Aurelius looked at the phone in confusion, hung it up, then dialed again.

-------------------------------------

"My, aren't we popular?" the hooded woman said, and snapped her fingers at the ringing phone. Someone behind Augustus moved-- not the woman with the gun, but someone new-- and went over to the phone. A short-statured man so bulging with muscles that it made him look almost distorted promptly brought down a ham-sized fist on the phone. Naturally, it stopped ringing.

"Who are you people?" Augustus demanded. "Go rob someone else. I don't have anything of value."

"Oh, I think you do, Augustus. So how is your dear brother?" She drew back her hood to reveal a familiar face; the same black hair, dark eyes of the superhero who had given him the magic book.

"You--" Augustus started to step towards her, but the gun-toting woman sharply dug the barrel under his shoulder blade. "That spell did something to my brother, he's--"

"But you did successfully cast the spell, no?" She moved closer and smiled at him, a cold, almost predatory smile. "Your brother's up and about, healthy and whole. Most impressive."

"But he's changed," Augustus said. "You've got to tell me how to fix this, and-- what's with the gun? Just who are you?"

"You may call me Ligeia. And the gun La Hibou has at your back is just to make sure you don't raise any undue fuss and attract any capes that might be lurking about. Oh my," she laughed, seeing the dawning comprehension on his face, "you poor simple fool. Didn't have one single nagging suspicion, did you? Give you a magic book out of the goodness of my heart. Sorry to step on your rose-colored glasses, my friend, but I'm only here to collect what's mine."

Augustus felt all the blood drain from his face. Aury's transformation, he thought. I made him a monster, and now they want him for god-knows-what! "If you touch my brother, I'll--"

"Your brother?" Ligeia barked out another laugh. "Please. Your brother was only the test. And you passed with flying colors. Congratulations... you work for me now, sorcerer."

"No," he spat. "I'm never touching that book again, not for anything. Not after what I did to my own brother. So you can just find someone else."

She grabbed him by the collar and sneered, nose-to-nose with him. "Do you know how long it took me to find someone who was able to read that book, let alone use it? Do you have any idea how rare a commodity you are? You are coming with me."

"Go to hell, bitch."

She let go of him, her face a mask of mock surprise and hurt. "What a mouth on you!" She gave a curt nod to the woman with the gun, who gave the back of his knees a sharp kick, forcing him down to kneel.

"Let's fix that," Ligeia said, and extended a hand towards his face. She clenched her hand into a fist, and--

Augustus's throat clenched, and he was momentarily blinded by a burst of red light that erupted around his head. It felt as if something were wrenching out his windpipe and throttling him at the same time. There was a strange metallic rattle, and he felt something cold twist and wind its way around his neck, and tighten with a final clank!

Coughing and wheezing, he fell forward on his hands. He reached up to feel the strange heaviness on his neck.

Chains.

--------------------------------------------

"Maybe he's on his way here..." Aurelius tried to think if he'd told Augustus where he'd been going. He wasn't picking up the phone.

"What sort of training has your brother had in magic?" Azuria asked, flipping slowly through the book.

"None," Aurelius replied, shrugging. "He didn't even know he had the ability until that cape told him he had some latent talent."

"I'd hardly call this latent," the MAGI official said, gesturing up and down at him. "but what I find significant is that he was able to use this book. You see, the Daggerwheel Order was an obscure cabal of sorcerers known for being exceptionally paranoid and secretive. They eventually faded out, but not before making sure that their magic and knowledge would die with them-- they enchanted their texts so that no one would ever be able to even read them. It worked, but as your brother has so aptly demonstrated, there are some cracks. Every once in a while someone will be able to read one, but even then you have to have some magical aptitude to use it."

"Can you read it?" LittleBig asked.

"Only just," Azuria replied, scrutinizing a page carefully. "I've had training to see past glamours, but this one's a doozy. But... I think I've found the spell that was used on you, Mr. Cae."

"Does it say how to reverse it?" he asked eagerly, but she held up a please-shush-now finger without looking from the book.

"It's not a spell to call a guardian beast," she said after a moment, "but to create one. 'The creature is able to restore the most grievous of injury and ill, and is possessed of great will to protect and defend'. Or near as I can make out."

"There's your healing factor," LittleBig cheerily piped up, but Aurelius barely heard her.

"Create? A beast? Is that what I am, some kind of beast?" How like Augustus, to read the first few lines and skip to the juicy parts. It was how he approached any book, why not a book of sorcery? Details, details! "I'm going to kill him!" He dialed the phone again.

