The body that hung before the window was clearly dead. The angle of the neck was one no living person’s spine could support. Also, and perhaps more tellingly, the body was transparent.

“That’s not an illusion is it?” Val asked, each word slower than the last as denial crumbled away despite how tightly she clutched it.

“No, it’s not,” Tam said. She stepped into the room with calm and measured footsteps.

Outside, every door in the hallway slammed open.

There was a rush of children’s laughter and then the lights were blown out like candle flames.

In the ensuing darkness, only the beam from Val’s flashlight remained to illuminate their surroundings. It cast a flickering circle of light on a room that had been long emptied of its contents.

The wind outside gave one last calamitous moan, the voices in it screaming for release audibly human and yet strangled and despairing.

Bring them back to me.

The words blossomed in pulsing red light on the room’s wall, and oozed downwards like they’d been cut into living tissue.

Anna flipped the switch on the wall and the room’s normal lights came back on, dispelling the writing on the wall and the last of the moaning wind.

“So we have a ghost to lay to rest?” she said. “Why did it manifest here?”

“This is probably the room where they died,” Tam said.

“Think JB can find out who died here?” Val asked.

“Probably,” Tam said. “Let’s hope it was only one person though.”

“JB may have trouble turning up the victim’s identity,” Anna said, She was searching around the room, inspecting the walls and the edge of the old carpeting in the room.

“Victim?” Tam asked.

“Yes, his hands were tied together,” Anna said. “What we saw was how he looked when he died, not how he was found.”

“Wow, I didn’t even notice that,” Tam said. “I wasn’t even sure if he was a guy. He was wearing was a nursing uniform.”

“You two were doing better than I was,” Val said. “I only noticed that he was see through and that someone had killed him before they hung him up there.”

“What do you mean?” Anna asked.

“You saw how his neck was broken right? That takes a lot of force. The ceiling in here isn’t that high. There’s not enough room for a fall to a snap a neck like that. Someone broke it first and then strung him up.”

“There’s also the fact that he left a ghost behind I guess,” Tam said. “That’s generally only the result of malice or a grievous accident.”

“So he’s hanging around for revenge then?” Val asked.

“I do not think so,” Anna said. “He spoke to us again, and for the second time he asked for something to be brought back to him.”

“Something or someone,” Tam said.

“His killers?” Val asked. “Does he want us to bring them here so that he can devour their souls or something?”

“It doesn’t work like that exactly,” Tam said. “A part of him would want justice, but I don’t think that’s the part we’re seeing here. He’s not saying ‘Bring me them’, or even ‘Bring them to me’. He’s asking us to bring someone back to him. Rage can fuel a spirit but so can compassion and love. I think he wants to bring someone who was important to him in life here.”

“Hmm, maybe we know who that is? The ghost was calling out to Derrick before right?” Val asked. “Should we have Jimmy B arrange for transportation to get him over here?”

“Not until we understand what the ghost wants with him,” Anna said. “And what happened to his friend Kyle and Rakeem.”

The voices of two men, out of synch with one another, and far distant, echoed up the stairs. They sounded bewildered. Each was asking questions. What was going on? Who had invited them here? What were they supposed to do? What did the house want with them? Both tracks of spectral dialog ended with the same words though, the two voices coming together in perfect harmony.

“Ok. I’ll go.” they said in unison.

“Wait, the ghost is bringing them back so they can go?” Val asked. “What kind of sense does that make?”

The house’s foundations groaned.

“Go where I wonder?” Anna asked.

“They sounded pretty happy to be going, so I’m going to guess it was anywhere but here,” Val said.

“Were they happy, or were they unafraid?” Tam asked.

“They sounded relieved to me,” Anna said. “Like they’d received an instruction or an answer.”

“Answers would be nice to get about now,” Val said.

“Kyle, Rakeem, and Derrick were all a part of the same trial group,” Anna said. “Perhaps it was related to that?”

“Our next step is to find them then,” Tam said. “And I think I know where to start looking.”

***

It was midnight on the following night when people once again gathered in the empty house at 32 Willow St. This time however, Anna, Tam, and Val were not alone.

“This seems like a weird place to meet Ms. Le,” Derrick said. He had a plate of food and a glass of ice tea from the refreshments Jimmy B had arranged for a catering company to bring in.

“You don’t recognize it, do you?” Tam asked. “Do any of you?”

The dozen young men who’d gathered at the house looked every bit as mystified as Derrick.

“I don’t blame you,” Tam said. “The last time you were here, the layout was a bit different and the decorations were a bit more kid friendly.”

“Also, the psychoactive cocktail they fed you here wasn’t that great for long term memory retention,” Val said.

“The what now?” Angelo Garcia, one of the other men, asked.

“You were all a part of a pharmacology study fifteen years ago,” Anna said. “The study lasted for almost two years, but your participation in it varied. Some of you only came once a month, others were here on a weekly basis.”

“Yeah, that’s how I know a lot of the guys here,” Derrick said. “What do you mean about our memory though?”

“The study was focused on finding a ‘cure’ for ADHD,” Tam said. “Or at least that was the reported goal of the study.”

“The real experiment they were running was whether the hyper-focusing aspect of ADHD could be weaponized,” Val said.

“They gave you tests that were a cover for the treatments and exercises they had you perform,” Anna said.

“What kind of treatments?” Derrick asked. “I don’t remember much of what we did, just that I’d get these great raspberry truffles when I did well on a test.”

“Oh yeah! Those were the best!” Angelo said. The rest were nodding their heads in agreement.

“They were also laced with a chemical cousin to LCD,” Tam said. “The idea wasn’t to get you tripping, it was to open your mind up to certain suggestable states. The plan was to build some trigger keys into your psyches they could use whenever they wanted to make you obey their commands without question.”

“Think of it like getting a song stuck in your head, except this one is stuck in your subconscious and because you can hyper focus and it’s stuck in there so deep, it never goes away,” Val said. “Somebody who knows the song can sing a verse and then you can’t hear anything but them, and you’re basically hypnotized at the same time.”

“So what does that mean?” Derrick asked.

“The procedure wasn’t reliable in most of you,” Anna said. “Even for the subjects who didn’t retain the suggestions though, the procedure intensified their attention deficit issues.”

“Great, I’m a space case because the doctors messed me up?” Angelo asked.

“No,” Tam said. “Your ADHD is a natural part of you, but any struggles you’ve had because of your neuropsychology have been exacerbated needlessly for years now. You’ve been working with both the ADHD and a constant subconscious loop that you’ve had to build extra coping mechanisms around, and that’s slowed you down, tired you out, and made you more susceptible to illness and other disorders.”

“And it’s not the doctors who did it,” Val said. “It’s one doctor in particular. Neil Cartman. He was in charge of the hidden part of the research project. The nurses who were part of the program weren’t brought in on the fact that psychotropics were being used, or what Cartman’s personal evaluation sessions entailed.”

“Why would they do that though?” Derrick asked. “I mean, we were just a bunch of kids. What’s the point of weaponizing kids?”

“You were step one in their plan,” Anna said. “If the treatments had worked on you, they would have moved on to developing variations that worked on people with other neuropsychological profiles.”

“Also, children grow up,” Tam said.

“Why’d they stop?” Angelo asked.

“Because one of the nurses, a man named Gary Barts, found out the truth of what was happening and threatened to blow the whistle on them,” Tam said.

“So they just stopped everything?” Derrick asked.

“Only after they killed me,” the ghost of Gary Barts said.

“Oh! What?” Angelo was the first one to speak but not the first out of his chair. Twelve young men leaped up and scrambled backwards, pausing only when they saw the three women who were with them were standing calm and still.

“Hi boys,” Gary said. “Sorry to scare you.”

He was still translucent, but the pale of death was absent. And his neck was straightened out, appearing like it did when he was still using it to breathe.

“Nurse G?” Derrick asked, blinking in shock.

“Derrick, it’s good to see you again slugger,” Gary said.

He held out a closed hand for Derrick to fistbump against but when Derrick tried he passed right through Gary’s fist.

“Oh damn, you really are dead?” Derrick said.

“Yeah, but a bit less so thanks to Ms. Le over there,” Gary said.

“How can you be a bit less dead?” Angelo asked.

“I was kind of scattered,” Gary said. “She helped me pull myself together.”

“Why? Derrick asked.

“So I could talk to you boys,” Gary said. “I had to tell you how sorry I was. I didn’t know what we were really doing to you. And I had to make sure you would get the real help that you needed.”

“That’s where Kyle and Rakeem are by the way,” Val said. “They’re both checked into an in-patient health care facility, where they are doing great, at least from what they said earlier today. Gary managed to get them to come here and then talked them into seeking out some real treatment.”

“I wish I could apologize to them too,” Gary said. “I wasn’t quite as…clear with them as I am now.”

“So does this mean we’ve got our own Casper now?” Angelo asked. “Cause that would be kind of cool.”

“Yeah Nurse G,” Derrick said. “You were always pretty awesome. I don’t remember much of what all happened, but I remember you sitting with me while we waited for some test or other and you read me a book on the birth of Hollywood. I think that’s why I’m a set designer now.”

“I’m sorry boys,” Gary said. “I can’t stay though. I can feel myself drifting away already.”

“Why do you gotta go?” Angelo asked.

“His purpose,” Tam said. “The reason he hung on here, it’s being fulfilled right now.”

“I just had to know you were going to be okay,” Gary said, his voice growing distant as his outline became fuzzy and indistinct.

“What about you though?” Derrick asked, tears freely filling his eyes.

“Me?”Gary asked, his voice almost a whisper. “I’m going to be fine.”

And then he was gone.

***

It was a much later that night before Anna, Tam, and Val were back in the Second Chance Club.

“Jimmy B will arrange for their medical appointments and make arrangements for any in-patient stays which they need,” Charlene said. She was calling in from an aid station in the Middle East, but the connection was remarkably clear.

“Gary’s life insurance spent the last fifteen years in an account gathering interest for those guys,” Val said. “Why didn’t anyone reach out to them sooner?”

“Bureaucratic snafus,” Anna said.

“Yes, very intentional ones,” Tam said. “I poked around a bit and found some familiar faces waiting for us. Or maybe I should say a familiar logo.”

She tapped a button on her laptop and brought up the deed to the research building that JB had uncovered.  The original owner was a shell company whose parent company bore the unmistakable logo of PrimaLux.

“These guys again?” Val asked.

“Yep,” Tam said. “They were the ones who were conducting the trials, and they were the ones who put out the hit on Gary when he uncovered what they were doing.”

“We should perhaps make them something of a priority,” Anna said, her eyes narrowing.

“No,” Charlene said. “Let me worry about PrimaLux for now. This year isn’t the first time I’ve encountered their work. I have another project I need you to work on. One that’s a little bigger than what I’ve given you so far.”

Anna, Tam, and Val settled into their seats, wondering what Charlene could possibly have in mind.

The house at 32 Willow St. was haunted. Tam didn’t need to walk in the door, or cast any spells to figure that out. Just looking inside its empty rooms and feeling the shiver that ran down to the base of her spine was enough to tell her that.

“This is the place that Derrick gave us, right?” Val asked. She was holding a lit flashlight despite the fact that the power was still on to the building and the lights inside were functional.

“It seems to be in better shape than he described,” Anna said. She ran her hand along the trim on the living room’s doorway. Only a thin layer of dust came away on her fingers.

“Yeah, I asked JB to look into that,” Tam said as she stepped inside the building which had once been a home and looked ready to serve that function again with only minimal changes.

“I’m surprised you can’t hack into the town archives and find the info we need?” Val asked.

“Housing deeds are public records,” Tam said. “In theory there’s no need to break into a system that we’re supposed to have access to already. In practice, it would be faster, but there’s the problem that ‘publicly accessible’ doesn’t mean that anyone’s bothered to scan the documents into a central system. A lot of cities are pretty low-tech in how they manage their property records.”

“JB may also be able to find more than is listed in the official forms,” Anna said. “Granted it is well after hours, and the town hall is officially closed, but that’s never slowed them down before.”

“They are pretty talented,” Tam agreed.

“Yeah, I’ll put fifty bucks on JB winding up with the information we need and a date for the weekend in less than an hour,” Val said.

