"...same thing that always happens, I guess." That voice that swam into focus was a familiar one, a basso rumble. "Trial. Execution." It was in the same space as Morana, but not nearby. On the other side of a relatively small room, perhaps. The surface under her was rock-hard, unyielding, cool. There were lights on, but they weren't especially strong?indirect lighting, maybe, or a lamp on elsewhere in the room. The air smelled crisp, metallic, antiseptic. Her gorgeous raspberry dress was missing, as were her shoes; they'd been replaced by something that felt like plain cotton. A sheet had been draped over her, and her face left bare. She was not bound.

"So," another familiar voice said. A woman's voice. "We'll be the ones to retire, you think?"

"I hope so," Reece said. There was a rustle of paper and fabric. "She's the one they want. He's a traitor, so he'll probably be executed too."

Morana's breathing didn't change perceptibly as she swam back to awareness, nor did her eyes open, not immediately. She stretched out the rest of her senses, hearing, smell, the nameless other that was magic. Assessed her situation, and added little ticks of information from every word from Reece and Keeya before she finally let her eyelids slide open. Black, Void black and empty. Her wards were either corrupted by the woman in the room with her or missing completely, probably the result of the elf that hovered at the edge of her vision. The rest of her magic was there, but her control felt imperfect, wavering. It could have been the remnants of the drug that still coursed in her veins, or that could have been Keeya's fault as well.

The wall that stretched up beside her was painted a glossy gray up to a height of ten or twelve feet before meeting a slightly paler ceiling. The bed or platform she was on had been folded out of the wall. Two thick cables held it in place: one at her feet, one above her head. The lighting came from a strip set into the wall at waist height that ringed the room. Keeya and Reece stood with their backs to her, consulting a flat plastic pad. Judging from the difference in shape of the metal wall panels beyond them, they were standing beside the door.

"She's going to need another dose in a few minutes," Reece said, and turned to look over his shoulder at her.

"She really isn't." A low purr as Morana swung to her feet, glanced down at the simple cotton gown that had replaced her dress. Her lips curved up, and the look she sent through her lowered eyelashes at Reece was hot as flames. "Darlings. This was very clever. I must congratulate you. But where is your third?"

The decking underfoot was as chilly as the 'bed' had been. His eyes widening, Reece pivoted to face her, drawing and pointing what appeared to be a mini flechette gun from a holster at his waist. Rather than answering, he said to Keeya, "Go get him. And another dose." Keeya, clutching the pad, looked between her and Reece before nodding and turning to go.

This was the problem with relying on a wardsmith who worked in sounds and colors and sensations. This was also the problem with relying on a human appearance to limit human capabilities. Morana tipped back her head, opened her mouth. The sound that issued forth was not something that vocal cords could actually produce. High-pitched to the point of pain and physical damage: the sound struck, aimed, at the elven woman and anything glass in the room. And she danced the frequency up and down to hit the resonance points of the glass, to shatter it as explosively as possible.

Keeya shrieked, doubled over and dropped even before Morana slipped into her deadly vibrato, the pad flipping out of her hands and slapping face-down onto the decking. The entire lighting strip cracked, pow-pow-pow right down the length of the walls as those soundwaves hit it...and the room was plunged into darkness. But only momentarily. Reece, on one knee and bleeding from both ears, pushed backward toward the door, which opened by sliding into the wall behind him. The opening door lit him from behind, outlined a harsh rectangle of white light into the room. As soon as he could see again, he fired.

Morana wasn't where she'd been standing when the lights exploded. She was also not terribly concerned about the needles flying through the air when the capsules attached to them were nothing but shards. No, this body she was wearing now drew from one of the cheetah-lycanthropes, and the lunge of speed took her low to the ground, toward the elven woman. Despite Reece's weapon, that was her more immediate threat. Teeth and claws were, undoubtedly, deadly weapons.

Keeya had been rendered unconscious by the black blast of hate?something vital had ruptured inside her with the attack, and teeth and claws made very short work of her. Reece scrambled to his feet beyond and ran out into the hallway, shouting an incoherent phrase over and over again.