LittleBig tugged on his wrist. "Before we resort to fratricide, maybe she can find a counterspell."

"Well, without knowing exactly how your brother cast the original spell it'd be a bad idea for anyone but him to try undoing it," Azuria said. "No luck on the phone?"

"Nothing." Aurelius had a small, formless bad feeling, but chalked it up to having left an argument hanging. "I'd better just go back and get him."

"I'll keep the book here, if you don't mind," Azuria told him. "We have special facilities for the... inexperienced in magic that might be safer to do this in."

Aurelius nodded. "I'll bring him in. Kicking and screaming, and I don't know which one of us."

"Will you be okay for the walk back?" LittleBig asked him, pausing in the doorway. "I promised my family I'd be there for lunch today."

"As long as I don't wander into any more alleys," he replied with a small smile, unconsciously rubbing his claws together.

------------------------------------------

"Get up."

Augustus looked up, the chains clinking with the movement. He opened his mouth to say What did you do?! but no sound came out. He couldn't even make his mouth form the words.

"I said get up," Ligeia snapped again. "You're mute, not deaf."

The woman with the gun-- La Hibou, she had been called-- grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. Augustus frantically pried his fingers into the chains, trying to make some noise, scream, swear, even whisper, to no avail.

"Stop it," La Hibou murmured in his ear, in a rich Haitian accent. "You will only choke yourself."

"Unless it's an incantation, you won't utter a single sound." Ligeia strutted a few steps away, looking boredly around. "Should have been more respectful, shouldn't we? Now get the book. We're leaving."

Had his voice not been so arrested, he would have, like an idiot, immediately blurted out that his brother had the book. For a very short moment he panicked, trying to think how to convey this, but it hit him: Without the book I'm useless to her. And she shut me up so I can't even tell her where it is.

He started laughing, a stuttering hiss of air. Ligeia narrowed her eyes at him.

"What's so funny? Where's the book?"

Augustus smirked nastily, still laughing, semi-hysterically. Ligeia responded with a sharp slap across his face.

"Where is the book?!"

He put a hand on his stinging cheek and pointed insolently at the trash can in the kitchen, only a few feet away. Ligeia turned and looked, and actually flipped the lid up, only to be greeted with the stench of food waste that was a few days past pickup. She made a delicate gagging noise and slammed the lid back down.

"Find it!" she screeched at the muscular man. "Hibou, watch him." And she stalked off into one of the bedrooms as the man started pawing through Aurelius's bookshelves, dumping the books row by row to the floor.

La Hibou steered him to sit on the couch and stood in front of him. She was a tall dark-skinned woman dressed in a tight black keyhole top and tight pants tucked into knee-high combat boots. She kept trained on him both a dispassionate gaze and a pistol of some sort, fitted with (and Augustus rather darkly thought it was appropriate) a silencer.

As the villains ransacked the apartment, he could only hope Aurelius didn't return, either with or without the book.

------------------------------------------

Aurelius had never been a bold man by nature, preferring to be inconspicuous and out of the way. This transformation made him anything but. On the walk home he felt fortunate that this was Paragon City, a place that gave whole worlds of new meaning to the term 'differently abled'-- if this had happened in any other town, he'd be getting a lot more than slightly curious looks. More like mobs with proverbial torches and pitchforks. His discomfort at this small amount of attention was offset by his anger, down to a simmer by the time he made the turn to his street.

He'd haul Augustus back to MAGI, get him to fix this under strict supervision, and then they could go on with the business of living. Unless reversing the spell meant reverting back to a body eaten away by cancer... life as a monster or death as a man?

He could just hear Augustus's take on that: "Only you, Aury, could turn one personal decision into a philosophical quagmire."

Well, it was his quagmire, and he would rather be human. His tail (liberated from the pant leg during a discreet trip to the mens room at City Hall) twitched with annoyance. The tufted appendage twitched with just about anything, he'd discovered, only staying still with sheer force of will; he just let it swing and lash for now, opting to concentrate instead on not tripping over his own feet.

One block away from the apartment building, it happened again.

A woman's frightened cry drew his attention directly ahead, where thirty feet away a pair of hoodlums had accosted a lady, one playing tug-of-purse with her while the other solicitously asked her to think of it as charity.

