In Which Evie Checks Out

The next two hours passed in something of a blur. I wasn't interested in conversation, preferring to brood in silence as I hashed the conversation over and over in my mind until both it and my ego resembled mashed potatoes. I was fucked up beyond repair and it looked like I'd have to trust that a scheming businessman like Dali could save me. Shit. At this point, did I even want to bother?

Whenever Adrian's presence became too much to bear, I popped another charm on myself, layering the curses until they resembled a second aura, blanketing my mind and body in a nice, numb, mostly transparent fog. It was far easier to focus on potions this way, though I had so little interest in following the any conversation that eventually Adrian and Pierce ceased to ask me what was wrong. I barely heard them anyway. I brewed us all line-jumping curses, I brewed us damage-resistance and body-fixing curses, I brewed up doppelganger curses, and I brewed up things Ash didn't bother explaining and about which I couldn't dredge enough care from Give-a-fuck Bay to ask.

Al arrived at some point, nancing around like a big peacock, insulting me and smacking Pierce. I didn't care, apart from reminding him that I needed Pierce at full capacity. Al said something about Pierce not being mine yet, and Pierce protested that he could take care of himself, but at that point I'd already lost interest. I could feel Al's eyes on me, but it didn't matter. The eyes of the entire Ever After were probably on our little dysfunctional kitchen right now, but it wouldn't make a difference to my stirring, and that was all that required my attention at the moment.

I felt like everything was out of my hands now. I knew nothing about how the Coven was set up, or how the headquarters were laid out, or what the demons would have to do to destroy it. I was just along for the ride, trapped on this freight train headed for the busted bridge, and there was nothing I could do except bail out or hold on. But bailing out wasn't an option, either. So here I was, stirring curses and trying not to fall apart like the rest of my life, waiting for the inevitable fiery doom just down the line.

Ash tried to reach me at some point, and I answered his questions about whatever it was as best I could. I fought him when he tried to strip all the curses off me, though, which proved I did have some spark left. He was still annoyed, which finally penetrated my fog of numbness, and when he pushed again I snapped at him, "Look. You want me to consider your brilliant idea. I'm considering it. I'm not going to fall apart now. Just leave me the hell alone."

A fit of sneezing, however, was harder to ignore. I finally realized it was someone calling me. I couldn't imagine who it might be, but on the off chance that it might be Newt or Rachel, I ambled over to Ash's mirror. I had words for Newt… somewhere in there, anyway. Right nowt I wasn't certain I gave enough of a damn to even be impolite to her. I also had words for Rachel, but they were mostly along the lines of how breaking and entering into the Coven was her kind of gig, not mine, and would she mind taking over so I could go sulk for a few years?

As it turned out, it was neither. The cold, blue steel pillar of Dali's mind met mine on the other end with a dash of cold, logical clarity, emphasizing just how vastly discombobulated and scattered my thoughts were, and I winced. I honestly couldn't imagine anyone else I wanted to speak to less right now. Yvette Sinclaire. I will bring Brooke over so that we may discuss our preparations in approximately twenty minutes.

"Sure," I replied, unenthusiastically. "Let's all hang out. Should be fun. Gang's all here."

Yvette, what is the matter with your mind?

I tried, but I couldn't pull it together even to lie to him. "I'm reconsidering your proposal," I said. "I'm just a little depressed about the state of my life at the moment. Sure it'll pass soon and then I'll be my normal belligerent self."

Now I could feel the eyes of just about everyone in the room burning into my back, and realized that I'd been speaking aloud. Oh, just peachy. Even worse, I could sense Dali's total lack of surprise and caught a hint of his anticipation. So he'd known all along that Newt was leaning on Ash over this. Brilliant. Ugh. I'm sure he got a good whiff of my distaste before I took my hand off the mirror. It probably didn't matter to him that much in the long run, that I was unhappy about the prospect of him as a mate. I'd been clear as crystal in his office about my reluctance, after all. Perhaps my disgust was the source of his anticipation. I tried not to think along those lines any further as I returned to stirring.

Some time later, I realized that it was Al standing by my hip, and that he'd probably been looming for a few minutes waiting to catch my attention. "Proposal…?" Al asked, and I shrugged.