Morana flowed back to her feet, humaniform again, and licked sweet copper blood from her lips, her fingers, as she prowled out into the hallways. And her wards were back, now, visible and crackling sanguine lightning sparks as she moved in a shield of Nothing. "Come, darling, live down to your mistakes." Abyssal followed, hissing and foul, as she Reached for the running half-troll. He jerked to a stop in mid-stride, one booted foot hovering off the floor, his eyes wild and panicked.

Beyond him, something flickered in the air, less than a shimmer and gone again.

Another cut of words sliced reality into razor-thin shards from his feet up, slowly. "You took both of us, darling. Where is the Benandanti?" But Morana didn't give Reece a chance to answer, not really. He came apart like a ball of yarn cut in half, bits and pieces of him splattering the hallway around her and behind her. She left Nothing to consume him as she continued her stalk down the hall, looking for doors, other containment.

Two more steps along the hallway and Tahli put in his entirely predictable appearance. He'd pulled the trigger on his gun, and his concealment fell apart as the needle-tipped darts chuffed out of the barrels and chewed their way up her leg. About half the darts vanished into the Nothing of her wards, but the rest made an absolute mess of her calf and she could feel a blur of numbness starting to spread out from the impact sites. But that was far removed from her lungs, her throat, her mind. Fingers twisted through five dimensions while Abyssal tore the air.

Tahli was slammed backward into the wall, suspended a foot above the ground, and it wasn't metaphysical fire that sparked and flashed through his hair and skin. His shrieking was eerily like Keeya's before the ability to scream was taken from him altogether. The smell in the hallway?which looked exactly like the room had, with paneled metal walls, a lighting strip, a paler floor and ceiling?was indescribable.

Delicious.

Void-black and red were still sparking and flaring and swallowing her eyes as she limped down the hall, checking the paneled walls for doorways while the tranq eased its way through her blood and started to blur her vision. The hallway had gone straight ahead and to the right from the room she'd just exited. Here, along that right-hand stretch, were doors on either side of her at about twenty-foot intervals?identifiable by the shape of the panels and the matte outline of a hand-sized square on the wall beside each of them. A few feet ahead of her was a t-junction, with the hall continuing on to her left and ahead. Another forty feet beyond that, the hall she was in turned left. In this hall there were four doors to her left, three (counting the one she'd come through) to her right.

The tranquilizer was slow to take effect. What should have been instantaneous was hindered by her physiology, by the wards, by the injection site so far from her major organs. She leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, and concentrated. Feeling, reaching for the burn that meant John Benandanti. Then she opened her eyes again, and limped on in the direction she was facing, toward the right. John was somewhere ahead and to her left. It was almost as bad as playing hot-or-cold with the power source in Vrashne.

Her breath was a frustrated, pain-filled hiss out with every step as she shaped her hand to Keeya's, slapped each of those hand-sized squares as she passed them. The first door on her left opened onto an unlit room: boxes wrapped in plastic sat on metal shelving. The door on her right opened onto a barracks, the only furniture six rows of bunk beds. Three of them were made with sheets and blankets. The hallway on her left stretched out featurelessly for twenty or more feet before opening onto a cross. There were doors down by the cross: with the state she was in, they might as well have been a million miles away. Another storage room on her left. A tiled shower room on her right. A door that refused to open on her left. John was not in that locked room, but somewhere beyond.

She opened the door that refused her. Shredded it, really, into absolute Void. Her control was fracturing as the tranqs finally really started to hit, and blurred out her vision again. She fought and cleared it, limped into the room, and caught herself on the wall with a blood-soaked palm. Reece's blood, mostly, with a bit of Keeya's for good measure.

Her mouth was twisted into a snarl, a guttural stream of soul-searing wrongness that rose and fell with the blurring of the tranqs. She was confronted with a perfectly ordinary cold storage, rows of boxes and plastic containers stacked up on the shelves lining the sides of the room.

Guttural words hissed away when she crumpled. Straight down, and the impact would have hurt if she'd been awake at all to feel it. Lights out.

He took the next step out onto a low-pile pale cream carpet, in a pale cream room touched only with accents of color. He knew what was going to happen next. His arms tightened around her, and he waited for it. And it happened. Convulsions that grabbed her, worse for the close contact she'd had with the Void during the escape from that building. Her muscles seized with a nearly back-snapping arch and her lungs caught a gasp until just as abruptly the tightening released all at once. This was what all that upper-body strength was good for. When she bucked in his arms he kept her from jackknifing head-first into the floor, biceps straining, tendons leaping in his wrists and elbows.

