Hela picked at the edge of her desk with a manicured thumbnail as she stared at Anna. It made the mage want to squirm, but she was reasonably confident that the vampire was assensing her rather than contemplating her as a meal option. "The reality is that the first diagnosis you received is perhaps more accurate than the second, but even the word possession is inadequate to describe the reality of your situation."

"Not a mentor spirit?" Anna said, heart sinking. She'd hoped that after explaining what Doc and Church had learned from Monterey Jack, the vampire would side with the shaman over their medic.

"Regrettably not," Hela said, a faint sympathy in her expression. "That you have been able to function this well speaks to your own strength of will, but without intervention one way or another, even that is temporary."

Anna tensed. "What do you mean?"

"I am intimately familiar with essence in a way most Awakened people are not," Hela said pointedly, prompting an uncomfortable shift from Anna. The reminder of what her host could do to her was still terrifying to the illusion mage. "The most pertinent part of that knowledge is this: any creature with the ability to drain essence can only acquire so much. My astral signature can hold more essence than a normal person would cap out at, just as a mage who has initiated into a higher understanding of magic can increase their native power above and beyond what even the most gifted, but unschooled, can achieve. In both cases, however, there is a limit to what the signature can hold."

Anna tensed. "Is the spirit draining my essence?" She hadn't felt her magic ebb, but the potential was terrifying.

Hela shook her head. "The opposite, in fact."

Bishop rubbed the back of her neck, apparently comfortable on the floor. "I thought more essence was a good thing. Like, if that's the cap on your magical power and all that stuff."

"What makes a poison, babe?" Hela asked softly.

Before Anna could react, a sudden blankness flashed across Bishop's face. "The dose," the normally cheerful woman said flatly before blinking a couple times. "You know, you could have just said too much of a good thing is bad instead of killing my vibe."

"I wanted you to understand Gemini's position. That spirit, or fragment of a spirit, is overflowing her body's natural ability to deal with it. She has so much essence that it's bleeding off her in the Astral. A person, even an Infected one, can't handle that level of power without suffering some serious consequences." Hela sighed slightly. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially to someone Church wants alive, but that spirit is killing you without even meaning to. The longer it is inside you, the worse it is going to get. In spirit possession, domination is the thing you have to fear. This is far more destructive in the long term."

"You could just drain some of that essence off, though, right?" Bishop said hopefully. "I mean, it wouldn't hurt her, right?"

"But it would harm the spirit, which would lash out, and I don't particularly feel like getting my fangs handed to me."

Bishop blinked in surprise. "You think that thing can handle you and Nadr and Vic? I've seen you take out a blood mage and jaguar guards, sexy."

"That required a team that included a lot more than me, a sword, and a valkyrie," Hela said pointedly. "We had Church, a steel lynx piloted by the best rigger I've ever met, and you running interference."

Bishop considered that for a split second. "It's cute that you included me in that when all I did was stay passed out in the van. Couldn't you or Vic banish it?"

"You're on several terrorism watchlists for a reason, babe. Don't sell yourself short." Hela sighed as she considered the question. "All banishing does is remove favors from a spirit that's contracted or bound somehow, allowing it to go on its merry way. This one is here on its own recognizance."

Anna twisted her ring again. "What about an exorcism?" she asked nervously, still rattled from the idea of voluntary essence drain.

Hela grimaced. "With how powerful it is, the only way anyone's showing it the door is if it wants to leave. This is not my suggestion, but the easiest way to remove it would be to kill you."

A sharp, aggressive knock on the door sent Anna almost jumping out of her skin. Bishop bounced up to her feet again to answer it. "Hey—frag! Hela!" The young woman backpedaled, catching someone as they stumbled forward.

Anna's heart lodged in her throat, and she sprang up. "Church!"

The Vory enforcer had looked better. Her kevlar jacket was sporting new, bloody rips and the reinforced ballistic mask was charred, some of it blistered from the heat. She moved with a limp, but the amount of blood and flecks of bone on her hands and sleeves seemed to be mostly someone else's. "I am fine," Church hissed, recapturing her balance. "I came in through the back door."

"What the frag happened?" Bishop said, wide-eyed. "You look like a bear chewed you up and then spat you out off a cliff."

"A combat mage and some cylons." Church looked offended by the concern. "I've parted out worse."

"That looks like a hell of a fight, omae," Anna said more softly. She looked at Hela. "You have a medkit?"

"I'll fetch it," Hela said. She looked the Vory enforcer up and down briefly, assessing the damage. "Leave that rebar there until I'm back."

