Facing the Bullets

Holy shit this is so long I really hope you guys like it, I'm sorry there's so much exposition at the beginning, I can't believe I spent so much time changing the order around but NOW I HAVE IT RIGHT. Thanks to Vaysh for writing the lovers quarrel with me, and for pitching in on the lion scene despite being on a Metal Gear kick.

There's a dozen reasons in this gun.

-"Demolition Lovers"

Nearly Three Years After

Arizona

There was a town hall. Obviously, there was going to be a town hall. They got back to town at seven and the first thing Hanna did was send word out that there was going to be a meeting at nine, grabbing shoulders and nodding pointedly and generally making it feel like an ominous but resolute storm had blown into town on the dust at their heels.

In the mean time, the energy behind getting multiple tons of automobile pushed into something resembling a wall had ratcheted up to frantic, mothers and teenagers pitching in for the first time in a jittery blur that went on and on around Worth as he made his way towards the RV. He didn't figure he was going to get much in the way of quiet for the next day or two, so he might as well grab what he could while he could. Knowing Hanna, he probably didn't have any plan to speak of.

But he was going to need one, of sorts, and that was going to be the noisy part.

After maybe ten minutes of uninterrupted work, the door to the Herring guest bedroom slammed open and shut behind Conrad. Slammed doors weren't exactly unusual around the vampire. Worth didn't even look up from where he was sitting on the bed, running a bore snake saturated with Hoppe's gun oil through his rifle. Clean it every time you use it, or at least every time you think about it. He would have run out of the oil if he pulled a cleaning strip through the barrel each time he got in a gun fight.

"What exactly is your problem?" Conrad said, with the aggressive sort of huff-snort that made Worth think of cartoon bulls blowing out steam. You couldn't hardly take the vampire seriously even when he did his damndest to look intimidating, and that was just typical half-cocked Conrad for you wasn't it?

"I gotta narrow it down ter one thing?"

There had been a rifle and a bore snake in his hands. Now there was just air and the hot pain of rugburn on his palm. He glared murder at Conrad, who was glaring it right back at him and dropping the rifle and bore snake to the ground. Messing with a man was one thing. Messing with his firearm was something else. Worth stood, spine stiff as his upper lip, as he used every inch of his height to tower over Conrad.

Conrad was not backing down. "You. You think you're off the hook for harassing Miriam last night? You have been nothing but a rude piece of shit ever since we got here. So what the fuck is your problem?"

"Yannow, maybe ya shouldn't ask me. Mebbe ya oughter ask someone else. Sure seem happy as hell ter do that lately."

The reply was flat, though Conrad's nostrils were flaring. "What."

"Ya heard me. G'on. Run off. Talk ter yer best gal pal. Why not? 's all ya been doin' since we got here. Jus' you an' her all cozied up all fuckin' day an' night."

Thoughts were running behind Conrad's eyes like a film on a projector screen, and a white, sharp ended finger stabbed into Worth's sternum. "Oh fuck you. That's what this is about? Some kind of a cockblock? Don't you even dare. I am not letting you do that to her."

"Do wot, exactly?" he responded, nasal and mocking.

"She doesn't need you trying to fuck her like you try to fuck everything else on two legs. She doesn't deserve that, and I am not about to let you do it."

"Her? Fuck her?" Worth's laugh was high, loud, and over pronounced as he felt blood pressure spiking, rushing through his veins. "Ya couldn't pay me enough ter touch her."

"What?" This time Conrad sounded honestly surprised, but more than that, he sounded insulted. "You're really trying to say this isn't about you wanting to have sex with her?"

"Ya even bothered ter look at her? Ugly's fuck. Ignorin' th' nose which," he leaned a little closer with a sneer, "is real damn hard, she's got hips like a rhino and sure as hell ain't got th' sort a rack ter make up fer it. Arms're too bulky, feet 're like goddamned horse hooves."

Steam was rising from under Conrad's shirt, ears and limbs elongating ever so slightly. "Oh, yes, oh of course. How utterly stupid of me to think you might care about a person and not what they look like. And fuck you, by the way. She has a lovely, classical body."

"Well why don't ya jus' draw some pretty li'l pictures of her then? Hmm? If she's s'damn lovely."

"Give me something to draw with and I would fucking love to. Not just because her shape is appealing, but because she's beautiful both outside and in, which," he snarled, "is way fucking more than I could ever say for some other people I've had the extreme misfortune of being forced to share space with."

"Oh yeah, yer life's just a fuckin' sob story, boohoo."

A darkening, cloudier shade was taking over Conrad's eyes, making the red of iris all that more startling. "I would give anything to be rid of this side show spectacle of a group I've been stuck with for the past four years!"

Something that had been twisted up and cracking inside Worth finally broke. He didn't know what, and he didn't want to examine it. He couldn't examine it, not now, not here.

"Fine! Why don't ya, then? Worthless piece of shit. We always gotta fend fer ya, always gotta cover yer ass. Why don't ya jus' stay here, then, hmm? Have your fancy li'l white picket fence with your fat cow wife and live yer faggot happy life, Doris Day?"

"Oh wouldn't you love it if I did!"

"Make my life a motherfucking cake walk, it would!" Worth shouted. "Three years I've been cleanin' up yer messes an' wipin' yer ass fer ya, y'ungrateful little bitch, when I coulda been doin' something useful with my time! We'd all be in a god damn better place if you'd had the fucking decency to croak properly when the bitch first killed ya!"

"What."

"You heard me. Blood bank's closed, Conrad. Go fuck off an' have yerself a wonderful life. We're better off without ya."

And then it was Worth's turn to slam the door this time, shoving Conrad out of the way and storming out into the bitterly cold night.

-A-

The dead guy came and got Worth just before nine. Considering he was just lurking around the park and glaring at children, it was probably impressive he'd been found at all, or something. Then again, everybody seemed to know just where to find Worth tonight, at exactly the times when he didn't want to be found.

The zombie didn't ask. He could probably tell, anyhow.

Mostly, Worth was happy to throw himself into some kind of task, even if it was menial politician shit that he couldn't have picked his own way through with a road map.

Town hall was pretty podunk all things considered. Best anybody had been able to tally, there were about three thousand people left in the city and that was with a fair sized chunk of the previous inhabitants of White Town added in. Ruling out children and babysitters, you were still up around a thousands. When the first fist fight started over available chairs in the auditorium, Worth was decidedly unsurprised.

Hanna left to go mediate . Hanna came back with a bloody nose.

They eventually did manage to get the clusterfuck straightened out, which was shitty timing since Worth had been trying to edge his way over to the melee for a while now and he only finally managed to get out from under Hanna's line of sight at about the same time they got all the major participants in various headlocks. Christ, what did a guy have to do to get involved in a low level civil disturbance these days? The second they got out of this town, Worth was heading back to Salem and finding a bar.

Hanna hopped up on the stage

"Look, I don't have a microphone so if everybody can try to be really quiet while I'm talking that would be super helpful!"

A vaguely resentful murmur fizzled out into mostly silence. Towards the very back, people were repeating the order to the crowd seated behind them.

"So," Hanna started, with his naturally tenor voice pitched to carry, "this is just to give you guys a rundown of the situation. Most of you probably already heard by now, but I guess some of you have like, lives of your own, and maybe you haven't heard yet? Um. Me and some guys went into White Town earlier today. Tonight? Anyway, we made contact with the leader of the faction, who some of you guys might recognize. His, uh, his name's Miguel Jackson?"