Her voice was low and rough. "I always...always forget how that feels."

When she went limp and started croaking at him he looked around, considering, then carried her to the bedroom. The bathroom was on the other side, right? It probably won an award or two in some local rag, the way it looked. He wanted some quality time in there. And some bleach. Because someone saw his manparts without his consent. "Who's we?"

Strong men were infinitely useful. She curled up, rested her head against his broad chest as he headed directly for the bathroom. Which was the main reason she'd wanted her place, actually, because the huge shower with the multiple showerheads and rainfall plate really seemed like salvation just at the moment. "The Organization?my organization, now. You don't think I could do all of it on my own, darling? Though I admit quite a lot is done through contacts and allies rather than directly. Oh. There's also quite a bit of espionage and political manipulation that I do handle personally." Which reminded her, and she frowned. "I've got to go back to Vrashne, soon. I need the power source there. And there's a few other matters in Teobern and Icecrest I need to finish, as well."

Maybe she considered it bragging rather than honesty, and that was why she was so comfortable with spilling it all. Or maybe this was just another lie. He thought about that, too, as he carried her in. Something in her hair was sticking to his cheek, and it was probably someone and not just something, and he could be disgusted about that later. Right now he had other things to think about. She named the names of places he'd never heard of, and talked about 'matters' like it was a tea party that she needed to invite a few friends over for. And she was warm and soft in his arms. And being this close to her felt like it was roasting the flesh off his bones. Nudging a stack of towels out of the way, he settled her onto the countertop between the two sinks.

She'd just about recovered her bearings after the trip through God's Own Presence, finally. She licked her lips, studied him thoughtfully with opaque eyes. "Are all your dates this eventful, darling?"

"Next time we order take-out tandoori and watch one of the Terminator movies." After settling her down he just...stood there for a minute or so, looking down at her, considering her opacity. He could guess at its reasoning, but he'd probably be wrong. And what if he was right? Wouldn't that be a lie, too? His own expression was full of a dozen different subtleties, not one of them prominent over the others.

"The which movies?" She blinked at him with sudden surprise and a look of vague puzzlement. She'd had a very hit-or-miss exposure to popular culture, apparently. A tilt of her head to the side slapped her face with one of the Reece-soaked strands of hair, and she made a sudden face. "Also, if you aren't going to start the shower, darling, I am." Distraction from the unreadable look on his face; the man could baffle her as nobody else could.

"Sorry." He turned, gawked at the shower for a beat, then pulled the door open and started turning knobs and pushing buttons or whatever the hell it was going to take to get the damned thing to work. He was tired. He'd had a long day. But he figured it out: one knob each for hot and cold, and a no-kidding remote and touchpad for the shower-head selection and pulse strength and spray. No-fog glass in the mirrors and shower enclosure. The rest of the apartment was high-quality without extravagance. In the bathroom? She'd spared no expense to get exactly what she wanted.

Morana eased from the counter, padded back into the bedroom at a slow limp to chase up something that wasn't grey gown or scrubs. What she came back with was a pair of really very ugly pajama pants that looked sized for John, a white men's t-shirt, and another long button-up nightshirt the color of midnight skies. "I'm afraid you'll have to use my soap and such, John."

"Do you charge extra for the and such?" Jesus, Joseph and Mary. He started fumbling with the remote. She wasn't really planning on taking a shower tonight, was she? All the possible world-ending issues they'd been so casually bandying about were forgotten. His face lit up like it was Christmas and he was five years old and just won the Transformers jackpot. A remote. For the shower. Seriously.

His sudden thrill let her laugh. "Only if you really want me to, darling. Shall I leave you to play for a little bit, or do you think you can bring yourself to share the space?"

He blinked. He looked over his shoulder. And then John blushed.

She laughed again, started to pull off the blood-soaked grey cotton gown while steam started to fill up the shower enclosure?the man did like things hot. "It's waterproof, as well?the remote. So you can take it into the shower with you and change the settings on the fly. I'm fond of the pulse massage from the showerheads while the rainfall plate is going."

"Really?" He looked at the remote like he fully expected it to start showering him with pizza and hummers.

