Who'll travel the bramble road?
For something waits there, be it Robin or no.
I'll brave the thorns, said the toad.
For my kin has dwelt there long below.

—

The demolition man held out a hand to Ash-and-Cinder. The creature leapt forward. Its black hand met the human hand. Martha put her hands to her mouth, horrified and despairing. She didn't know what devastation this union might bring, but she was certain it would be horrible.

Ash-and-Cinder's hand bent and altered when it touched human flesh. The black dust it was made of turned into a ribbon, circling and binding and wrapping higher and higher over Bud Dean's arm. Ash-and-Cinder's body became an amorphous thing, pouring more and more of itself into the black ribbon. It passed over Dean's neck, over his chest and legs and feet, like the stripes of a black tiger. Smoke and flashes of fire passed through it. Red and yellow light gleamed through the black ribbon as if they showed gaps in the human flesh as well. He coughed and cried out as if he were in pain. Ash-and-Cinder settled around him like a snake. The black marks dissolved under his clothing. He lifted his chin, and a black mark around his neck looked like burnt charcoal, patterned in tiny squares. Another length of black marred his cheek like a burn. Dean opened his mouth, and fire seemed to burn inside there.

They were one. Dean stroked his throat, as if trying to tame the black mark there and force it back underneath skin. He raised his hand, and fire burst from the tips of his fingertips. Ash-and-Cinder rejoiced within him, and Dean felt his power like he had never known it before. Bound with a creature that could not die because it did not live, he would exist as long as he wanted to bring fire to the world. The human and the creature laughed together in gleeful satisfaction, and sparks shot from between their teeth.

Then they looked at Martha with eyes of burnished coal. Their harsh voice came out of a mouth black on the inside. It buzzed like a fire set between hot granite rocks.

"Run home, little girl," they said, and raised a fireball in her direction. They launched it into the air.

Martha ran.

—

Heather tossed the old nursery rhyme book at the wall. The whoosh-thump of it was pleasing. Apparently Great-Grandmother Chandler made a hobby of collecting the world's most sickening nursery rhymes, had them vanity published in gold-leaf editions, and donated a whole bunch of them to Sherwood schools.

Probably in between yelling at the servants who'd killed her.

Heather had read enough to get the point anyway: the rhyme that Veronica claimed she heard the ghost sing was different in Sherwood to the rest of the world. Maybe Veronica lied about what she heard, just to bore me senseless with kid stuff, Heather thought. The hamster let out a squeak in its cage, the closest thing the universe was giving her for entertainment now.

Annoyingly, J.D. hadn't bothered to look up from his book. He and Heather Duke thought they were doing research, and liked to brag about it. Grandma Chandler's books were boring, old, stank of rotten moth corpses, made no sense, and contradicted each other on the rare occasions they were comprehensible.

At least Heather didn't have to look after J.D. any more. He preferred to do everything himself, even if she could tell he was still badly hurt. Feed his pet, stumble to the bathroom, even walk out to the garden to smoke a cigarette and let the hamster get time on the grass. He had the common sense to realise Grandma Chandler would absolutely never tolerate smoking inside her mansion. He wore his old clothes, with the burnt ragged holes in them that matched the bandages underneath. Heather had watched him, seen his ability pinpoint Heather Duke's and Veronica's moods to the second, noticed that he was surprisingly good at playing head games for someone who'd obviously never been popular in his life.

It was an interesting thing.

"I'm bored," Heather announced. She waved a hand in front of J.D.'s book - something about the possibilities of an afterlife - and lowered it out of his hands, her fingers running across his knuckles. "Have you found anything good?"

"Depends." He gave her the usual hostile glare and recited something. "How many miles is it to Babylon? As I fell asleep, I walked through the woods. I journeyed through brambles that matched my dreams. I had not seen them in life, yet knew them intimately; I knew, too, the wizened, gnarled face that stared from them."

"Ugh," Heather said, making a face. She could imagine the thorn lady looking at you through the brambles; it might have been a still from some kids' TV series or movie. "Like purgatory then?"

J.D. looked at her as if she'd actually made a meaningful point, but he lifted up the book anyway and his eyes flicked back to the words.

Heather went back to pacing and thinking. She knew J.D. was eavesdropping on her frustration. She could ask Grandma Chandler to teach her the trick to rein her emotions in and be unreadable, but that wasn't Heather's style. Go all out and be a raging inferno of sexy, scary destruction rather than some beige nothingness.

So Heather focused on the things that made her mad - VeronicaHeatherDukeSpiteGhostMarthaDavidTHISFUCKINGGUY - and shaped it into a flaming spear.

She knew she'd succeeded when J.D. was forced to look up at her.

"I can tell when you're doing that on purpose," he said.

"You're welcome," Heather said. "What you've got is more like a vulnerability than a power, isn't it? So I'm helping you get used to it."

"What you're doing is more like trying to make yourself stupider than you really are. The trouble with that is it's so often successful," J.D. drawled. "In case you're too badly-read to catch that reference, I'm saying you're not a dumb blonde."

"As is, you couldn't handle a shopping mall," Heather pointed out. "You have a hard time with Grandma's cleaners downstairs - and a much harder time with me. What am I feeling now?" she threw out. She wasn't entirely sure herself.

"Bored. Curious," he said. "Things have always come too easily to you, and so you don't value them. But when people actually try to resist you, you hate that as well. I don't envy you, having to live with yourself."

He was wrong that Heather didn't value the things that came easily to her. She'd thought until recently she had three best friends; now she'd found out she only had one.