"None of your business." Nosy son of a bitch. Well, you're not getting any more entertainment from my predicament if I can help it. "Go away," I added, settling back into my funk. "This part's tricky." And it was — the next sequence would require all the attention I had to spare. I saw Al linger a moment more before walking away, then banished him from my mind as I performed the ritual of adding pinches of powder between precise stirs, controlled breaths, and whispered words. When the concoction finally turned a milky green, I sat back and wiped my brow, removing it from the heat. I barely felt the sting of the knife as I invoked the curse, but I was startled when I saw water spattering my fingers. I sniffed and realized that tears were running down my face again, unnoticed until now. Sighing with annoyance, I dashed them from my cheeks, casting another calmness charm over the slew of curses. It had pretty much no effect on my mood, at this point, but at least the flow of tears ceased. I spent a moment listening to the indistinguishable, subdued murmuring of the men around me, finding my center once more.

Endure, Evie. You've survived so much; you will survive this.

At what cost, though? At what point should I throw up my hands and decide the price was too high? Would I really turn my mind over to Dali to survive? It would be giving him my soul, and whereas I'd done so with Ash, before, I knew that Dali wouldn't give it back. Not without some sort of leverage.

Leverage. Perhaps that's what I should be looking for, now. Some kind of leverage, guarantee that he'd let me go after an appointed time. Some kind of protection against his access to areas of my mind where he could manipulate me. Blackmail, maybe. Perhaps I should speak to Newt about it — she'd apparently appointed herself guardian of my fucked-up head. Ash claimed she liked me. Maybe she could help. Maybe she'd help me if I saved Hope for her.

I just had to figure out how.

I'd been close to some kind of insight a few hours ago, before Ash had interrupted. Something about Hope operating from a place of pain and confusion, rather like the one I was in right now. Except Hope wasn't wearing the bracelets to keep herself from accessing the lines directly, and Hope hadn't had an anchor keeping her soul bound to her earthly flesh. She'd been making some powerful magic, that much was certain. In the end, she'd self-destructed like I'd nearly done, when Ash had dived into the lines and pulled me back to myself.

I shivered, recalling the sensation of my mind reaching out over the lines, feeling myself dissolving and dissipating and unable to stop it. Ash had gathered all the pieces of my soul and stitched them back together. Why hadn't Newt been able to do the same for Hope? She'd tried, but she'd missed something, spent hours searching. Why hadn't she found it?

What had I been trying to do? I'd been directionless, wanting only to gather as much power as I could. I hadn't even been sure why — some vague notion of ending Ash by drawing the lines through him, maybe? But Hope wouldn't have wanted vengeance. Not yet. Hope would have been wanting to hide from the pain, wanting to push it all away. She wouldn't have been gathering the power for destruction, herself or others'. But what had she been casting?

Perhaps her ley line might hold a clue. Not that I was any expert in ley lines, but—

The sound of flesh meeting flesh broke my chain of thoughts, and I looked up, startled. Al had just given Ash a good smack upside the head.

"Do I need to separate you two?" I asked, and Adrian snickered behind me. Ash gave me a surly look, and Al favored me with a condescending sneer. At least, that's what it looked like — the glasses made it difficult to gauge his expression. "You got it out of your system? Dali'll be here shortly." I stood up as my stomach clenched at the thought of seeing that sneer on Dali's mug. Ugh. I didn't think I could handle it, and anyway, that last thought train had given me a great excuse to get out of this stifling atmosphere for ten minutes. They wouldn't need me for planning, anyway. "Either of you boys want to take a short trip with me? I want to take a look at Hope's line before we leave to do this Coven thing."

Ash opened his mouth, but Al was at my side in a moment, gallantly taking my arm. "Why, I would love to, Yvette," he said smoothly, giving Ash a glare that clearly indicated that he was not coming along. "We have so much to discuss, you and I."

"No, we don't," I replied. "I just want to look at the damned line."

"As you like," Al replied, giving Ash another stay put! glare when the other demon moved to follow. "Don't trouble yourself, Kavi. I'll have her back here in a jiffy."

Kavi?

We dissolved into the iciness of a line, Al's mind encircling mine before I could throw up a shield myself. Before I could stop him, he'd stripped away the curses that hid my battered psyche, tossing them aside like leaves.

Hey!

Unconscionable, he replied, and I felt his irritation. Making yourself so slow and vulnerable. All while expecting a visit from Dali, no less! He'd have you under his heel in thirty seconds, and then where would you be? How you survived this long is beyond me, Yvette.