Aurelius felt his hands open and claws lengthen, and then snap. His body sprang unbidden at the purse-snatcher, long, powerful legs propelling him down the sidewalk at a fearsome speed. He was upon them in an instant, claws slashing down directly at the snatcher's head. The thug turned, just enough so that Aurelius's open palm caught him square in the face, instead of the deadly claws. Without missing a beat, he wrapped his hand around the mugger's head and swept him backwards, down hard to the pavement.

"Aw, geez, come on!" the other thug whined as Aurelius turned a glare and a growl in his direction. He spun and made a run for it, and Aurelius could feel his body coiling to give chase. He would have if the woman hadn't touched his arm.

"Thank you so much," she gushed. Aurelius shook his head, looked down the see the groaning would-be mugger flat on his back underneath him.

"Thank you, I don't know what I would've done," the woman was saying, tearfully clutching her purse. "My son needs this medicine I just got..."

Aurelius backed away, mentally reeling. What is going on here? Why am I doing this? Is it when--

The woman in danger. The businessman at gunpoint. '... and is possessed of great will to protect and defend...'

"I've got to get out of here," he said aloud, shaken to his core.

------------------------------------------

La Hibou put a hand to her ear, touching some sort of earpiece. "Ligeia," she called over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off Augustus. "Kregan says there's a cape outside headed this way."

Ligeia stormed back into the living room, flipping her hood back up. "Feo! We're leaving now."

"But seƱora, the book?" the short muscular man looked up from emptying out the kitchen cabinets.

"We'll have to get it later," Ligeia snapped, pinning Augustus with a narrow look. "Wherever he squirreled it away."

La Hibou urged Augustus to his feet and had him crawl out onto the fire escape after Ligeia. He tried to look around for the incoming cape, but La Hibou gave him a smart tap on the back of his head with the barrel of her silencer.

------------------------------------------

Aurelius looked up as he approached his building and stopped short.

There was something on the roof. A large, dark metallic lump. A helicopter? No rotors. He frowned, approaching the front. As he crossed in front of the alley between his building and the neighboring building, movement on the fire escape caught his eye.

------------------------------------------

"You should have let me stay and cloak the craft," La Hibou said as they climbed the steps to the top level.

"And let Kregan give our new recruit a concussion." Ligeia paused. "The cape! Move it!"

Augustus grabbed the railing and leaned out. A tall, pale figure stood out on the street, looking right at them-- with a face Augustus would know no matter how much the body around it changed. He tried to yell, to warn his brother, but nothing came out. La Hibou grabbed his arm and yanked him around, flashing her gun meaningfully, and thus propelled him to the roof.

Their vehicle was a squat vtol that looked in dire need of a new paint job. A tattooed man leaning against the hull saw them approach tossed aside a lit cigarette and opened a hatch.

"This the fresh meat?" he asked, eyeing Augustus the way a snake might a rabbit.

"Get us airborne, Kregan." Ligeia clearly was in no mood to banter. La Hibou pushed Augustus into the craft, roughly depositing him into a threadbare seat next to Feo. Kregan got into the cockpit and started the engines.

"Hibou, cloak us!" Ligeia barked, as the white-haired figure appeared at the edge of the roof.

Augustus couldn't even wonder how Aurelius had gotten up there so fast before La Hibou aimed her pistol at the swiftly approaching man. He lunged, grabbing her arm just as she squeezed a shot off. He saw Aurelius twist out of harm's way, barely missing a beat. The craft started to rise, and La Hibou withdrew her gun, adopting an expression of intense concentration. There was a faint electric hum that Augustus felt rather than heard, and outside Aurelius paused, squinting as if he couldn't see the big ugly vtol right in front of him.

She said cloak, Augustus thought. She's got some kind of stealth field. Good, maybe Aury will give up. They need me, but they'd have no qualms about killing--

A clawed hand latched onto the lip of the open hatch. Snarling, the thing that was his brother pulled himself up into the opening as the vtol angled up and away, moving still higher.

Augustus felt his jaw drop. Aurelius's normally gentle face was twisted into a expression of pure rage, his teeth-- fangs-- bared, a bestial growl audible above the whine of the engines. His claws left shallow silver furrows in the metal.

Feo, closest to the hatch, balled up a fist and rammed it into Aurelius's chest. The impact sent him hurtling, falling, and Augustus couldn't even scream, because at the height they were at, the impact would certainly be fatal.

Feo closed the hatch, the sound like a resounding final clap of thunder in his stunned ears.