How many miles to Babylon?
Three-score miles and ten.
Can I get there by Robin's way?
Yes, but not back again.

—

They were breaking the speed limit as it was. It wasn't remotely safe. Veronica looked into her rear mirror for a glance at what she was doing. An ordinary looking man with grey hair drove the car behind them, but then she saw his eyes flash red from the unearthly creature inside him, saw the black charred markings on his neck.

That was when Veronica hit the brakes.

Screaming; shattering glass. Fire and blood on her left arm. Her cigarette dropped next to her foot. The steering wheel pressed into her and she couldn't move. The other car had gone some distance through Veronica's car, its front in her backseat. The metal was horribly twisted. There was a strong smell of petrol.

"Veronica, c'mon, please, c'mon." Duke's hands were on her shoulders, Duke's face bleeding in a set of red stripes. "Get up, we gotta get out of here, we - "

Duke dragged her out on the verge. Away from the car. Martha was near them, helping them. Then came the fire -

A brilliant, lambent fireball enveloped both vehicles. Veronica and Duke smelt and saw nothing but smoke. A black silhouette of a man walked out of the fire. Part inhuman, all but immortal, he was utterly unhurt, untouched by the crash or his own flames.

"Make him," Duke sobbed, "make him go back to the other place. Don't let him set us on fire - "

"He has to touch me," Martha said.

Ash-and-Cinder, or Bud Dean, or both, approached closer and closer. Veronica thought she saw a volcano-red smirk in the black of smoke and ash.

"Okay - " Duke gabbled. "Martha, you can do illusions. Do Hiroshima - remember how you cried at that video Mizz Morgan showed in seventh grade. Show him a bigger explosion than he'll ever get from Mr. Dean. Make him come to you - not us."

Good one, Veronica thought. Her legs were wobbly, but she stood next to Duke and Martha, her arm around Duke's shoulders. It was Duke who kept her upright. They'd stay together no matter what happened, go down together even if this was Custer's last stand.

Martha's body tensed as if she was doing something very difficult indeed. She closed her eyes and her face twisted inward. The shape of a man stopped still in his tracks as he saw something greater than any fire he had seen before.

A harsh, inhuman voice burst out of its lips. "That bitch is lying, can't you see it?"

And then: "No," thrummed an echo, the sound of ashes hissing in air. "This is what I want. This is what I need."

Martha enthralled Ash-and-Cinder, her arms spread wide and muscles knotted. She forced him to come to her with visions of the destruction of millions, of more black ash and devastation that even he could ever have imagined, memories of a bad videotape in a stuffy classroom that her imagination and empathy conjured and illused into so much more.

A black figure stepped forward, inch by inch, a figure shorter than a man with long, spindly limbs.

The mortal it had left behind screamed with an inhuman noise, as if most of its mouth were missing.

Ash-and-Cinder came closer, close enough to touch. Veronica and Duke could barely move, but Martha lured it to her. The black figure approached, reached out to touch what it thought it wanted -

And it vanished like the birds.

Martha opened her eyes. She squeezed first Duke's hand, then Veronica's. Veronica felt what she did, Martha reaching inside her to patch her up. They felt healed again. Veronica thought there ought to have been sirens around them, more screaming and summoning cops and ambulances and other drivers stopping to goggle in self-satisfied gawking, but it was as if Martha's powers kept them in a bubbled world of their own, invisible to others.

"Should I heal him as well?" Martha pointed to what was on the ground. "He has killed but he is suffering."

The thing on the ground was red, and bloody, and looked like about half a man. It was all that was left after Ash-and-Cinder departed its human host. Bereft, it crawled to the only human figures it could see, lifting a bloodied hand. Its voice howled as it pleaded for something, but none of them could tell what it was.

Duke picked up a length of metal that had rolled from the burning cars. She hissed, touching too strong a heat; she wrapped her hands in her sleeves and tried again. She held it out to Veronica.

"You should kill him," Duke said. "It'd be a mercy kill, and you'd get power. I was supposedly born in the wrong place to get power, but you were born on the same nexus point as Heather and your ex-boyfriend. Take the gift that's offered to you, Veronica. You could fight Heather if you had to, fight anything in your way. I'd do it if I were you."

Kill Bud Dean - after what he's done, after he chose to become a monster, Veronica thought. Claim a power that might lie in my blood. It could be strength or speed or flight or just about anything. It could even be total immunity to Heather's power. She rolled her sleeves over her hands like Duke had done, then took the length of metal. She half-raised it above the crawling half-man before them.

She let it drop again. "No," Veronica said. "I won't kill anyone. I've thought about killing people and thought some more. I'm not that sort of person."

Maybe killing Bud would have been the most merciful choice, she thought, watching him crawl. Martha, at least, looked like she approved of Veronica's words.

Duke scowled. "Even if this one doesn't work for you, there are legal ways to kill people. Join the army, be a cop, euthanasia doctor, executioner. You should take power if you can."