Sheer force of will, I replied. Without my curses the anger, disappointment, and heartache had returned with a vengeance. All laid out for Al to see, how nice. You're such a bastard, Al. Are we fucking there yet?

I heard him chuckle as we reformed on the barren surface of the Ever After, in the ruins of UCLA. The university buildings were mostly rubble around us, the palm trees aflame without being consumed. Above us, the sky was iron-grey with thick, evil-looking clouds that hung so low I felt like they might fall on us and drown us in a literal shitstorm. I opened my mouth to ask why the hell we weren't on the reality side of things, then remembered that of course it was the middle of the day. I could cross, but Al couldn't.

"My mother's ashes," Al said, sounding shocked.

I followed his gaze to the wreckage of the science building, and the ley line that lay within, pulsing and shimmering like some kind of sci-fi event horizon. I hadn't gotten a good look at the thing when I'd been here with Adrian, but now it had my full attention. It wasn't a ley line at all, at least, not as I thought of them. Ley lines went from somewhere to somewhere. This was… my mind shied away from it, because it hurt, somehow, to look at it. Worse, it was pulling at us. It was a faint sensation, but I felt the gentle tug on my soul and dreaded the thought of approaching any closer for fear it might suck my aura right off of me. It lurked there, beckoning. The… resonance?… pitch…? Everything about it was distorted and very, very wrong.

"Yeah," I agreed. "What the hell…? Is this the first time you've seen it?"

He nodded, tilting his head curiously. "Treble!" he shouted, and I jumped two feet back when a pony-sized grey gargoyle appeared beside him without warning. I gaped, because while I'd seen pictures, I'd never seen an actual, living gargoyle up close like this. Her skin was grey, her tail had a tuft, and her ears were flat to her head as she drew up her lips to reveal fangs at least six inches long. Her grimace wasn't directed at me, though, but at the rift in the building before us.

"Discord and cacophony, what do you want of me here?" she rasped, flinching as if in pain.

"Opinion," Al replied shortly, pointing to the line.

"Fucked up," she replied. "None of us can stand it. The screeching harmonics, the — please. It's too loud. Let me leave."

Al reached out to touch her, red eyes widening as he did so. Even as she seemed to relax a fraction, he hunched up in pain. He held the pose for a moment, then released her. "Go," he said, voice a harsh whisper, then held up a hand. "No, wait. Yvette. Have you brushed with a gargoyle before?"

"Have I what?"

"Treble," he said, and Treble, still trembling visibly, reached out a clawed hand and grasped my arm.

My world went white, then exploded. All I could hear was screeching, keening discord, and distant screaming. A kaleidoscope of shifting, unstable colors and chaotic patterns, frequencies beyond my hearing combining with resonances that grated on my raw nerves filling and overwhelming my senses.

When I could see again, I found myself lying in the red dust, holding my head and whimpering. Treble was gone, and Al was looking at me with confusion writ clear on his features. "Hmm," he said.

I wanted to throw up, but settled for throwing a rock at him. "That's all you have to say? Hmm?"

Al was still eying me in a faintly clinical fashion. "You've never touched a gargoyle before, have you? Interesting."

My head was starting to pound, and all my senses were still tingling painfully, like I'd just been jolted with a live wire and little sparks were crackling about here and there between my neurons. "Al…" I growled, furious at him. "Pretend for a minute that I'm an ignorant doofus who wasn't raised properly and explain what the hell just happened?"

Al smirked. "We designed our gargoyles to live and breathe the lines for us, so we could hear their songs. To touch one is to experience all of the local lines and their unique resonance — which is why it takes a gargoyle to travel them. You're apparently quite sensitive to ley lines already. Fascinating."

Fascinating, my ass. My mind was starting to make sense of the sensations, now, as I realized there was a three-dimensional network-like afterimage burned into my thoughts. All the lines. Not just the local lines, ALL of them, everywhere, all burnt through reality, winding through the Ever After, some tied to demons and sharing their auras, many older than the Ice Age humming with the colors of the universe, a huge, incomprehensibly complicated knotwork of energy. Now I was certain I was going to throw up, and I tried to banish the sensations from my brain. "Oh, god," I moaned. "It's too much."

