dark purple backpack with pink straps beside it. The ground was dirt, the walls were thin wood, the windows were glassless, and it was so dark in there that the extended beams of light from the windows made the dirt in the air look like lasers.

            The girl used one of their blankets to wipe the slime off herself, wrapped it around herself like a towel, and then opened the chest. She tossed out a few worthless pieces of junk, one of them an empty Amazon box, until she found a pair of jeans, ripped in several places, underwear, a bra, and a shirt that was once pink. It was incredibly filthy, all around, leaving everything blackish-brown. Then she took them in her arms, walked out, placed them down by the dead blonde, and yanked off the hiking shoes.

            Ethan noted those shoes and everything else in her arms looked very worn down as though they had done a lot of work and not been cleaned in a while.

            The girl smelled her arm and sighed unhappily.

            He cast a Detect Magic spell to see if anything magic was in the hut, found nothing here, and went searching through whatever was there.

            The sacks were old, burlap types that the poor sometimes used back in the Tudor period, and they contained fruit, notably oranges just like those in the tower, and salted meat wrapped in cloth to protect it, although that smelled just terrible. In the chest where she had found her clothes, he started to toss out more junk. He found an old Etch A Sketch, which he only knew because a cousin from his mother’s side had one, an old 1970s, maybe 1980s radio, with a built-in cassette player, a bunch of old, medieval looking tools, and then, hidden in the middle under all that junk, found something that made his heart sour.

            It was an old, thumbed through book with the words, “Dale Timothy Sanders’s Magic Book.”

            “I am so goddamn happy!” he cried and then tossed everything else out, most of which he expected to be nothing more of use but found another surprise. “Oh fuck me!” he said when he did.

            He reached in and pulled out the gold bar that matched the one he found in the troll cave. The girl had returned to the open door of the shack and her eyes jaw dropped at the sight of it.

            “Confederate gold,” he told her even though she couldn’t understand what he was saying. He slipped it into his backpack along with his book, which he had to maneuver carefully so as not to crush the Doritos, and went out.

            He led the girl down the hill easily enough, she was a very experienced hiker and could do it even barefoot for she had not put on the clothes and simply carried them. When they got to the bridge, she stopped him, pointed down, and placed everything but her canteens there by the bridge. Mickey flew down onto the bridge’s rail and watched her with uncharacteristically mute fascination as she went down to the river.

            Ethan took off his own backpack, moved down to the edge and wiped the blood off his arms, which considering the type of fight he was in, was surprisingly the only place that was really bloody. His leg had bled too but it was really only a very minor scratch and he wiped that off as well as the slime that touched his face and arms.

            If being naked bothered the girl, she did not show it. She bathed herself aggressively for several minutes despite the icy cold water, filled her canteens and then stepped out and used the blanket as a towel. It did very little, the dirt seemingly caked onto her body, but it did get the slime off at least.

            She asked him something in German.

            Ethan replied with a shrug and the words, “Sorry. Nothing.”

            She pointed at herself. “Emilia.”
“Ethan,” he said as he pointed to himself.

            She walked up to him, grabbed his face, kissed him deeply and looked into his eyes. “Danke,” she said.

            “You’re welcome.”

            Mickey tilted his head and looked up at her curiously. “So, uh, what’s going on here exactly?” he asked.

            “I honestly don’t know,” Ethan told him.

            Emilia blinked and looked over at Mickey and then back. She pointed at him while staring at Ethan and asked something that Ethan understood nothing of but was absolutely certain meant, “Did that bird just talk?”

            “He sure did,” Ethan replied, “Getting him to shut up is the hard part.”

            “Bite me,” said Mickey. “And I think you stole that from Shrek.”

            Emilia slipped on her clothes and shoes, sat on the waist-high rail and looked through her backpack. She pulled out a cellphone, sighed, pointed at it and then at Ethan.

            Ethan wasn’t sure what that meant exactly but he made a guess, reached into his own backpack and offered her his cellphone. She squeaked happily as she took it, then saw there were no bars, groaned and handed it back.

            “Yeah, these woods suck,” he told her as he watched her put on her backpack and then said, “Come on.” He led her over the bridge and back to the tower.

            As they stepped around it, Emilia stared up at it in mild, but only mild, curiosity, Ethan saw all four of his companions standing around in front of the tower talking aggressively, all of them except Swenson holding their weapons.

            “I told you he’d be fine,” said Thorne the instant he appeared.

            “Where the hell did she come from?” asked Paige incredulously.

