Blondie, that impetuous scamp, was the first to fire: a barrage of mage balls so fierce I could actually feel heat coming off them. Phaedra’s lot pulled in tight, reinforcing each other’s defenses as their leader launched her own attack.

On the one hand, watching an Alfar and an Original hammer at each other was interesting. The amount of power was breathtaking, as was the creativity of their pummeling. But on the other hand, it was just that: pummeling. And raw strength versus raw strength—while awe-inspiring at first—gets a mite boring after a while. Even though I had no doubt the Original was stronger than Phaedra, the bald little Alfar had enough of her people with her to negate most of her weakness. Numbers helped make us evenly matched, which meant witnessing this fight was a bit like watching those plastic robots box, without the promise of one of their little plastic robot heads ever popping up.

In other words, this could take forever. And I hadn’t brought any snacks.

On second thought, I realized, looking around. Phaedra and Blondie might have the stamina to make this last forever… but I don’t think the cave does.

Between the Alfar and the Original, enough force was flying about that the walls of the cave were starting to shake. I used my own power to increase the mass of the shields over our heads, so that falling crystals wouldn’t drill through our skulls.

That would be uncomfortable, I thought as a huge crystal bounced off the shields right above my forehead and hit the ground a few feet away. Probably as uncomfortable as getting completely crushed, I added, as more crystals came raining down as the cave walls shook harder.

The two fighters had noticed the effect they were having on the cavern as well. In a game of supernatural chicken, they met each other’s eyes as they forced their power toward one another. That power crashed together and then streamed upward, causing a crack to form in the ceiling of the cave. Neither one would relent, however, and the power forced that crack up and open. Daylight shone through as I used my own power, as did Phaedra’s cronies, to shore up the earth around the crack before it could collapse in on us.

I felt a rise in my belly—that familiar feeling of resentment at always using my own energies to clean up the messes made by more powerful creatures. Luckily, however, I wasn’t the only creature who had had enough.

“You’re too late!” Phaedra was shouting behind the wall of magic her people had erected in front of her. “I’ve already unlocked the second glyph, and the next two will fall shortly! I will claim the prize!”

“If you can find ’em,” Blondie grunted, forcing even more magic toward Phaedra as I pulled frantically at my own power to keep the walls around us from coming down.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Phaedra said, unwittingly admitting that she did not, indeed, know where the other two sigils were. “We have resources you cannot imagine,” the evil little Alfar cackled. “And soon you’ll know what it is to suffer.”

Been there, done that, I thought, as Blondie frowned.

“Who’s we, anyway, elf?” the Original asked, using the Alfar’s most hated term after “halfling.”

Phaedra laughed even more maniacally, as the two harpies sidled behind their group.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the Alfar asked, quite rhetorically.

“Yes, we would,” I muttered, keeping an eye on Kaya and Kaori.

“Um, duh?” Blondie said, loud enough for Phaedra’s ears. “We do want to know. That’s why I asked.” And with that she winged a few more mage balls at the Alfar, as if in punishment for asking stupid questions.

“All you need to know is that you should be glad Rockabill will not exist for much longer. For when our forces rise, you will all be slaves.” Phaedra’s blood-red eyes—extra large underneath her shaved pate—met mine. “Well, except for those of you we kill for being stains,” she finished.

“I like to consider myself more of a smudge,” I called back, lobbing a few mage balls of my own to punctuate my sentences. Just because I was letting the Original do her thing didn’t mean I was weak anymore. And I looked forward to teaching Phaedra that particular lesson.

“You are something to be wiped clean, and I will enjoy being that dishcloth,” Phaedra hissed at me, her posture menacing.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “You just called yourself a dishcloth, you idiot. That was the worst villainous threat I’ve ever heard.”

Blondie chortled. Phaedra fumed.

“It’s not a threat!” the Alfar shouted. “It is your fate! To be crushed!”

“And lemme guess… You’re the rolled-up newspaper that will do the crushing?” I said.

“Or the big dirty boot?” suggested Blondie. “The boot in the face? The brute, brute heart of a brute like you?”

Clearly not having read her Sylvia Plath, Phaedra could only fume.

“That’s enough,” came Graeme’s voice through the darkness. “While we’d love to stay and play,” he said, touching the edge of my shields with that dark mind, “we have things to do.” And then the incubus unleashed his thoughts: a paradoxically gentle touch of darkness that made me break out in a cold sweat.

The touch spoke more clearly than words: I can get to you anywhere.

Keeping their shields with them, Phaedra and Graeme let the two harpies launch them into the air. I watched them go, Graeme’s eyes stayed on mine as they flew through the huge crack in the cavern’s ceiling. I shuddered when I could finally look away.

“We need to work on your emotional shields,” Blondie said, in a distractingly conversational tone that I appreciated. “And we will, very shortly. But right now, we’ve got a playdate.”

Fugwat stared at us, stupid and abandoned, from his corner of the cavern.

It sucks to be the henchman no one cares about, I mused, wondering just what Blondie would do to him first.

“I don’t know anything!” the spriggan sobbed, for about the fortieth time. And, once again, I heard that horrible crunching sound come from underneath Blondie’s boot.

“Tell me everything you know, or I’ll break even more,” my sadistic friend shouted, raising her foot in the air menacingly above where Fugwat crouched.

When he only whimpered, she went ahead and crushed another of the beautiful crystals she’d apparated for the spriggan’s benefit.

Who knew Fugwat torture would cost the lives of so much bling? I mused, watching as Blondie melted down a cluster of sparkly bangles with a wisp of her fierce power.

The spriggan sobbed at the sight, but didn’t change his tune.

“I don’t think this canary is going to sing,” I suggested, gently. “And somewhere there’s a Claire’s whose stock is seriously being depleted.”

“Fuck,” said Blondie, kicking the wall against which the spriggan leaned. Then she turned to me. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” she asked. I considered the question. On the one hand, Fugwat had been really shaken up after being left by his gang. He obviously hadn’t assumed he was as expendable as Phaedra thought him to be. And if Phaedra thought he was expendable, he probably didn’t know anything. On the other hand, Fugwat might not know what he knew. In other words, he might have picked up on things, or overheard things, that would make sense to us, if not him.

“I have no idea,” I said, finally. “I don’t know a lot about interrogating prisoners, to be honest. I took the elective in creative writing that semester, instead of Torture 101.”

“Shit,” she swore, again. “I really don’t want to have to go in—”

“Go in?” I asked, sharply. While the bling torture had been amusing, I wanted no part of actual torture.

“Mentally,” she replied, grimly.

“Oh,” I said. “Like what—”

“Graeme does? Yes.”

“You can do that?”

“I can. But unlike Graeme, I’m really good at it. So I can do what I did to you in that soda shop.”

I nodded, remembering. The first time I’d met Blondie she’d made me see all sorts of vines and stuff grow out of the darkness. All when, in reality, I’d been standing in a brightly lit ice cream parlor.

“Which is not invasive at all,” she finished, as I nodded again. For what she’d done to me had felt outside of my mind, rather than in it. I knew she hadn’t been party to my thoughts, or anything like that.

“But you can do more than that?” I prompted.

“Oh, yeah. Like I said, I can do what I did to you, which is basically a party trick. Or I can go in. Way in. I can pull whatever I want out of your mind. But that’s more like what Graeme does. That’s more like—”

“A violation,” I said, for her.

“Yes,” she replied. “And not something I like doing.”

“I can understand that,” I said, fulfilling my requirement for Understatement of the Week.

“But if Fugwat knows something, and we don’t get it out of him, and this whole part of the country gets wiped out—”