"But that's not my style," Veronica said.

Martha looked into the distance. "Heather is journeying to find the lost soul," she said. "We should travel to join her there."

"Excellent idea. Got any spare cars, make one out of ectoplasm?" Duke asked. "Heather's grandmother can probably help you, if we can get you there."

Martha reached out and seized both of their hands. "Let's run together," she said. "I think that will be faster."

Veronica pictured Miss Chandler's address. At first they ran through smoke, over grass; then the world seemed to fold around them. They ran through total darkness, and emerged in the garden.

—

J.D. toyed with the piece of pussywillow plant in his hand, a fragile piece of grey fluff over a black stem. Heather twisted the gold ring around her finger.

"It's only tokens and symbols added to ordinary tea," her grandmother said. "There's one-quarter of a sleeping pill; willow bark; and marjoram leaves. I left out the eye of newt and toe of frog."

"Just as long as you didn't overdo the hemlock," Heather muttered. She held her head up high. "Where are we going?"

"A place that is not a place, neither life nor death. Betwixt-and-Between," Grandma Chandler said. "You will find that it's a place you partly know already; it's shaped by desires and dreams of our waking world."

"Like a Jungian collective unconscious," J.D. said, pretentiously.

"I see you've studied well," Grandma Chandler said. "Something akin to that. What you see will be influenced by the tales you grew up with; shaped by what you expect to find. The geographies there constantly shift, and you'll be drawn to that which resembles what you already know."

"So I should expect more golems, fewer cupids?" J.D. said.

"Will this ring take me to Heather?" Heather asked. "How do I find her?"

"You may have to try asking," Grandma Chandler said. "You likely won't have the same power that you do here; you might have to use your natural charm. Now I think on it, I can see that could go terribly wrong. Just try to avoid bad language and remember your Ps and Qs, dear."

Heather thought about holding up her middle finger, but it seemed crass at such an event. "I'm ready," she said, and drank her tea in one long slug before she had the chance to think twice. Look at me, she thought to J.D., I'm a hero. I'm going to risk my life to save my friend. My only friend. My first friend.

"Are you chicken?" she teased him. He drunk too, then, as she watched.

Heather felt herself to be drowsy already. She pictured Heather McNamara's face; first as she was now, and then back when Heather's family moved to Sherwood in sixth grade, the little girl with salon-curled blonde hair and braces, the girl that Heather could finally have as a friend.

Remembering her made Heather remember the old aching wound as well. In her first day in kindergarten, the teacher pointed out especially that she and Heather Duke had the same name and gave them seats next to each other. They should have been friends. They were made to be friends. Heather offered Duke friendship in the sandpit, asking to build a castle together. But instead Duke chose Martha, rejecting Heather, daring to resist her. All the years between kindergarten and sixth grade, Heather only had people who were scared of her, not one single friend. Then Heather McNamara came to school and liked the same things as Heather and was almost as good at her at many of them, her first real friend. That was when it all came together for Heather. She would soon finally overrule Duke's willpower and bring her where she belonged.

Martha hurt me once before. I won't let her steal my other friend away from me, Heather thought.

Just before her eyes closed, Heather saw J.D.'s head droop forward as well, the empty teacup lowered back to the saucer.

Then she left her body behind, and travelled between life and death to rescue her true friend.

—

Veronica and Duke and Martha burst in on the kitchen. They saw the two unconscious teenagers slumped in their chairs, Miss Chandler paused midway with her own tea in hand.

"I suppose I'll need to put the kettle on again," she said simply.

It was mad to go on this - venture, as it were. But Veronica wasn't backing out when they had come so far, and neither was Duke. Finish what they started. And there was a goodly dollop of fear of being left behind mixed in there as well. If the others were going on a wild adventure to the Betwixt-and-Between, they wouldn't go alone.

Veronica flicked the small silver bell she held with the tip of her fingernail, hearing the pure tone ring out. She drank her tea, smiling cockily at Duke over the rim of the cup, a grin slightly shakily returned to her. She started to lose consciousness. The square of polished stone in Duke's right hand rolled across slackened fingers.

Martha had drunk her tea as well. But then she stared at Miss Chandler with a great shock at the last.

"I know you," she said. She tried to open her hand to drop the fragment of thorn-bush she held, but her hands did not work. Her eyes began to widen in a knowing fright. "I recognize you. What have you done? Why have you worked this upon me?"

Miss Chandler took a calm sip of her own tea. "Fear not, child. I have always done as you wished. Now go to where the soul belonging to your body lies."

"That isn't right," Martha stammered. "You didn't tell me. It is more right to say that I did as you wished - is it not? Will you help me again? Will you ... "

Her head slumped forward on her arms. She dozed off and even snored. Miss Chandler watched her go off with half a smile, and drank the rest of her tea.