The bars in Denver are obligated by law to close at 2:00 a.m. Last call, last call: almost universally signaled by the sudden blare of oh-god-the-lights. Some late night partiers repair to Pete's Kitchen or the Waffle House to load up on carbohydrates in hopes of cushioning tomorrow's hangover. Others, well.
For others, 2:00 a.m. is way too damned early.
After-party, Sera had said. This moment of hangtime, of awareness, of sharpened, study. The first time she'd really roused from her strange little cocoon at Dan's side was to say hello to Kiara. Maybe she still needed most of her energy to heal whatever had gone-wrong inside her.
Whatever time Kiara arrives, the door is open. The truth is: the door's open all night. The door is always open at 719 Corona Street, even when its most compelling resident is absent. Some people still prefer climb up the steps and stand on the front porch with its unicycle and ashtray and string hammock and porch swing and collection of rainboots and umbrellas and junk mail and recycling and knock and wait for someone to answer and someone always answers but, the door is open.
Music inside, not as loud as you'd think, not as loud as you'd <i>attribute</i> to someone like Sera, but it is after 2:00 a.m. and they are also - oddly - rather good neighbors. So, music, somewhere. The foyer with its polished hardwoods, its collection of antiques and contemporary pieces, its collection of coats mounded on the hatrack like a great shuffling monster-muppet. The front parlor to the right is dimly light and from the noise inside whoever is in there has taken advantage of the isolated, dark space to make out. The hallway from the foyer leads to the warm white kitchen, the living room. That's where the people are.
Kiara
Little after 2:30AM when she appears. And she does - sort of just - appear.
The way people with a standing invitation did, one moment someone passes in front of the kitchen door and there's space and one minute longer on the return trip and there's this young woman leaning there, half settled against the doorjamb with masses of dark hair that fall around lean shoulders in waves and bangs that have grown out enough to tease the edges of her eyelashes. She's still wearing that dark fur-lined coat and those knee high boots and there's the red lipstick, of course.
Same goes for her eyes, the edges smudging just barely, giving Kiara Woolfe the muddled, weary-at-the-edges-come-2AM attitude that just fits, really. It's the mood and the energy and she leans there, the Verbena, one hip cocked out, feet crossed and really she's just -
For a while, for a beat she's just absorbing the atmosphere where the light spills over into that giving kitchen warmth. Skirting with the edges of it the way she's seemed to have been all night. Hand in a pocket, head half tilted back as if she were a little high (she could have been - but she's not, at least, not right now). Just watching the gathering - the interplay of people with this vague little smile teasing the edge of her mouth. She can feel Serafine here and beyond that - when she touches the edges of her fingers to the wall, slides them against the paintwork - the history, too. The phantom echo of other days, the ghosts that lived inside a home.
That hummed inside Corona Street.
Felt it acutely of late, Kiara. The spiritual bleed-over, the essence of
things around her. It's become far easier than it ever used to be to
reach out and touch (reach through, too). Still, it's a brief thing, just the slip of fingers over that wall and away.
She
lets herself into the kitchen (and into the peripheral awareness of
others) with this little contained motion, a sweep of her hair over a
shoulder, the tug down of the zip on her coat. She smells faintly of
woodsmoke and the chill clinging outside.Serafíne
The house is old. Not as old as Denver, sure, but old. Older than anyone currently inhabiting it. Older than their parents, and perhaps older than their parents' parents, and it has been thoroughly lived in. Perhaps more so in the past two-and-change years than at any point before but: easy to feel the bleed-over when you are half in another world. The walls, the floorboards, the antiques and the more recent treasures all have more solidity in the other-world than most structures. Nothing here awake that she can sense or feel but maybe not precisely sleeping, either.
Call it: sleep-walking.
--
Such a tangle of strangers here. Strangers and those vague sort of acquaintances one acquires in cities, the extended networks, the friends-of-friends, the guy you don't realize was working out on the treadmill next to you at the Absolute Fitness, the chick who waits tables at the Greek diner you slip into when you need a really good gyro-and-fries or a cup of black coffee-sludge instead of an artisinal coffee-drink. Strangers and more familiar faces. Over by the stove a tall, curvy chick with milk-white skin and one of those retro hairstyles that should be too big to fail, but isn't. Lipstick precisely as crimson as Kiara always sports, which has been more recently reapplied. That's Dee, and she's leaning back against the counter by the stove in close conversation with a guy and a girl, animate, head back, laughing and she keys in on Kiara first. This little burr of something that is slow-developing awareness.