“No bet,” Anna said.

“If their date can help us get to the bottom of this, I’ll pay for dinner for the two of them,” Tam said. “I mean our ghost was polite enough to wait until after my show was done to pull that poltergeist act but I’d rather not chance it for a second night if I didn’t have to.”

“I thought ticket sales went up after the news got out though?” Val asked.

“Sure, because people like the idea of seeing the uncanny and otherworldly,” Tam said. “Actually seeing dead people, or being slashed to ribbons by a glassnado, on the other hand? That tends to drive attendance down just a little bit.”

“I guess I could see that,” Val said. “So, just how bad of a dead person are we talking about here? I take it most ghosts can’t pull off what this one did? Is there a limit to how often they can manage a stunt like that?”

“There is, but it’s wildly different for each spirit,” Tam said.

“Do most people leave ghosts, or is it only the strong ones who do?” Anna asked.

“It’s not about strength entirely,” Tam said. “It more about purpose, if that makes sense?”

“I think I could use more of an explanation,” Val said.

“Ok, well, take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt the size of bus because I’m not an expert on the afterlife,” Tam said. “From what I’ve read and been taught though, a ghost isn’t a person. Think of it like an after-impression that a person leaves behind when they die.”

“So a picture of who they were when they passed?” Val asked.

“Sort of, or more precisely a picture of part of who they were,” Tam said. “In the case of a Haunt, it’s the part of the person which was called to perform some specific task. Or, not even called, that’s not strong enough, maybe ‘consumed’ would be a better description. If there’s something that you’re supposed to do, and expected to do by people who matter to you, and that you deeply want to do, but death interrupts you before you can finish, a Haunt can be the result.”

“But not all the time?” Anna said.

“No, definitely not all the time,” Tam said. “There are people who leave behind tasks and people they were incredibly passionate about and there’s no Haunt that remains.”

“Because they lack the ability to cross back over to the mortal world?” Anna asked, leading them away from the front door and deeper into the house.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Tam said. “If it was then mystics would leave ghosts of different sorts all the time. I think there’s more happening on the other side of death than any living person is aware of. People with deep family heritages, for example, rarely leave ghosts of any sort behind, except for the families who collect ghosts like other families collect fine china or paintings.”

“So the ghosts are rare,” Val said, shining her flashlight into every corner and shadowed area of the rooms they entered. “That’s good to know, but what can they do?”

The house wasn’t a large one. At least not from the outside. It’s inner dimensions felt somehow distorted, like the rooms were burgeoning outwards, straining to hold in a presence that threatened to shatter barriers far more solid than mere plywood and sheetrock.

“Basically anything,” Tam said. “But it has to be something in the service of the purpose they’ve remained behind to complete. There’s other rules too, I think, because it doesn’t seem like they have completely free reign in the sort of powers they can manifest, or even when or where they can choose to manifest themselves. A ghost bent on revenge, for example, can’t turn their killer into corn chowder, or ground sirloin. Except in the cases where they can. It’s pretty confusing really.”

“So when Sun Tzu said ‘Know Your Enemy’, he obviously hadn’t ever thought about fighting ghosts then I guess,” Val said.

“It’s good advice with ghosts too,” Tam said. “What any particular ghost can do is going to be much more limited than the full range of powers that ghosts in general can manifest. Knowing exactly who they were can help a lot in terms of figuring out what they’re actually likely to do, which is a lot more important than what they could possibly do.”

“Our ghost can cause words to appear, briefly, and can move significant amounts of material around with deadly force,” Anna said.

“Those are both fairly typical abilities,” Tam said. “It’s likely this ghost can do more than that, especially if we make any efforts to contain or disrupt it.”

“Do the powers manifested so far tell us anything special about who we’re dealing with?” Anna asked.

“Manifesting written words, suggests they were a devout reader in life. Likely someone with a lot of formal education, to where they could interact with the written word without conscious awareness,” Tam said. “The telekinesis suggests they were involved in physical work a lot too though. The ghost of an accountant wouldn’t usually manifest poltergeist type abilities unless they were also a devout marathon runner or something similarly physical and all consuming.”

“So they’re someone who used both their mind and body, and they have powers they’re still keeping hidden from us?” Val asked. “Why are we here after midnight again?”

“Because waiting till morning would make it less likely that we would encounter the ghost of this place,” Anna said, leading them to the stairs up to the second floor.

“And this is a bad thing?” Val asked, her flashlight held resolutely in her grip. “You did say they would probably manifest even more powers if we backed them into a corner, right?”

Despite the lights they had turned on, the stairs seemed to darken as they walked up to the next landing.

“Yep,” Tam said. “Which is why we’re not here in the day. In the day the spirit would be more distant, and weaker. If we could find their hiding spot at all, they would be much more likely to lash out at us.”

“They seemed pretty happy to lash out at us while we were in the theater,” Val said.

“I think that’s because they were so far from their primary tether,” Tam said. “This house feels like it’s spent a long time being haunted. It’s probably the spot where the ghost lived when they were alive, and maybe the spot where they died too. If that’s true, the ghost should be strong and secure here. If there’s anywhere that we can talk to it, this should be the place. Anywhere else and they’ll be weak and more likely to flee.”

They reached the top of the landing and where the first floor had seemed like a normal, if empty home, the second was something else entirely.

The stairs rose into the middle of a long hallway. To the left, the hallway ran down past nine doors and to the right there were another nine, with all of the doors closed slabs of dark brown wood in matching wooden frames.

Across the floor, and up the walls, almost reaching the ceiling, there was chipped and cracking paint, and it was covered in words.

Black lines of varying sizes from thick marker tip strokes, to fine ballpoint pen marks spread out like a tattoo run amuck. The phrase “Come Back to Me!” was repeated over and over but there were other words too. “Olanzapine” and “Risperidone” showed up in many places, each one crossed out and each one followed by “2mg” and “4mg” and “16mg”.

The mural of words wasn’t what bothered Val though.

“What the hell are those,” she said, pointing her flashlight’s beam at the runner that ran horizontally down the middle of the wall at waist height.

All along the runner, there were handprints. Small handprints.

“A warning,” Anna said. The house was quiet as her words faded, even the noise of the city outside its walls dropping away to an unbroken stillness.

“And a message,” Tam said, approaching the wall. She reached out for it and the wall seemed to flex outwards trying to meet her touch.

“How do you tell the harmful ghosts from the benign ones?” Anna asked, putting a hand on Tam’s shoulder to hold her back.

“Look for the same things as you do with harmful people and benign ones,” Tam said.

She reached out to touch the wall and the laughter of a child ran past them down the hall to until it reached the sound of a door slamming shut.

The door that it reached was the only door open on the whole floor. It was at the distant end of the hallway.

“That was closed just a second ago,” Val said, taking an involuntary step back down the stairs.

“Maybe the wind blew it open,” Anna said. Her tone left no doubt as to how unlikely she thought that was.

From outside the house, a low moaning picked up. It could have been the wind, or could have been mistaken for the wind, except for the faint echoes of little voices that it carried with it.

“I think we’re being invited somewhere,” Tam said, and took a step towards the room.

As she trailed her fingers along the handprints, more laughter came from other areas of the house. It was distant and distorted though, and not all of it sounded like it came from human throats.

Another few steps and not all of it sounded like laughter anymore either.

“Is this wise?” Val asked, her voice tight and controlled.

The stairs below them creaked, one after the other.

Val turned the flashlight on the steps to reveal the person climbing them.

The creaking stopped the moment the light touched the stairs. Of course no one was there. They were the only living bodies in the house.

“Wisdom comes from experience,” Anna said. “I don’t believe any of us have experienced anything like this before, so come, let us grow wiser.”

Her words carried the icy fatalism of the Russian steppes but they served their purpose of moving everyone forward.

As they walked past the doors to the other rooms, each one in turn cracked open a tiny bit.

“Don’t go into any of those,” Tam said. “Getting sidetracked could be bad.”

“They’re supposed to be empty aren’t they?” Val asked.

“Things aren’t always what they are supposed to be,” Tam replied, her voice sounding like it had traveled a hundred miles as it crossed the half dozen feet between them.

Tam reached inside the room at the end of the hall and flicked on the light within.

Where Val’s flashlight illuminated an empty room though, the lights overhead shown on a fully appointed child’s playroom. It had blocks, and story books, and stuffed animals.

And in the back, a man hung from an overhead pipe, his feet dangling well off the floor.

The show had to go on.

Even with falling lighting fixtures and a glass whirlwind, the stage techs were back at work within a few minutes of the “technical malfunction”. The next performance wasn’t till the following day but cleanup and prep was better done sooner than later. No one asked how Tam had pulled a globe of light too bright to look at from between the palms of her hands. She was a magician, and magicians didn’t tell you how they did their tricks.

“So, what was that, exactly?” Val asked, as the tech who’d passed out was taken away by the ambulance crew that showed up in response to the accident.

“That was a spirit of some kind,” Tam said. Her attention was focused on the tube of water that featured in the final effect of her performance. It hadn’t been hit by the whirling debris but she was probing it’s circuit board with a voltage meter anyways.

“An unhappy one it would appear,” Anna said. She dabbed her suit with a piece of duct tape, drawing off a few small flecks of glass dust that had landed on her.

“Unfortunately many spirits are,” James said. He had borrowed Val and Anna’s cell phone, loaded an app on them and then set the two phones plus his own up to form a triangle around the area where the storm had raged. Val and Anna watched as he adjusted the settings on one of the phones and then checked the readings on the other two, moving in a circle around the phones and repeating the process several times.

“It’d be nice to have some info on what we’re facing here,” Val said. “I haven’t punched many dead people in the face but I’m guessing there’s going to be a trick to it that I’ll need to look into.”

“I’m afraid answering that question will require a great deal of research,” James said.

“The phone arrangement you have there will not tell you?” Anna asked.

“This will tell us if the spirit is still present,” James said. “It may lack a physical form, but it’s quite possible for for an unseen force to remain active in a locale without manifesting in any tangible manner.”

“I spoke with the stage manager,” Anna said. “This is the first time an inexplicable incident has happened in this building since it was built five years ago.”

“Is today the anniversary of the date they started excavating? Or of the first day they opened up?” Val asked.

“No,” Anna said. “From the building’s history that Aly, the manager, could recall, there’s nothing noteworthy about this date. There were no warnings or threats that lead up to it either.”

“So we have no idea what we’re dealing with?” Val asked, wandering around the circle James had drawn to connect the three phones.

“It was a Haunt,” Tam said, stepping away from her death trap. “And I need a new control board by tomorrow night.”

“You found evidence of ectoplasmic residue?” James asked. He turned away from his phone array went over to look at the circuit board in Tam’s hands.

“Very faint, and only on the charged leads,” she said. She held the board out for all of them to see and indicated a few spots on it. At first, they looked no different to Val than any of the other part of the green board but when she leaned in she saw tiny bits of ash around the miniature components which was generally a bad sign.

“And that tells us what was responsible for what we saw?” Val asked.

“Not directly,” Tam said. “A Haunt is basically a type of ghost. They’re what’s left over when someone passes but can’t stop doing the job they were trying to finish in life.”

“And they are the one sort of spirit which leaves the residue you see on your device?” Anna asked.

“Most ghosts can leave a residue behind,” Tam said. “A Haunt is so focused though that they tend to manifest more precisely than other types of supernatural entities. So the clue is less that there’s ectoplasm around and more that there is very little of it.”

“Other sorts of spirits would not leave such residue I presume?” Anna asked.

“Not generally,” Tam said, “I’m not that good in the spirit arts, but from what I understand spirits of the natural world tend to form bodies, if they need them, from the elements they are more familiar with.”

“So we’d be looking for, what, mud if we were hunting a spirit of the earth?” Val asked.

“That, or roots and branches, or stones,” Tam said. “Unless I’m forgetting a class of spirits, I think the rule is that spirits which derive from animals and places generally use aspects of the world for their bodies, while humans and other sapient beings conjure their own spirit matter, or ectoplasm, directly.”

“You are a quick study,” James said. “That is precisely correct.”