A wave of white noise washed over the auditorium as people whispered to their neighbors—Worth assumed they were telling the same story Herring had told him, but one girl in the front row was making the kind of revolted faced that girls usually make when they see dead animals. He guessed Miguel must have had a couple stories to his name Herring either didn't know or hadn't felt the need to share.

"Yeah!" Hanna said, clapping his hands together anxiously. "There's that. Miguel's operation looks like it's smaller than us but it's a lot better armed. They've got plenty of regular weapons and also they've got some big nasty magic in the bunker sooo…"

Worth wondered, for a moment, why Hanna wasn't just telling them about the Djinn contracts. And then he remember that this was the same kid who wouldn't even tell his doctor the full story behind his giant sliced open chest, and ultimately chalked it up to Hanna's bizarre sense of need to know basis.

"We have to be protected," Hanna went on. "These aren't trustworthy guys, you know? If they, like, launch a bomb at us in the middle of the night we're gonna wanna have some protection or something. I already put up some rudimentary shielding against hexes and curses and, uh, miscellaneous bad mojo, but it's a long way from impenetrable and it only covers distance magic which is…"

The zombie gently nudged him in the ribs.

"Right," Hanna winced, "Never mind, sorry, I'll save the lecture. The point is, they've got cars and guns and things so Havel, Rebecca Havel? You out there? If you could maybe put up your hand!"

A number of rows into the audience, a hand went up.

"Great! The most important thing we gotta do is get that car wall finished. How close to done are we?"

There was a muffled reply, and then a guy a row or two closer shouted, "She says we'll be done by noon tomorrow! …If everybody pitches in!"

"Awesome," Hanna breathed. "Okay so I'd like it a lot if everybody who isn't busy with some other task could help finish up Project Trojan Wall which is a pretty cool name I think I'll keep using it. Remember that's there's more jobs than just pushing vehicles, there's also looking for keys and steering and running for water I guess? Also I think Janet Iovitch—hey Janet! Was working on barbed wire patches and so on so if anybody wants to help her out, please and thank you!"

"I still don't understand," someone started, then cleared their throat and tried again louder, "I still don't understand why we're not just launching the first strike on these bastards! I'd volunteer!"

There was a smattering of agreements with some swearing mixed in. Worth was already squeezing his temples aggressively before Hanna even opened his mouth to reply, because there was no way he'd be smart enough not to mention—

"Well I promised them twenty-four hours," Hanna admitted, rocking back on his heels. "To think it over and maybe make peace? Or like, stage a coup or something lucky and well timed like that."

"Why?" someone else shouted, sharp and impatient.

"Because," the magician replied, "we don't know what their story is. We don't even really know what they want. They might decide that it's not worth it to launch any kind of attack, or they don't have enough free men to mobilize, or… heck, just about anything. But if we fire the first shot it's gonna be like aw no you didn't and then we're guaranteed to have a fight on our hands even if they weren't really gonna do anything otherwise."

Worth let out a breath.

"So yeah! Also I'd rather not let anybody get killed if I can avoid it. We definitely need to get rolling with the defensive perimeter though, and I want you guys to be ready if they do decide to try something nasty in the next couple of days."

"How ready are we talking?" a woman in the front row asked. Squinting, Worth thought he could make out the face of the same woman who had met them in a bathrobe the first night.

"Weeeeell," Hanna said, twirling his hands vaguely, "you need to be physically insulated, and in the longer run you need to be self sufficient so getting the planting business on is a health and safety thing for sure, but you also need some kind of like, chain of command, for emergencies? And a nightwatch."

"What about getting armed?" the woman demanded. "What if we have to go on offensive?"

"I'm not gonna let it get to that if I can help it."

"But what if you can't?"

Like a shadow drifting across the stage, the zombie cut through the middle of the conversation and bent at the knees just before the edge of the stage. He extended one gloved hand, and pulled Bathrobe Girl up onto the platform.

"You were saying," he murmured.

She paused, a little unnerved, and then gave him something like a grateful nod. "I was saying," she said, turning her attention back to Hanna, who she towered over, "what if you and your friends can't protect us. It's not that I don't believe you've got some tricks up your sleeve or whatever, but I'm not happy about putting the safety of my entire town in the hands of four strangers with an RV. There are some people here—"

She looked pointedly aside, toward the assembly.

"—Who'd like to blame you for the White Town aggression. They think we were fine until you showed up and stirred things around. But me and my family are aware that this was a long time in coming, and we're with you. We know you're the only chance we have at holding our own against whatever satanic voodoo shit's going on next door. But Mr. Cross, you're just one man."

"Mrs. Uh, Gordon? Okay yeah, Mrs. Gordon, we can do a lot with just a handful of people, I promise you!"

Gordon snorted. "Sure."

"And the plan is to avoid direct skirmishing if at all possible—"

"But what if it's not possible," Gordon insisted, planning her hands on her hips. "You're telling me things always go off without a hitch for you? Let us protect ourselves."

Hanna rubbed at his forehead. "Look, I'm trying not to come off as patronizing here, but you do not understand what you're volunteering for. Miguel has powers like you wouldn't even believe. I can't in good conscience ask any of you to put yourselves in danger like this."

"You're not asking," Gordon snapped, "we're demanding."

"If you don't participate," Hanna explained through gritted teeth, "there's still a chance that you can surrender peacefully if things go south. We play scapegoat, your city keeps surviving. The most important thing we can possibly do here is make sure that your kids don't grow up orphans."

"With all due respect," Gordon replied, pointedly looking over the length of Hanna's civilian getup right down to his battered marker-stained converses, "we have the right to decide if we want to run that risk or not."

"And I have the right not to arm you if I think I can save your lives some other way!"

"Put it this way: you're leaving us someday. Probably some day soon. Are you going to leave us defenseless when you go? We're asking you to give us the tools to protect ourselves. It's a big damn world out there, and I've got a toddler to think about. There's magic out there, right? Someday when you've been gone a year or ten years or twenty, what if we've got to protect ourselves from something that bullets don't kill."

Hanna stood there for a long moment, his eyes far away like stars half hidden behind dark clouds. Maybe he was remembering the hollow ribcages of all the thousand cities left empty by the ravages of plague, or maybe the streetfires in the heart of New York City. Maybe he was imagining some far flung future where he would be remembered as the man who made the bomb possible, the awful specter of another project Manhattan hung up on his already dragging conscience. Worth couldn't say which one it was, but the result was the same.

Gordon reached out and put a hand on his arm. "Please," she said, "we deserve the chance."

Hanna looked away, and then his shoulders locked like Atlas ready to take up the globe. "Alright," he sighed. He took a step forward and spoke to the muttering audience. "We are definitely not instituting a friggin draft or anything, but. If. If any of you want to learn how to defend yourselves against supernatural stuff… if you learn, I'm gonna expect you to use it to protect each other, okay? That's the deal. That's the only way I'm doing this. You gotta swear to me you'll only use it for times like these."

The murmur rose and fell like a wave.

"Not everybody is going to have the talent for this," Hanna said, breathing like he was about to take a jump off the high dive. "Class starts at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. We'll start simple, with stuff even, like, Worth can do."

Worth scowled at him, but Hanna was a long way off—too far right now to be paying attention to people standing a few feet away.

"First we'll do self protection, then we'll do healing, and then… then I've got some ideas about how to deal with Djinn. It's gonna be full-on World War II day, I expect everybody to pitch in as much as they possibly can." He turned back to Gordon, who was still standing there behind him with her brown hair pulled up in that tennis-player's ponytail. "I hope you know what you've just signed yourself up for. Miguel isn't gonna have a lot of mercy ready for people who spit in his face."