Oh.
Dark eyes lifting over the shoulders of one of her friends to find that spot in the room that makes her breath catch. It's different from the way Sera makes her breath catch. Different from the way Davie made her breath catch. Different from the way -
- but, oh. And Dee is so fine, so straight-laced, so transparent that her Oh is visible on her mouth. Perfect little crimson circle.
She's about to head over, play hostess, offer to take Kiara's coat and add it to the muppet pile over the coat-tree in the foyer or toss it on a bed somewhere, to be reclaimed later. Sera appears first, close to that threshold, coming from the big living room with the wide windows that look onto the back garden. She has changed since their encounter in the park, when she was in fishnets and heels, leather jacket and a miniscule black dress. The heels are gone, she's all stocking-footed. An impression of a men's button-down, unbuttoned three or four steps past the point of modesty, white, but loose enough around her frame that one can still maintain the pretense. And a tuxedo coat, assuredly too large for her. Thigh-high fishnets with these little bowed garters. And that's it. Think of lingerie as she moves because hey, who needs pants in her own home.
Not a Cultist of Ecstasy.
--
Mouth a little bruised, hair a little wild. The fringe is a bit grown out, enough to be molded into a few pincurls when she's of a mind and: soft and dark and fine as a short-haired rabbit.
"Kiara. What'll you have?" Better than she was earlier. Easier and more natural, buoyed up by the wamrth and the life and - Kiara with a strangely, slidingly lucid. Dark eyes skim over Kiara with a supple, bruising grace. "Let me get your coat."
SerafíneAnd: Per + Empathy / Seeing Past The Mask.
(Specifically: is Kiara in the mood to talk to Sera? Or does she need a place to be-and-not-think for a while?)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
KiaraThe Verbena tonight is reminiscent of the low burning campfire. The glow and spark of the embers was present and with the right application, with stoking, with kindling applied, it would burn far more brightly again but right now - it's banked, more a promise and an idea of something stronger than what was gleaned on the surface.
(Doesn't mean Dee doesn't feel it, though. It's hard to ignore it, sometimes. The way they got under the skin. All of them, not just Kiara. Not just Serafine).
Is she in the mood to talk? She may have some willingness to, but not in the kitchen. Under the lights and buzzing with people. There's a way she lingers, stays near the edges of the room that speaks on a level her words don't. She's not here out of a desire to be loosely, easily social.
She's there by invitation but - it feels, the way those dark eyes settle on the Cultist and remain there as she passes off her coat - as if she's only there for Serafine. Because of Serafine and that's where her focus is going to stay.
-
"Wine, if you have something open."
She shrugs the coat off and passes it over, beneath there is more layering (Denver's moodiness rolling toward lashing snow and rain), a deep purple sweater in soft knitted cotton, beneath it some black undershirt; a camisole perhaps too. There's that gem around her neck now she's freed from the heavier coat; a simple crystal piece suspended on a fine silver chain. Her wrists rattle with bundled bracelets, her fingers and ears gleaming with adornments.
She looks the part of Kiara Woolfe, moves like her. Sets her fingers against the counter-top and casts Dee, casts the whole house, those brief, brilliant flashes of teeth and red, red lips. But the facade feels as brittle as it looks it costs her - playing a part was what it was.
It took a better actress than the brunette to maintain some semblance of believably with it. She wasn't built for it, you see - the dance around the bruises. Better to apply force, to feel the sting than pretend the wound wasn't festering.
"Otherwise, surprise me." She smiles, another brief cast off. More sincerity to this one, though. As she leans into the counter. Follows Serafine's trajectory around. "How was the gig tonight?"
SerafíneKiara sheds her coat and Sera takes it, right, only to hand it off to Dan who comes up behind her. The interplay between them as natural and connected as any. His is a long shadow down the front hallway but instead of adding to the monster-muppet-pile of coats he opens the antique wardrobe in the front hall, fishes out a hanger and hangs it the fuck up.
Then there's someone emerging from the front parlor, a couple of someones, all dissheveled and ready to take their leave but maybe not before lingering in the corridor for a while to talk with one of the hosts who brought them together.
--
Wine, Kiara requests, if they have something open. And: even if this isn't exactly a wine household, they always have something open, especially on nights like this when everyone has to bring something bottles of wine and bottles of whiskey and bottles of tequila stack up on the kitchen counters like corded firewood. They go through them just as quick, mind.