“It leaves us with a more pressing concern though,” Anna said. “If this is the work of a deceased human’s spirit, then what did they want on the stage?”

“Also, who killed them?” Val asked.

“No idea on the second question, but I’m willing to bet the first is something we can ask Derrick about,” Tam said.

“Derrick? The guy who passed out?” Val asked.

“Yeah,” Tam said. “He’s one of the regulars here. Nice guy. Fairly quite. A little odd, but then that’s theater for you.”

“Nice, quiet, and odd? So, he’s a serial killer then?” Val asked.

“I do not think so,” Anna said. “Consider the words our ghost chose.”

“It was ‘come back to me’, wasn’t it?” Val asked.

“Yes,” James said. “Which would be an odd message for the victim of a serial killer to choose to convey.”

“Let us see if this Mr. Derrick can recall anyone who passed and had unfinished business with him,” Anna said.

***

Derrick had recovered by the time Tam and the rest found him, or at least he had recovered in the sense of being conscious and relatively coherent. Looking into his eyes, Tam could see hard walls shut down around his emotions in a desperate attempt to hold in the fear that had overwhelmed him and the shame that lingered from losing control.

“Hey Derrick, how are you feeling?” Tam asked.

“I’m ok Ms. Le,” Derrick said. He was sipping from a small bottle of apple juice, the third one since he’d brought into the theater’s office by the paramedics.

“Low blood sugar sucks doesn’t it?” Val asked, nodding at the empty apple juice containers on the counter beside Derrick.

“Yeah,” he forced out a laugh.

“If you need a bit of time, that’s ok,” Tam said. “If you’re up for it though, we’ve got a few questions we were hoping you could help us with.”

“Oh, uh, sure,” Derrick said, taking in the unfamiliar people who were with Tam.

“We’ll get the obvious one out first,” Anna said. “Do you know who that was on the stage?”

“Who? What do you mean?” Derrick asked.

“You saw the words on the curtain, right?” Tam asked. Derrick nodded. “Do you have any idea who could have written them?”

Derrick’s gaze flickered around the room, focusing on the empty spaces rather than the people in front of him.

“I don’t know,” he said, his shoulders scrunched in and both hands clasped on the tiny juice bottle. “It was really weird.”

“You are not wrong about that,” Val said, dropping into one of the seats around the wall of the office waiting area.

“Have you heard that phrase before?” James asked.

“No, I mean not exactly,” Derrick said. “Listen, I’m sorry for losing it like that. I don’t know what happened.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tam said and at his frown of self recrimination and disbelief added, “Anyone mind if I show him some proof?”

Anna nodded at the idea, her expression indicating her acceptance, while Val simply shrugged.

“What do you mean proof?” Derrick asked, concern written all over his face.

“What you saw on the stage curtain wasn’t normal writing,” Tam said. “It was a manifestation of something that shouldn’t have been able to appear here.”

“What does that mean?” Derrick asked.

“Well, there’s magic,” Tam said and reached over to pull a silver dollar from Derrick’s ear. “And then there’s magic”.

In her hands the silver dollar began to glow with a warm, yellow radiance.

“Wow,” Derrick said, entranced by the glowing coin.

“Take this coin,” Tam said. “The glow will fade pretty soon, but it will come back if you need it to.”

“Why would I need it to?” Derrick asked, taking the coin without waiting for the answer.

“I think you passed out because a spirit of the dark was reaching out for you, and the human mind can kind of short circuit when things outside our world start screaming for our attention,” Tam said.

“Oh my god, I’m possessed?” Derrick asked.

“No,” Tam said. “You wouldn’t be able to hold the coin if you were, and I don’t think the spirit we saw is interested in possessing anyone.”

“So what? It wants to drag me to hell or something? Oh my god that’s what happened to Kyle and Rackeem!”

“No, I don’t think this spirit is evil either,” Tam said.

“But you said it was a spirit of the dark?” Derrick said.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s a technical term I guess,” Tam said. “A spirit of the dark is just one whose natural state is to be hidden from sight, rather than disguised, or bound as a part of something like a river or a mountain or a fox. It’s not necessarily bad. For some things ‘dark’ is really good.”

“Our internal organs, for example, sort of enjoy being in the dark,” Val said. “Expose your spleen to the light and it get all kinds of cranky.”

“You mentioned a Kevin and a Rakeem?” Anna asked.

“Yeah,” Derrick said. “They’re some people I know, but they went missing and nobody knows where to find them.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Val said. “Have you talked to the cops?”

“No, we’ve had enough trouble with them,” Derrick said.

“I understand,” Anna said. “If Kevin and Rakeem are related to this, we will try to find them for you.”

“And if they’re not related to this, we’ll still try to find them just to make sure they’re ok,” Val said.

“Thanks, they’re good guys,” Derrick said, looking up from the coin to show a small, grateful smile.

“Where did you meet you them?” Anna asked.

“We were in a program together when we were kids,” Derrick said. “Some of us kept in touch after it was done.”

“What kind of program?” Tam asked.

“A medical thing,” Derrick said. “It was for kids who had problems. You know, like behavior problems.”

“A drug study? Or were they focused on therapy sessions?” Val asked.

“Drugs, and tests,” Derrick said. “It didn’t go anywhere though. Just ran for a while and then got shut down, so we were back out on our own.”

“You mentioned that you hadn’t heard words exactly like the ones on the curtain,” Tam said. “Have you run across anything close to that? Especially with Kevin and Rakeem?”

“Not with those guys, no,” Derrick said. “I did get a card at my house though. It just had an address on it and it said ‘Come back’ written in kind of sloppy handwriting. But not blood or anything weird though.”

“Do you still have the card?” Tam asked.

“Yeah, it’s back at my apartment,” Derrick said. “Is that why I’m being haunted?”

“I don’t think it’s the reason, but it could be related,” Tam said. “What was the address on the card?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Derrick said. “I didn’t recognize it, but I was kind of curious so I looked it up online and it’s just a house. I tried taking a ride by it on the bus and the place is old. Like broken down and empty old. I don’t think anyone lives there. I don’t even know if anyone ever lived there.”

“There may be no one alive there, but I bet if we drop by, there’ll be someone to greet us once we walk in the door,” Tam said.

Tam was fully submerged, dangling upside down, bound hand and foot for execution and, according to the clock that ticked nearby, her air had run out thirty seconds ago.

Darkness descended, the light dwindling away as her feet twitched their last frantic spasms until only a flickering, choked pool of illumination remained.

Then the first sparkler light, followed by another, and then dozens more, bathing the stage with a brilliant showering of radiance.

Before the audience’s eyes, the dark cloak that lay discarded on the stage began to rise.

The form below the cloak stood slowly, by inches, as a drumroll built to a crescendo. A constellation of small fireworks bloomed across the stage as the music reached its highpoint and the Tam whirled the cloak off herself, no longer chained in the Tank of Inescapable Doom but instead clad in the sparkling green and gold armor the Sovereign of the Seven Seas.

With stabs of her trident, she sent pyrotechnics out over the audience to burst at the edges of the theater, each flash of light revealing one of the pirate crew members she’d managed to “misplace” through the course of the show. Gone were their billowing shirts and cutlasses, replaced instead with iridescent sea fairy costumes.

At her behest, the Sea Fairies then scattered “golden doubloons” in the audience’s outstretched hands, returning the Pirate Booty the show had been themed around to the guests so they could carry its magic out into the world with them.

***

Tam was In her dressing room, scrubbing off the layers of stage make-up when Anna and Val arrived.

“There is no way you weren’t cheating out there,” Val said. “James totally hooked you up with some special glamour for this one didn’t he?”

Tam just shook her head and smiled.

“This is the same show I’ve practiced every night for the past two weeks,” she said. “Do you really think James would let me fritter away the real stuff that much?”

“This is what you’ve been working on for the last year isn’t it?” Anna asked. “I recognized some of the effects from your last show but it seemed like most of the work up there was new.”

“I’ve been trying out bits and pieces of it in the smaller theaters,” Tam said, putting away her costume and changing into her more usual street clothes. “With the small shows there’s usually there’s only time for one significant effect and some lead up to it.”

“I’m impressed with the overall narrative flow you achieved,” Anna said, hanging Tam’s costume on a hanger for her.

“Yeah, you had the audience in the palm of your hand from the first effect,” Val said, packing away the trident Tam had carried as her final prop. It still had the smell of gunpowder on it from the pyro she’d shot off.

“Your assistants seemed well trained too,” Anna said. “Some of the later sequences couldn’t have been easy to coordinate.”

“Thanks, we worked pretty hard on the lead up to this one,” Tam said, locking down the last of her specialized gear. “It’s a larger cast than I normally get to use, but I think they really came together.”

“Are you going out with them for an after party?” Anna asked.

“Normally yes, but a bunch of them are heading off to work a few other shows,” Tam said. “We’ll all catch up after the last show next weekend and have a big bash then.”

“Cool! That means we can take you out!” Val said, offering Tam her coat.

“Indeed. We must thank you for the tickets to your opening night somehow,” Anna said.

“Aww, you folks don’t need to do that,” Tam said. “It’s nice just knowing there’s some friendly faces in the house.”

“With the kind of applause you were getting, I don’t think that’s something you ever need to worry about,” Val said.

“You know, the funny thing is it’s still really hard to take that first step onto the stage,” Tam said.

“For big shows like this?” Val asked.

“Nope. All of them,” Tam said. “You’d think after a few successful shows the stage fright would go away, but that’s not a thing that happens. At least not for me.”

“It is very common, what you describe,” Anna said. “But you manage to perform anyways.”

“There’s all the other people counting on me,” Tam said. “That’s what usually gets me behind the curtain before it rises. If I don’t go out, there’s a ton of people who don’t get paid, and in entertainment that can mean they don’t eat.”

“Wow, that’s pretty harsh,” Val said. “How about for the smaller shows where it’s just you?”

“For those I usually try to talk to the crowd beforehand,” Tam said. “If I can find someone who’s eager to see the show, I look for them in the audience as an excuse to force myself on stage. If not, I think about whoever’s running the venue. Or the next magician who’s going to have to play that spot after me, and how hard it would be on them if I bailed. I know this all probably sounds ridiculous, because I really do like performing, it’s just a weird thing I go through.”

“I think it’s amazing,” James Baughsley said, joining them outside Tam’s dressing room with a bundle of show merchandise in his arms.

“Did you leave any for the rest of the patrons James?” Val asked with a chuckle.

He looked at her in confusion.

“Why would I do that?”

“Thank you James,” Tam said. “But you didn’t have to buy all that. I could have picked you up some swag from whatever was leftover once the shows ends.”

“I think not,” James said. “I collect opening night posters. Waiting for yours would be an insult I have no intention of ever giving.”

“You collect posters?” Val asked, trying to reconcile the very proper British gentleman James always comported himself to be with the notion of someone who collected something as lowbrow as a poster.

“Yes, from any concert I go to, particularly on opening night,” James said.

“Is there something especially magical about opening night posters?” Anna asked. James was their resident arcane scholar, and organized most of the magical support they required or requested.

“Not in a mystical sense,” James said. “I just find them charming.”

“What kind of posters do you have? I’ve never seen any hanging in your room?” Val said.

“They’re not meant for a work environment,” James said. “I keep them in my apartment and rotate the ones I have up occasionally.”

“Now I want to see your apartment,” Anna said.

“You are welcome anytime Ms. Ilyina,” James said, which was met with an answering smile from Anna. “Though I must temper your expectations. I feel my workspace in the Club’s aerie more accurately reflects who I am overall. I am at my apartment rarely enough that it is somewhat disheveled on most occasions.”

“God, now I want to tag along too,” Val said. “I can’t imagine you and disheveled in the same state, never mind the same room.”

“I assure you, I am no better than any other man in that regards,” James said.

“What did you think of the show?” Tam asked.

“It was spectacular,” James said. “I am at a loss for how you pulled off the vanishing escape at the end, especially since there was no hint of actual teleportation magic involved.”

“Thank you,” Tam said. “That one took a while to work out.”

“I must confess though I am somewhat puzzled by the closing effect,” James said.

“The Sea Faeries?” Tam asked.

