Only the threat of a bloodmage would send Anna even vaguely into the vicinity of the Looking Glass. Banshee had been dangerously close already, and it was at least six blocks away and above ground. For much of Seattle's Infected community, the portions not feral, even the acid rain clouds that wreathed the city most of the time were too bright. They had withdrawn into their own section of the Underground, where even troll gang bosses and Ancient phys-ads feared to tread. Even the syndicates and corps left it alone for the most part, knowing how volatile and dangerous the denizens were.

Anna stared down at the stairs leading into the district, skin crawling at the sight of dark stains on the concrete. Enough horrible drek had happened in the area to give it manacount, which seldom bothered the Awakened practitioners who made their home in the area. They were dark enough that they just attuned to it, using the residual torments of their victims as a weapon. She was about to walk down into a den of serpents like a mouse flashing a giant Eat Me! sign sculpted out of fluorescent lights and the smell of raw meat. Her plus one had radically changed her astral imprint. There was no flying casual any more.

Her mouth kept up its admirable impression of the Sahara desert as the fear crept deeper in. She was shaking by the time she reached the bottom step. The darkness yawned ahead, not a hint of normal lighting to be seen. Why would there be, when the real children of the night had no need for it?

Redmond, for all the jokes about it eating people alive, was seldom a place where that literally happened. In the Looking Glass, that was a daily occurrence. Anna had heard all kinds of stories about it at Ikon: you wanted a body to never be found, you dumped it here, not out in the Sound. Fish weren't as thorough as ghouls.

They don't waste any part of the person, Mikhail had warned once. Essence, blood, flesh, bone…

And this was where Church was sending her. Part of Anna wondered for a moment if maybe it was the Russian who wanted to get her killed. She checked the chronometer on her comm, then switched on the lowlight amplification on her contacts. It was barely enough to stop her from tripping over her own two feet, but she wasn't sure if thermographics would actually even help her. Two minutes and she'll be here. You can survive two minutes.

Anna crept down the dank, mold-slicked concrete tunnel, still wrapped in her invisibility spell. She'd lost Paladin pretty quickly, but if Fuse's photo was good, she expected the blood mage was hunting her too now that she'd been stripped of her protection. The only reason she'd survived their last encounter was Church, and the Russian wasn't here to save her now. She made it maybe half a city block worth of walking before the landscape changed from a barren tunnel to the faint glow of red neon glittering across glass. The smell hit her next, a wash of grime and rain with not at all faint traces of rotting flesh and old blood. She stopped in her tracks, stomach churning.

As she tried not to retch and betray her position, the mage realized she was being watched. A pair of ghouls, hunched in the shadows, had turned milky eyes towards her. She cursed herself, realizing that here, everyone but her was dual-natured, able to walk through the world perceiving the Astral and the physical at the same time. Even blind, they could see hints of her spell now that she was no longer an astral chameleon. Even if they were weak magically, their perception made them extremely dangerous, as did their hunger for her flesh and essence.

She tried not to think about having her essence drained.

One of the ghouls flicked a cigarette butt carelessly to the ground, displaying long, sharp claws. "You lost, little girl?" he rasped, cocking his bald head to the side. His friend flipped a battered ball cap around, the stained fabric spattered with blood.

"I'm looking for Mercy," Anna said.

He chuckled deep in his chest, more of a growl than a laugh. "You came to the wrong place, chummer."

"I have intel for her."

The other ghoul laughed, his voice high-pitched and almost shrieking. Anna cringed in response despite herself, dropping the invisibility spell so she would have her whole focus ready if she needed to defend against them. Once he recovered from his cackling, the second ghoul grinned altogether too widely, displaying a maw of sharp teeth. "I think she's a little lost lamb, Scout. How about we show her the ropes? Give her the tour!"

Anna was about to respond when she felt something shift in the mana, even without assensing. A spirit had arrived, far more powerful than the beast spirit she'd banished. It manifested in a moment, and its appearance did nothing to put her at ease: the garb and weapons of a Valkyrie, but the figure was gaunt to the point of being skeletal and the eyes burned like black pits. It was hard to know if it was a spirit of man or something much darker.