Sera sorts through those bottles with the gauzy precision of someone who is perfectly fucked-up: who has achieved that glowing point of equilibrium where they world is fuzzy at its edges and golden everywhere in between, where he head is buzzing sure but not yet spinning and comes up with one and then another and then a wine glass and then Dee glances at the bottle and gently replaces the chosen wineglass with the more bulbous sort intended for the enjoyment of a nice red wine and Sera pads back across the kitchen, holding two bottles in one hand and two glasses in the other. One of those glasses has lime slices and a salt shaker so it is a fair guess what bottle she has choosen for herself.
Neat little hipcheck for Kiara is a sort of invitation to follow: out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
"Show was great. Felt right, you know? Haven't felt that right in a while."
Left turn at the top takes them to Sera's room.
--
Which is a window onto chaos all its own.
Sera heads straight for the window seat, picking her way over discarded clothes, boots, shoes, books, Things That Have No Identity but might assume one if one were to pull them out of the pile. High heels and combat boots and canvases and photographs and showposters and a frog-thing carved by a guy with a chainsaw and a dream on a two-lane road somewhere in the North Carolina mountains.
There are other places to sit: an oversized velvet-covered armchair that not yet buried in clothing because she hasn't been home long enough to change that many times. The bed, of course, with its mound of white sheets and duvet in the center.
"What about you?"
KiaraShe hasn't been in Serafine's bedroom since the first time. (Or was it the second?).
There's a little hesitation on the threshold as she remembers that, or them, or it. Any and all of the things memory washes up in the moments between climbing the stairs and setting her feet into the chaos of the Cultist's bedroom. She settles on the armchair after a little tick back and forth with dark eyes. The bed feels like an intimacy to her - maybe an invasion of space she isn't sure they have any right to any longer.
That she does, anyway.
Curls up there and then leans back, crossing her legs and sort of slouching, sliding down a little into the giving embrace of the cushions. She looks (sounds) tired, Kiara. Which was telling in its own way: she was a Life Mage, a healer. She had no cause (no need) to feel wrung out unless -
"Honestly? I don't know."
Her mouth framed down in a sharp frown. Her eyes tick over to the other woman. "I'm glad to see you back." Back. Fully dimensional. The absent tug of her mouth at the corner spells that translation out. "Things have been going on while you were gone, you know?" She sits up, sweeps her hair back with both hands. Nothing about the way she frames it makes them sound like happy things.
SerafíneWhatever else she is, Sera belongs here and doesn't seem to give quite the same sort of damn about what belongs to what or whom or when. If Kiara sprawled over the bed with the bottle of wine for a solid gossip session and a snuggle and a good platonic cry, she wouldn't mind. If Kiara sat neatly at the edge, quietly and consciously avoiding the sleepy intimacy of that nest of soft sheets and the warm duvet, she wouldn't mind. She eschews definitions or at least, skews them, and she has slept in that bed and cried in that bed and had sex in that bed and dreamt in that bed: the random firings of neurons sure, but also: prophecy. Takes selfies in there pretty goddamned regularly and also: quiet nearly died there, once. The door locked up tight, lungs filling with her own blood -
- now though, Sera curls up in the windowseat. The garden is dark, there are these stark little swirls of snow that lash out of the darkness toward the glass and the bare limbs of the big old oak shudder and swing with each new gust of wind and the glass is chilly but the room itself is warm warm warm and Kiara takes the armchair that is not as swallowed-by-clothing as it usually is and Sera hands off the bottle-of-wine (a Malbec) and glass, reaching out, leaning across the space between them with a fine and rather precarious sort of grace that seems to belong to her body, not her mind.
--
This stitch between her brows when Kiara says that she does not know. But Sera does not challenge the other woman about not-knowing the way Hawksley might her. Just: a stitch. That resurfaces into a vague grimace close-to-pain as Kiara says that she is glad to see Sera back -
- because, yeah. Seriously. That shit sucked.
--
But it is passing, not lingering. Something restrained, leashed back into a quietly bruising empathy.
"Tell me what happened?"
KiaraThe Verbena pours out a glass as she asks what happened.