“No, the glowing letters on the curtain,” James said.

“What glowing letters?” Val asked.

“The ones which read ‘Come Back to Me’. I thought they were an odd addition to the parting message with the doubloons,” James said, his words growing slower as he spoke and watched Tam’s confusion grow. “But none of you saw them, did you?”

He looked around between the Val, Anna, and Tam, searching for recognition in their eyes. There was none to find.

“That wasn’t part of the show,” Tam said, her eyes narrowing. “Where did you see these words?”

“On the curtains after they fell,” James said. “They were just a faint shimmer at first but the letters grew in clarity and brightness as the audience diminished.”

“I wasn’t looking at the stage once the show ended,” Anna said. “I was searching for a gap in the crowds to get back here.”

“Me too,” Val said. “Did anyone else notice the words?”

“No one mentioned them, but the flow of the crowd was out of the theater at that point. I was looking back towards the stage to see if I could see any of the setup work for the next performance. I thought it would help me puzzle out how the effects were accomplished.”

“Could the curtain words be something from the next act?” Val asked.

“No one else is going on tonight, and that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d setup early,” Tam said.

“We should go and have a look at these words,” Anna said.

The other nodded, and they moved as a group back to the stage. When they arrived there though, no glowing words were in evidence on the curtain. Only the stage techs were around, tidying up and putting away the electronics that had been used during the performance.

“I was standing over there when I saw the phrase appear,” James said, indicating the middle of one of the rows near the stage.

Val hopped down and walked to the spot James had pointed to.

“Nothing on the curtains anymore,” she said.

As she turned to look down at the chairs however, the lights in the theater died completely.

For an instant the dark was absolute and empty, but then the silence was broken by the moaning of the wind.

Except no wind was blowing in the theater.

Then the screaming began.

One of the techs started to freak out as words scrawled in pulsing red light were ripped into the curtain on the main stage.

“MINE” the first words read and, as it bled off the curtain, it was replaced with “cOme bACk to mE”.

That was more than the tech could handle. He turned and fled. Straight off the stage.

Val was too far away to save him from the fall.

Anna however was not.

Before he could reach the edge of the stage, she was beside him and managed to knock his feet out from under him so that he skidded to a stop before tumbling off onto either the first row of seats or the concrete in front of them.

That was good for the tech, but seemed to rouse the ire of whatever force had killed the lights and was fingerpainting on the curtains in glowing blood.

A light fell on the stage.

And then another.

Tam had to dodge the second one, and managed to pull James to safety before a third on crashed down on the spot where he’d been standing.

The shattered lights weren’t content to lay on the stage though. The wind which was roaring through the theater without any discernible physical presence was nonetheless able to send the broken shards of the lights swirling into the air.

The tech screamed louder as the hurricane of glass and steel whirled over them all, and Anna covered him with her body.

The intensity of the storm built higher until the darkness was split by a piercing light.

Standing at the center of the storm, Tam held her hands spread before her body, a ball of dazzling sunshine caught between her outstretched fingers.

The storm of glass diminished under the glare of the light and with a final howl, the winds rushed out of the building, and the theater’s remaining lights flooded the room with illumination.

“Sometimes you need more than just special effects,” Tam said, calling the raw magic she held back into her palms.

“Yes, and I believe we have our next case,” Anna said, rising from where the tech had curled into an unconscious fetal ball.

When Val stepped into the ring it felt like coming home. All at once she was thirteen again, the roar of the women who’d gathered for Lara and Sam’s bachelorette party the same as the roar of the first crowd she’d fought in front of.

Fighting was something that was in Val’s blood. It had been since before she’d even started training in martial arts. Fighting in an arena was different though. She could be a showman. She could play to the crowd and sell hits that hadn’t landed with anywhere near enough force to knock her down. Performing was an art however, one that distanced her from the honest clarity a good fight offered.

The trouble was, no one wanted to see an honest brawl. They wanted exciting moments. They wanted a good back and forth between the fighters. If it looked like an even contest, a good pair of performers could send the audiences’ emotions on a rollercoaster like no other. A one sided slaughter though was boring for everyone involved.

From her corner, Val watched as Nike, her opponent, entered the ring. Val tried to judge from how the woman carried herself and how she approached the fight whether she was going to play along with a more theatrical bout for the crowd’s sake.

Nike climbed through the ropes and locked eyes with Val, sizing her up with a fire in gaze that told Val Nike was taking the fight seriously.

They had a few moments to prepare in their corners before the bell rang, and Val breathed, settling her mind into the state of relaxed awareness that a really good battle required.

That turned out to be the right tact to take as Nike came out swinging the instant the bell sounded.

She was taller than Val, but for as furious as her initial flurry of blows was, Nike didn’t commit herself to any of them. They were questions, asked in a language Val spoke fluently.

How far can you reach? the first punch asked.

How fast can you react? the second punch inquired.

Val responded with the standard Muay Thai answer of attacking the attacks, meeting Nike’s punches with ones of her own.

I can’t reach as far as you, but I’m faster, Val said with well timed blows to Nike’s arms.

The two danced apart after the initial fray.

You think you’re good enough to hang with me? Val’s posture and footwork asked, playful and taunting.

Try me, Nike responded with a posture that was all business and focus.

Ok, I will, Val said by lunging forward with a low kick to Nike’s legs. Val didn’t want to cripple her or end the fight early, so she pulled the force from the blow. That was a mistake.

No respect? Nike caught Val with a hard knee to the midsection, anger driving it in deeper as an exclamation point.

Oh, you want to play for real? Val’s smirk asked, after she recovered from the blow.

Prove you’re in my league or I don’t have any time for you, Nike said by unleashing a hail of close in blows.

She wasn’t holding back or going for theatrics. She threw her shots with enough force that if they landed they would have put Val on the mat. Even being able to defend against them required having the a well honed fighting mindset.

Where the pain from the first punch to connect would have rattled a new fighter and left them wide open to be obliterated, Val knew the right answer without thinking. She turtled up catching two blows on her arms and leaned into the assault, reducing Nike’s range of motion and opening the taller women up for a series of counter attacks that pushed the two of them apart.

Ok, let’s do this then, Val said with a series of short, hard strikes, not committing herself fully to any of them but rather using each one to bait out a response from her foe.

Nike was too cagey of a fighter to fall for that trap. She ranged outside Val’s reach, wary and ready for their next engagement.

They’d agreed on the terms of the battle in their first few exchanges, and demonstrated a little of their prowess to convince the other they were serious. Despite that, Nike still looked unconvinced that Val was really much of a threat.

You’ve got nothing, Nike said with a series of hard punches that brought her in close enough to unleash a brutally fast knee strike to Val’s ribs. The hits weren’t taunts, they weren’t focused on making Val mad or humiliating her. They were an assertion. Nike didn’t feel like playing around more than she had to, so she threw her blows to end the fight immediately.

Val blocked each of the attacks with counterstrikes targeting the limbs Nike extended.

Punch. Counter to the forearm.

Punch. Counter to the wrist.

Kick. Counter to the knee.

Val had been playing before, but in the face of Nike’s attacks, she got serious. Not deadly serious, and certainly not “call on magical aid” serious. The fight wasn’t a joke though, and it wasn’t about pretending. Nike demanded a real battle, and so Val honored that desire.

You’re fast, she said with a series of rapid strike that flashed around Nike’s body, targeting head, groin, and ribs. They weren’t individually decisive but even with Nike blocking them, the cumulative effect was considerable.

Out of respect for Nike’s strength and speed each of Val’s attacks snapped back to a defensive guard the instant after landing. She was fighting with the caution that someone who was facing a skilled foe would employ, landing hits that drove towards victory while at the same time foregoing risky openings, even when they were ones Nike hadn’t intended to leave.

For her part, Nike answered in kind.

You’re stronger than you look, she said, dancing away from Val’s blows rather than muscling through them.

You’re not afraid to take hits, Val said by giving Nike an opening that Nike had to pay for by absorbing a shot right across her temple.

Neither are you, Nike said with a trio of knee strikes that Val was able to diminish the force of by moving into them rather than trying to get away.

Good form, Val said.

Good balance, Nike said.

You’re looser than I expected, Val said.

I’m always loose when I’m fighting, Nike said. I love this stuff.

It’s the only time everything drops away and things just feel right isn’t it? Val asked.

Exactly, Nike said.

That’s why you don’t like fooling around in a fight isn’t it? Val asked

Yeah, I hate when people don’t take it seriously.

Because they’re not taking you seriously?

Nah, I don’t care what anybody thinks about me, Nike’s footwork and gaze said.

That’s tough to do, Val said.

I’m pretty tough.

Pretty and tough you mean, Val’s smile said.

You ain’t so bad either for a latina girl, Nike said with an answering smile.

Thanks, Val said, I’m not quite as tough as you, I guess. People can really bum me out.

Well, yeah, that can suck.

Whether it’s in and out of the ring right?

Definitely.

How are the folks here? You get many good matches? Val asked.

I got a good match going now, Nike said.

Folks here ain’t on your level though, are they? Val asked.

Nah, Nike said. I mean some are ok, but they ain’t really where I need to be.

You ever try teaching? Val asked.

I’m not a good teacher, Nike said.

Now that ain’t true, Val said. You’re showing me some nice footwork and that knee jab combo? I’m already stealing that.

Yeah, but you listen to me. You get it. The normal girls here, they just don’t.

I’ve had a lot of practice being a student, Val said.

Not me, Nike said. I just pick stuff up, you know?

I do, Val said. When you’re gifted, it’s hard to find any teachers that can keep up with you.

Yeah, I don’t want to play around and get sloppy, but when I take a fight seriously suddenly people get all mad at me, Nike said.

Because they think you’re mad at them, Val said.

Nah, I’m never mad when I get in the ring, Nike said. This is where the fun happens.

It’s the intensity, Val said. What you bring to the ring is so much more than what they’re used to that they think you’re holding back a ton of rage.

So what, I’m supposed to be nice and smile more?

Nah, you be you, and anybody tells you to smile more? That’s when you get mad, Val said. We just need to get you fighting with the right crowd.

You got some Warrior Princess friends? Nike asked.

Yeah and I think I’m making a new one now, Val said.

***

The wedding was a simple affair, with family and friends close enough to be family in attendance. There were only a few important seats empty and despite that Sam looked radiant, and Lara’s gown gave Val a brief thrill and regret that things hadn’t turned out differently between them.

The art gallery where they held the ceremony felt like both a distant land to Val and also the natural milieu where the two brides belonged.

Lara had always been a gym rat, more comfortable in sweats and a t-shirt than anything else. Seeing her in a formal gown, hand in hand with the woman she loved, though Val felt like she was at last seeing the complete picture of her oldest and dearest friend.

There’d always been an elegance and serenity inside Lara just biding its time, and with Sam she’d found someone who could draw that part of her out and allow her to be everything she could be.

A tear creased Val’s eye. Whether it was from knowing that she couldn’t have been that person for Lara, or happiness for her friend, or even the distant hope of finding someone like that for herself, Val couldn’t decide.

“You know, technically, you didn’t win that bet,” Lara said later as Val swept her onto the dance floor.

“And yet, here I am dancing with you, so I’d say technically I did,” Val said, spinning Lara out before pulling her back in for a deep dip.

“Tell me the truth,” Lara said. “You threw that fight didn’t you?”

“Throwing the fight would suggest that I Iost it, and I point out, that I did not lose,” Val said.

“Yeah, but a tie? Really? Come on, when have you ever tied before?” Lara asked.

“All the times I didn’t win or lose,” Val said, smiling. “Seriously though, Oyenike is that good. She’s a prodigy.”

“It’s nice what you’re doing for her,” Lara said.

“The Nationals trip?” Val said. “That’s only part of what she needs. I’m going to see if I can hook her up with some of the people I’ve trained under. She’s so damn gifted, but a lot of what she knows she’s had to pick up and work out for herself.”

“I thought that’s what all the great masters did?” Lara asked.

“To some extent, but it’s always nice to have someone who knows what they’re talking about there to provide another perspective.”

“To see the mistakes you’re making?” Lara asked.

“Or the things you’re doing right that you don’t want to lose,” Val said.