"Mmm." And since he was playing with the remote, she just cracked open the door and slipped right past him into the running water, lifted her voice to be heard over it. "I love things that do exactly what I want them to?don't you?"

He squinted into the steam. "I could take that nine or ten different ways." And pulled the door open and offered the remote to her, pretending that the view and the sudden lack of a Void playing hell on his nerves hadn't already begun to tighten him up.

"Take the one that's most appealing to you then, darling?and do join me. There's plenty of room in here, and you can help me get my back. Dried blood is a terrible annoyance to scrub off when you can't quite reach." She claimed the remote, smiled at him, and turned on the rainfall, the pulse massage with three rapid punches of the buttons. Then she slid the remote onto the hook ready for it on the wall.

There was even a hook.

Which made sense, because otherwise she'd have to hold it all the time that she was in the shower. Just at the moment, she was trying to run her fingers through her hair while the first wash of blood vanished down the drain. That was mesmerizing. He stared, and how convenient was it that the glass wasn't fogging up between them? The scrubs were starting to become an annoyance, so he got them out of the way. "I think..." What was he talking about again? Oh, yeah. "In my toasters, sure. Otherwise I think I'd rather be surprised." Cooler air wafted in with him behind her, and the overhead rain...thingy...deal...proved that it was happy to see him by promptly flattening his hair, pouring water into his eyes and reminding him that he was still wearing a contact.

Through the blur he saw her frown at a bit of black ick and let that hit the drain too. That seemed to be the worst of it, and she turned and reached past him for the shampoo. "Really? I tend to prefer plans to surprises, but?" And she laughed, softly. "Something tells me you've figured that out already."

He burbled something as the water ran down his face?yes, he'd turned his face right up into it?and sank into the joy that was her presence sans a dip in three hundred degree oil. And stood there, only occasionally turning his head to breathe. Part of him wished he could just wash his whole head clean, run the water in one ear and out the other. But no. As she said, he did ask. There was that scent from her shampoo, touched with lilacs and lavender and a hit of something warmer?amber, maybe.

Her eyes were closed while she scrubbed her fingers through her hair and rinsed off the lather with a sigh of relief. The scabs on her legs didn't care for this at all, but the rest of her was blissfully content for the moment. "You didn't say which movies you were talking about. I've not heard of this Terminator."

He lost the contact. Then he cuddled up to her in the post-shampoo universe, flattening his big hands over her stomach and fitting her and her scabs and her scent up to him. The spray was right in his eyes again. He squeezed them shut, tangled her just-washed hair up in the burgeoning stubble on his cheek. "He'd be great in your organization." His voice was nearly as rough as hers had been after the transit, and he was a wall of muscle and grief behind her.

She sighed as he pulled her close, melted into the embrace that didn't burn under this running water, and then her mouth pulled up in a curve with an odd twist. "You asked me, darling, and I gave you what you said you wanted." A twist turned her face up toward his and into the direct spray?she couldn't keep that up long with her eyes open. "Do you wish you didn't know? Would you prefer to forget?"

"No." That single word wavered between states, a binary response with an analog twist. His mouth was gentle on her hair, painted like a moment's mad love for Art Deco over her forehead and cheek. One of the hands rubbing minute circles over her belly caught her hip almost carelessly and pulled her around to face him. Better that she didn't drown. "No." That was more certain.

"I keep wondering, you know." That was her mouth against his chest, the curve right below his collarbone. Her palms skimmed his back, the scars there, down his sides and then back up again, the same path in reverse. "What will be the breaking point. When you'll have too much, reach your limit." The way she said it almost sounded clinical?a science experiment, with abstract results. She wasn't looking up, not at him or into his eyes. Instead she slid her hand around to his chest, along the vertical scars that marked him as hers.

It hit that same nerve, the one she'd pinged earlier with her unreadable stare. He said goodbye to her hips and took her upper arms in hand instead, kneaded them as if she wore her tension there. "Hey." The Stiffy was happy to see her. The Stiffy was always happy to see her. But he could wait. "Look at me."

Steam clouded the air between them with wisps of mist, but eventually she did look up at him, expression a smooth mask of smiles, and it would have been a perfect facade if not for the little tiny flickers of blue that surfaced and died even while the water washed away Presence and Void. "What is it, darling?"