            “This is Emilia,” Ethan said.

            “That doesn’t answer anything,” said Paige incredulously, her face still shocked.

            “We heard gunfire,” said Upton. “I’m guessing she has something to do with it.”

            “We need to start moving,” Swenson told him. “I didn’t want to say anything until we were together but I think someone might have alerted others.”

            “Fucking goblin,” Ethan said. “Let’s just go. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”

            As they all started walking, Emilia moved up beside Ethan between him and Paige.

 

*          *          *

 

            As Emilia walked and heard them speak English to each other for a few minutes, she finally blurted out with, “Please tell me at least one of you speaks German?” They all just looked at her with the same expression. “This nightmare just won’t end!”

            She finally had normal people around her again. If she were to spend the rest of her life in the Schwarzwald, at least she wouldn’t be alone.

            At least, not for a while.

 

*          *          *

 

            “Find anything in the tower?” asked Ethan after he told them his story.

            “Nothing,” Upton replied.

            “I didn’t think you would,” Ethan said. “But I guess you had to know the truth.”

            “Yes,” he said bitterly, the sound of his son’s bones banging together in the bag he had wrapped over his shoulder.

            “I’ve got a lead on something.”

            He stopped and jerked toward Ethan fast enough to startle him. “What lead?”

            “I’m not certain yet.” There was the path of the Michaeladises but another one as well. The issue with the twin girls he rescued from the hag being forced back by their grandfather back into the town was something and he thought perhaps quite serious. That wasn’t settled yet and Ethan was growing more certain every day that sitting on that too much longer would lead to some sort of catastrophe. He was going to need to question that grandfather and it would be infinitely better if he were the one to do so instead of the twins’ mother. If that bastard was in on it, Ethan didn’t want him looking at the mother as a potential threat.

            The twins had enough problems without losing their mother too.

            Somewhere in Bartlett Bay was a connection to Agatha Cane and the deaths of Rory Upton and Alan Thorne but there was more. A lot more. The name “Saturnine” came back to his mind. They fit in somewhere too.

            The Saturnine betrayed us, whispered a voice from memory.

            “There is something going on that brain of yours,” said Upton coldly.

            “Somewhere before this is all over, our interests will almost certainly align,” said Ethan. “If you stick around, I’ll keep you in on everything I know.”

            “I’m not going anywhere, Bartlett,” said Upton in that cold voice of his.

            Thorne said nothing but there was something unpleasant going on in his eyes.

            Nobody liked the Order of the Autumn Rose but themselves and some people made fun of them, often their name, which was not particularly manly, and their alleged connections to old European knighthood were mocked regularly but there was a reason people were scared of them even if they tried very hard to pretend they weren’t.

            They started walking again and that time they made much better progress, easily finding the general direction toward home without requiring landmarks. They stopped for a snack only once, Ethan passing out rations, and Emilia saying something to Ethan that no one understood and made eating gestures with her hands.

            “I’ve got one for you too,” he said as he reached into his pack. She looked into his backpack and squeaked for joy.

            “Cool American!” she cried when she saw the Doritos inside and grabbed the bag as though it were gold.

            “No!” cried Mickey as he flew onto Ethan’s shoulder. “I forbid it!”

            She gave the bird a strange look and then back at Ethan.

            “Those are my Doritos, damn it!” Mickey told her and then made gestures with his arms indicating putting them back in the bag. “Back! Put them back! How do you say no in German?”

            “Nein,” said Swenson, a wide smile on her face.

            “Nein! Nein!” Emilia gave Mickey a strange look and then looked at Ethan.

            “I got other things too,” Ethan told Emilia. He showed her the rations he gave her and she looked at them with far less interest. She said something he didn’t understand but he replied, “Yeah, I guess.” He gestured for her to eat and she opened it up and devoured the food. “Don’t worry, Mickey, I’ll buy you another bag when we get back.”

            Mickey growled and squeezed his shoulder with his feet angrily but it didn’t hurt because of the armor. “You’re weak when it comes to females!”

            “Men usually are,” Paige told him with an unreadable expression on her face.

            When Emilia finished, she folded up the empty bag, put the wrapper in her backpack, and hugged him tightly.

            “Stupid German thief,” said Mickey unhappily. He looked over at Thorne. “Oh, you’re liking this, aren’t you?”

            Thorne just smiled and shrugged.

 

*          *          *

 

            They got back around dusk, the still out but only barely.