“So what kind of external perspective can you give me?” Lara asked.

“Today? You are doing everything right today,” Val said.

“I couldn’t believe I was going through with it this morning,” Lara said. “I never thought this day would ever really happen.”

“I’m glad it did,” Val said. “Sam’s put a smile on your face that I never could.”

“You put plenty of smiles on my face,” Lara said.

“Yeah, but not like this one,” Val said. “We had crazy, wild times, and I hope we’ll still have them again, but this? What I see today? You look…peaceful. Like your soul is in harmony with all of the rest of you. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you looking like that.”

“I think that’s what scares me,” Lara said. “What I’ve got here is so good.”

“For what it’s worth, Sam looks exactly the same,” Val said.

“Thank you,” Lara said, tears sparkling in her eyes.

“For what?” Val asked. “I’m only saying what everyone here can see.”

“For more than that,” Lara said. “For being you. For this dance. Everyone knows it was supposed to be my Dad who had the first dance, but he…”

“He should have been here sooner,” her father said and asked, “may I cut in?”

Lara blinked back the tears as surprise and amazement stole over her features. Her father had been the last hold out, the last one resisting the idea of his daughter marrying another woman, but here he was, in a perfectly fitted tuxedo, looking as dapper and suave as he’d ever been.

Lara looked at Val, who nodded in confirmation. It had taken only a few words from Val and a small intervention on Jimmy B’s part to get the tuxedo, but her father wasn’t going to miss one of the best days in his daughter’s life.

Sometimes rifts are too deep to mend but sometimes all people need is a second chance to do the right thing.

As a teenager, Val had always relished a good fight, whether it was in or out of the ring. Walking into the “Pathways to Health Fitness Center”, she felt a tingle of nerves dance along her fingertips. She wasn’t there for a fight, not yet, but the anticipation was starting to sing within her.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the ring,” she said, glancing over at Lara who was holding the main door open for her.

“Don’t worry, it’s like falling off a bike,” Lara said, smirking at Val’s unaccustomed nervousness.

“Got it. Break her fists with my face. I can do that.”

A call to James for some mystical assistance would allow Val to do exactly that, but this was absolutely not a scenario where the Second Chance Club’s arcane resources were appropriate, or even desired.

“Just put on a good show,” Lara said, leading them past the reception desk with a wave at the woman behind the counter. “This is supposed to be a fun night for the girls who’ve been supporting us.”

“So knocking Sam’s champion out in the first thirty seconds isn’t the game plan then?” Val asked. Against most opponents, Val wouldn’t need even the weakest of the Club’s enchantments to make good on that boast. Sam was putting forward her best fighter though, so Val figured the fight would last at least a minute or so.

Her confidence would have been unusual in someone who’d been as injured as she was, as recently as she’d been. Physical therapy wasn’t a fast process, and there were often complications or long term effects that took years to sort out. Even just the loss of six months worth of muscle development would have held a lot of people back from thinking they could compete at the level they had previously. Her physical state wasn’t a problem for Val though.

“You know, I didn’t think to ask, but you are cleared for this right?” Lara said. “I mean, you look fine…”

“Thank you,” Val said with a smile.

“But I know you lie about that kind of thing all the time, Ms ‘I’ll go to the prom with a fractured rib’.”

“That was a one time thing,” Val said. “And yes, I passed my last physical with flying colors. I’m probably in better shape now than I was when I was kid.”

Lara led her past a room with high tech exercise bikes, and another where a spinning class was in session.

“You must have been working with a great medical team,” Lara said.

“I was. Still wasn’t fun mind you, but they were some of the best people in the country.”

The Club’s medical benefits were impressive by any measure, and that was before accounting for the magical treatment options they had occasional access to.

“How did you afford all that? I thought the Army kicked you out?” Lara asked.

“Honorably discharged.” Val correct her. “The costs were all part of my signing bonus with the Second Chance Club.”

“That’s a pretty sweet deal then,” Lara said. “What do they have you doing for it though?”

“Investigation, troubleshooting, and problem resolution for a diverse mix of clientele,” Val said. “Or at least that’s what the official job description says. Mostly, we just find ways to help people who are in trouble.”

“That sounds nice. Vague, but nice. How’d you find them?” Lara stopped before a door with the words “Employees Only” on it.

“They found me,” Val said, following Lara into the health center’s back office. “I was still in a coma at the time and they arranged for my transfer to the facility where I woke up.”

“Wait, so they hired you before you were even conscious enough to interview?”

“Better than that, I was on the payroll from the first week I was in therapy,” Val said. “Charlene, that’s our boss, came to see me once I was conscious for more than a few minutes at a time and made the job offer.”

“Like there was some chance that you’d turn it down?” Lara asked.

“Yeah, I was kind of scrambled at that point,” Val said. “Part of me was thinking that if I could just get better fast enough that the Army would take me back. The more I worked at it though, the more I found I didn’t really want to go back. Of course part of that was Charlene cheating too.”

“How did she cheat?” Lara asked.

“She wouldn’t let me answer yes or no until my neural exams came back with a clean bill of health. Coming out of the coma I had a bit of impairment in my speech and attention. While I was recuperating though, she sent over some of the casefiles that Anna and Tam were working on.”

“Anna and Tam are your coworkers?”

“Yeah, we’re the field team,” Val said. “JB kept filling me in on these great things they were doing though. Stuff like locating a lost boat that was carrying a major supply shipment meant for refugees in Jordan, or the one where they ran witness protection for someone testifying against a corrupt police chief. It was like every day JB would drop by with some awesome adventure the their team was working on.”

“Who’s JB?” Lara asked, leading Val to a door labeled ‘Samantha Cruz’. The door was open but the woman inside was on the phone so Lara paused outside and indicated to Val to wait.

“They’re our public liaison,” Val said. “They handle dealing with the people on the periphery of our cases. Law enforcement, caterers, supply clerks. I don’t know if JB has an endless pool of contacts or if they’re just phenomenal at making friends in an eyeblink but they save us about ten million headaches every time we go out to deal with a crisis of some sort.”

“Are they looking for a new job?” the woman behind the head desk, Sam, asked, putting her phone on the desk. “Cause god I could use someone like that today.”

“City inspector’s still making excuses to not come by?” Lara asked, leading Val into Sam’s office.

“What needs inspection?” Val asked.

“We had our new pool building put up two months ago, but the inspector won’t get out here and give us the CO that we need to open it up for public use,” Sam said.

“What’s his excuse this time?” Lara asked, picking up a pamphlet of papers from Sam’s desk.

“He says it’s against his values,” Sam said. “He’s claiming he shouldn’t have to authorize buildings for a use that he finds offensive.”

“It’s a pool,” Lara said, frowning.

“Yeah, but it’s about who owns the pool, and who would be using the pool,” Sam said, massaging her temples.

“Given me one second,” Val said and tapped out a quick text to JB.

A reply appeared a few seconds later. Anna and Tam were enjoying some time off too so things were slow at the Club.

Sam and Lara watched curiously as a few more texts went back and forth before Val looked up.

“Ok, looks like Brad Cosgrave, your previously assigned inspector is going to be sent for some diversity training which he was overdue for, and Inspector Sara Meltzer will be out tomorrow to verify your pool installation.”

“What? Really?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. I wasn’t kidding when I said JB knows everybody.” She smiled. Sometimes wins were easy to come by but it didn’t make them feel any less awesome.

“I would kiss you but my fiance is right here,” Sam said.

“Get in line, I might kiss her first!” Lara said.

“I have sworn off kissing engaged people,” Val said with a laugh. “Too many things get thrown at me when I do that.”

“Lara told me about that,” Sam said. “But that was more of a ‘failed to get engaged’ scenario wasn’t it?”

“I think we’re filing that under ‘it was messy’,” Val said. “But it’s nice to see that it seems to have worked out for the best.” She gestured to the two of them and the picture of domestic harmony they were already radiating, noting in particular the engagement rings that Lara and Sam both wore. Sam smiled broadly and stretched her hand out to give Val a better look at it.

“I  suspect I don’t have to tell you how lucky I am to be wearing this?” she said.

“Your wife-to-be said pretty much the same thing about the one she’s got,” Val said, leaning back with a smile and taking the two women in. “So of course you’re going to start things out with a proxy war.”

“This surprises you?” Lara asked. “You’ve known me how long?”

“I have to confess, I have plans within plans here,” Sam said.

“Have a I mentioned that she’s really smart?” Lara said.

“What are you scheming?” Val asked.

She’d wondered if meeting Sam would be awkward, a fiance and an ex-lover don’t always make the best of impressions on each other, but Sam seemed secure enough in Lara’s affection and Val secure enough in having moved on that no cloud of jealousy boiled up between them. They were just two women who happened to care about the same person but in different ways.

“Lara says you’re good. After the fight, I need to hear what you think about the girl who’s getting into the ring for me,” Sam said.

“That sounds reasonable enough. What’s the catch?” Val asked.

“Oyenike Ladipo, have you heard of her?” Sam asked.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Val said, looking to Lara for a clue. Lara rolled her eyes in whatever the opposite of surprise was at Sam’s choice.

“Nike is going to be my champion for our bet,” Sam said. “She’s good. Really good. I want to encourage her to go for the nationals this year.”

“If she’s good shouldn’t she be shooting for that on her own?” Val asked.

“She’s got a few issues,” Sam said.

“Issues like what?”

“Like she’s never lost, so she’s got a huge chip on her shoulder and a terrible attitude towards competition,” Lara said.

“Maybe,” Sam said. “I think she’s got the makings of a great fighter, but I’m not a coach, and I’m certainly not a prize winning fighter myself.”

“So you’d like an expert opinion on whether she’ll be able to cope with the stress or wind up getting hurt?” Val asked.

“I’m more concerned whether she’ll hurt anyone else,” Sam said. “I don’t want to encourage her to go for something if she’s going to completely lose control.”

Val glanced over at Lara.

“And this is who I’m getting into the ring with?”

“She’ll be fine for this,” Sam said. “She knows this is a friendly bout, and that she’s supposed to put on a good show more than just knock you out.”

“Wait, she thinks she’s going to win this one?” Val asked.

“She’s in top shape, and she practices daily. No offense, but this will be your first time fighting since you recovered right? I know you were good back in the day but it sounds like you’re at least a little out of practice at the moment.”

Val laughed.

“Yeah, this will be the first time I’ll be back in the ring,” she said with a smile that lingered from her laughter.

“If you’re not sure about it, I can ask one of the other girls,” Lara said. “If you get hurt, you know that your mother will kill me so damn hard, and I don’t really want to miss my wedding on account of being dead.”

“I’ll be fine,” Val said, still amused.

She hadn’t been in a ring since before she joined the Army. That was true. Fighting however? That was something she was in better shape for than she’d ever been. Her daily workout routine would put most heavy weights to shame, and she’d had the chance to work with some very gifted teachers as part of her rehabilitation. Charlene had seen potential in her and hadn’t been lax about providing opportunities for Val to develop that potential, both in the areas she was strong in and the ones where she was weak.

“So, how about a side wager,” Val suggested.

“What did you have in mind?” Lara asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion. She knew Val far too well to trust what was going to come next.

“If I lose, I’ll make sure Nike has travel and lodging accommodations all set up for the nationals,” Val said.

“And if you win?” Sam asked.

“I get the first dance with my-friend-the-bride at the reception.”

Two years. It wasn’t a long time, but Val could recount almost every day of them. From the moment when the Jeep she was riding in was struck broadside by a minivan, to the agony and strain of just staying alive in the ambulance, and then the long months of rehab. Each tiring, terrifying days she spent stitching her shattered body back together was etched into her memory with perfect clarity. The only days she couldn’t recall were the six months when she’d been lost to the world entirely. Comatose, with no signs of possible recovery.

“But you remember the accident?” Lara asked. They’d managed to meet up on the day after the fitting, choosing a Starbucks near Lara’s gym for old times sake.

“Every bone crunching moment of it,” Val said. “One second we were heading back from a supply run laughing and joking and the next we got T-boned. Found out later the guy driving the other car had a heart attack, so, you know, not exactly his fault entirely.”