He was slow sometimes, that John, but he wasn't completely stupid. "That's what I thought." And let her go. "Turn around and I'll get your back."

Her eyes narrowed?she still couldn't tell what he was seeing when he looked into them?but she did turn. "What is what you thought?" Mildly irritated, then.

"Sometimes you push me deliberately. Just to see what I'll do." He was gentle on the first swipe up and down her back, then unexpectedly rough, turning it into a surprise deep-tissue massage session; he caught her shoulder with the other hand to stop her from escaping his evil clutches.

"Oh, that." The irritation eased away into a curve of smile that turned into a low moan at the nearly-bruising backrub. "Don't you ever do that, darling? How else would you know what to expect from a person?" Paranoia, paranoia?it was built into her fabric along with the lies (because of the lies), the suspicion, the rest of her.

Good thing the shower kept her from being able to tell when he was telling the truth, when he was lying. "I think who I am is enough of a push for you." He dug into her lower back, just above her hipbones.

She moaned again, one that ended with a very happy sigh, and finally answered. "I think, darling, that who you are is more than you've shown me so far. I want to see the rest."

"I think you're seriously overestimating me. I can't bellydance. I'm not the greatest cook. And I'm not your hired hitman." Her back was about as clean as it was going to get. He slapped the cloth over his shoulder like he thought he was Emeril fucking Lagasse, soaped his hands up, and went at her neck. His fingers and thumbs demanded she give it up.

She melted. That sound? That one right there. That was something he'd gotten her to make before. She had her eyes closed while the water sheeted down over them. "I haven't hired you to be my hitman, John, nor asked you to be. You don't have to cook or bellydance?I can do that. But I've seen the edges of the killer in you, and you touch God as if He were your own best friend... but you're here. I'm not overestimating you, darling?I'm afraid I may be seriously underestimating you." She reached backward, slid her hands against the fronts of his thighs.

"No?" He twisted her hair up, dropped it over the front of her shoulder and hit the muscles there. If his life were to get any more surreal, Salvador Dali would step into the shower with them and start splattering tigers and clock faces all over the walls. "These designer drugs, it's easy to find their chemical structures." His thighs shifted under her hands as he worked her over, the muscles tensing and coiling with each minute shift in his weight. Such a miracle that people took for granted every single day of their lives.

Blessings in disguise, or silver linings. John would never take walking for granted. Her hands slid, fingernails drew lightly over the skin in the cascading water. She let out a sigh, shook her head slightly. "Yes, if you know to look for them, or have an idea of what you're looking for. John. Mērā hai. I've told you why I hired you, why I wanted you. It's not as a hitman?you're more valuable than that?but your ability to kill, your willingness to? That interests me. Most people can't, not easily."


His breath hitched. He leaned in, set his forehead against the back of hers and stood there as all his sins were washed away. After a moment's silence he reached, threaded his fingers through hers and lifted them off himself. One squeeze and he released her, to turn his back on her. Steam and scalding-hot water and all the silence in the world. He waited for her reaction, waited to see what she?d say when she saw the ruin of his back. He?d been hiding it from her. He hadn?t wanted her to see it. Now he was showing it to her.

And maybe he should have used words. She tossed the washcloth down onto one of the benches, and her voice was thick and bitter. "There's a toothbrush for you on the counter, if you want it." A swirl of cooler air stirred the steam as she stepped out, pulled over a towel to wrap herself in, and another to twist up the soaked length of her hair. She grabbed the midnight-blue nightshirt on the way out of the bathroom.

Well. Guess he shouldn't have been so freaked out about hiding his back from her after all. That went well. Didn't it? "Thanks." He debated, scrubbed the last little bits of latex off his face?beyond getting the smell off himself, he hadn't needed the shower the way she had?and decided. "I need to go home, though."

She changed in the bedroom, frowned at the scabs the injector darts had left up her leg, took the comb from her dresser and started to pull it savagely through the tangles of her hair. "Mmm. Do be careful then, darling." Cool again, collected and rich-voiced. "Sleep well."

He finally got the water shut off. The shower door opened and closed. He scooped the flechette gun up, sighted with it. And a dripping wet, naked Benandanti went to find his brother so that murder could be done on the face of Rhydin.