            The sight of stepping out of that forest made Emilia cry out in utter ecstasy. She rushed forward, climbed over the gate as limber as a cat, dropped onto the other side and fell to her knees before the road, her hands resting on the blacktop. Then literally burst into tears, kissed it and then rolled over onto it and made cute, squeaking, happy sounds that made Ethan smile.

            Once outside, Ethan’s phone suddenly had bars and he found Google Translate and translated something into German. When he slipped out of the fence, he held out the phone to her and she saw in German the words translated from, “Hello. My name is Ethan Bartlett. How long have you been in the forest?”

            She squeaked like a little girl, flipped it from English to German to German to English, and it said, “Oh God, I don’t know. What day is it?”

            He showed her the date on his cellphone and her eyes went wide. She said something and, when she remembered he didn’t understand German, she wrote, “Almost a year. I thought I might be wrong but I wasn’t.” She looked around, put her hands on her hips, and said something in a strange, pondering voice.

            “Alright, we’re out for now,” said Upton and he gestured for Paige to approach. “This girl is our responsibility. That one is yours.” Paige hugged Ethan tightly and gave him back everything she borrowed from him and then she and the other members of the Autumn Rose went back to their cars, which, luckily, were still there. Paige went with Upton and Thorne in the Honda Civic, and Swenson took the Toyota Camry.

            “Want to get some real food?” Ethan asked through his cellphone.

            “Oh God, yes!” she told him back.

            He got to his truck, placed all his weapons, armor, and ammunition in the storage toolbox and their backpacks in the back cab, and then drove toward Mandy’s. As the car moved, he saw Emilia give the most vivid look of relief that he had ever seen on another human being in all his life.

            He parked on Edmonton’s St. in front of the restaurant and Emilia immediately started toward a young man who was walking out. When she tried to talk to him, he repelled from her in disgust, the back of his wrist going over his nose.

            “Is she French or something?” asked the man as Ethan came up behind her.

            “Did you actually just confuse German with French?” asked Ethan incredulously.

            “Man, whatever, just keep this smelly bitch under control.”

            Something like horror was going over Emilia’s face. As they entered the restaurant, she looked up at the menu. She gestured for him to hand her his cellphone without looking, took it quickly and then wrote something on it with wide, surprised eyes.

            “Why is everything in English?” she asked.

            Ethan looked at her confusedly and wrote back, “Because everything in the United States is in English?”

            When she read that, her eyes grew even wider, and she lifted her head up and stared into his face. “Amerika?” she asked incredulously.

            “Why does that surprise you?” he asked back. He forgot she didn’t speak English and wrote it down and then showed it to her. She didn’t answer and instead looked deeply uncomfortable and hugged him with a whimper. He then wrote on his cellphone, “Pick anything you want. I’m buying.”

            She nodded and made an agreeable squeak sound. Then she looked over at the menu, picked a simple hamburger and fries combo, and as soon as they were sitting down at a table outside, she asked if she could use the cellphone to call home. After a moment of searching on how to contact Germany from his cellphone, she walked behind the restaurant.

            “You promised me more Doritos,” said Mickey from his spot on the table beside him.

            “Don’t worry, I’ll get them on the way home,” Ethan told him.

            Mickey had ordered some fries but he still seemed super grumpy about the whole Doritos thing. “Fine,” he told him and then peered over where Emilia had gone and asked, “So, uh, what do you think is up with her?”

            “I’m not sure. I have an idea.”

            The owner Francine Randal appeared dressed as a waitress despite being the owner. “So that one is different,” she said.

            “You have no idea,” Ethan replied.

            “What’s her story?”

            “I found her transformed as a toad in the Engelstad, used a Remove Spell potion, and turned her back into a girl. I’m not sure how she got there but I feel as though she somehow entered the Engelstad in Germany but stepped out in America.”

            “It’s not impossible.” Ethan and Mickey looked up at her. “Back in the 1970s, a man from England claimed the same thing,” she told him. “My father told me about him later. He got lost somewhere around York, England and he popped up here a couple of years later. I think people thought he might have been a victim of a serial killer after his sister had been a victim sometime earlier and that he ‘might have been silenced.’”

            “Interesting,” said Ethan. York, he mused internally and understood where Willem’s accent came from.

 

*          *          *

 

            The phone answered and a very tired voice said, “Whoever this is, it’s very late.”

            “Uh—Mother, I—”

            Her mother shrieked through the phone and Emilia repelled from it with a gasp. “Emilia!” She could hear her father getting up beside her. “It’s Emilia!”