“Damn, that is bad luck,” Lara said. “I’m surprised you remember it though. I thought coma victims usually lost a lot of their memories?”

“It differs,” Val said. “I was out for a lot longer than most, but I had a great team helping with my recovery so it kind of balanced out.”

“That’s who you’re working for now right?” Lara asked.

“Yeah. Three months into my coma, the Army decided I wasn’t fit to serve, which was true,” Val said. “I can’t blame them. At that point there was no sign when, or if, I was going to wake up. And if I did wake up there was no guarantee that what was left of me would be able to serve in any capacity. My current team picked me up sometime after that.”

“Well, the Army’s loss right?” Lara said. “You’re looking pretty good from what I can see.”

“Says the evil woman who’s marrying someone else,” Val words would have held pain and recrimination half a decade earlier but that was a lifetime ago, and even before the accident she and Lara had made peace with what seemed like the insurmountable mountain of drama between them at the time.

“You had your chance girl,” Lara said shaking her forefinger back and forth.

“Hey, I tried to give you a ring,” Val objected. “You threw it back at me! No, I correct myself, you pitched it at me like a fastball! Overhand!”

“Yeah, whatever happened with you two?” Elena asked. “You got in some big fight didn’t you? Right before Val left for the Army?”

“She cheated on me,” Lara said.

“Now wait, that’s technically true, but there was a whole lot of cheating and miscommunication going on there, you’ve got to own up to that,” Val said.

Lara bowed her head and shrugged.

“Yeah, we were young and stupid,” she said. “I mean that wasn’t even that long ago but I look back now and I want to slap my teenage self. She was such an idiot.”

“At least you didn’t sleep with Kevin Louganis,” Val said. “God why? What was I thinking?”

“That you needed to get back at me,” Lara said.

“For something you hadn’t even done!” Val groaned.

“So you two were dating, then you broke up and slept around, and now she’s your Maid of Honor?” Elena asked. “How does that work?”

“Lara is a very forgiving person,” Val said.

“And Val’s good at apologizing sincerely,” Lara said. “After I returned her ring, I started feeling a bit bad about, you know, hurling it at her face.”

“Wait, back up, why was there a ring involved at all here?” Elena asked.

“The usual reason,” Val said. “I asked her to marry me.”

“You did what?” Elena jumped in her seat. “Did Mom and Dad know?”

“Not exactly,” Val said.

“She wanted to elope,” Lara said. “What did you say? ‘I was stupid, here you wanted this, let’s grab a bus to Vegas’?”

“In my defense, it seemed like a great plan at the time, but I did come to see that there would have been a few problems with it,” Val said.

“Yeah, the first one being that your mother wouldn’t have had time to kill us, because we would have killed each other first,” Lara said.

“We might have made it as far as Philly before that though,” Val said. “That would have been a nice long engagement right?”

“So how did you get from ‘murder each other on a bus’ to here?” Elena asked.

“Step one was throwing the ring back at her,” Lara said.

“Step two was going away and thinking about what I really wanted,” Val said. “The ring and the proposal weren’t really honest. I felt bad, and I thought I could buy forgiveness by making a giant gesture.”

“I didn’t want a huge thing though,” Lara said.

“Yeah, I didn’t either it turned out,” Val said. “I just wanted my friend back.”

“So did you two never…?” Elena asked.

“Sleep together? Oh that wasn’t problem,” Lara said. “That part was fantastic. It was what it did to the rest of our relationship that sucked.”

“I don’t know if either of us were ready for a relationship like that,” Val said. “I know I wasn’t, and I think I kind of went overboard.”

“Oh, I was out of my mind too,” Lara said. “I remember being livid – like burst a blood vessel enraged – when you gave me that ring. When I look back now though, I don’t get it. I mean I know what I was thinking at the time, that you weren’t taking me serious and were just mocking my feelings,  but how the hell couldn’t I see where you were coming from? That you were just so hurting and trying to make things right?”

“The same way I couldn’t see just how bad stabbing you in the back had hurt you. It’s easy to get lost in our own pain.”

“You were leaving too,” Lara said. “I think that’s where everything started for me. I knew I was going to lose you to the Army after school ended and then all the stupid drama happened and suddenly I was losing you right away. I had a dump truck full of sadness and anger inside me and it had to come out somewhere and make an ugly mess.”

“The funny thing is? I wasn’t even thinking of the Army as being a big deal for us,” Val said. “I thought, ‘I’ll go to the Army, and Lara will be there when I get out and we’ll make some kind of awesome life for ourselves’.”

“So why didn’t you?” Elena asked. “No offense to Sam, but if you two made up after your big fight, why not get back together?”

“We talked about it,” Lara said.

“I was still leaving for the Army though,” Val said. “And once we were broken up, it was easier to go back to being friends. Right?”

“Definitely,” Lara said. “I’ve loved you since second grade, but we were just not meant to be in love with each other. Not like that at least.”

“Sam’s the one though is she?” Val asked, stirring her coffee and watching it swirl.

“I think so,” Lara said with a happy sigh.

“What’s the she like?” Val asked, looking up to take in the contentment in her best friends eyes.

“She’s grounded, like a rock I can hold onto,” Lara said.

“And then there are the parts of her that aren’t her abs,” Elena said and ducked a playful swat from Lara.

“No, seriously, I know I can be a bit over the top sometimes. It doesn’t take much to drive me up a wall. Sam though? She’s able to bring me back down.”

“That sounds a lot healthier than what we had,” Val said. “You’d go off on something and I’d be there going off twice as loud.”

“I think that’s why you were always my best friend,” Lara said. “No matter what, you always had my back.”

“Damn straight,” Val said and held up her fist.

“Straight as a rainbow,” Lara said completing the fist bump.

“Oh my god you two!” Elena said, mocking a scandalized expression. “If you’re like this now, you must have been disasters when you were in school.”

“Yeah.”

“We were.”

“Why did Mom ever let you out of the house?” Elena asked, turning to Val.

“It was either let me out or I’d sneak out,” Val said. “Plus she knew Lara had enough sense to keep me from getting in too much trouble.”

“What’s hysterical is that my mother though the same thing about you,” Lara said.

“If they only knew,” Val said.

“I used to think we were clever, but you know, I think they had a good idea the kind of things we got up to. I mean they were teenagers once too, and from the stories I’ve heard they raised all kinds of hell before they settled down.”

“Probably best if we never dig too deep into that, but now that you’ve said it, I’ve got to admit I am damn curious to know what Teen Sophia was like,” Val said.

“Picture us I guess, but in the 70s and 80s,” Lara said.

“And now I regret my curiosity,” Val said with a chuckle. She drained her coffee before adding, “You said you had a special request to make though didn’t you? Some unusual part of the wedding?”

“Not the wedding, the bachelorette party,” Lara said.

“I could swear you once said you had no interest in having one of those?” Val said.

“That’s when my mother was talking about marrying me off to some guy,” Lara said. “And anyways, this is more than a bachelorette party. It’s an affair of honor.”

Val drew back and cocked her head to the side.

“A what now?”

“Sam owns a women’s fitness club,” Lara said. “It’s how we met. She came by my gym to see if she could expand by buying me out.”

“And you told her to go to hell because you’d never sell your grandad’s place,” Val said.

“I could have done that, but instead I asked her out to dinner to talk about it,” Lara said.

“Were you seriously considering selling?” Val asked. Lara had been unimaginably proud when she’d inherited the gym. Unless the business was in deep distress, Val couldn’t imagine Lara parting with it.

“No. Never. But as Elena said; Abs. My god, they were hypnotic.”

“Okay then,” Val said with an appreciative laugh. “Did you propose that night?”

“No, we just had a nice meal,” Lara said. “I didn’t know she was even into me at all until the third time we went out.”

“Oh that is typical Lara,” Val said. “Tell me she didn’t throw you onto a bed and just smooch you?”

“Wait, is that what you did to her?” Elena asked.

“Yes, it is,” Lara said. “And no, Sam was much more polite about it.”

“You dared me to do it!” Val said.

“I believe I mentioned we were stupid when we were kids,” Lara said as an aside to Elena.

“Ok, but tell her about your bet!” Elena said.

“I was getting to that,” Lara said. “When we decided to get married, we went back to the idea of combining our businesses. Sam’s place is more of a health club with a decent set of speciality courses, and mine’s more of a boxing gym with a smaller number of general fitness programs.”

“Sounds like an excellent match then,” Val said.

“It is. What we’re trying to decide is which of our business names we want to consolidate under,” Lara said.

“And this is something special you’re planning to work out at your Bachelorette?” Val asked in disbelief. “Is the honeymoon going to be a trip to the tax assessor’s office?”

“Oh, we’re not talking this one out,” Lara said. “We going to mats over it.”

“What?” Val asked, perplexed.

“The girls from our places wanted to help us celebrate, and so we wanted to put on a bit of a show for them,” Lara said. “Sam had the idea to make a wager for the naming of our combined businesses, and then we’d have a Champion’s Battle between our best fighters to see whose honor would reign supreme!”

“That sounds like the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Val said try to hold back the grin from her lips.

“Aww, you don’t want to be part of it?” Lara asked, her bottom lip dropping into a pout.

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for world!”

Val stepped out of the taxi cab and sighed. No matter how far she traveled, or the dizzying number of people she met, there really was no place like home. That didn’t mean returning was necessarily easy though.

“You’re late!” Sophia Perez, Val’s mother said, bapping her daughter on the shoulder. Val’s mother wasn’t a fighter. Not in the technical sense that Val was anyways. That didn’t mean she couldn’t throw a decent punch though. Val’s interest in fighting had been fostered by her mother first and foremost. Fortunately her mother didn’t throw actual punches at her loved ones. Those were reserved for the people who dared to raise a hand against her family.

“Hey!” Val complained. “I got here an hour before I said I would!”

“An hour early and a year late!” her mother said, and picked up both of Val’s bags as the taxi cab driver passed them over. Val groaned. It wasn’t that her mother was wrong but that didn’t mean Val felt like admitting that she hadn’t been home in far, far too long.

“Is Elena home yet?” Val asked, wishing her sister had been the one to meet her rather than her mother. Elena would have teased her too, but Val would have been able to tease her back.

“You probably know better than I do,” her mother said, starting up the stairs that lead to their second floor apartment. “She talks to you on the texts more that she talks to me.”

Val tagged along in her mother’s wake, knowing that trying to wrestle her bags away was not a battle she needed to wage at the moment. Sophia Perez had opinions about her children leaving her, and while she was far more reasonable than she pretended to be, there were times when she felt the need to demonstrate her feelings forcefully.

Val could have objected. She was an adult and could have demanded to be treated like one. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Or the hundreth probably. Moreso than wanting to avoid a fight though, Val went along with her mother’s desire to herd her into the apartment because she felt like she was the Prodigal daughter coming home at last.

They’d parted on poor terms many times in the past, but their last parting hadn’t been a bad one. It had been in a hospital, the day before Val was moved to a facility to start six months of physical therapy. There’d been tears but they’d been happy ones.

Six months was a long time though, and it had been longer than that before Val was back to feeling 100%, and in that time, a strange guilt over not reaching out to her mother had settled into her.

On the long list of items she had to work on while she was home, making up for her long absence was near the top of the list.

“Val? You’re early!” Elena called out when they got into the apartment. Their mother scowled at that but didn’t correct her youngest daughter.

Val and her mother were starkly different in their appearance. There were a few similarities, the shape of their noses, the cast of their chin, things an artist might notice but weren’t strong enough to mark them as related to unfamiliar eyes. Elena on the other hand could have been her mother’s clone. Pictures of Sophia from when she was 16 years old and pictures of Elena as she currently was could have been mistaken for images of the same girl.

The only differences lay in their eyes and the expressions they most commonly wore. At 16, Sophia’s eyes showed the toughness that she would carry with her throughout her life. Her lips were often tight and her jaw set, ready to kick life right back in the teeth when it tried to knock her down. Elena’s outlook was a hundred degrees warmer. She hadn’t lived a perfect life, but she’d had people behind her, helping her up when she fell, and urging her onwards when she was ready to fly on to new things.

Sophia Perez had failed at many things in her life, but she had never failed to give her children the love and support she herself had always craved.

