Author's Note: I'm terribly sorry for not posting a chapter in so long. Writer's block wound up coinciding with Spring Break to prevent any kind of writing for a few weeks. I'll try to be more regular in the future.

*SPOILERS*

Disclaimer: All property is the property of their respective owners. I will also apologize in advance for any and all grammar errors I make.

Marcus didn't live in the best neighborhood. True, the lawns of every house colored the Los Angeles suburbs he called home in a pleasant, if patchy, green, the pavement retained an ordinary number of cracks and chalk drawings from children too young to realize why they had the right to deface public walkways, and their parents moved hurriedly to and from jobs that, even if they weren't generating vast amounts of wealth, supported a comfortable, modern lifestyle.

Yet, lurking among these ordinary spectacles, a darker specter persisted to color the landscape. It weaved interminably through the resident's lives, raising suspicion in their otherwise normal activities. Were the children glancing over their shoulders to watch Marcus pull his small, two door Toyota out onto the street, or were they worrying about the strange man a few doors down buying baggies of sugar? Did the parents rush because they were full of vigor, or was fear over the growing reputations of gangs fueling the speed in their movements?

As Marcus shifted gears to pull away from the conflicting views, a pair of boys tasked by Hidalgo to keep tabs on him began waving goodbye to Marcus. All parties involved knew that as long as they played by the rules, no one would get hurt. They were teenagers, too old to maintain any semblance of innocence, but too young to be tried and true members of any gang. To be blunt, they were expendable. Hidalgo had thousands of desperate adolescents to recruit for the more monotonous duties associated with life in the Cartel, like spying on Marcus and antagonizing him every chance they got. Though they appeared to see more opportunity in his fetching companion, and their comments reflected that belief.

"Hey Chica! Why don't you come see me later, spend some time with a REAL man?"

"Leaving so soon nina? Was your big man that disappointing?"

Elizabeth did not see fit to deign the remarks with a response. It was clear to her that she was being used as a tool to get at Marcus, but knowing that did little to prevent her from stiffening upright in her seat. Up until that point, Marcus had not reacted at all, but upon seeing her supposedly fearful reaction, a dark scowl colored his face.

Putting a clamp on his rising anger, Marcus shifted from reverse, into first gear, and quickly moved up past the second and into third gear, letting the engine propel his vehicle forward at a comfortable twenty-five miles per hour. The tension eased out of his muscles with each minute Marcus placed between him and his antagonizers, and as he relaxed, so did Elizabeth.

Marcus's Toyota may have felt chilly when she had first entered the vehicle, but Elizabeth was learning that California was a very hot part of the United States, and the confined spaces of a vehicle could heat up very quickly. The warmth of the car, coupled with the gentle growling produced as it traveled down the road, was gradually lulling her back to sleep.

For a moment, Elizabeth could almost believe she was an ordinary girl, living a normal life, without the ability to rend the barriers between time and space, the possible and the actual. Sadly, she knew it was a fantasy. Her life was never meant to be a joyful one, but it certainly made for an interesting idea, a world where she hadn't been sold to pay off her drunken father's gambling debt. She hadn't been bought by a fanatical cult version of her father. She hadn't-

"SHIT!" Marcus suddenly yelled in surprise.

Elizabeth's eyes snapped open just in time to watch a dirt speckled Little(1) automobile come barreling out of the Tear she'd just opened. It hadn't been purposeful, but her intent didn't prevent Marcus from being forced to sharply turn the wheel, leading his car to a soon-to-be painful stop when the hood crumpled against a tree in some unlucky citizen's front lawn. Right after the Little passed out of sight, Elizabeth heard a sickening crash of glass shattering, metal twisting, and tires squealing in a vain attempt to avoid catastrophe.

Elizabeth wasn't entirely sure of what had ended the vehicle's forward momentum, but what she could be certain of was that her own joyride was about to meet a similar fate. Time slowed to a crawl as Elizabeth watched the tree grow in the windshield, first occupying only the edge, but it apparently decided that it wanted to move towards the middle. It had just settled into its new position, mere feet away from the vehicle speeding directly towards it, when a long, sinewy branch of dark brown cloth slipped in front her.