"Frag it!" The ghouls scattered like frightened minnows at its arrival, racing off into the darkness.

"Who are you?" Anna asked around the lump in her throat.

The skeletal Valkyrie curled a finger in beckoning. Its voice when it spoke was not weak or creaking, but as deep and resonant as the echoes of a tomb. "Your escort."

"Mercy's a phys-ad. She couldn't have summoned you."

Those black eyes seemed to narrow slightly, bringing the mage more into focus. She was very aware of the hunger in its expression, far more intense than even the ghouls. Suddenly Kier didn't seem like the worst thing in the world. "You may follow or be carried."

Anna rubbed her hands together nervously, twisting her counterspelling focus like a worry stone. There was no real choice in that, but she knew she didn't want it touching her. She tapped her comm quickly as she followed the spirit towards the red neon, trying to dial Church again. The link buzzed again and again, but then the signal abruptly cut out.

Even in the Looking Glass, the Matrix was accessible. For it to suddenly go dead quiet meant someone had just switched on a jammer.

Anna looked down at her comm. It wasn't exactly a sophisticated piece of technology, barely better than a burner metalink. Anyone with even basic cybersecurity tech savvy could crack it in a minute or less, so why use a jammer?

Almost as if her comm was reading her mind, it suddenly popped an icon she didn't recognize into her vision: a white chesspiece, a bishop, with small cartoon googly eyes.

"Heya, chummer!" it chirped. The voice was female and sounded ever so slightly manufactured, something created by a voice modulation system that was almost perfectly human…but not quite. "You're in quite the neck of the woods."

Anna sucked in a deep breath. "Who the frag are you?" Her subvocal mic captured the words well enough that she doubted even the spirit would hear more than a mumble.

"You can call me Bishop. Don't mind Vic, there. I hear you've got intel for Mercy."

"Vic?"

The googly eyes wobbled slightly as the chesspiece sprouted arms and shrugged. "The spirit. Vicious. That's what I call her, anyway. You got a name?"

Anna tried not to shudder at the spirit's nickname. It reinforced the general bad vibes she was getting. Still, she wasn't going to piss off whoever the hell was on her comm. "Gemini. Are you the summoner or just a friend of theirs?"

"Nice to meet you, Gemini." It sounded genuine, but with a voice modulator, that didn't mean anything. "I'm…ah, how to explain? I guess you could call me the life of the party. I make sure everything on the Matrix down here is just the way Hela likes it."

Anna tried not to panic as she saw the crowd ahead: Infected everywhere, going about their business. Ghouls made up the majority, but every once and a while she saw other things, some hairy and large or others more disturbingly normal in appearance. It was packed, just as crowded as Downtown, but the meat being sold by the street vendors was definitely not soybeef. Mirrored murals and dull red neon made the place a chaotic mix of lights and shadows. "Who's Hela?"

"Cool your jets, chummer. Vic won't let anyone get a mouthful," Bishop chirped. "As for Hela, well…Mercy is to Banshee as Hela is to the Looking Glass. You savvy?"

Anna felt her stomach lurch. "Church, what did you just get me into?" she hissed without thinking.

"Church?" Bishop's voice sounded surprised. "You've got the wrong accent to be dropping that name. Though, looking through the call logs, I guess you do have her number."

"How the f—"

"What? Relax, chummer, I do too. And judging by your current condition, she wasn't looking to make a deposit in the body bank." The little icon did a weird, gyrating dance. "This is great! Is she getting the band back together? Hela's gonna be so pissed she found a new mage."

"You know Church?" Anna grasped weakly for the lifeline offered, even though she was questioning her sanity after the icon's display.

"I mean, not in the biblical sense, but we did ice a blood mage together. Hela and I really spruced up the place with our half-mil. The Looking Glass used to be such a drekhole."

Anna blinked, her brain catching up a little as she caught sight of a large neon display of a skeleton wearing a top hat. The sound of drinking and laughter could be heard spilling out from a door that read: the Laughing Cadaver. The emaciated valkyrie was making a beeline for it, Infected flowing out in her way even as hungry eyes tracked Anna's progress. "How did you know I was a mage?"