“I was afraid the flight back from Denver wouldn’t arrive on time, so I hopped on an earlier one,” Val said. She didn’t explain that she’d been connecting through Denver after spending a weekend at an amusement park. If she had, they might have asked why she needed a weekend off in the middle of the country and an answer of “to soak away the Nazi blood I got all over myself when I rescued a bus full of kidnapped children” would have led to entirely too many questions she didn’t feel like getting into.

“Must be nice,” her sister said.

It was and it wasn’t. Val liked being able to believe in the work she did. She was overwhelmingly glad she’d been able to get to the right place, at the right time to save a little boy from some of the worst monsters to ever walk the earth. Despite that though, men had died. Killed by their comrades thanks to her subterfuges. Men who arguably deserved to die, but celebrating their deaths was a path Val knew she didn’t want to start walking down.

It was glorious to be alive, it was wonderful to feel safe again, but the cost of that had been confirming that the men who died would never be anything more than the monsters they’d devolved into. Val was a soldier, despite her honorable discharge, and she knew that sometimes winning required acknowledging that the best solution was unreachable. Sometimes for someone to win, somebody else had to lose. A true victory though didn’t leave people dead. A true victory left them changed. It left the people who were imperiled safe and secure and those who imperiled them yearning with all their hearts to change for the better.

“You’re in your old room. Nothing’s changed,” her mother said, dropping Val’s bags on the bed that she’d slept on since she was twelve.

Val glanced into the room. Her mother’s claim wasn’t strictly true. The room was clean for one thing and it had never looked like that when it was Val’s personal sanctum. Apart from that though, it did look reasonably similar to how she’d last left it.

On the top of the bureau stood her collection of trophies, including the two Regional Championship trophies for Muay Thai kickboxing and the one for Escrima. They’d been a source of pride to the whole family when she’d won them, her mother’s cheering only slightly louder than her father’s during Val’s final bouts.

The trophies weren’t in their old arrangement though. And her nightstand didn’t have her favorite frog charm on it any longer. In her absence things had changed, but Val had to smile at the work her mother had done to put things back as best as they could be. Whatever else was missing, the love was still there.

“It looks perfect,” she said.

“Don’t settle in too much,” Elena said. “We should get going to the fitting. If we’re late for that Lara’s going to kill us.”

Val glanced at her mother, wondering what the reaction would be to her leaving so soon after arriving.

“You know when dinner is,” her mother said and wandered off to the kitchen. In Mom-speak that was code for “you are free to go”.

***

The fitting for her bridal gown turned out to be Val’s least favorite part of the day. Not because the gowns were terrible. Lara had chosen a golden cream color for her bridesmaids that Val felt she looked reasonably decent in. The seamstress was in a hurry to get through the fitting though and jabbed Val more than once, in what Val suspected was revenge for Val not standing perfectly still.

“I thought Lara was going to be here with us?” Val asked, thinking that some forms of suffering were meant to be shared.

“She had her fitting last week,” Elena said. “Her and Sam were going to check out the spot they had picked out for the bachelorette party.”

“Together?” Val asked, turning to see if Elena was serious. That earned her another jab from the seamstress. A deliberate one.

“Yeah, they wanted to make sure it was going to have enough space,” Elena said.

Val’s thoughts swam.

“Wait, I thought Lara didn’t want a bachelorette? Is this Sam’s idea?” she asked. “How many people are going to be there?”

She thought she’d signed up to be part of a small, relatively quiet affair. Sam’s family wasn’t local and Lara’s was a not yet sure about the wedding.

“Just a few people.” Elena was terrible at lying when she was amused. Prying the truth out of her would have required bribery equal to whatever the surprise was though and Val didn’t think she had that kind of capital to work with.

“So what’s this Sam like anyways?” Val asked, frowning but staying still, lest she take another needle jab to a soft bit of flesh.

“She reminds me of you,” Elena said.

“She’s been in the military?” Val asked, wondering why she’d never asked Lara for a picture of her fiance.

“No. She’s a fighter though,” Elena said. “She’s got a bunch of trophies like you do, but hers are newer.”

“Ha.” Val didn’t dare move or actually laugh at the notion. She didn’t really need to either. Her competition trophies felt like they were from another life. One she was glad to have lived, but that she could put behind her too. Tournaments were fun, but they demanded a lot of preparation and commitment. Joining the Second Chance Club had given her rewards that were a lot more fulfilling than a collection of statues on a bureau. Especially the rewards with names and lives that they got to keep on living.

“Were you going to swing by the gym?” Elena asked.

“Why? Need me to spot you?” Val asked in return.

“No, I’m not fighting anymore,” Elena said.

“I thought you were planning to go to the City Wide tournament this year?” Val asked.

“I was. I still could I guess, but tournament training isn’t that fun. I just like sparring.”

“You’re still working at Lara’s gym though?” Val asked.

“Yeah, I’ve decided I want to go into sports medicine,” Elena said.

“Really? That’s awesome!” Val said. She knew her kid sister was smart, but there’d always been a question of how Elena would choose to apply her gifts. This was the first time Val could remember that Elena had expressed a definite interest in something. “What made you look into that?”

Working at the women’s boxing gym that Lara owned, would have given Elena plenty of opportunity to see various forms of sport-related injuries. Between the classes in Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu, people were regularly bruised and battered in any number of novel ways.

“You did,” Elena said.

“What?? I’ve never studied medicine,” Val said, which wasn’t strictly true but she didn’t count the first aid training she’d received in the Army the same as the kind of training Elena was looking for. The healing magics the Second Chance Club had access to were also a different matter, since they were unreliably available and usually required calling in favors that were better saved for as long as possible.

“Not like that,” Elena said. “More like, well, we didn’t really start texting until you were doing your recovery. I mean, I know that whole thing sucked for you, but the stuff you talked about? A lot of that it made sense. How they had to work each muscle independently and as a whole system. I remember seeing you on the hospital bed. That was not good. I didn’t think you’d ever be walking again. But, look, here you are!”

Val knew even better than Elena or anyone else did how bad off she’d been. If fate had followed its natural course, the car crash that ended her military career would have done more than put her in a coma for six months.

By all rights, Val knew she was supposed to be dead.

Anna pulled the trigger and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Just like she knew it would. The weight of the gun had been wrong, but more importantly she’d been able to verify that it wasn’t loaded in the brief interval when the Brotherhood brought the young boy who stood before her into the room.

She made a show of checking the weapon as though it might have misfired, but everyone in the room knew it hadn’t. The Brotherhood hadn’t trusted her and the last thing you want to give to someone you don’t trust is a loaded firearm.

Once Anna had proven that the firearm was in working order, she held out her hand for a replacement, being careful to appear visibly unhappy with the trick they’d attempted to pull on her.

No one wanted to give her their own gun of course. Even those who were rapidly coming to believe her story found Anna’s demeanor intimidating.

Anna shrugged and reached into her pocket. That was too much for one of the jumpier members of the Brotherhood. Driven by a frothing panic, he drew his own firearm and stepped within a few feet of her, demanding that she drop the gun she was obviously reaching for.

Instead, she finished withdrawing her hand from her pocket, along with the buzzing smart phone she’d reached for.

The Brotherhood member was not pacified by site of a phone in place of the pistol he’d assumed she was reaching for. From his reaction to it, the phone was even more threatening of a weapon than a gun would have been.

Flecks of spittle flew from his mouth as he demanded to know who was on the other end of the line. He would shoot her if she didn’t tell him. He would shoot her right there, right in the head.

The flecks of spittle were shortly joined by a spray of blood.

In his panic and rage, he’d walked within Anna’s arm’s reach.

There are many methods of disarming someone. Anna chose one that would produce an audible snap as the bones in the man’s wrist shattered. Before the pistol could hit the floor, she scooped it up in the hand which had broken the man’s wrist, and then, before the other Brotherhood members could react, she used the pistol to smash the man in the face, breaking his nose and shattering his jaw.

The time for pretense was done, she had a large room of people to deal with, and she needed to make sure that the most trigger happy one among them wasn’t going to be a problem later.

Shooting him would have been the most efficient option to ensure he didn’t become a problem again, but she held back. Broken bones could heal, bruises would mend, but if she ended his life, that ended too many other things. Gone would be the slim chance that he would turn around and repudiate the man he’d devolved into, and gone would be the very real possibility of seeing justice done for the crimes he had been party to.

No one in the room was going to die.

That didn’t mean everyone would be leaving under their own power however. Or fully intact.

The primary myth of the gun is that bearing one is a path to safety. People see the power offered by a firearm as a means of guaranteeing their safety. When danger threatens they imagine that their gun will allow them to fight back, to shoot the other guy before they get shot themselves.

The reality however is that danger doesn’t arrive when you’re ready and prepared for it. It strikes at unforeseen moments, and usually has the initiative on even the most well prepared of people.

The Brotherhood had brought Anna into the control center questioning whether they were going to trust her or bury her in some forgotten acre of the forest. Anna, by contrast, had entered the control room knowing she was going to take down every last person inside it.

The numbers were against her, but she knew the general plan of what she would do before she stepped into the building. The specifics came to her in the moment, with some degree of improvisation (no plan survives exposure to reality), but overall she moved without pause or delay.

From the man with the broken wrist and face, she turned to the next most dangerous person in the room.

He started reaching for his gun the moment she turned her eyes on him, but her reflexes were already executing her plan while his were still figuring out exactly what he wanted to do.

She shot him in the hand. Hands aren’t critical body parts, but they are composed of highly delicate bones. Even after a number of surgeries, he wouldn’t regain full use of it, though he would learn, in time, to sketch portraits quite well with his diminished manual dexterity.

The next man to draw his weapon received the firearm Anna was holding as a projectile to his throat. He went down gagging and choking, in far too much pain to think about the rifle Anna took from his unresponsive fingers.

Of the rest of the men, the whole group had been sure that when they were in a life threatening situation they would instantly react just as their favorite action stars did, dropping one-liners and responding with clear headed speed and precision.

Precisely none of them managed that however.

For all their practice and training, none of them had envisioned the situation they were in turning violent. In the first few precious moments they each scrambled to first understand what was occurring, then evaluate the area around themselves, then form a proper response. Even something as simple as “draw gun, aim, and fire” was complicated by the fact that Anna didn’t stand still like a target dummy, or pop out in a static set of locations like their practice range targets.

The room held nine men, plus Anna, plus the child named Gabriel. Ann put the first two men down before any of the rest registered that a conflict had even begun. The other seven couldn’t manage to get out of each other’s line of fire long enough to get a shot off. They scrambled to find an avenue of attack and Anna broke them one by one.

By the time the fifth one was writhing on the floor the remaining four’s morale broke and they tried to flee instead of engage. That wasn’t an option Anna could allow them though. Tam was supposed to have rescued the children in the bus but if she was delayed, Anna needed to buy her as much time as possible.

One man tried to take Gabriel hostage.

That was a mistake.

Anna broke his back.

The last to fall was beyond panic and could barely articulate his threat as he waved a detonator switch in the air.

He was threatening the children in the bus. They were all wearing explosive leggings, and he was more than willing to blow them all up if Anna didn’t let him go.

There was a long moment when it looked like they would be stuck in a deadly standoff, but then Anna’s phone dinged with the arrival of a new message from Tam.

She glanced at the phone and then at the last Brotherhood member still standing. The calm delight on her face was too unnerving. The man released the detonator and blew up…not the children but the large stockpile of weapons the Brotherhood had collected on the base.

***

“How did you get the kids out of there?” Val asked. “I thought you said removing their leg bombs was going to take too long?”

She was relaxing in the inground hot tub adjacent to the main pool at the Anderson Water and Amusement Park. Charlene had rented out the entire park for the weekend and after trekking through the wilderness for hours evading the Brotherhood hunters who hadn’t gotten the memo that they were beaten, a long relaxing soak was exactly what the doctor ordered.

“That turned out to be pretty easy,” Tam said. “A couple of the kids knew sign, so I explained how to take the ankle bracelets off to them with my really poor signing skills and then let them watch me unlock one. They helped show the other kids how to do it and we cut the job down to fraction of the time.”