Anna looked down. Someone had stabbed a chunk of rebar into Church's ribs, through one of the gaps in her ripped jacket and transfixing a lung. It was the kind of thing that'd send anyone else directly to DocWagon or the morgue. Church just looked annoyed, though she was holding the rebar to keep it stable. Her breathing sounded terrible. Anna grabbed one of Church's arms while Bishop got the other and they guided her together to sit on the couch.

" Blyat!" Church cursed when Bishop peeled off the ballistic mask to reveal freshly blistered burns down one cheek.

"That's gonna need some foam," Bishop said sympathetically. "What happened to the guys who jumped you?"

Church gave them a bloody grin, savage in her pain. "If someone starts static with me, I finish it. The cylons are dead and the mage fled."

Anna helped Church out of the tattered remnants of her coat. The dress shirt underneath was forever ruined, so she tore that away next to get a better look at the lacerations. Most had already clotted thanks to the platelet factories and other bioware augmentations Church had. It was impressive, the amount of damage she could see there. "You really are a hell of a terminator, omae."

Hela set a very nice med kit down beside them and pressed a biomonitor onto the side of Church's neck. "This is going to hurt," she warned before abruptly pulling out the rebar with vampiric strength. "You should have gone to a proper street doc instead of coming down here with exposed wounds. You know how risky that is."

Church said nothing, letting Hela work. The vampire seemed to know her way around severe wounds very well, directing Bishop and Anna to hand her things as she worked with the authority and experience of a seasoned trauma surgeon.

It wasn't until after everything was bandaged and stable that Hela glanced over at Anna. "If you are familiar with healing magic, she could use some. Otherwise, I can call a spirit."

"I can help." Anna concentrated, weaving a healing spell with an elaborate gesture of one hand and a muttered incantation. A fiery orange glow spread across Church's body, healing the wounded killer with surprising speed. A second later, the drain hit and she realized she'd given more than she meant to. The headache hit like a truck and she cupped a hand over her nose as it started to bleed again.

" Spasibo," Church muttered, relaxing back against the couch. She looked much more comfortable and the burns on her face were gone. Under the bandages, the damage was probably almost completely healed based on the change in the Russian's breathing.

Bishop gave a low whistle. "Damn, she's almost brand new. Nice job, Gemini." She elbowed Hela gently. "Think we can get her on retainer? With how often Church gets banged up…"

Anna shook her head. "Not while I'm on the menu."

Hela sighed and then focused her attention on Church. "What the frag were you thinking, sending her down here alone?"

"I knew Bishop would find her right away and get her to Mercy," the Russian said with a shrug. "No one starts static with Bishop and they definitely don't with Mercy."

"Bishop is only protected because of Mercy and I," Hela said sharply. "Nor can she intervene physically. If someone had been stupid in my absence, Bishop could have done very little. I had to send Vic to get her."

"Hey, I coulda de-rezzed them with drones," Bishop said defensively. "I wouldn't have let a friend of Church's get eaten."

"I also intended to be here sooner," Church said bluntly. "The hit squad was a delay." She glanced at Anna. "Tlaloc was injured badly, but he got out."

Hela pressed her lips together into a firm line, crossing her arms. Anna almost froze in terror at the sight of displeasure on the vampire's face. "Church, what the drek did you just drag us into?"

"Did you hear about what happened in the Squatter's Mall?" Anna said quickly, noting that a similarly stubborn expression was forming on the Russian's face.

"The official story or what's percolating everywhere else?" Bishop looked amused by the bristling rather than worried. "Knights Errant released a statement saying some mage jacked up on combat stims hit a power transformer down there with a spell. Fingered some Halloweeners for it and yanked all the feeds they could find."

Hela looked over at Bishop, narrowing her eyes. "I told you not to go snooping on the Knights Errant Matrix nodes."

"Would I even be worth keeping if I didn't occasionally buzz police nodes? The people have a right to know." Bishop's grin was still hidden behind the respirator, but it was obvious from her eyes. "Besides, you want drek on the Shadowlands, you better have some stuff to trade. The full, unaltered glory of that video was totally worth it. It's a big ass boom."

Hela sighed and shook her head slightly. "If they show up here, you are absolutely sleeping on the couch."

Bishop rolled her eyes. "I can clean up after myself, sexy. Anyway, after the light show, all kinds of people have been talking about who Mr. Sparkles was and it's definitely not the Halloweeners. They wish they could blow a load like that."

"His name is Tlaloc," Anna said quietly, twisting her counterspelling focus. She glanced at Church. "We thought he used to be a wagemage. Dunno what the employment status still is. The name he gave at Nina's Teahouse was Kingfisher, before he killed a girl and got himself added to the Ledger."