"Oh, Hela pegged you walking up to the pearly gates, chummer. Way before Vic got there, even. You're like a glow stick spelling 'bon appetit' to most people down here." Almost as if an afterthought, Bishop added, "No offense."

The spirit stopped at the door and turned to face Anna. "I will be watching," the valkyrie said ominously before dematerializing. Anna didn't need to look to know it was still probably not far in the Astral. She stepped in, almost freezing when a sudden hush hit the room and every head turned. The inside of the Laughing Cadaver was a comfortable English style pub, filled with smoke from intoxicants of various kinds. The bar displayed various cigars and cigarettes, as well as other inhaled forms of drugs, probably much easier to tolerate for Infected who had allergies to alcohol. The wood in the room was a faux-oak, the grains geometric in patterns so as not to be mistaken for the real thing. Infected of different kinds lounged in dozens of comfortable seats, some eating and others drinking from nicely made china cups and plates.

There were several doors to other rooms, one behind the bar and the others off to the right. The room was larger than Anna had been expecting, and not at all in the state of mess or decay as the streets outside.

"Homey, right?" Bishop prompted.

"Where am I going?" Anna asked nervously as normal conversation resumed after a tense silence.

"The back. Just walk up to Fawkes and tell him Hela invited you in. He's the ghoul with the faux-hawk toupee. Give you three guesses how he got his name." The chesspiece icon gave a wink.

Anna swallowed hard and approached the bartender, a massive ghoul currently polishing a glass the size of her head. He had probably been a troll prior to contracting the virus. Perched on his head was an absolutely absurd toupee that would have made Anna laugh if it was on anyone less threatening. He wasn't blind, she realized with a quick scrutiny: both eyes had been replaced with cybernetic ones, protected behind a sheen of mirrored ballistic shields that she'd almost mistaken for sunglasses. "Are you Fawkes?" she asked.

He looked up. "Ain't seen you around before, meat."

Anna fought down her shudder. "Hela invited me in."

He jerked a clawed thumb towards the door behind him. "Better hustle then. She don't have much patience for your kind."

"That's not entirely true," Bishop confided in Anna's ear. The icon gave her a conspiratorial wink. "You've just gotta know how to handle her."

"I'm open to pointers," Anna mumbled as she stepped gingerly around Fawkes and into the back. Through the storeroom, she could see another door marked Private. Anna stopped, doing a quick astral peek, but the door was either mana-warded like a lodge or contained enough earth to block Astral passage and sight alike. The spirit was waiting by the door expectantly, shifting its grip on its spear impatiently.

There was nowhere to run except forwards, so Anna steeled herself and then opened the door.

Mercifully, it didn't open to the torture chamber she was expecting. It looked like a comfortable back office, not so different from out front in terms of style. To the left was a screen mimicking a window with a view out onto the Sound. A large desk stood at the far end of the room with a stack of composition notebooks, a trid display, and several old books. The woman seated in it looked relatively normal, though her fashion taste was a decade or so old. She wore a sleeveless dress shirt that showed pale arms covered in ritual scarification in runic patterns and a lot of rings on her fingers that glimmered in the low light. Her dark hair had several white streaks, though it wasn't clear if that was natural or not. She seemed lost in thought, chewing on the end of a pen.

Sprawled across the floor on her stomach was a younger woman wearing a kevlar combat biker's jacket complete with some scorch marks and scrapes, ragged jeans, and battered off-brand converse. She had a cyberdeck next to her, playing what looked like some kind of farming simulation game, and the lower half of her face was obscured by a respirator. She wore her hair long on one side and shaved on the other, but there was no sign of a datajack on her as she dozed next to the computer.

Anna did a quick assensing. The girl on the floor was healthy, no trace of Infection or cyberware, with a weird aura. It was incredibly subtle, the strangeness, but Anna didn't know what it meant. Honestly, it was hard to focus on her when the woman at the desk looked over.

Now Anna knew what a minnow in front of a shark felt like. The woman in the chair was considerably more powerful than her, and so was the sword leaning beside her seat: a single-handed Viking-style blade so old in appearance that it was a wonder it held together. It looked like it had come straight out of a barrow, albeit with a newly wrapped grip. The summoner smiled, showing delicate but very sharp fangs. "You must be Gemini."