“But the bus still blew up?” Anna asked. She was less sore than Val, but the warm water still felt good on shoulders. She didn’t like violence, and especially didn’t like the degree of it she’d had to inflict, but life didn’t always arrange itself according to one’s preferences.

“I wasn’t sure how long we had before the SWAT teams showed up, so once the kids were off I put a rock on the bus’s accelerator pedal and sent it into the nearest building I could see,” Tam said. She was sipping from a fruit filled adult beverage whose silly name she hadn’t bothered to ask. Just so long as it had an umbrella and a straw she was happy.

“Yeah, what happened with the SWAT guys? I thought they were supposed to be rallying to follow us as fast as they could?” Val asked.

“The first story was that there was a mix up in the lines of communication,” Anna said.

“But then we recovered the data from the sniffer Anna brought into their communications hub and we found out that one of the local SWAT commanders and a few of the on duty officers were members of the Brotherhood,” Tam said.

“So Charlene was right to have JB do an end run around them. Huh, color me not at all shocked,” Val said.

“It does make some sense, right? The Brotherhood chose the location they did because they had the local police on their side,” Tam said. “Any investigation that lead to the Brotherhood’s doorstep would go through the office of some of its senior members.”

“Speaking of that, how did we do with identifying the people behind the organization?” Val asked.

“Well, we got their full member roster,” Tam said. “So those guys will all be doing time in separate federal prisons fairly soon I imagine.”

“We also found a number of their financial backers,” Anna said. “Jimmy B is already tracing the connections between them to see if we can catch any who might not have shown up on the ledgers we copied.”

A young boy went running past the hot tub, chased by two girls and another boy. One after the other they cannonballed into the pool and swam to the other side, leaping out of the pool as quick as they’d entered it to race up the stairs that led to the top of the Twisty Turns Fun Slide.

“Gabriel seems to have come out his ordeal ok,” Tam said, nodding at the boy in the lead.

“This weekend will be good for him, and good for all the children, but the scars of their abduction will linger too,” Anna said.

“I was talking with some of their parents,” Val said. “A lot of them are considering moving, but none of them know where they could go.”

“I don’t think there are any good answers for that,” Anna said. “We want so much to protect the ones closest to us, but safety isn’t something we buy for any amount of coin.”

“Charlene asked me to work on that,” Tam said. “Not perfect safety,” she amended. “But something that will make staying as a part of their community easier.”

“What are you going to put together?” Val asked.

“There was a lot of support offered online to the families who were affected,” Tam said. “It may help a little that people in other states or other countries were reaching out, but a fair bit of the support came from people in the community the kids and their families are a part of. Jimmy B’s and I are helping some organizers there put together events to show that the people they live with are going to stand with them, and protect them.”

“I like that,” Val said.

“It’s the only answer that works,” Anna said. “We can give them a second chance, but only when people come together can they truly make the world a better place.”

Anna didn’t assault the Scarlet Freedom Brotherhood members like Val did. She didn’t evade them like Tam did either. Anna favored a more direct approach, so she rang their proverbial doorbell.

The upside to infiltrating a heavily monitored compound was that it was incredibly easy to get the inhabitants’ attention. After scoping out the Brotherhood’s base from a distance, and allowing Val and Tam the time they needed to get in place, Anna simply drove up the main road on her motorcycle and knocked on the security gate.

The guard there tried to turn her away. It was what he would have done on any day but especially during “hunting season” when there couldn’t be any breaches in security. Even the most rabid of members knew that organized mass murder wasn’t something they could walk away from if someone outside their cult found out.

Anna tossed the guard a trio of skulls, small ones, looped together by a silver chain drilled through the temples and asked, in a broad German accent, if she was too late to join the fun.

The skulls weren’t real, or at least weren’t the skulls of human children as they appeared to be. The guard had neither the training nor the instruments to determine that however. His ears heard the voice of the Nazi Reich he so admired, and his imagination was all too eager to cast the tall, light haired woman with eyes of steel as a modern day angel of the Iron Cross, so he did what any loyal, unquestioning follower was supposed to do; he called the main camp to ask his superiors for permission to bring her in.

Anna’s answering smile to the invitation said she was eager for the hunt, and it was true, except for the part where she wasn’t going to hunt children.

In her career in high finance, she’d run across all sorts of disgusting and disreputable people and the worst of them were the ones who cultivated groups like the Brotherhood. Some number of people were going to fixate on their hates under the best of circumstances, and the only thing easier to profit off than hate was the fear which bred it. She’d struggled over the years to drive those profit mongers into the ground, and met with mixed success because the victories always seemed to be indirect ones.

She shut down a company which peddled hateful rhetoric targeting the disadvantaged and kept an oligarch in power, but the cost of the shutdown was money and resources that could have done tremendous good if they could have been used to alleviate suffering elsewhere. Even something as simple as creating a community space where people could engage with those outside their isolated spheres, had cost her the opportunity to create a program which could foster a deeper understanding of other cultures for those who were already interested in learning.

The trade-offs were ones Anna believed were worth it at the time, but the urge to strike back in more a personal manner was a temptation that never went away.

She continued smiling as the guard opened the gate and passed her into the custody of two men in a jeep, each of whom was armed well enough to donate several thousand dollars of gear to the person who popped their fantasy bubbles of being an ‘elite warrior’ and simply shot them when they weren’t looking.

Anna wasn’t going to be that person though. In her eyes, their fates were already sealed. If they were lucky, Tam would get to them. If they weren’t Val would. And if they somehow escaped the Brotherhood’s compound before the end of the day? Well that would be the worst possible luck they could have. Then Charlene would be the one to deal with them.

When they arrived at the main camp, there was a small force waiting to meet them. Not the leadership of the Brotherhood. Those men were either out hunting or believed themselves too important to risk exposure to any unknown entities.

Anna repeated her story for them, but in greater detail.

She wanted to join their hunt.

Why?

Because she’d heard good things about their group and wanted to see if they could live up their online billing.

The hunt wasn’t advertised online. None of the members ever talked about. How had she heard about it? What branch of the government was she working for?

She offered them her hand. Run her fingerprints. See who she was. You’ve got cops on the member roll. It shouldn’t take long.

It didn’t. Interpol’s database had a very quick response when it came to the people on its global most wanted list.

Anna’s crimes were lengthy, at least as far as the dummy account assigned to Anna’s fingerprints showed. Tam had asked a helpful member of the Second Chance Club to create a fake profile tied to Anna’s real fingerprints. It would disappear within the hour but by then the need for deception would be long passed.

Among Anna’s fictional offenses was a string of murders of high profile civil rights activists, and several charges for organizing later day Nazi parties, which in Germany had been strictly illegal since WWII.

The false identity worked like a charm, which is to say it enchanted some of the Brotherhood members but others remained suspicious. As a whole though, they were willing to play along with the story, many of them immediately imagining how they could expand their reach to Europe and places Anna claimed to know where there were no extradition treaties with the U.S.

In the guise of welcoming her, the senior Brotherhood member assigned one of his trusted lieutenants to show Anna around. He explained that there was already a hunt in session, and that to make sure everyone had a chance to take part in the fun, they staggered things out into waves. If she wanted to be a part of a hunt, she would have to wait until one of the last rounds, once all the members had been a chance at “bagging a prize” first.

Anna shrugged. Waiting for last would be better than missing out entirely, she assured them, and she was pretty sure she’d win the best prize. Half of what she said there was true, just not the half the Brotherhood was going to be happy about.

The Brotherhood had its own plans though. To keep up the appearance of welcoming her, they gave Anna a tour of the compound while the first hunt was run. The first stop was the armory, which she made appreciative noises at. The members all had their own collection of weapons, but their siege mentality demanded that they build up as large a horde as possible for ‘the coming war’.

Anna could have pointed out the futility of maintaining a militia arsenal against a modern military force, but allowing evil men to misspend their resources was like planting a seed for victories yet to come.

She did talk to them about the prices she usually paid for weapons, and some of the dealers that she knew who could ship product internationally. The names were real, but they belonged either to dead men or law enforcement officers who specialized stopping the flow of  illegal weapons trading. With no easy method of verifying the names, the Brotherhood members who had joined her on the tour reacted only with disbelief that prices could be so low, or eagerness to increase their stockpiles at a discount.

As they talked, she drew info from them.

The members she spoke with mostly purchased their firearms legally, though they knew many routes to sidestep troublesome parts of the law, and more than a few methods of acquiring “untraceable” guns.

They were all proud of the collections they’d amassed in time for this year’s “hunt”, which was by far the biggest they’d ever attempted.

Usually the Brotherhood relied on kidnapping people from across the country within the month that led up to the hunt. That had proven to be more trouble than anyone cared for though. Kidnapped prisoners required upkeep – food and even medicine occasionally – or they wouldn’t be worth hunting at all.

The plan to kidnap a bus of immigrant children had been put into place after the Brotherhood’s leadership saw it becoming clear that the political climate was changing, that hating foreigners was acceptable at the highest levels of government and that people across the country would leap to defend even the most vile of actions rather than allow ‘their side’ to look bad. Nazis and paedophiles had become ‘good people too’ in enough people’s eyes that the Brotherhood thought they could get away with anything they desired.

Killing kids wasn’t something good people did of course, but the Brotherhood broke through the “weaker” members resistance to that with the conviction that children weren’t really people. They were “illegals”, and they’d forfeited their rights they moment they “invaded”.

Anna had dealt with monsters before. She was able to feed them exactly the justifications they wanted to hear, anticipating the arguments they were used to being presented with and feeding them their own words before they even had a chance to speak in their defense.

For the members that wanted to believe she was on the level, her speaking their language was enough to win their eternal devotion. For those who were suspicious, her claims raised their concerns even further. She was too good to be true. They couldn’t accept life as ever being in their favor and certainly not when it came in the form of a stern and powerful older woman.

The tour ended at the communication hubs of the compound. The more technically gifted members were monitoring the progress of the hunt and watching the state and local police bands for any sign that they’d been detected.

The hunters weren’t wearing any kind of tracking devices, in part because no one wanted to give away their secrets in how they tracked and brought down their quarry, and in part because no one thought it was necessary.

The child who was being hunted though had been injected with a GPS transmitter, and was wearing one of their radio listening devices, so the central communications station knew exactly where he was.

It made for a festive environment in the tech bunker, as the members who were present watched the child’s movement and speculated wildly on what the hunters were doing to find him.

There was a betting pool on which hunter would find the boy first, and a separate one for who would make it back to their base with “the trophy”.

Anna kept well away from the computers and controls so that no one would be concerned about her meddling with things. The Brotherhood didn’t trust her yet, and any move that tested that trust was likely to be accompanied by a fatal blowback.

Also, with the device Tam had given her, and being within range of their wifi system, there really wasn’t any reason Anna needed to touch their computers to harvest the information she needed.

The hunt hit a snag when the tracking device on the boy showed him moving in a straight line off the compound and towards the mountains.

There was a wide open stretch of plain between the forest’s border and the proper rise of the mountains. Plenty of open space for a hunter to finish the target off but despite the fact that someone should have had a shot at the kid, the boy kept moving.

Something was amiss and the Brotherhood was not in a position to deal with things going wrong.

Anna watched as one of the members lead the next child to be hunted into the room.

The young boy had been “being prepared”, which meant outfitting him with the injectable GPS tracker and providing the proper motivation by telling him that he had to run or the other kids would die.

He was eight years old. Anna recognized him from his file. Gabriel Sanchez. A mother, a father, and two sisters were praying for his safe return. He stood before the assembled Brotherhood members trying to be brave, but he couldn’t keep his limbs from trembling.

They handed her a gun, which she checked with a quick glance. The safety was off.

They didn’t like what was happening, and so she was going to have to prove herself. She wanted to be part of the hunt? Time to pass her first real test then. If she was who she claimed to be, she wouldn’t have any problem bagging the next body.

On the other hand, if she was a Fed, or working for anyone who stood against the Brotherhood, if she hesitated in the slightest then they’d know she was part of whatever was happening, and they would act…

They never got to finish the threat.

Anna pointed the gun directly at Gabriel’s head and pulled the trigger.