Al gave me time to recover, and I focused on simply breathing, letting the afterimage fade from my psyche. "We'll have to find you a gargoyle," he said, though he sounded far from certain that this was a good idea. "You'll need one, eventually."

We…? Did Al still have some crazy-ass illusion that he'd be teaching me a damned thing? Yeah, right. Not in this lifetime. "You're kidding, right? If I ever touch one again, I'll explode. That was horrible!"

"It's unnerving, but once you're bound, there's no need for touch. In your case, however, I would suggest you have your anchor present prior to the binding."

"Bound?" You've got to be kidding me. "This is another one of these fucking demon binding-for-life things? Forget it! I've had more than enough of magical demon binding-for-life shit. And the last thing some poor gargoyle needs is to be magically bound to me." I sat up, brushing clingy, malodorous dust from my hair and clothing.

Al didn't reply, gaze once more fixed upon the rift before us for a long moment. "What else do you notice about it, Yvette?" he asked, in a voice that indicated he had thoughts but didn't want to bias me. The professorial tone of the question irked me, but I gamely looked again anyway. I managed three whole seconds of observation before I had to turn off my second sight once more, wincing.

"It's…" I tried to describe it, which was difficult since I had such a difficult time even looking at it. "It doesn't go anywhere. No, that's not right. It… goes nowhere?" I shook my head, looking for an analogy for what I'd seen. "It's a…loop. A Möbius strip," ?" I said, reaching back into my disused physics background. "Or a Klein bottle. Something… twisted and turned back on itself?"

Al nodded. "It's not a ley line from reality to reality, or even reality to Ever After. It's a rift that contains itself."

"Like a black hole or something?" No, that wasn't right. I just didn't have words for what my mind was seeing, beyond what my eyes could stand to witness.

"Yes, event horizon and all." Al's smile turned wicked. "Care to take a look peek inside, love?"

"Not in this lifetime," I replied, finding a mote of pleasure in the thought that oblivion called, just over there, but I was still fighting it. Good. I wasn't done yet.

"What else? Look to reality this time, Evie. What do you see?"

I swallowed back rising bile, turning my attention to the surroundings, and reluctantly raised my second sight again, trying not to see the singularity crouching within the rubble. UCLA in Hell was not a pretty sight, either. I looked into reality, finding the ruined, collapsed lab building, then compared it to what I saw in the Ever After. I had to go back and forth a few times before I could explain it. "The buildings… the damage doesn't match. It's not right, somehow. I can't explain how."

Al pursed his lips, lifting his head as if catching a scent in the air. "The Ever After is a damaged reflection of reality," he said, again with that professorial tone that was both familiar and totally irritating. "But the damage is quite specific in its patterns." He pointed to the building, specifically at the middle portion where, in reality, the building had caved in around a missing sphere. "What you see here is the damage that would occur to this building, were it, in fact, intact in reality."

And that was exactly it. I could totally see it now. In the Ever After, the rubble was equally distributed, as if the internal structure all throughout had become riddled with age or disease. There was no material missing, for lack of a better description. "So Hope made a ley line that goes nowhere, and only damaged the building in reality? What does it mean?"

Al shrugged. "I've no idea. I've never seen anything like it before." His goat-slitted eyes traveled over the desolate landscape dispassionately, as if losing interest. "And we have little chance of healing the breach before it kills us, most likely— not unless we kill the little bitch first. But that solution only rarely works even with regular ley lines— and this monster may only grow hungrier if we try that solution." He looked up at the heavy, ominous clouds and grimaced. "So, Yvette? What were you hoping to learn from this little jaunt, love?"

"Something about why Hope's still dying," I said. "If I can save her…" " I let the rest of the thought go unsaid. Who was I to think I'd come up with the answer, if Dali and Newt and everyone else here, who knew so much more about lines and demon magic, didn't have a clue?

Al gave it a moment's thought. "Deduce what curse she was casting," Al he finally suggested. "Working backwards from the available evidence has led our best minds to a dead end. And there are no precedents for damage such as this."

"Yeah." I felt my slim hope fading back into numbness once more. My chances of discovering it within my designated week were pretty slim. After that…? Well, it probably wouldn't matter. Dali would have me. Or Hope might be dead, in which case Newt would let us all perish. "Anything else you can tell me?"

"Why, Yvette. How pleased I am that you asked." And with a smirk, Al took my arm and hurled us into the lines once more.