Bishop bobbed her head in a nod. "I was getting to that," she said, switching on the trid display linked to the cyberdeck beside her on the floor. "I mean, as a naturally nosy person, I'm not gonna not dig. First, the boom, courtesy of a comm confiscated by Knights Errant from some idiot culture vulture. Fragging newb, if you ask me. Should have used a flyspy if they were gonna get all shaky."

The video played, showing the thronging press of the Squatter's Mall. Anna didn't see herself in the video, only the sudden explosion rocking the area, shattering windows and metal. At first it was chaos, illuminated by emergency lights and the strobes of damaged electronics. The hand holding the camera shook, making everything even less clear. Her heart started to pound with adrenaline all over again when she saw herself fleeing, only to be stepped on by a figure emerging from the crowd with emerald mana swirling around his hands. The light cast weird shadows across Tlaloc's face, but the camera had a decent view of his tattoos.

"Definite Atzlaner in style," Hela commented. "Though that's not saying anything, really. There's plenty of practitioners who style themselves that way even if they're not affiliated, for the rep and show. I'd expect a lot more subtlety from an actual corp type."

"Not wrong, sexy," Bishop said. She froze the video right as his spell flared before Anna's counterspell went off, illuminating his entire face. "So I did some digging. A guy with this pic going by Kingfisher used to do some running down in Free Cal, on the Azzie side. Just a shadowrunner, not a proper wagemage, mostly wetwork. He used to have a team."

"Used to?" Church said, arching an eyebrow.

Bishop flicked her fingers and the trid display shrank the video into a corner window, popping up six photographs. One was Tlaloc, the other five Anna didn't recognize at all. Each one of the headshots had a grisly looking photo of the corresponding tortured body, though Anna wasn't confident all of them were recognizable as the same individual. The biometric data displayed was a jumble to her, but Hela took in a breath sharply. "Everybody meets their maker, except him."

"He flipped on his team?" Hela questioned.

"For enough money to get the hell out of Free Cal, because he fragging poofs after this until he shows up in Seattle about two months ago," Bishop said. "And I don't mean he went to ground. I mean I checked with the mercenary company he used to run with and there was no record of him on their systems: not biometrics, not a name, not a photograph. Someone on Shadowlands said he had a criminal SIN in San Fran, that's gone too."

"Was it ever there to begin with?" Church asked skeptically.

"I asked myself that too," Bishop said smugly. "So I had Vila run an image search on some of the local news-sites. I found a shot of him in the background of a holding cell on some prison reform blog. Nothing else, but I doubt they'd let an unlicensed mage go without slapping something on him to track him, especially one with Atzlaner tats. Everything else was scrubbed. When I went back into the Knights Errant node the next day, that video I showed you? Fragging gone."

Hela frowned. "Does anyone know you accessed that file?"

"I spoofed the access of that asshole lieutenant who used to shoot those less-than-lethal rounds at ghoul heads. So as far as anybody knows, he accessed that. I've got Zmory watching to see if something unpleasant happens to him. I didn't share the video on Shadowlands once I realized the feed in custody had vanished."

Anna swallowed hard. "So who's protecting him? Aztechnology?"

"Maybe? That was a little loud and proud for their covert teams," Bishop said.

Church sighed. "He's working with a blood mage named Kier. If Mercy's to be believed, she was a project lead for Aztechnology down south."

Bishop rubbed the back of her neck. "They don't typically let their project leads just walk off. That's corporate intellectual property at risk."

"Not unless the reward outweighs the risk in cost benefit analysis," Hela said, turning her attention back to Anna. The stare was even more piercing. "Like a spirit or fragment of spirit capable of creating Gemini's situation. If it can increase a user's essence, it can increase the threshold of their magical power significantly, perhaps even limitlessly, without requiring initiation or cybermancy to do so. That is not a normal result of spirit possession."

Bishop gave a little whistle. "Sexy, not to put too fine a point on anything, but if anyone else finds out about this, we're going to have a lot more problems than just AT. This is Seattle. It's anybody's game."

Hela groaned. "God fragging damn it, Church! Couldn't you have pissed off a dragon or something easier to deal with?"

Church gave Bishop a pointed look. "Have you told anyone?"

"About Gemini? Nah, I figured your explanation would be way more fun than Mercy's. Totally called it, too," the younger elf said with a wave of her hand. "Still, this is Seattle. Secrets spread like herpes. Honestly, I'm kinda amazed you've kept your drek locked down for so long. I don't think Gemini's has that kind of shelf life."

"What drek?" Anna asked without thinking.

Church glared at her with that ill-tempered cobra air and Hela kicked Bishop before anything else could be blurted out. "That is my concern."

Anna paled a little. "Sorry."

"Right, umm," Bishop said, clearing her throat awkwardly. "Plan? I mean, if we're fishing for this kinda shark, we're gonna need a bigger boat."