The inky red liquid spilling into it and lapping at the edges as Kiara's indelicate maneuvering steers it dangerously close to dribbling over the side. She salvages it though and leans down to set the bottle somewhere in a clearing between clothes and furniture and the details of Serafine's world. This precise placement that allows it within arm's reach of the chair should the brunette seek it out again (she may well, for the story she leans into the arm of the chair she's adopted for the evening to tell).
A throwback of it, first. Kiara tips the glass to her lips and closes her eyes to swallow it; breathing out after she does as if she'd been holding her breath to drink all the faster. There's something captivating to that, the way she surrenders to the act of it - licking the edge of her lower lip, dangling the glass between her fingers.
She's all edges, tonight, the pagan.
Those dark, mascara smudged eyes travel to Sera and she frames her thoughts with this absent, near-transparent shrug. It's like that I don't know of earlier. A sort of helpless surrender to the impossibility of it all, the complicated tangles and snares that had been Kiara's life of recent days. And then: "There was a Nephandus in the city. Michael, the Euthanatos - " Kiara's brows draw in a little. She corrects herself after a beat, almost as an afterthought. " - Chakravanti. He was here, hunting it."
She shifts a little, her dark hair tumbles over her cheek, dips half her features into shadows. They draw along her cheekbone, the length of her nose. Veil one dark eye. "Turns out two of his former students, Farrah and River, made it before him. Grace brought Michael to see me. Apparently he'd been blacking out." There was a long stretch of silence, broken only by the music spilling from floors below them.
Kiara's eyes tick over Sera's shoulder, out the window, to the weather punishing the trees, shaking their limbs.
"Turns out there was a connection, between him and the Nephandus. The Artist, that's - what he was called. A past life of Michael's, Alice, she'd been tormented by him. When the Artist tried to use Michael, get into his head, Alice took control of Michael, instead. She didn't realize she was dead and was taking vengeance with Michael's body.
She killed those young men who went missing here." Kiara draws her lip between her teeth, rotates the glass in her fingers. "Michael and Grace needed me to find a way to stop Alice taking control when these mental attacks happened.
It took a while, but I finally did it. Reached Alice. She'd walled herself off into this Dreamscape. This reality where she refused to believe anything had happened that did. I had to - " The Verbena leans back, meets Serafine's eyes. " - make her remember dying. And when I finally convinced she was dead, the Artist took notice. Took control of Michael in my apartment. Took my knife and - "
She frowns, sharply. "I managed to banish Alice. Once I did that, his connection was broken but - he was going to kill me. The Nephandus. With Michael's hands." She finishes softly, turns her face. "It's hardly the first time I've been in a dangerous situation, you know, but feeling that. The anger. The hatred in the Artist. I feel like he's under my skin."
SerafíneSera is framed in the window, head, shoulders, spine against the wall, her profile pale against the darkness beyond. Her hair is twisted behind her head, cushioning her skull, tangled around her shoulders, all those loose (dyed) blond curls. Stocking-clad feet flat on the window seat, knees drawn up, arms loose around them. The bottle of tequila tucked between her knees, one hand loosely wrapped around the neck. She hasn't taken a shot yet, but when she does she won't bother with the shotglass she snagged. Maybe she'll remember she wants a lime, and a lick of salt from her skin to chase down the burn with a cauterizing sharpness.
--
And she's (more than) a little fucked up but in this moment she is so present, stripped of artifice such that she seems - strangely - sober. Quiet, as Kiara tells her story.
Right at the beginning, the stitch of recognition has her straight brows drawn close and pulls her dark eyes back - fixed - solid - over to Kiara. This complex array of emotions swim through her eyes, underscored by the dark sludge of guilt.
Listening, right on through.
--
Quiet after, too. This reverent sort of space given over to the story, which allows Kiara all the time she needs after to: think, and to: process, and to: be.
And then: a notice, a though, a question that - "Did he get into your mind?" A direct look, with that, that sobriety, again. That strange clarity.
KiaraThere's this brief noise, at that.
Kiara pushing the fall of her hair back over a shoulder so the other is bare, the line of her neck. She lowers her face, framing the glass in two hands. Lifting it to take another sip and then forgoing it to answer, this twinge of darker humor threaded through it: "I was worried, you know, before all of this. About what would happen if the Union got their hands on me. They don't particularly like loose ends and when I left New York - " She offers this little smile, this raise of her brows.