"I live with myself just fine," Heather said, sitting next to him on the bed. She felt a thorny prickle of anger run through her; she hated that he'd know about that. She saw J.D.'s expression change to a knowing look. I was worshipped at Westerburg, I have a power to make people worship me, and - maybe not everything about my life is or was perfect, but I'll never admit it. "You're just angry at the world. Angry at people like me who rule it. Nowadays you can't even fight back - when you hurt someone you feel it too," she sniped back. Distract him, demean him, at any cost. "Toothless and helpless, playing impotent mind games because it's all you're left with.

"We should fuck," she added.

That threw him off as much as she'd hoped. The book jerked in his hands but he picked it back up. "This seems a good time to bring out the word no. And the phrase funny joke, right?" he snarled.

She'd meant it as something like a joke - throwing out ammunition from her arsenal to see what stuck, what wounded. But maybe it wasn't entirely a joke. She'd made the same invitation rolling around in broken glass with him, revelling in feeling something. And she was definitely thinking of more possibilities now.

"Veronica broke up with you; you're single." Heather reminded him of another painful fact. "I actually think it could be fun. For me, I mean. Remember that power you have?" she pointed out. She was surprised J.D. hadn't already thought of the implications - high school boys were gross. "You feel what I feel, you'll know exactly what works and doesn't. That's more than most guys get. I've had sex dozens of times - okay, not dozens, but more than you - and it's never as fun as I think it could be."

He did find her difficult to resist, she thought. "The blind seer Tiresias spent seven years as a man and seven years as a woman. He said women found it nine times more pleasurable," J.D. said.

"You can't use shit that never happened to prove a point. Besides, if you were that good, Veronica wouldn't have dumped you." Maybe that would tempt him to counter that point with action.

J.D. wrinkled his forehead like he was thinking, trying to get out of this by analysing it like some dusty old book or stupid school assignment. Heather moved closer to him, letting her physical closeness do the arguing. "Seems you haven't liked men," he said. "I suggest a reading course in Brownmiller, de Beauvoir, and Sappho. Granted, everything I know about tribadism comes from Penthouse letters - Dear Penthouse, I am a 36-24-35 brunette co-ed and my roommate is a gorgeous blonde who's getting a little too friendly - Really, if you like women, that's fine with me, I just feel sorry for the women." He let himself grin, a sensitive lopsided mouth, challenging her.

"I see men, I think they're hot, they disappoint me," Heather corrected. "Peter Dawson said he wanted to save his virginity for marriage, can you believe that in this century? Who does he think he is, Queen Effing Victoria? Kurt had muscles but zero personal hygiene and about the same IQ score, David's pretty, but - ugh, I'm not talking about him. You've got something that makes you a different kind of man." She placed her hand down next to his face, not touching him, reminding him that she could do so.

"I'm - flattered is far from the right word - and this is a bad idea."

"Don't be flattered. Grandma made me look after you, I've already seen everything there is to see and it's not that impressive. Even the way you try to resist me isn't impressive. Heather Duke held out for years against me, and you're having trouble with days. You want a blowjob first?"

"No."

Heather shrugged. "I could just tell you to do it."

Then J.D. grabbed her, gripping both her arms tight and pulling her on top of him. Heather could tell that it hurt him. Her elbow was flush against the bandaged burn. It pleased her that he'd pain himself so much for her, giving her bruises while sacrificing himself. She could have freed herself easily, but she liked the tightening grip on the flesh of her upper arms, liked being pinioned so close and looking up at that intense glare. If he found her repulsive, it was the sort of repulsive that he absolutely couldn't look away from. She got a little more comfortable on the bed, on top of him.

"It's good to know the difference between you and Kurt and Ram is that you didn't realize that was a possibility until now," J.D. said, face taut and voice strained.

"And my boyfriend David. He's an ass too," Heather reminded him, looking up into his face, close to his chin. "You want to kill him for me? You think that would be hot?" She grinned. "Yeah. You think people like Kurt and David and me should die. You're a pretentious creep, a seventeen-year-old kid who misses his mommy. You don't have any right to decide who lives and who dies, jackass - "

He should've kissed her to shut her up. It would have been messy, hot, more like a battle than like cherry candy stuck on a Valentine's day card, sharp tearing teeth everywhere, biting and seizing dominance, anger sizzling into arousal and understanding, knowing, finally finding out exactly what the hell was going on with the other person. She'd seen some red flush in his cheeks, could feel that he wasn't completely immune to her. Men were easy, straightforward, grab them by the dick and it was plain sailing off to the wild west seas of You-Do-Whatever-I-Want -

Instead, he shoved her off the bed. Heather hit the ground. "You really didn't get the no-hitting-girls memo, did you?" she demanded. "Your mom would be so proud."

She turned her back on him. He could have attacked her from behind; he didn't. "It's all right," Heather said sweetly. "You say you want to go save Heather McNamara from the spite ghost, but really you'll try and use the journey to see your mom. You'd betray me for Martha at the first opportunity. Grandma wouldn't send you if she knew the truth, but I want you there. I told you I'd help you."

The noise had brought Grandma Chandler and her cane to the door. She opened it and raised a cool eyebrow. "Heather, are you trying to corrupt this nice boy?" she said, with heavy sarcasm. J.D. snickered in half pain and half mirth, clutching his chest over the bandages.

"It seems you're feeling better," Grandma Chandler said. "Heather, you'll find a lunch tray in the kitchen; you'll need to be well-fed and rested. The time has come to rescue your friend."

—

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." - C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew.