Morana sat behind her desk in the newly repaired and redecorated penthouse office with her reflection shimmering off the acres of her glass windows. She pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and two fingers against the threat of incipient headache. Not only was the paperwork boring, but she hated how much time and attention it took from more important things. Vivaldi soared through speakers while she turned over the next page from her stack of reports still needing attention. Kaylan, her secretary, had left hours ago. The scent of curry still floated through the office from the remnants of her takeout dinner. She tapped her slim gold pen against the side of her leg, absently.

Vivaldi's "Summer" turned to "Autumn" while Morana made a note on the side of one piece of paper and then turned to the next with a sigh. Paperwork. It would be better dropped into the Void, if only so many of her people didn?t rely on it. She closed her eyes and stretched back for a moment, with a roll of her shoulders and arch of her spine. And then, eyes still closed, she frowned. Something was pinging on the edges of her wards. Not Sarva's erosion, this felt just a little different. Different raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck with wariness and fear: in response she extended little tendrils of herself down the lace-fine network of magic and Void to seek out the source.

Morana's concentration shattered when alarms tripped and sang through her spine. A familiar presence and Presence had breached Sarva's confinement. Benandanti. That must have been what she was feeling. "What are you doing, John?" She said into the otherwise-empty office over the singing notes of Vivaldi.

"Reece," Keeya whispered and laid her fingers from above over the very narrowest thinnest edge of the window's glass. "The wards are live. She's here." Starlight flickered where she should have been as Tahli concentrated and bent the light around them.

All three of them were mages, a tight-knit group that always worked together. Keeya and Tahli were brother and sister; Reece, two years younger, was occasionally a lover of one or the other. This was not the first corporate run they'd done, but it was by far the highest-risk of all of them. Blissed-out thugs dying in back-alley pools of their own hemorrhaged brain-parts; whores losing their contracts to some conglomerate who then farmed them out for nightly gangbangs until they died; weapons flooding the local markets of half a dozen Nexus points, just at the right instants to take advantage of an upswing in local violence. This suka's web was spun wide, wide. But the payoff meant retirement. It was worth it.

"Can you commune?" Reece asked Keeya in an almost subsonic rumble while he bent his long thin body double to lay a hand on her shoulder. The heat that bled off his touch was efficiently shunted outward to radiate into the night sky by Tahli , who clung like a spider to the corner of the roof parapet six feet away. "Or are they too far out there?"

"They're far, far strannyi," Keeya whispered. "But not so far that they don't love me, I think." A flicker of light might have been Tahli's fierce smile in response.

Keeya's and Tahli's family were noteworthy mages all, with a peculiar and interesting twist. Along with the magic borne up like prayer in their blood, they were all synesthetics. Keeya found the place in the wards she was seeking, tipped her head back, and began to sing to it. The sound became color, and color became numbers and letters, all of it in a language too foul for her to have imagined or comprehended on her own. She persuaded the wards with her vision and her magic, turning numbers and letters--the words of the ward-spell--into colors and sounds that she received in response, and tuned the difference between what she sang and what she heard until the two exactly matched and she had her result.

"Go," Keeya whispered, and the three of them merged with the wards, swinging around and down on the pre-hooked ropes to explode into the penthouse in a spray of glass and distorted landscape.

There was a crash from behind her, and a gust of cold air and high wind; glass shattered and sprayed down over the thick plush carpet with a patter that sounded like raindrops. Morana spun, and a thought flickered through her mind, bizarrely detached. Malloy is going to have a fit. We just replaced these. The wards hadn't broken or she would be flat on her face with backlash, but they had been altered, tampered with, seized. They had taken her wards! Her eyes darted for the security cameras in the corners of the room. Malloy or his people would see this attack, they?d be here within seconds - the security cameras were dead, their lights extinguished. F*ck. She started to chant in a guttural, foul language, calling the Void to her defense.

There was a flicker, a warp along the carpet, but when she looked she didn?t see anything. A stretched-long caricature of a man hit the wall and clung like a lizard, reaching for one of the spell-blades he'd conjured into being on his bandolier. A shorter man (elf?) dropped lightly into place behind the first, gently gathered up all the excess photons in a six-foot sphere around himself--the area dimmed perceptibly--and flung them all directly at Morana's face.

Reality shivered and sliced into bits as Morana Stepped - and was flung back from Void when she hit the wards that were no longer her own. F*ck. Adrenalin sent her construct body?s heart to racing. The ripping snarl of her voice rose to a shout and broke the wall of photons to sparkles of nothing but light. Through the combat, Morana could feel Sarva below, pushing against her confinement, stretching her reach around John and speaking Morana's true name. Her fingers twisted and cut Reality with flashes of sanguine lightning directed at the intruders.

The troll-man scuttled along the ceiling, away from the last shattering blast of crimson lightning and torn Reality, readying another fat handful of pain.

Being snapped Morana?s spine and whip-cracked her to her knees with shattering pain flaring in every nerve. The sudden fall, the unexpected convulsion, they saved her life--more blades whipped through the spot she'd been in just a fraction of a second before. She looked up from her hands and knees and snarled out another grating command. Red surged and pulsed and more lightning screamed toward the ceiling on a twist of Abyssal.

There was a thump behind her, a short shriek that ended on a crunch. In front of her, pieces of the knife-wielding attacker adorned her desk, the carpet, and her chair. He dripped slowly from the ceiling, along with flakes of just-dried plaster and paint. Yum. Delicious.

But what the hell was that thump-scream-crunch on the tail end of manifest Presence? Her eyes were still glowing red when she twisted, ready to fend off another attacker. It wasn't a smooth motion, but the twist kept one hand free. She snatched another handful of Void to her call. Her voice ripped through a preparatory command while she dripped blood--her own and Reece's-- onto the carpet. I?m not going to die through some half-rate assassination attempt.

As it turned out, the thump-scream-crunch was the sound of a big red wolf chewing his way through someone's neck. Crunch, crunch, went the vertebrae. The wolf shook the woman?s neck once, a hard snap that separated head from body. He dropped the pieces, and ale-brown eyes focused on Morana as the wolf?s head sunk lower on his shoulders.

Abyssal broke when Morana swallowed her words, dropped her hand. John. He wouldn?t attack her, not like this anyway. With surprise and sudden relief, she thumped the rest of the way to sitting on the glass-and-blood-splashed carpet. "There were three of them. I only saw two." There were downsides to having a body. She could feel it shaking as the surge of adrenalin faded, as pain screamed out from the slices of those knives and the burn of John's sudden arrival.

He licked his bloody chops and stalked stiff-legged toward her, carrying an inferno in his wake.

Suspicion flared back to life, chilling her veins to empty calculation. Was he hunting her after all? Had his God decided this was the time to try her defenses? Her hand half-lifted again, held ready as the bloody wolf stalked closer. "John--" Half warning and half question in her voice. She didn?t want to hurt him if she didn?t have to, she didn?t want to have to kill him. He was too useful. She didn?t examine the way the thought sparkled the energy of lies through her being.

But John shook his head, shook his whole body like he was casting off her suspicion, ears flapping. He circled close enough to snuffle at her sliced-open shoulder, and the tension in her eased. He did not offer to lick it all better. The hand full of nothing received a wary glance before he stalked past to check out the shattered window. It took some careful steps, picking through slivers and shards of glass, before he reached it.

She released her hold on the Void and frowned vaguely at something that pinged her attention. "I just finished telling Malloy that the wards were good enough on this office. Damn." She reached across, put her hand against the slice in her upper arm, and let her body shiver. John looked out as she spoke: looked up and down and around until he'd satisfied himself that he'd seen what there was to see. Then he turned and padded back to his chair, standing abandoned a few feet away from her. The wolf leaping neatly up into the seat and perching there was a moment of bizarre comedy. It almost made her want to giggle light-headedly.

"Can you heal yourself?" John asked. "Or do you need me to take a look?" He was a doctor, even if his treatment usually ran more to the dead than the living. His face was clean, blood-free. Convenient. She could have used a trick like that once or twice.

"It's like trying to lift yourself by pulling on your own shoulders." Her voice was still a little bit detached, her expression starting to tighten as the pain grew more insistent. "Healing myself." Her eyes slid around the room and the remnants of bodies. "They were good. I didn't see the third, the woman, at all."

"Next time you throw a party I want an invite." He reached her, stretched a hand out to her. His expression was perfectly focused and absolutely livid. "Can you make it up?"

She stretched out her bloody hand to take his and used the leverage to get back to her feet. Standing didn't last long, when pressure sent the slice in her calf screaming. She dropped back down and just barely managed to twist that to his lap instead of back to the carpet. "I think this was a surprise event." Dark brows pulled together suddenly along with a twist of frown. "How did you know?"

"Sarah told me. I can shortcut us to my place, I can take you physically down to the first aid station, or you can go somewhere else."

"Your place." It didn't take much thought. She wouldn't show this much weakness down below, nor yet show him where she lived. And freezing despite the burn of his touch, she added, "Please." There was a pause while she breathed, and shut her eyes to think through pain and heat and cold. "Sarah told you. Why were you talking to Sarah?"

"I had a question to ask her." He shoved them through another portal and almost immediately out again, into the kitchen on the lower floor.

She had forgotten how much it hurt her to travel by John?s means. Or maybe blocked it out of her memory would be more accurate. Presence fried her with another wracking convulsion when they emerged from the portal. She choked back a cry of pain by biting her own lip hard enough to draw more blood. And when she could speak again she said, very distinctly, "F*ck. Ow."

"Sorry," he muttered distantly, kissed the side of her head, and dumped her in the first chair he came to.

The first aid kit he hauled out of one of the boxes stacked up beside the kitchen cabinets was the size of a very enthusiastic fisherman's tackle box. She stared at it with rather stunned disbelief. John balanced it across his lap, rotated, and ferried it back to her. "Where'd they get you?"

It took some effort to focus on the very impressive first aid kit while her hand wrapped back around the slice on her upper arm. "You saw my shoulder. Here, and my leg. It's freezing in here." Unnaturally steady, the calm tone of her voice. She felt rather like everything was wrapped in glass. "What question?"

"It's not freezing in here. You're shocky from adrenalin response and blood loss." He set his brake, hauled her chair around so that he had better access, and handed her a thick wad of gauze. "Put pressure on the shoulder. I'll handle the other two. Have you ever had any kind of significant bacterial infection?"

Her eyelids twisted shut and her face screwed up into a knot of pain when his big hand closed hard over the gauze and clamped down. She sucked in oxygen, applied similar pressure to her own shoulder. Through a constricted throat she managed to answer. "No. Never even a cold. What question did you ask her?"

As soon as she let go he followed suit with the other cut, his hand knotting around her slender arm. "Okay. I'll forego wasting time on antiseptic measures. I asked her your name."

Oh, good, distraction. She could feel the Void creeping up her spine again. "I felt her say it. They have power, names. I had to pull too much--they were too close." She sucked in a breath, let it out, and another, slowly. The pain wasn't easing much but at least the shivering was starting to relax. "You shouldn't have gone in there without me. Alone."

"She's actively working toward escape." He didn?t even sound surprised or confused by that.

"Yes." More distraction, and she was happy to focus on the question of Sarva instead of whatever he was doing to the slices in her flesh and the scorch of his touch against her skin, muscle, nearly bone. "I'm slipping, losing a little bit of ground every second. I don't--I'm not enough. To keep her contained. Not alone."

"You could release her into a world with an equally strong bastion of goodness." He'd released the pressure on both slices, checked them, and stretched her leg across his lap. She darted a look at the cut there. It was still bleeding, but only very sluggishly. Still, his slacks were a loss, with blood smeared across the knee and thigh. He wrapped up the cut in gauze and started loading up a curved needle, thread, a hypostat.

"I can't just let her loose. Not to mention that--" The sentence broke off with a hiss when he started stitching. She dug her fingers into the gauze over her shoulder-slice and continued over a moment. "Not to mention that most worlds with 'bastions of goodness' I can't actually enter to set her free there. There are. There are a few neutral worlds. Here. But that's not the solution either. There's something. I've been looking for it--" Her words were choppy with the tug and pull of needle through her flesh, held by a radiating sun.

He snipped off the thread, set another stitch. When he glanced up at her, the look revealed his mouth tight and brown eyes ablaze. "What something?"

"I don't know." Frustration rode her voice clearer even than the pain, just for a moment. She let the frustration leak with a certain amount of calculation; it was time to tweak John?s interest a little further. "It's in Vrashne--something is. Marius was looking for it. I've got the papers, he left them behind. And I can feel it there--a power source. Something I can tap into, I think. But I can't find it." From apparent introspection she looked up, out at him, and stated the obvious. "You're angry." Hook planted, it was time to change the subject.

"Marius isn't here. Say she got to you before I got to her and buried that foot-long--thing, I don't even know what it was--in your back. What would have happened?"

Her eyes went wide. She hadn't noticed the weapon in the woman's hand. When she answered, the reply was flat. "This body ? I ? would have died. The me that's tied into this construct and built from it. All my wards would have dissolved. All of them, at once." She let him imagine the consequences of that, frowned. The tugging through the numbness of analgesic felt...strange.

He shook his head and set another stitch, and another, and the internals were done and it was time to change both needle and thread for the externals. "You mentioned Vrashne the other night. What is it??

"Another world, another plane. It's fairly isolated, as these things go, but stable--very stable. Oh, minor conflicts between countries, but nothing--" She gave a vague gesture that carried between planes. "I didn't know anything about it, until I found those notes, and then DeMuer got his fingers into the place." Good. There was some interest, then.

"Okay. What is my job?" The needle dimpled her flesh, sank in.

Her eyebrows lifted. What an odd question. "Forensic pathologist. God's Own serial killer." Take your pick. She looked down curiously to study the progress of the stitching needle.

"Am I supposed to be working in the lab, or protecting you? Or is there something else that I'm supposed to be doing that you just haven't told me about yet?" He was still furious. But his hands were rock-steady on her as he set each stitch.

Fury kindled and flared in her veins. Her voice was chill as ice when she replied. He had no right to be angry with her, not for that. There were so many other things he could rage at her for, but not that. "If you'll recall, darling, I didn't ask you to protect me. I'm quite glad you arrived when you did, as it turns out, but I didn't ask for that. " She dug her fingers harder into the gauze over her shoulder. "Nor have I asked you to do anything but the job I hired you for and pay you quite highly for."

"No. You didn't ask me. But maybe you should, with the way they just fucking waltzed in--"

"Wait." The ice was bleeding to fire. "I'm confused. Are you angry because you 'had to' protect me, or because I didn't ask you to?" Her lip curled up into a sneer. "Darling, maybe you should decide what you're so livid about before you take it out on me. As for the way they waltzed in, be assured that I intend to figure out how they managed that so easily."

"You could have died, and I was this fucking close to not being there. That's what I'm pissed about." He held up the needle's point, and then inspected her leg. Apparently it passed muster. He taped it up and then started on her arm.

"Mmm, and still in the cell with sweet Sarah when the wards dissolved--that wouldn't have ended well for either of you." She was missing his point, deliberately. That way his words wouldn?t hurt so badly. Lifting the blood-soaked gauze pad from her shoulder, she peered underneath it at the gash that still oozed blood slowly. "I don't think this one will need stitches."

The glance at her shoulder and at her opinion was arrogantly dismissive. "We'll see. Who were they?"

"I don't know." More frustration and the remnants of anger leaked into her voice at that; sincere emotions. "It's been quite some time since the last attempt; I can't think of anything that would have triggered a new one. Well--" She broke off, frowned thoughtfully. "Maybe one or two things. Malloy is going to be furious. He should be able to find an answer in a day or two."

He stifled his never-ending questions and focused for a few minutes on the neat motion of his hands twisting needle, thread, and scissors, scowling in silence over the task of sewing up her torn flesh. She focused on the motion of his hands, the neat and precisely aligned stitches she couldn't feel through the topical medication he'd applied. "Tell me something, John."

This time he understood the prompt and required no further instruction. "I've lived in Manhattan, and I've lived in Rhydin. I took a trip to Harper's Chicago to meet her parents. I've never been anywhere else. When I was a kid I didn't understand why we never went on vacations. When I was older I had my duties and college, then med school, then the residency and fellowship. I used to be jealous of other people."

"When did you stop being jealous, darling? What decided it for you?" Distraction in a different form while he finished the last of the stitches and tied it off. They'd come back to the other topics, inevitably.

"I realized that I like being busy. I'd get bored if I didn't have something to do, you know?"

A thread of rich humor worked through her voice while she peeked under the gauze on her shoulder again. "There's a difference between vacation and nothing to do, John. It's worth knowing. But if that's your way of telling me that you won't be taking your vacation time..."

"Not unless you go with me."

It startled a laugh out of her, short and disbelieving. "You were furious with me just minutes ago and now you want to go on vacation together. I hear there's a nice tropical resort in Lashkar, or winter mountains in Icecrest or Enkid. I'd prefer Lashkar, though, if it's all the same to you." She was mocking him a bit.

"It wasn't you." He finished the dressing, nudged her chair around so he could get a look at the other shoulder. "I don't like the situation."

"Lashkar, then. Pack a bathing suit; the water runs at almost blood temperature." Her mouth quirked with a smile that fell away fast. "The situation." Flat, while he inspected the wound that was leaking crimson with the gauze removed. "What would you change, John? I won't have you glued to my side for 'protection'. You wouldn't like that at all."

"We'd kill each other inside forty-eight hours," he agreed absently. He started bandaging her shoulder up--no stitches, she must have been right after all.

"You're generous." Amused. "So what do you want, then?"

"I don't know," he muttered, his voice frustrated. "I'm not used to this. You're so okay." He sat back and reached for a wipe. His fingers, cleaned, were riddled with stripes and streaks of visible burns.

The phrase ran her headlong into confusion, with a puzzled pull of her eyebrows together. The painkiller was starting to wear off, the anesthetic that had masked the piercing of needle and left the stinging burn of his skin precisely clear. "Darling, I lie. What do you think I'm 'okay' about?" Her eyes flicked down to the hands that had stitched her up. "And how long did it take before touching me did that?"

"I'm sorry." He rubbed the heel of one hand against his forehead, started packing everything away. "I'm fine in a crisis. This just--" he broke off, followed her gaze to his hands. Flipping them back and forth, he frowned at them, and then returned to cleaning up. "Your blood."

"Ah." Simple. And, "I'm sorry." She didn?t mean it, but he didn?t know that and it never hurt her to give a lie. Her full lips turned into a frown while she contemplated standing from the chair. "This wasn't a crisis, John. It was an assassination attempt that came closer than most. And you still did just fine."

"Same difference. I'm having a reaction. I can have a reaction. It's okay. Do you need to call anybody?"

"I should call Malloy. He'll be having a fit about the bodies in the office by now. And the window." Her lips quirked into a little bit of a smile. "I like your reaction, darling, but do come here. Please." One finger crooked to gesture him closer.

He came hither, scowling all over again. At some point his tie had been yanked loose, and hung crooked from its place around his neck. There was a smudge on the left lens of his glasses, and the zoom had picked up that damned squeak again on the left axle. He was adorable, all disheveled like that.

She reached over without asking permission, pulled his glasses off his face. Then she grabbed his tie by the loosened knot, pulled him forward while she leaned in and ignored the step from furnace to bonfire. She kissed him, carefully, completely, hard, and then released kiss and knot and spoke through stinging lips. "Thank you." She didn?t mean that, either. Gratitude and guilt were both foreign to her nature. Still, she was?relieved?he had been there. Skirting the dangerous edges of that thought kept it from twisting her with more pain.

His fingers were threaded through the disaster that her hair had become, and his palm cradled the back of her head. When she drew back, he kept his eyes closed for several seconds. Without his glasses his face looked naked, as vulnerable as he did in sleep. "Stay the night." His eyes flicked open and he peered at her, a small tight crease between his brows as he struggled to focus at this close remove. "Please."

The corner of her mouth turned up a little. "You just want me to shower here." If her blood burnt him physically, she would need that shower. One finger, wiped as clean as she could of dried blood, reached up to touch the little crease between his brows and then the small scar beneath his lower lip. "I'll stay."

"Yeah." He braced himself, offered his hand out to help her onto his lap. "Just let me know ahead of time so I can get the camera set up."

Another laugh escaped. "You can do that while I'm calling Malloy." With his hand and help she swung over from the chair to his lap and snugged up against his chest. "Then I can get cleaned up and pass out."

"How," he asked, as he fumbled through his pocket for his phone, "does your hair smell so good. It should smell like ozone and dead guy. Shouldn't it?"

"Mmm. Good shampoo. Guaranteed against blood, sweat and tears. Also, I don't think either of the dead men wound up in my hair. Everywhere else, yes. But not my hair." Once the phone was handed over, she dialed in the Chief's personal line.

It rang once on the other end before the Chief's voice barked out, an indistinct but curt sound through the phone. She rested her head against John's shoulder, answered calmly. "No, this isn't Benandanti." And a pause while more words barely made it to audible. "Yes, I'm aware. You know the procedure, Malloy. Means, methods, motives. Get me some answers. And make sure they fix the window and get the mess cleaned up.?