            “Mother!” Emilia sighed. “Look, Mother, I need you to listen for once. I—”

            “Where have been? It has been almost a year! You left in June! In June without a word!”

            “I went hiking in the Schwarzwald and—”

            “Oh, I just knew it! You went down that terrible little village and hiked down the Forbidden Path, didn’t you?”

            Emilia rubbed the bridge of her nose with a sigh.

            That was correct and if she lived a thousand years, she didn’t think she would ever regret anything more in her life than accepting her boyfriend’s explanation of “it’s just a stupid story to sell to tourists.” All the people there had warned them but they didn’t listen and now she had lost a year of her life, her boyfriend and several of her closest friends, including her best friend, and, as a bonus, she was going to have nightmares about it until the day she died.

            “Uh—” she swallowed “—how is Bilbo doing?”

            “Your cat is fine!” she hissed and then, surprisingly, she burst into tears. “I thought you were dead! You are my only daughter! How could you do this to me?”

            “Oh yes, that’s me, Mother. The selfish one.”

            “Let me talk to her,” said her father in that calm voice of his.

            “No!” her mother hissed. “I’m angry at her and worried half to death and she needs to know it!” She turned back to the phone. “Did you know you and your friends are believed dead? Some officially. We had funerals for most of you!”

            “They are all dead.”

            That stopped her mother’s talking for once.

            “Listen, Mother, I’m in America for some reason.”

            “How did you get to America?” she asked with a tone of disapproval. “Did you get on your plane to Las Vegas or something so you could get married in some terrible American mating ritual?”

            Emilia laughed bitterly. “No, Mother, I did not go on a plane to Las Vegas to marry Johann. I genuinely wish I had but not because I love him or anything. No, I really entered the woods and the woods did not end. I’ve been traveling for a year in one direction trying to escape and was nearly killed a thousand times but this last time I was saved by a man and thankfully he got me out.”

            “Man? What man?” Her voice sounded suspicious as it always did when it came to Emilia’s taste in boys.

            “His name is Ethan. I’m using his phone and I’m in Connecticut. It’s a state in America.”

            “I know where Connecticut is!” her mother replied curtly.

            “I don’t know how I got here! I’ve been in the woods and wandered east for a year but all I found was more forest! I somehow skipped Germany, Poland, and Russia and then crossed the Atlantic and most of the United States! Connecticut is on the east side of America and I was walking east the entire time! I don’t understand how any of this happened!”

            Emilia didn’t realize she was crying.

            “I’m sorry! I’m really upset!” She looked around at one of the workers, a young man in a red apron who was decently attractive, staring at her strangely. She gave him an awkward smile and waved but he just stared at her. It wasn’t just because she was crying out in German, it was also because she was wearing clothes that hadn’t been cleaned in a year and smelled so awful that everyone who got within ten feet of her repelled away in disgust. “I’m sorry!” she said again as she turned away.

            “Don’t worry,” her mother told her. “We’ll get you home. It may be hard since you’ve been declared dead and your uncle is after your inheritance but we’ll get you back.”

            “What’s this about my inheritance?” she asked suspiciously.

            “It’s not going to be a problem.”

            “You tell Uncle Felix that if he touches one cent Grandma left me, there are going to be two members of our family that are officially dead!”

            That made her mother laugh. “I’m so happy you’re back!”

            “Let me talk to her!” said her father. Her mother finally relented, her father was then given the phone, and the two began to talk.

            Emilia smiled and talked to him for about ten minutes and felt much better. Her father was as much of a calming influence as her mother was a stressful one but she didn’t want to talk much. She was starving for real food, felt lightheaded and a million other things were going through her brain. The stress of the last year was vanishing now that she was safe enough to relax and she felt that it had left her physically, mentally and spiritually drained.

            She needed an activity to calm herself once she had a good night’s sleep. The thought that maybe she could get Ethan to take her to New York City or something while she was stuck in America appealed to her. She was always the kind of girl who went off somewhere, a trail, a city, a beach, anywhere, to get her mind off her problems. New York City was a place she had always wanted to see after all those superhero comics she used to read. She wondered if it was nearby. Los Angeles was on the west side of America, she recalled, so that wouldn’t be an option.

            After the ten minutes ended, she took a deep breath and lied with, “My food just came. I’m starving. I’ll call you—tomorrow, I guess—whenever I wake up. It’s just getting dark here.”

            “Don’t you worry,” her father told her. “We’ll get you home.”