"I'm a big loose end for them. I asked Ian to show me how to protect my mind. Turns out, the Technocracy weren't my biggest concern on that front." She takes another sip, now. "He would have tried to. I could feel it. Instead he just stared at me and when I banished Alice - when I - " Kiara's eyes drop. "He used the knife on himself. Stabbed Michael as this last fucking - " Her smile, the little shake of her head, is agitated. A flicker of remembered anger and disbelief.
"He was just toying with me. But - he's dead now." She finishes, reaches for the bottle with a hand that barely shakes. The tremor settles in her voice, though. In the tense set to her jaw. "I just can't seem to forget it. The dreams I've been having. The way it looked through me. As if nothing I did would mean a damn thing.
I don't know how you forget that. Seeing it. Feeling it." She cants a look at Sera for this long minute: "I think it changes you. And that terrifies me."
SerafínePer + Empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 6, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]
SerafíneThe worm of guilt lingers. Maybe even starts burrowing but Sera leaves it be. Considers it and even turns it over inside her and glances at Kiara and -
- breathes out. Rounded mouth, curving shoulders, careful, collapsing grace, and leaves it be.
No one else needs to be burdened with it.
Certainly not Kiara.
Not now.
----
And she is so slight, Sera, so burned away, and so paradoxically given to excess that you would never credit her with the capacity for restraint. But there it is, this band of it in the line of her mouth, the minute touchbacks of attention as precise as if she were etching Kiara into being.
"Of course it changes you." Quiet. Hasn't touched the tequila since Kiara started to speak. Doesn't touch it now. "Everything changes you, or you change it. A lover leaves you, a parent gets sick. You remember someone you'd forgotten, or forget someone you said you'd always remmeber. Someone brings shrimp cocktail to a party and your best friend guilts you into trying it and you decide its not nearly as gross as you always thought it was. You wake up one day and there's a certain slant of light in the sunrise so precise it hurts. Physically."
And she breathes out, then, this long, slow sliding breath.
"You won't forget it. You know how dark some of the darkest parts of the world are now. They were always that dark. You just didn't know, before. That doesn't mean it changes you the way you think it does.
"Or could. How do you think you'll change? Why does that scare you?"
Kiara
It takes the brunette a long time to answer.
Less out of resistance to it, the idea of spilling tiny kernels of truth, littering the Cultist's bedroom, her life, with them and far more simply because the words take threading together. The way the Verbena feels about those events, weeks ago, still feels raw and bruised, the memories are vivid and tender-fresh. The oil-slick essence of the Fallen as he'd seeped into Michael's consciousness; Alice's wracked, helpless sobbing, the sting of blood on her palm from gripping her fingers too tightly around a crystal, pressed against her skin until it lacerated.
She's looking down at the wineglass between her hands for a while, Kiara.
Her mouth pinched downward into a small frown. Brows drawn low. There's a pendant that the brunette has taken to wearing of late, a crystal suspended from a fine silver chain; it finds a way to unearth itself so often from her clothing; swings low and gleams there, in the light. "Alice, Michael's past life, she was just a girl. A street kid who was taken in by her mentor. She changed her whole life. Became ... her whole life. And then the Artist happened and Alice watched her die.
Her mouth pinched downward into a small frown. Brows drawn low. There's a pendant that the brunette has taken to wearing of late, a crystal suspended from a fine silver chain; it finds a way to unearth itself so often from her clothing; swings low and gleams there, in the light. "Alice, Michael's past life, she was just a girl. A street kid who was taken in by her mentor. She changed her whole life. Became ... her whole life. And then the Artist happened and Alice watched her die.
Saw
- " She swallows, lets out a long, low breath. " - the Artist violated
her mind. Made her relive the worst parts of her life. Broke her so
badly she couldn't let go, even in death. All she had was her anger. At
him. At her mentor." Kiara leans back, frames her arm along the chair,
plays, idly with running her fingertips over it, her eyes ticking to
Serafine's face, searching it. "I understood that. The anger. Losing
your mentor before you were ready.
I think I reached
her in part because I did. We must dance pretty close to the edge, all
of us." She sits forward, her eyes bright little pinpricks and the music
reverberates softly up the stairs. The weather outside offering up a
volatility that seems matched only by the fervor of Kiara's tight little
smile, her eyes where they shine out of her face; half masked by all
that wild hair of hers.
"It scares me because I know
where that line was for her." She makes a complicated, uncertain little
face, half folds her fingers up, flexes them against her thigh. "It
scares me that I was angry enough to kill Michael that day." She offers
the last softly, reaches to throw back more wine with this aggressive,
aggrieved little motion."So damn close."