"Live free or die," Gordon quipped, and briefly saluted before jumping off the stage into the milling crowd. There was going to be a while yet for the meeting, while people sorted out some kind of chain of command, and there was a pretty likely chance that another fight would break out before the night was over, but Hanna wasn't showing any signs of sticking around for it.

Hanna sighed. "Come on, guys, I think I'm gonna turn in early for once."

-A-

Somewhere in the middle of the night, snow had started to fall. Snow fell on the desert, sand and snowflakes, and the sky was white and gray when Worth woke up. He'd fallen asleep in the heart of the RV, crumpled painfully into the booth underneath the window. He must have pulled away the blackout curtains that morning, in the darkness when he settled down to wait out the empty hours of the dawning day. Couldn't remember. They hadn't had a proper meal yesterday, too much to do, and the world was blurring a bit at the edges.

There were ghosts awake with him, ghosts of things he'd always known were coming. And damn, but they were coming. He'd felt it starting the moment that dim bitch opened her mouth.

Outside the window, white and gray and blue and far away yellowish stone stood stark and straight like a photograph of a place he'd never seen. Christ, you'd think he'd have seen it all by now.

Not snow, though. Not in a desert. Not even sure if that was something that should happen.

There was a faint noise from the bench that had become Hanna's bed in the last year-and-a-half. It was piled up with blankets and pillows, four inches thick, and the redhead lay curled, sunken into the middle of it like a stone embedded in concrete. Worth couldn't remember how he'd been convinced to let the kid do that. It seemed like too long ago to bear remembering. He wondered vaguely why Hanna was sleeping out here, in the RV, when a warm house was waiting for him just across the lawn.

Probably some kind of self-flagellation, if he knew Hanna, which he did. The thought just made him feel tired.

Worth had figured he was past his expiration for a long time now, but this morning, in the snow and sand and faint, not-quite-sunlight, Worth felt honestly, truly old for the first time in his life. He could feel it in the sunburned mesh of his skin, in the blue tunneling veins.

There was no sound from the bedroom at the back. Obviously. The sun was coming out, somewhere, and the metal bones of the thing they called a home still rattled with shouts from the night before.

Worth closed his eyes. They had plans for the day, and he was tired to the bone.

Sleep returned easily, for once.

-A-

Doc Worth was getting old enough that he probably would have slept in past noon if something loud and smoky hadn't exploded on the front lawn and sent him swearing in a tumble to the floor beside his make-shift bed. Blearily, he glanced over at the bench just long enough to be sure that Hanna was long gone.

Well that put the odds of it being a science experiment just a little over the odds of it being a surprise bombing. Worth shrugged his jacket on over the ratty shirt he figured was close enough to pajamas and made his stumbling way over to the window. Huh. Sunlight in the morning. What a goddamn novelty it would be, if great grey elephantine tons of clouds weren't blocking out the sun this particular morning.

"Oi," he shouted at the nearest living thing, which happened to be a teenager, "we got a motherfuckin' Pearl Harbor on our hands or did I just get a early mornin' Hanna'gram?"

The kid gave him a look like she'd really rather bolt than answer the question, but she did manage to shout back, "Mr. Cross had to leave before he could tell us how to turn the magic off!"

"Typical," Worth mumbled, shutting the window, "teach 'em how ter peddle an' ferget ter tell 'em where the brakes are."

The clock on the mantle said11:40 AM when Worth left the RV, in a pisspoor mood and ready to tear somebody a new one. He would have gone back to sleep, except for that ugly nagging twist in the back of his head that had kept him alive more times than not. Today was the day. Better not to sleep through any more of it.

He found Hanna further in town, situated on the hard-weathered pagoda at the center of the park. Dozens of people were scattered around the step, uncapped markers wiggling in the faint daylight. The whole area smelled vaguely of permanent ink.

"—It's incendiary," Hanna was saying, "so it's all about putting energy into the system. You'd need less energy if the material was naturally flammable, but that would also make it easier to put out—"

Worth paused under a tree and watched the lesson for a while, the thunderhead of his terrible mood dissipating a little. He figured he'd probably missed the healing lesson at this point, which was kind of a shame. He'd tried to get the hang of that rune before, but he only ever ended up frustrated and swearing at Hanna.

After maybe a quarter of an hour spent on that lesson, the magician stood up, stretched, and made is way over to the tree where Worth was standing.

"Just woke up?" Hanna asked, capping his pen with a quick snapping motion.

Worth grunted. "See ya got the fac'try floor runnin' on the war effort here."

Hanna winced a little. "I was going to make them myself, but…"

He didn't need to finish. They both knew what happened when Hanna tried to stock an armory all by himself, and as far as Worth was concerned it was nearly a goddamn miracle he wasn't trying to do it again.

"We're gonna need ya if they try anythin'," Worth said, as close to verbal approval as he was willing to get that morning.

"Yeah," Hanna sighed. "Anyhow, when I get done with this, the townspeople worked out some kind of chain of command and they want us to hold a meeting. More details stuff, I guess? Anyways, you should come if you're not doing anything else. Since we're a team and all, right?"

"Wotever. The clinic can do without me fer another hour."

"Oh, no, you should go there now 'cause I'm gonna be out here working for a while. I already had to put out one guy who was on fire earlier this morning—man, I remember the first time I did that, we didn't have any water so I had to jump in a dumpster to—yeah okay, that is probably not the best story to be telling right now? The point is, I better stick around to supervise."

"Lookit you, some kinda respectable adult."

For a second, Hanna lit up so brightly that the whole sky looked like nighttime. It was almost blinding, and for that moment, Worth had no idea what to say.

After a pause, he tilted his chin upward. "What's the deal with the snow'n shit, then?"

"Oh," Hanna replied, less happy now. "Well, it's not like… meteorologically impossible or whatever but. I think it's a bad sign. You know one of the signs you've got Fairies hanging around is mixed up seasons?"

Worth didn't know that, of course, but he shrugged anyways.

Hanna pointed upwards. "I think something kinda… reality warpy just stepped onto the playing field."

One guess what that might be, sure. Worth figured that was enough for him, so he ducked on out and let Hanna get back to his junior professor routine. The clinic could probably do with someone shouting at it for a couple hours if it was going to be crisis-ready in time for anything of a crisis type nature, and Worth was more than willing to be the guy shouting at it. Besides which, these dumb hicks didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and he was guessing a couple guys around town had probably pulled their stitches by now, so—

A pale figure came around the corner, walking under the vague shadow of a burnt-out gift-shop's awning.

"Connie?" Worth said, squinting. What were the probabilities that he was dreaming again? The ultra-vivid nighttime excursions had gotten rarer after he torched Lamont, but even those were never this mundane. Goddamn stupid dream if it was one, which wasn't looking likely.

Across the street, the vampire tucked his shoulders up around his neck and didn't stop moving."Doctor," he grunted.

Worth glanced up at the sky. Well, he'd seen Conrad come out during thunder storms. This wasn't too different—except that those were usually late in the afternoon, when the sun wasn't so bloody high.

"It's goddamn mid-day," Worth snapped, "what're y'doin' outside?"

"I don't see what business of yours it is," Conrad sniffed. There was a faint pink flush on his cheeks that spoke more of ambient sunburn than embarrassment.

"Wha', yer goin' fer the world record most roundabout suicide attempt?"

"You give yourself too much credit," Conrad replied, and promptly walked away.