As the Toyota's hood crumbled around the unyielding tree, Elizabeth felt her body try to fly forward, its launch prevented by the safety belt she now never intended to forget, and she briefly wondered why Marcus had saw fit to thrust his arm out in front of her. Almost as soon as her mind formulated the question, a large white balloon violently exploded forth from a part of the car mounted at exactly eye level, solving the mystery.

It slammed into his limb, as if mimicking the crash that necessitated its release, and produced an ear-splitting 'WHUMP' on impact. Despite the ferocity of the air bag's assault, Marcus's arm proved as submissive as the tree, refusing to move so much as an inch.

Elizabeth's head was spinning, rocked by the sudden whiplash and refusing to give her a clear picture of the car. She smelled something acrid, a pungent odor that made her nose crinkle and brought old memories of Songbird to her mind, the kind where he hadn't been serviced for a while and was in desperate need of an oil-

*No!* Elizabeth chastised herself mentally. *That kind of pointless reverie is what caused the accident in the first place.* "Do you really want to add Songbird to the list of things that'll go wrong today?" Elizabeth added as an afterthought, forgetting to keep her thoughts to herself.

"Who the hell is Songbird?" Marcus groaned, lifting his face from where it had smashed against the steering wheel.

"Oh God! Are you alright?" Elizabeth asked while quelling her own panic. She had just realized that when a person chose to protect someone else, it often came at their own expense. It took someone either incredibly selfless or hopelessly uninformed to take that kind of risk. Looking at Marcus, she knew that often enough it was both.

*But then again, I already knew that didn't I? That's why I wanted him to protect me.*

Elizabeth didn't have any reason to believe that's why she'd chosen to go through this door, and into this world, but she had even less reason to doubt herself. She was still herself. She just didn't know the reason for everything she'd done. Trust was funny like that.

Glass shards were strewn across the interior of the cabin as if . . . well, as if the windshield had slammed into a tree at thirty plus miles an hour. The dashboard looked a little deformed as well, but otherwise everything appeared to be no less for wear. The driver was another matter. Marcus may have been able to lift his head off of the steering wheel, but he was still slumped forward, staring blankly with a disconcerting lack of focus on a face discolored with still-forming bruises.

Elizabeth leaned over Marcus, practically straddling the man, to begin assessing his condition. All of the medical journals and textbooks she had been able to read while locked away within her tower in Columbia pointed to three things she needed to check for, the so called 'ABCs', or Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. Elizabeth knew she could safely assume his airway wasn't compromised since he had already started talking, although it was admittedly not a normal sounding voice, but she dismissed the concern as unimportant. His chest and breathing looked and sounded normal respectively; no evidence of paradoxical, or uneven, chest movement, he wasn't breathing haggardly, and his chest was expanding to its proper volume. Moving on to circulation, Elizabeth began to check his skin color, nail beds, and whether his skin regained its color after it was pinched, disregarding the ugly, but ineffectual, bruises, everything checked out.

To rule out any brain damage, Elizabeth raised up Marcus's eyelid to observe his pupils for any distortion. It wasn't foolproof, but it was really the only option available to her right now. Before she could actually assess his condition in that regard, Elizabeth jumped in surprise when Marcus clamped his right hand around her slim arm.

"Get out." He croaked. "You need to get out."

"No. You need medical attention." Elizabeth argued, making no move to comply. "I won't leave you here."

"Fire." Marcus told her in the same hoarse voice as before. As Marcus spoke, he balled his left hand into a fist and Elizabeth watched in stunned silence when it lit up with small spots of light. The analytical part of her brain was telling her that each pale, sort of white glow was centered around muscle and key load-bearing portions of bone, but the more sympathetic side felt the pain Marcus apparently didn't after he slammed his arm into the driver-side door, tearing it off its hinges and sending the door flipping end over end across the road.