Serafine
The other creature, for her part, is also quiet. Still. Listening, assuredly, and the strung-tension in her spine, her neck, her whole spare frame suggests that she is listening actively, with an attentiveness a stranger would guess her incapable of. There is something about that active stillness that recalls the aspect of a priest - priestess, perhaps - at prayer. The silent focus, the strange, remarkably still, abandon to the moment.
--
There is so much to unpack.
She takes her time to do so. Lifts out that nuggest of guilt and <i>Feels</i> it sure and also turns it over and puts it: aside.
It belongs to some-other-time, later perhaps, or long-ago, but not now. Another thought she considers: turns over. Dismisses. Later, perhaps. Or never.
Never is also a possibility.
--
"I can help you with the dreams." First, an offer. Neat glance up with it, chin rising, tangled curls sliding over her narrow shoulders and her eyes: clear then and so direct. There is power in her skin, in her bones, in her soul and an embrace-of-that-power implicit in that offer. "If you want to sleep well, or dreamlessly. If you need surcease. For as long as you require.
"Or if you want to walk deeper into them." A sharp little sigh. "I can help with that too."
--
Straight brows crease, then. Thought, poured into her lungs. Sometimes it <i>hurts her</i> to think like this: clear and straight without the prism of fancy or the veil of excess that marks so much of her life. She does it anyway.
"Someone I - " pause, here. This sudden, fleeting little smile, braced with an ache that just: rises, rises, rises. " - someone whose judgment I trust told me once - when I was feeling so <i>filthy</i> I thought I might never surface from the muck - that I needed to find something that made me feel clean. And do that, again and again, with intent, until I did.
"He said - well, that's what ritual is. Form and intent shaped by will. If the anger is overwhelming you, maybe you should find something that makes you feel peaceful, calm, alive: and do it. Again and again, until that comes true."
--
"May I tell you a story?"
Kiara
There is so much to unpack.
Layers of scar tissue that the Verbena turns over and lays bear there for consideration and study. She'll do the same in a day or so from tonight, sit across from a Mercurial Elite she saw in the depths of his own trauma, lost to Quiet for weeks and offer what bare scraps of awareness she can muster for the shape and size of her own psychological wounds. Tell him that she's angry and the anger felt as unclean as the lingering dreams - the faces and voices that cling to her, even in wakefulness.
About Sera helping her walk deeper into them. Wading into the inner landscape.
Serafine
<i>Maybe</i>, Kiara says, <i>she doesn't know if - </i>
- and Sera gives her a spare but very direct look, framed by the supple curve of her fine little mouth.
"You don't have to be ready, now or ever. I could just give you a good night's sleep, or three, or a dozen. As close to dreamless as you need."
Time to rest and to process and to heal without reliving the worst moments again and again in the immediacy of her sleeping mind.
--
The story. She looks away before she begins it. Her profile this cheated three-quartered view angled toward the darkness beyond. The cut of her cheekbone, the jaw fine as a bird's wing. The strange admixture of delicacy and excess that defines her. Outside: the city, still and quiet, the suggestion of a moon somewhere beyond the bare limbs of the old oak tree that dominates the back yard. Music and strangers' voices mingling downstairs, muddled into a patterned rhythm punctuated by outbursts of laughter.
"The first mage I ever met was a guy named Jonah. I was eighteen and I had a different name then and I'd been awake for god-knows-how-long without really quite understanding what the fuck was going on with me. No money to my name, not really, half the time I was sleeping around to have a place to stay the night. He was an Orphan but he kinda took me under his wing and we had that whole, <i>you're not crazy, the world is</i> chat.
"The second mage I met gave me the name I have now and brought me in to the Ecstatics. She was loaded, posh and gorgeous, <i>to the manor born</i>, you know? Jonah couldn't stand her.
"The third mage I met called himself John Montague, though I'm sure that wasn't his name. He liked me and he used Jonah to get close to me, keep tabs on me. I thought he was exciting and I was always pushing Jonah to - "
An interruption. She breathes out, all sharp. Cuts herself off, leans her head back, eyes closed.
"It was like walking on a bridge made of straight razors over a pit of sucking quicksand. I mean, Jonah made a living as a dealer but somehow Montague always had the <i>best</i> shit.
"He was Fallen. I didn't know that at the time."
Closes her eyes then, Sera. And she's silent, for a long, long time.
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