That was it. No argument, no screaming, no blows—just Conrad walking away, once-expensive shoes kicking up powdery clouds of snow still unmelted in the shadows.

Worth had trouble remembering what he'd set out to do, after that.

-A-

Town Hall that day wasn't actually being held in the Hall proper this time. Instead, since they'd streamlined it down to single representatives from most of the households that were willing to get their hands dirty with Hanna's brand of community service, they holed up in a conference room on the second story where the floor was like ice but someone sitting beside the window could easily make out the distinct shadow of White Town flickering in the distance.

Conrad was already there, settled peevishly in a chair at the front corner of the room. Worth pointedly slammed himself down into a seat at the far end of the table and kicked his feet up on the polished wood. He turned his attention towards the spasm of redheaded motion front and center of the room, just a few feet to the vampire's left.

Hanna crackled with nervous energy.

Standing at the head of the table, ice-blue eyes wide and skittering, he looked like something wild shivering at the doors of its cage, waiting for the zookeeper to pull out his key. Everyone was seated, now, and that was as much go-ahead as Hanna needed to launch right into it, picking up from some quieter side conversation that Worth must have missed.

"Patroclus looked it up. They're violating the codes," he said, in a voice cracked with so much meaning that the meaning itself was indiscernible. "Clause numero uno, self defense, and that gives us jurisdiction."

In his corner, legs crossed in his curved chair, Conrad scowled dangerously. No one who hadn't seen him in his darkest moments would have recognized it for what it was, but three of them in that room knew. That was fear.

"Are you positive?" he demanded, ignoring the men and women around the room who looked at him with varying degrees of trepidation. "This is incredibly, incredibly dangerous, and I don't want to risk my pisspoor semblance of a life just to have the council haul us in for some kind of obscure execution sentence."

"Connie," Hanna replied, looking preoccupied, "I practically wrote that treaty, and we've enforced it for how long now? You seriously think I don't know where our jurisdiction ends?"

Worth watched them silently. Hanna was older. Hanna had to be older—everyone gets older, even immortals, even people like Hanna—but somehow Worth had known it all this time without really believing it. It was only now, in cold florescent light, that he realized for the first time in all this time that they were all getting older and thinner and colder, somehow. He'd felt it coming, sitting in that goddamn park like an overgrown kindergartener last night. The world had turned not gradually, this time, but in a sudden fit and start.

"I just want to be sure. God knows this isn't going to be easy as it is."

"Trust me, Con-man. This is serious. This is not within their parameters. War by proxy is covered in cases like..."

And then he rattled off some pseudo legal speak that Worth could not have been less interested in if he was paid to give the least amount of attention possible. The gist was that they could legally kill djinni—as if they had the firepower for that anyways—as long as the djinni were subcontracted to blahdyblahblah.

"Of course it's not like we can do much damage to a djinn anyways," Hanna said, apparently reading his mind. "I mean I can whip us up some water-based mojo so it's not like we're sitting ducks or anything, but…"

Hanna hopped up onto the table between two surprised townspeople, settling in for a lecture. Worth suspected he did that more to calm himself down than to help anybody understand anything, draining off the storm of anxiety into the forward-plowing motion of a lesson.

"What you gotta understand," he explained, "is Djinni are in a whole different league. Fey are magic—they live basically forever unless you kill them, they can heal and get up in your head and pretty much do anything I can do with runes only by just instinct, so like, fey are magic. Right. But Djinni, they can do things. Time and space are like, fuck naw, we're not messing with those guys. Djinn wants to be in Paris at five and China at five-fifteen? They can do that. If a fairy wants to spontaneously make a plant grow, they have to find a spot that already had a seed planted in it. A djinn doesn't have to do that. They just… make it so."

Conrad leaned forward. "Hanna, you can't expect us to fight something like that."

"Weeeeell… Miguel's djinn is gonna be tied down by the summoning so that puts us on like… slightly more even footing? Kilimanjaro versus Everest type stuff. But like I said, I can make us some stuff that'll hold it off so we can focus on the people instead."

"And you want us to do battle with something like that?" Herring asked, her sharp features gray from the beginnings of exhaustion.

Hanna winced. "Well not battle, hopefully? Ideally I'd like to do this with a small task force, since we… uh… have some previous experience. In that area. I did promise them twenty-four hours, but after that our best bet is probably to go in and take out the power center. Honestly, I'm not really much of a tactician. This is just something that's worked for us in the past."

"And if that's not possible?"

"Then…" Hanna sighed, "then we defend the city and play the rest of it by ear. Me and the guys can run whatever offensive turns out to be necessary but—"

He went on explaining, but it was easy to tune out.

The doctor's eyes strayed back to Conrad. Dumbass, shrieking, useless motherfucking goddamn Conrad. Conrad who learned how to use a gun in the space of days, who learned how to hunt in a matter of weeks, who took six months to finally sneak up on Worth, who had exchanged life-debts with him so many times he didn't even know who owed who these days, let alone why. Conrad, whom he'd watched sharpen and harden, like a stone beaten down into an arrowhead by the force of time.

Conrad who was still Conrad, always—just like Hanna was always Hanna.

Miriam was at the other end of the table. Worth didn't know what the hell she was doing in here, or who the hell had let her in, but his trigger finger was itching to put a round into her classically gorgeous chest, into the pumping bloody thing that bruised so easily. She had no fucking clue what she'd tried to do—what she'd successfully done. Not a goddamn clue.

He'd like to show her, precisely.

Hanna was asking for volunteers of some kind, something front lines for a worst-case scenario, and Worth only realized he'd been half-listening when his mouth opened up and a reply came bursting out.

"I'll go," he said, voice working before his brain could catch up with it. Around the table, eyes whirled to rest on him. Hanna had stopped mid-disclaimer, his wide hands flat on the table.

"What?" he asked, a puzzled look in the faint lines of his face.

"Said I'll go," the doctor repeated, drumming fingers on the tabletop. "Y'need a man ter get it done? Who else y'gonna trust?"

The magician looked at him oddly. "Don't you… uh, wanna stay with Conrad? I mean, there'll be plenty of action on that front, and we don't have enough doctors to be throwing them up front in the lines of battle."

Worth looked again at Conrad, who broke contact first.

"Conrad's a big boy," Worth replied. "So 'e tells me. He can look after 'imself."

-A-

Jackson pulled up at the edge of town a couple hours before sunset, in his big white truck with its bed full of scowling green-jacketed men. The dust cloud came tumbling over the crown of the blockade before his voice even reached them.

Worth was one of the people on this side, carefully directing the ends of their rifles at the crew cut heads of half a dozen armed guards. Worth's in particular strayed toward the center of Jackson's skull, and he wondered how many of the women and men around him were aimed the same way. Why not just end it here? Fuck that supercilious prick and his crow-hop swagger, walking out in front of a wall of armed hostiles like the goddamn king of the world. Worth flicked off the safety.

One finger hovering over the trigger, Worth paused to consider a possibility.

The sound of a shotgun blast about five feet from his ear nearly made Worth fire his own gun anyhow, from sheer startled reflex. Looked like somebody else had the same idea after—

Blue smoke, like ink in a transparent casing, exploded up from underneath Jackson's feet and swallowed the spray of shot.

Worth felt his mouth forming vague swears, uninterested in what exactly they might be. Possibility fully considered.

Two more townspeople fired in quick succession, both gulped down harmlessly by the miasma. In between the curls of indigo, Jackson's narrow eyes glimmered out at them. It was at that point that Hanna arrived on the scene, split-soled sneakers slapping the dust as he raced toward the barricade and didn't stop, caught a foothold in a truck's open window and slung himself over the other side.