            “Thank you. I love you, Daddy.” Emilia hung up the phone and went back over to Ethan. She slipped down into her seat across from the man who saved her life and wrote his cellphone the words, “Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome,” he said in English.

            She smiled at him then looked at her hands that still looked filthy and said, “Excuse me.” She went inside and into the female bathroom and then spent the next five minutes washing her hands with soup, watching them seemingly change color. It was the first time she touched soap within a year and it made a huge and wonderful difference.

            Even after using the river, dirt seemed to pour off in an unending brown stream, and it made her feel disgusting and miserable. Her old tendency toward cleanliness was already reasserting itself.

            The sight of her face in the mirror and her bulging, disturbed eyes disgusted her even more. She only barely recognized herself and thought she looked like one of those after-war pictures she recalled seeing in a schoolbook where they displayed the war’s effect by displaying a soldier’s appearance from before and after serving in World War I.

            When she got back, her food was waiting for her, and it, along with Cool American Doritos, was the best food she had ever eaten. After nearly a year of eating berries, or whatever she could hunt with a bow that she stole from those spider-worshipping crazies, a hamburger with French fries and Coca-Cola felt like a meal for a billionaire.

            The rest of the day felt like a blur as she started to grow numb with tiredness that felt a year overdue.

            Ethan took her through a supermarket and bought her toothpaste, a toothbrush, mouthwash, shampoo, conditioner, soap, a razor, face wash, some feminine products she deeply missed and a huge bag of Cool American Doritos they called Cool Ranch in America for his bird. Then, after picking up a young girl and a talking Labrador from a neighbor, he took her back to his house, which was not a small apartment as she might have expected, or even a house where he lived with his parents, but a full house that he owned himself. There, she got access to something she had been dreaming of almost every night since that terrible weekend.

            She could not remember ever feeling as physically good as when she slipped into that bath and she was still surprised at how dirty she was. Her hair had actually changed color as she scrubbed the dirt out of it. It was actually a natural blond but it had become an ugly shade of brown from all the filth over the year. It took a long time to clean herself, requiring her to refill the bath several times, and after she brushed her teeth and looked into the mirror, she still only barely recognized herself.

            Her soft, feminine face had become hard and when she opened her towel, she could see that her entire muscle tone was unbelievable. She looked as sculpted as an Olympic athletic with almost no fat to speak of as if she had spent the last ten months working obsessively in a gym instead of starving out in the woods.

            She wasn’t fat before but she knew just walking through a forest hadn’t done that to her. She was certain she was not like that before those gibberish speakers Ethan killed caught her either. The transformations were what did it, she decided, going back to that hobgoblin woman. Each time forced her body to work every muscle as it shifted this way and that better than any kind of exercise human beings could come up with it.

            Why, though? Why did he do it? He didn’t put her to work like the donkeys in Pinocchio or something so what was the point of the transformation?

            She wrapped the towel back around herself and walked back over to Ethan who was then lying down on a couch. He had put their clothes in the laundry and was wearing a pair of shorts and a black shirt and watching American television. The very beautiful, and extremely well-dressed, little girl who lived with him was lying on the opposite couch on the left side of the room and staring at her very strangely with those dark eyes of hers while the talking black Labrador curled up into a ball near the television. The hawk was on a metal bird perch set behind and above the couch Ethan was on and being quiet for once.

            She reached down and picked up his phone. She gave him a “can I” look and he shrugged and gave her a “go ahead” gesture.

            She wrote some of the words that the wizard and his females kept saying as they poked her body when she was in human form in the English-to-German part of Google Translate. Some words were plain wrong or gibberish to Google but some weren’t.

            Her eyes grew wide as she read the words translated and she saw, “sacrifice,” “meat,” and “lean,” the last most of all. “They want her lean,” she whispered in English.

            “What?” asked Ethan.

            She swallowed and thought about those old fairy tales where some troll or witch fattened up a child. Whatever they were going to feed her to wanted her lean and tight instead of fat but the principle was the same.

            She placed the cellphone down, looked at Ethan with wide eyes and then leaned down and kissed him. He kissed her back and then she melted on top of him. After a moment, she pulled him up and took him away to his bedroom.

            For another first time in a long time, she slept on a bed and it was like sleeping on a cloud. She didn’t dream of the horrors that passed, thankfully. The endless transformations, the monsters that murdered her friends or chased them through the woods, or the robed maniacal German-esque people who tried to sacrifice her to that giant, monstrous spider.

            The spider with its sultry feminine voice and monstrous grinning face.

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