"Get out." Marcus ordered in a voice devoid of its earlier infirmities. To most, it would have been an intimidating change, but Elizabeth could still detect some lingering reasons for concern; mainly the slight intake of breath before he spoke and the way his teeth were gritted throughout his speech. She was grateful for the way his right arm was apparently not as powerful when compared to its opposite, as Marcus used his limb to push her out the new exit he'd made.

Elizabeth landed on grass she quickly realized was not wet with morning dew. The fumes rising from the spreading puddle of gasoline were making her throat turn raw and her eyes were burning while they filled with streams of angry tears.

When she was stumbling away from the scene, Elizabeth missed Marcus's own departure, an affair that wasn't nearly as clumsy as her own. Despite that, it was impossible for her to miss the spontaneous eruption of fire around the car's engine block, probably brought on by a damaged spark plug.

Loosing a startled yelp as the flames ignited the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and various other elements found in the air with a sharp bang, Elizabeth turned to watch Marcus throw himself forward. It was an impossible leap, almost ten feet in distance, and Elizabeth had a nagging suspicion his legs were covered in small lights right about now. He landed on his feet in the road's center, normally a dangerous place to stand, but it wasn't like any other drivers would be using it any time soon. The ground where he'd jumped from had two clear indents where he'd pressed his feet into the earth.

"Are you alright Elizabeth?!" Marcus shouted over the growing roar of the fire. There was concern in his voice, but Elizabeth's attention was more fixated on the heat rising at a rate symmetrical with the inferno's size. It was growing exponentially, if it spread for much longer it would-

"Move your ass!" Marcus ordered in a voice that was equal parts panic and disbelief. Responding to his words, Elizabeth snapped free of her thoughts and bolted for the other recently wrecked vehicle, the Little. It wasn't clear even to her why she had picked that as her destination. She supposed it was because the Little was the closest landmark and she would naturally feel compelled to head towards it.

"The Hell?" Marcus questioned in rising frustration. *Is this woman insane?* Lacking any answer, he trotted over to Elizabeth. He could hear sirens in the distance, a sure sign that the usual Los Angeles traffic had failed to slow the arrival of the emergency responders.

Stopping at Elizabeth's side, Marcus began trying to pry her away from the antique that had caused this whole debacle. It flitted through his mind to wander where the car had come from, after all there hadn't even been a place to turn onto this road where the vehicle had made its sudden appearance, but Elizabeth's frantic efforts to open the crumpled driver's door demanded his full attention.

She was pulling on the latch, but the door's distorted frame wasn't budging. Marcus wasn't certain why she didn't just reach over and pull the man out of the vehicle, the cabin wasn't enclosed in cars this old, but one look at the unconscious driver explained everything.

The man was at least six feet tall, and he probably weighed close to one hundred 'an sixty pounds. Plenty of it appeared to be lean muscle as the stranger had the same sculpted build of all the soldiers he'd first met back at Fort Smith about five years ago, and that was unsettling. Marcus found himself reaching for his handgun for reassurance, the same one he'd strapped under his seat for easy access, the same one currently being heated in the world's newest roadside oven. Feeling increasingly uneasy, Marcus decided he was going to leave the extraction to someone else, and he sure as HELL wasn't going to let Elizabeth take care of it.

"Elizabeth you need to stop. The 'thorities are almost here, and you need to leave the rescue to the professionals." It sounded fairly reasonable to Marcus, but Elizabeth reacted like he'd suggested she strangle the driver instead. She took her hands off the door, but only to shove Marcus hard enough to send him back a few paces. Her eyes held an insane gleam, and she spoke like someone suppressing the urge to scream as she returned to her desperate efforts.

"NO! I WON'T LEAVE HIM, NOT AGAIN!"

"Again? What are you talking about?"

"BOOKER, MARCUS, WE HAVE TO SAVE BOOKER!"

Author's Note: As always, please Read and Review. All comments are appreciated.

(1)The 'Little' was an automobile built in 1912 and 1913, and only 3,500 models were produced. It was priced close to a third as much as another vehicle, the first Chevrolet, was released. It was produced by William C. Durant and The Little Car Company of Flint, Michigan.