If Worth hadn't been pretty sure that it would get them both killed, he would have thrown down his gun and dragged Hanna back over the barricade himself. Kicking and screaming, with half a dozen soldiers laughing at them, probably. When was he going to figure out a way to keep that kid from throwing himself headfirst into potentially fatal situations? Ten years and he still couldn't manage it if he had a bona fide leash to work with.

Instead, he kept his gun on him as he scaled the hood of something more reasonably sized and raced after the idiot he occasionally referred to as his leader. Another pair of feet landed in the dirt seconds behind him, and if it turned out that their owner had a pulse of any kind then Worth would eat Fagula's favorite vest.

Hanna slowed down at the top of the hill, just a few feet away from where Jackson was grinning with his arms crossed loose over his chest. By the time Worth and one-guess-who-else-would-be-wearing-a-fedora caught up to him, it was like wading chest deep into the ocean as an electrical storm goes raging overhead.

It was a cold war, and it went on and on for a long time. No one had to ask what the verdict was. The way Jackson grinned down his nose at them said everything down to the signature at the bottom of the page. Hair-trigger ready, Worth's anxious fingers scrabbled over a lump of misshapen plastic lodged in the bottom of his coat pocket.

"Miguel," Hanna said, at last, a look almost like disappointment on his pale features. In Worth's sidelong glance, the younger man's eyes were icy blue and hard. "Twenty four hours is up."

Facing down a man with a scar across the side of his nose and a bullet belt cinched around his waist, Hanna looked like a soldier. In fact, he looked for all the world like a goddamn general. Worth watched the width of his shoulders and the steel length of his spine and wondered what had happened to that kid he'd met a decade before, broken and bleeding and ghost-eyed in an alleyway. What had he grown up into? What had he become?

"Give us back the kids," Hanna ordered, twirling a sharpie in one rough hand. "This is your only chance. I've been really generous with you guys, this far, but you know what? I am so out of patience. The full force of the council is coming down on your heads—don't say I didn't give you a chance. None of this has to happen. No one has to die."

Scarface laughed. "And you'll do what? Draw a mustache on me? You're wasting my time. You're just a two-bit street magician who got a lucky break, and if you're smart you'll skip town and leave the real magic to us. What we do here? That's the real shit. Your council doesn't scare us, and those idiots behind you don't scare us either, kid."

Hanna glared at them for a moment, and uncapped his marker. "My name is Hanna Falk Cross," he announced, "and you can't say I didn't give you a chance."

Without a word, Worth snatched up the contents of his coat pocket and pitched the day's first bomb like a major leaguer splitting a hole through the air, and the man beside Scarface exploded into flames. Apparently that guy's mojo wasn't programmed for this eventuality. Tough luck, brother.

Maybe Hanna knew he would do it, maybe he didn't. All Worth really knew was that when he reached into his pocket for that first hell-bomb, a chunk of melted plastic with a nasty looking rune scratched into it, it seemed like the wind itself changed directions just long enough for Worth to lob it at the bastards who brought them all here to this godforsaken desert.

They fucking ran.

Doc Worth's boots scraped the casing of an old-fashioned shotgun shell half way down the hill, and the wobble in his step nearly sent him sprawling.

This is what happens when you sell your soul to some four-eyed supernatural jackass, Worth decided. Goes for me selling out to Hanna, and these douchebags to whatever the hell it was they sold out theirs to.

The doctor ducked out of a new hail of bullets, feeling the shield charm around him cracking at the edges. The redheaded blur ahead of him ducked and wove, while the two of them behind turned every so often and took potshots from the hip as they ran, like they hadn't been able to in White Town. Scarface and his nasty looking crew would have set up shields of their own, but the arrogant son of a bitch hadn't thought to shield for chunks of two-bit magic, had he?

Worth was down to one bomb when they hit the bottom of the hill and the line of rusted cars that was about to become their fiberglass and steel trench. Worth could feel his shield rune buzzing on his skin as he threw himself over the wall, more than half used up already. He'd applied the damn thing himself, after all, and he'd never really gotten the hang of any of this magic shit.

Hanna had been too tired to spare the juice for it, though, and he'd rather just put up with his own shoddy workmanship than ask.

There was a lull while Jackson slipped into his truck and drove away, disappearing over the shallow crest of the hill and becoming a length of dust along the gray floor of the desert.

In the relative quiet, orders started going out. Bit by bit, the curved metal length of the barricade gathered life, like a grim coral reef blossoming in the dusk. Buckets full of bombs were settled into the ground every few feet, marked bullets were passed out by children with little red wagons, too young to understand what was coming but old enough to want a part of the action. Down the row, a woman in a white fur coat was tying runic tags to her collection of sporting-goods arrows with a single-minded determination.

The sun sunk lower, a faint yellow stain in the low hanging clouds.

Just before sunset, a shadow settled over the distance. Worth squinted through the empty space where a window had been smashed open, picking out a whirl of dust coming up from the tires of ten miniature trucks barreling over the unpaved scrub. He shouted for a runner, sent something in the vein of a terse warning to Hanna, and then settled into his position to wait.

Across the desert, the first puff of smoke erupted under a wheel.

Worth's lips skinned back from his teeth. It was too far away to hear, but he remembered the sound of a trashbomb exploding underfoot and that was good enough for now.

Too bad Jackson was war savvy. After that, they drove more carefully.

There was commotion behind the doctor as countless people rushed to get the children put away and the doors locked and the ammunition laid out and the soldiers into their foxholes, but Worth's eyes were on the dip of a hill one ridge away from their current position. Hills here weren't much around here. He could see the dying light reflected off the windshields almost all the way down, flashing just long enough for him to hiss in a breath before black smoke and a muffled blast rolled up from the divot.

Makeshift landmines. Worth's breath hissed back out. Good thing for all of them that he'd had practice.

Just one thing left to do. Here was what he'd signed up for, why he'd come up to the front line at all. In an uneven wave, a score of dumb motherfuckers climbed over the barrier—Worth himself for the second time that evening—and scrambled up the low slope between them and the enemy.

See, if the enemy has superior manpower, the first thing you've got to do is take that away from them.

Bodies were scrambling stumbling out of their vehicles, coughing smoke and frantically slapping clips into their guns, wild eyes whirling in search of enemy combatants. Panicked. Instinct-driven.

The doctor dropped to one knee, lined up his sights, and blew a hole in a pottery-packed explosive that had been half-buried in the downslope of the hill. Bright orange clay and dirt blasted down into the panicked frenzy of human bodies, swiveling their attention backwards, leaving countless unprotected backs exposed.

Shots fired. Men down.

Worth yanked the cap from his one napalm grenade and tossed it into the face of a man staggering up from the wreckage of his truck. He turned heel before he could see it make contact, but the howls slicing through the smoke behind him were reassurance enough.

Worth remembered his half-shot shield charm just in time to regret volunteering for the damn position, but the expected wave of fire never came. Instead, the ground shook behind them like the earth was ready to rip itself open, and a din of alarmed swearing and shouting followed them down the hill instead of ammunition.

Down and going so fast now that they half-tumbled more than ran, they hit the barricade and clambered over hoods and roofs, boots slipping on cracked glass, and threw themselves over the side into the waiting arms of strangers.

Said arms in the middle of helping him to the ground, Worth was already shouting at the red blur of Hanna sitting only feet away. "Earthquake?"

Hanna nodded, hands still pressed flat against the ground.