"Hela?" Anna said weakly.

The young woman on the floor twitched and then rolled over, revealing the pointed ears of an elf. "And I'm Bishop! Now everybody's introduced," she said. The respirator seemed to be the source of the voice modulation.

The vampire rose from her seat and stepped around the desk to lean back against it, folding her arms over her chest. "Bishop says you're an associate of an old friend," Hela said smoothly. Her voice reminded Anna of black silk: smooth, cool, and dark.

"I don't know why she didn't just tell me to ask for you," Anna said nervously.

"We haven't spoken in some time. I assume she expected that I returned to Berlin after the late unpleasantness. Not incorrectly, I suppose. I do a great deal of traveling and I only recently returned," Hela said smoothly. "Bishop keeps in better touch with her and is connected to Mercy's network. No doubt she expected to catch Bishop's exceptionally prying ear and gain you safe harbor through Mercy."

Bishop rubbed the back of her neck. "Risky, really. I mean, I like Mercy, but she also has a thing for power."

Hela shrugged. "So do you, Bishop."

"C'mon, Hela, I don't love you for your biceps or sparkly magic," the elf said. "Now that thing you do with—"

" Bishop." There was an almost animalistic growl in Hela's annoyance.

Bishop winked at Anna, defusing some of the paralyzing fear that coursed through the mage as her lizard brain screamed for her to run away from the vampire. "Also that voice, particularly when the colorful vocab comes out."

Hela heaved a sigh, relaxing even as she frowned. "Incorrigible," she muttered darkly. "I should make you sleep on the couch."

"You won't," Bishop said cheerfully, sitting up. She made no move to remove the respirator. Anna guessed she was probably in her mid to late twenties, but her mannerisms seemed slightly younger in their playfulness. "You'd get bored and hor—"

Hela pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "Bishop! First impressions!"

"You were scaring her, sexy. I'm just defusing the situation," Bishop said with a shrug. "Besides, it's not like I'm wrong."

Hela glared, but seemed to take the point. "We are not going to harm you, Gemini. A friend of Church is a friend of ours. You can relax."

Anna felt a wave of relief crash over her, even though the fear of essence drain or Infection stayed. "I…."

Bishop laughed. "I think there's some explaining to do while we wait for Church. Don't mind Hela. She's fun later when I get her wound up and she can't do anything about it at the time. All that frustration…mmm…"

Hela sighed again, rolling her eyes towards heaven as if seeking saintly patience. "Get your brain out of the gutter." She looked at Anna, eyes more evaluating. "So why are you and your plus one on the run? The Looking Glass isn't the first place Church would send a friend, particularly someone vulnerable."

"I can look after myself," Anna said defensively.

"Against ganger trash, maybe," Hela said not unkindly. "My people are an entirely different experience to combat. With that essence bleeding off you, most would consider you at the top of the menu."

Anna realized something and backtracked mentally. "You said plus one."

"The spirit sharing your body," Hela said. "It hides itself well, but even weakened, it is more than you can safely contain."

"Safely?" the mage said weakly.

Hela looked down at Bishop for a moment. "I think our guest will want to sit down for this talk. Would you kindly get your drek off the couch?"

"Please is a word, Hela." Bishop bounced up and cleared a couple of bags full of computer parts off the couch that sat along one wall.

Hela arched an eyebrow, a hint of a smile creeping through. "It sounds better when you say it."

Bishop laughed. "Saucy! I like it! Alright, Gemini, have a seat. Hela can dish about your spirit buddy and I can get in touch with Church. Don't worry, we keep everything off the couch. Floors, walls, and Hela's desk are a whole other thing." Bishop turned and laughed again at the vampire's embarrassment. "Aww, sexy, you're actually blushing! I thought the vamp thing got rid of that."

"I hate you so much," Hela muttered, glaring daggers at the elf. Even in the low light, the faint pink in her pale cheeks was still slightly visible.

Despite everything else, Anna found herself strangely hopeful that maybe the pair in front of her really would help her—even though it was a struggle to picture Church taking Bishop seriously. She sat down on the couch, sinking in slightly. "Alright, dish."