"Why ain't ya just doin' that all the time!"

In lieu of answer, Hanna vomited a cupful of blood onto the dirt.

Worth sighed. "Yer all fuckin' idiots."

The first of Jackson's army came pouring over the hilltop seconds later, and the same arms that had pulled each of them to safety began firing up into the mass.

Worth reached for his gun, and found an arm still pulled tight around his abdomen, luminous skin in the fading twilight. Whatever, he could still shoot whether they let go or not. He unholstered his pistol and aimed into the shouting mass just like the man behind him, who was currently holding up a third of his body weight.

"Ey Connie," he yelled, over the thunder of firing ammunition, "ain't you supposed to be watchin' the armory?"

"Fuck that!" Conrad yelled back, firing over the doctor's shoulder. "Every time you leave me somewhere safe, I just ended getting the shit kicked out of me!"

The army on the hilltop started retreating somewhat, backing out of prime aiming range as a few of their shields started to shatter under the barrage of bullets. Time to switch guns. The folds of Conrad's dusty white shirt shifted against Worth's slumped back, and the low moon blazed down through the breaking clouds behind them, and he took a deep breath of melted snow and fear-sweat and gunpowder.

"Y'kin let go now, Xena," Worth muttered, turning his head back to speak directly into the vampire's ear. Conrad's marble-smooth cheek brushed the stubble on his own.

His partner let go like he'd been slapped, pushed the doctor away, and snatched up a rifle to re-aim up the hill.

"I'm still severely pissed off about last night," Conrad informed him, over the sound of a hell-bomb exploding. "And I'm still not forgiving you for what you said."

"Yeah? Then how come y'were waitin' fer me here?"

Standing in front of the vampire, Worth couldn't see what sort of expression Conrad had made—but he knew them all like he knew the positions of the bones in a man's hand or the sound of a beating heart, and he could imagine it easily without wasting the time it would take to turn around.

"It's not like I care what happens to your sorry ass," the vampire said, as gunfire exploded down at them, lodging in the hood of the truck they were hiding behind. "I just don't want to be there when they tell Hanna how you got shot in the head while you were dicking around up here."

"Oi," Worth muttered. "Ain't that my line?"

-A-

Silver-blue, the writhing smoky coils around the distant figure of Jackson's truck bloomed into something eldritch and snapping as white fire exploded across the ground at his tires. Something similar, smaller, on the left flank was racing down the field in a motion half like a wildfire and half like a monstrous cat, and the length of cars shuddered and groaned under the impact of its insubstantial shoulder. When it leapt over the line, people scattered under its silver claws.

Countless hands dug into the marker-scribbled ammunition, fumbling for revolvers and rifles and frantically unlocking clips, while everyone in the line of fire tried to scramble out low to the ground, praying through clenched teeth for deliverance from friendly fire.

Thunder ripped through the circle forming around the djinn, shot after shot sinking with sickly blue sparks into the translucent hide. The smoky jaws slip open in a howl like a house going up in flames. Somebody shrieked—someone across from them had missed their mark.

The djinn hunched into itself, rolling enraged golden eyes, and then burst up into a column of fire, leaving nothing but the gray flickering ghosts of licking flames across the dirt.

Worth wiped freezing sweat from his face. That was the third time, and every time it lasted a little bit longer.

Piece by piece, the fiberglass bulwarks had started to break down. The hill ahead was scattered here and there with bodies turned gray in the moonlight, and far behind them Hanna's wounded soldiers were being loaded up and taken away from the open fire of the front line. Bullets were rationed, and Hanna's plastic bombs were running low, and for a battle with so much flash and bang and desperation, very few people were actually dead.

It was a thundering, frantic draw.

Doc Worth looked aside at Conrad's scowling, hard-eyed mug. In a cool, wordless way, he was grateful that the vampire was here. He'd gotten used to it, the banter and the heavy feeling of companionship and all the goddamn ticks and faces that Conrad made when he went to do anything from reload to curse his own shot. Grateful for knowing that he had someone's back to watch.

He'd gotten so bloody used to it he hadn't even considered an alternative, until last night.

And he was alive tonight, alive in a wild way with a desperate edge that came from knowing how close he stood to death and the memory of how old and hollow he had felt hours before.

In between reloads, Hanna dropped onto the ground beside Worth's feet like a demented Leprechaun. Conrad took a step back and nearly stepped on him, and swore a blue streak till his lungs ran out of air to make sound with. Then he looked down properly, and must have noticed the same thing Worth was noticing: the deep purple circles growing under Hanna's eyes, and the discolored smudges still lingering in the corners of his lips. Conrad swore again.

"Don't you go any bloody where," he snapped, shoving his rifle into the magician's discolored hands. "I'm going to go see if anybody in the second string has a water bottle. Worth, hold him for me."

Conrad stalked off, ducking awkwardly through the thin zone where enemy fire fell fast and hard, and disappeared into the ranks.

"He's gonna miss the show," Hanna noted, with the faint smile of somebody humoring a precocious teenager.

"What show?"

Hanna gestured towards the window of the car in front of them, through which the silhouettes of the staggered opposition could be seen. "We're about to do something really clever in just a second, and you're gonna wanna be here for it. We're gonna do a magic trick: tonight, we make all the bad guys' ammo disappear!"

"Disappear," the doctor repeated, skeptical.

"Well," Hanna admitted, "not like, literally. But yeah, effectively!"

A bullet zinged through the shattered window and embedded itself in the cushioning of the passenger seat directly in front of Worth. Motherfucking Jesus.

"Alright, how th' fuck we doin' this?" Worth grumbled, sparing a glare for Hanna.

Hanna grinned, wiggling his ruddy fingers, and Worth was immediately less than enthused. "Ma~gic!"

"Magic?"

"No, not magic. Ma~gic!"

"Specifics, Cross."

"You remember Gordon? Right? She is killer with the runes and stuff. Apparently she uhhhh played with some stuff when she was younger and didn't really understand and wasn't using the right accent or else wow we could have had some trouble out here but! It meant that I could skip a bunch of the rudimentary, all killer, no filler, am I right?"

Worth stared and waited. A few bullets dinged off of the car barricade and Worth hoped Jackson's crew didn't have much ammo stronger than .22 calibur. Cars plus magical barriers only got you so far. If ammo can take out a charging elephant, it can take out a rune shield in one shot and hit you through what little metal was in a car with the second.

"Er...So! Gordon, and that's a cool name, a girl who goes by Gordon, totally learned how to do some extra mojo jojo, and we are about to get our opening here in just a minute."

"Yeah?"

"Totally yes."

And like clockwork, shouts exploded from behind the enemy lines. "Diversion!" Hanna grinned. "Open fire when you see their backs!"

Suddenly Jackson's soldiers split into bunched groups, flipped around, and began firing at something behind their lines. Well, Worth could see their backs, so he fired too. A man went down. All along their line of cars shots fired off, most hitting true, taking out Jackson's men handfuls at a time. It was easy - too easy. But they were dumb. The only man who doesn't think to shield both his front and his back is a dead man, and fuck if they weren't finding a hell of a lot of dead men in Jackson's militia.

As the men fell and scattered, a few deserting and running, Worth could see what had them scared and didn't really blame them. On the curve of the hill behind them a pride of enormous mountain lions were lunging and snarling, froth falling from fangs. The soldiers were firing and, looking through his rifle's scope, Worth thought he could see the soldier's shots passing through the lions, mostly pounding harmlessly into the dust—a few, though, striking their fellow men.

"Christ."

"No, ma~gic!"

"How th' fuck she doin' that?"

"Illusion spells are pretty awesome, but really wear you out. She's basically lying down in a trance right now willing the illusion. As long as they don't realize what's going on, we might actually-"

Of course Hanna had to go and say it, had to ruin things. Jackson's car roared up from where he'd been sitting observing, and didn't stop moving until it had rolled headfirst through the lions. He exited the vehicle and Worth could hear him shouting, could see the crackle and minor sheen of a strong protective barrier, swirling glints like light on oil, through his scope. The men filed back into order, re-positioned themselves, hunkered back down.

He sighed. "Nice while it lasted."

"Yeah," Hanna said, palming the tired hollows under his eyes. "Party pooper just pooped in the punch bowl. I hoped we'd be able to take out more with that one."

The lions vanished, but at least Worth could feel a bit of a morale boost among their own people who were using the lull in action to reload their weapons. That was something. Conrad chose exactly that moment to come darting back to the front lines, clutching a batman mug in both hands like it was the dried out remains of a saint.

"What'd I miss?" he asked, blinking at the frenzied motion of men and women all down the length of the barricade.

Hanna wobbled.

"Oh shit," Conrad hissed, and reached for Hanna's left shoulder at the same time Worth was grabbing for his left. Between the two of them, they managed to keep the magician upright. Water sloshed over the rim of the mug.

"Drink," Worth grunted, trusting that Conrad would take his cue while the doctor was fumbling for a pulse. A little thin, but not a death warrant. On impulse, Worth reached up over where Conrad's hands were holding cup to lips and pulled down on an eyelid. No blue streaks. Thank god. It had been a while since Hanna had smoked anything, and they'd started to suspect the worst was over, but…

He still sighed in faint relief when the worst he could see were tired red veins.

"Hanna," he said, "stay with us fer a minute. Yer gonna pass out in a second. Anythin' the troops oughter know?"

The redhead mumbled something, coughed, and then tried again. "Keep safe," he managed. "Smarts. We got brain advantage. Be smart."

"We got stupid is what we got," Worth retorted, and then lifted his head. "Stretcher!" he shouted, motioning to one of the clinic workers lurking on-call just out of the range of bullets. "Man down, needs a stretcher pronto!"

While they loaded up Hanna in the comparatively safe shadow of the bulwark, Worth ran a quick analysis of the scenario. Ammunition on both sides was about even now, mortality rate was within range of each other, but a line of cars wasn't going to stand strong forever and the next time that Djinn came back—

"We can't keep doing this forever," Conrad said, apparently running a parallel calculation of his own.

"Well it ain't like we got another choice," Worth retorted. "Sure ain't got the means fer another charge, an' I reckon the boys ain't got the energy for it either."

"We're not getting anywhere!" Conrad shouted, frustration and adrenaline thick in his voice. "At this rate, it's going to be the slowest slaughter in the history of the fucking planet!"

"Whacha want me ter do about it?" the doctor shouted back, fingering the last clip he'd tucked away. "I got one bomb left, an' one bomb ain't gonna get us anythin' useful done!"

Conrad squinted up the hill. "Jackson. That's who's giving the orders? We can deal with humans—if we could just take out the djinn, the whole thing would crumble like a Greek ruin."

"Fuckin' art school faggot analogy," Worth grumbled. He left the clip in his pocket and pulled out his last bomb. "Look, Xena, this is one bomb. How ya expect me ter hit anythin' from way th' fuck over here?"

One of the enemy bombs exploded further down the line, something whipped up in the middle of the fight probably, and it exploded like a tiny old-fashioned mortar, blasting a hole in their right flank.

Conrad paused, finger on the trigger of his stolen rifle, and for a second it looked as if he was seeing through the world into something else, something more frightening and insane than anything the world had ever dished out for them in the last lifetime. Then Conrad looked back at him.

"You know how, last night you said I was a useless hunk of bloodless meat and I'd have done the world more good if I'd just stayed dead the night we met Adelaide?"

Worth squinted. "Yeah?"

"Well," Conrad said, slowly, "let's see you say that again, doctor."

And then Worth's hand was empty , and the last thing he could see of the vampire was a pair of once-expensive loafers disappearing off the hood of their truck and into the night.

Worth blinked, stared at his hands for about two seconds, and then threw himself headfirst after the utter fuckhead he'd long ago started calling his partner.

On the pockmarked hill ahead of him, Conrad was weaving across the danger zone, faster than any human could have dreamed, leaping over moaning bodies and ducking more of the tiny mortars that seemed to be multiplying across enemy lines, and Worth raced after him despite the burning in his lungs and the protests of his muscles because fuck if he'd ever paid attention to the condition of his body anyways.

Synapses fired…

He had no idea what he was doing. Scarface's idiot army was yelling, pointing, training all their guns on Conrad, but Conrad could see who was aiming at him, where to dodge, and Worth watched the ground just feet ahead of him explode with ammunition that had missed its target. They were close enough now to see individual faces, and Conrad seemed to have found the one he was looking for. There was just the simple matter of a few armed men cluttering up the path between them.

He could hear Conrad's voice, but not the words, and god only knew what he'd yelled before the darkness exploded into fire for the second time that night, flames rushing up the figure of a man and leaping out to the men around him—fire and shrieking and random shots, and Conrad must have thought his chances of making it back alive would be miniscule, or maybe he just wasn't thinking at all anymore, because rather than keep running, he tugged his old pistol from its holster and proceeded to fire all twelve shots into the crackling charm-shields of the surviving men in front of him, shattering at least one with a telltale pop and scream.

And then he spotted Jackson.

Worth would swear to god afterward that he'd never seen anything move as fast as Conrad did, in the next thump of a heart beat. A white blur of inhuman angles, he sliced through the blue coils and kept on going, claws flashing, and in the blaze of a bomb bursting nearby there was just enough light to make out the length of one talon as it hooked on the string around Jackson's neck.

Leather snapped.

All around them blue smoke paused in the moonlight, the bulging thunderhead of it high above them tilting delicately, like a predator sniffing the wind. White burning eyes flicked downward, curved up in the unmistakable slit of a smile.

"Oh," a low voice whispered, "Miguelito…"

Jackson, the poor son of a bitch, probably never knew what hit him. The inferno that shot up from his feet seemed to grin, if a pillar of fire can do that, and swallowed him whole.

By then—and it should have been impossible but tonight he was faster than he'd ever been in his life—Worth had caught up with Conrad and grabbed the younger man by his singed collar and screamed for him to go back, go back!

Something seated deep in the fight-or-flight, do-or-die recesses of Conrad's brain must have heard that without question, because it was only with Worth's hand fisted in his shirt that he finally turned and ran. And sparing a few shots, Worth turned too. They all but flew back down the hill, Worth firing over his shoulder just like he'd done earlier that night, watching half the army behind them whirling in confusion while the other half raced down after, enraged, mindless of the forces they knew waited for them behind the line of battered cars.

There was one thing going through Worth's head, and that was the memory of Hanna telling him years ago that a shot to the heart or a shot to the head will kill anything—anything that can be killed.

He stumbled, lost his balance, picked himself up on the power of sheer senseless determination and felt nothing. When they reached the first freezing pane of metal that marked safety, the doctor grabbed Conrad under the arms and threw him over, ignoring the blazing hot feeling that exploded over his left side, as vague as the afterimage of a lighting strike.

Safety.

He hit the ground on the other side like an old mattress tossed out of a truck, bone meeting the icy dirt where snow had melted and almost refrozen. All in the same second, like they'd been given sudden permission, the townspeople stretching out on either side of him reopened fire, and he could imagine easy enough fifty of Jackson's men staggering and stumbling halfway down the hill, riddled with bullets.

Hands were on his chest. Cold hands. He glared blearily at them, and his heart thudded in his chest like it was clawing its way out of his ribcage. His breath was raw and his mouth was full of freezing saliva.

"Oh god, Worth, you're shot. You're shot, shit, shit shit shit—"

Pain was something Worth understood, and he went searching for the white-hot center of it while the air around him filled with cracks of gunshot and shouts and Conrad.

"You weren't supposed to come after me!" Conrad shouted, grabbing Worth by the lapels, and the Doc finally noticed that his own jacket was opened to the night chill, and Conrad was sitting across his hips.

Irony, you sweet mean bitch.

"Wha'," the injured man managed, between heavy spittle-stained breaths, "y'really think I'd letcha commit suicide withou' backup?"

"Oh god," Conrad moaned, pressing cold fingers to the soaking red stain spreading over Worth's chest. Bullet went out the other side, then. Would have been a small mercy as well as a miracle, under other conditions. "Oh god this is terrible and I'm not even hungry anymore, oh god. Why would you do that?"

"Meat shield," Worth replied, with a dull laugh. "Ain't I thoughtful?"

"You don't even want me here," the vampire said, horror slipping though each syllable. "You told me to leave, didn't you? You said we'd all be happier if I just married Miriam and left you all alone and stopped… stopped messing everything up. You said that! Why did you say that!"

"Hate how ya talk to her," Worth replied absently, considering how his fingers were feeling unusually cold. "Din' want ya t' leave us fer some cow-face broad."

Underneath the scattered cracks of gunfire, Conrad let out a noise that was equal parts frustration and fear.

"I wasn't going to, Jesus Christ Worth, of all the… never mind, okay, never mind, I need—Doctor! Somebody, I need a doctor or bandages or—God!"

"Won't work," Worth murmured. "Not now. You'd need a trauma unit an' an ambulance, an' all we got is dirt 'n bullets."

"Why?" Conrad repeated, fingers digging into the thin flesh over Worth's ribs. "Why in fuck's name did you run after me? This is so stupid. Why did you do that? I would have been fine. I would have been fine and now you've got a hole in your organs that I could thread a pipe-cleaner through!"

"Was scared," the doctor admitted, something he did for only the second time in his entire life. "Scared 'n stupid. Tha's all."

"Scared why?"

Worth looked up at Conrad's face, at the clouds and stars that were blurring together into a vague blue-white smear behind him, and grinned.

"Scared they were better shots than me 'r you."

"But you're human! You're alive! You stupid dickwad, at least I had a chance!"

"Yeah?" Worth contemplated the spreading stain. "Guess I didn't like those chances, eh?"

Conrad tore at the shirt, ripping it seam from cotton seam like so much paper, and stared down at the ugly black place below the doctor's heart.

"Why?" he asked, again, this time softer, and for a second he looked no older than the twenty-six he'd been when he first entered the world of desperate heroism, kicking and screaming all the way. "Why not?"

Worth blinked.

"Fuckin' love ya, y'dim twat," he said. "Maybe it's not th' best time but… Christ, yer slow."

The world swam.

"Love ya anyhow."

The last thing he heard was Conrad's voice, but he was too far gone to know what it had said.

Then there was pain, suffocating shrieking relentless makeitstopmakeitstopgodwhy god w h y

And then beautiful, empty numbness.

-A-

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't, of course.

But by all rights it should have been.

-A-

He wasn't dead.

Well, he didn't think he was dead. He was pretty okay with the idea, but part of him had long suspected that a man who wasn't scared of death was a man death couldn't be bothered with. So when he noticed that his brain was processing a sensation—the actual sensation was irrelevant—he started to suspect that he wasn't dead at all.

Hm. Another sensation. His mouth was motherfucking dry.

He opened his eyes, with an exhausting amount of effort.

A flashbomb exploded ten feet from where he was lying.

"Worth, Worth, fucking—fucking Luce, Luce Worth, are you awake?"

His eyes flicked up, met another pair of irises, bright red like hard candy, a cherry colored star expanding from a black pupil. Oh. They were so red, and the skin was so white, white and purple where shrapnel had left bruises of thick brackish blood just beneath the surface, pinkish and rippled in still-healing burns.

"Connie," he rasped, and when the hell had all this dirt gotten in his mouth? "Connie. What the fuck?"

"Oh god," Conrad wheezed, eyes wide, and promptly collapsed across his torso, head thudding painfully onto Worth's sternum. A freezing cold spot grew just above the place where Conrad's stupid huge nose dug into him. "Are you okay?" the vampire asked into Worth's skin.

"Nng. You fuckin' tell me."

"I…"

A bullet whizzed past the gap between their truck and the nearest minivan, plowing up clods of frosty dirt where it hit the ground. Somehow, it seemed to straighten out Conrad's resolve.

The dead man pressed a cool white hand to Worth's chest, just over his heart.

His unbeating, silent heart.

"I hate to tell you this," the vampire said, swallowing faintly, "but you're dead, you sorry sob."

It occurred to Worth, for the first time in his life, that he'd forgotten to breathe minutes ago, and still hadn't gotten around to it.

"Ya didn'."

"Did," Conrad replied, shortly. "If you think you can pull that kind of passive aggressive last minute love confession bullshit on me and get away with it, you have another fucking thing coming, asswipe."

Worth's eyebrows went up.

Well. He wasn't touching that topic with a thirty foot pole. "Fuck're ya burned fer?" he asked, instead.

Conrad wrinkled his nose, like he couldn't believe they were talking about this right now."I met Miguel's djinn while you were dead."

"Christ. You okay?"

"Me? Yes." The panes of Conrad's smeared glasses flashed. "Won't get the taste of ash out of my mouth for weeks, though."

Worth blinked.

"You…" Conrad started, pausing to lick his lips, "…you're gonna be thirsty. There's probably a few yards distance between the defensive line and Jackson's army now, and they've completely lost their shit, so. There won't be much to go around once the fight's over. You should go… take advantage of the chaos."

Worth looked up at his partner for just a second too long. This was the man he'd helped to shape, the man who shot like a Gatling gun and charged headfirst into the no man's land between two enraged armies, the man who left freezing cold patches of grief on Worth's chest and still couldn't figure out how to say "bite somebody".

Words welled up at the back of his tongue, god knew what he would have said if he'd let himself. Probably something redundant, now. Instead, he swallowed them down around the thickness in his throat.

"I guess this'll be interestin'," Worth observed, at last, pushing himself to his feet. Dizziness rattled his skull, and he felt like death had chewed him up and spit him into the garbage disposal, but he'd done harder on worse. "Th' whole… y'know. Immortality 'n shit."

"We'll make it work," Conrad said quietly, but there was a kind of iron in his voice that made Worth believe, despite his better sense, that somehow they would.

"Roit. Sure an' we will."

Worth turned to go, put a hand on the hood for balance, but Conrad caught him by the jacket just as he was about to step away. The younger man—dirty and pale and just as fucking stupid as ever—looked hard at him, like this was the most important thing he'd do all night.

"I love you too," he said, "and I'm not going anywhere. I never was."

Worth grinned, and after these last couple days it felt like his skin might just shatter under the force. Far away, someone shouted a retreat.

"Kin I go yet," he asked, "or are we still havin' an Oprah moment here?"

(END)