Sarah was tempted to ask herself what she thought she was doing. The answer was obvious, though. She was lying. She was lying a lot. Lying like her name was O.J. and someone had just handed her a pair of gloves. Pennant made it easy. The man kept so much incriminating evidence lying around that Sarah didn't even need to dig through her phone to find the videos she knew were out there. Instead, she could simply reference whatever files he'd kept on hand. It wasn't like she didn't know where they were; she'd already spent most of the morning snooping through his apartment, after all.
"I suppose the first thing you need to understand is there aren't any hard rules. The Squigglies - that's what we're calling them by the way - are very modular in nature. They can be different sizes, various colors, and they don't always possess the same number of limbs." Sarah flipped through a manilla folder until she found two warspawn she could compare side by side. "As you can see from these pictures, it's rather difficult to tell if we're talking about the same species or a collection of genera within an over-arching family. With that being said, I do have some good news: once we decided to focus on their behavior, we were able to draw a couple of inferences regarding their anomalous abilities."
Sarah set another full-color print-out onto the kitchen table. The image was of an infiltrator being cut from a mutilated corpse. "This particular specimen is known as the 'Hermosillo parasite.' It was found within the body of a twenty-six-year-old male after he started behaving erratically. 'How erratically,' you may ask? Well, prior to his decision to steal four million dollars from the local Cartel, Carlos here shelved books for a living. He had precisely one vice, and that was feeding a feral coyote, which died shortly before his kleptomania expressed itself. Would you care to take a guess at how the animal expired?"
Adam peered at the picture in between sips of his coffee. "I get the feeling you're going to tell me it was a neck injury."
"Perhaps I should've included a spoiler warning because you're right. From what we can tell, the Squiggly attached itself to the canine's spine and then migrated over to our victim once it became convenient. In other words, immediately because I cannot overstate the control these parasites are able to employ. We suspect it's total."
Kaitlyn winced. "That's-"
"Pertinent," Sarah cut in. "Animal attacks have been on the rise ever since the 28th of August. According to my research, there have been six in Boston alone. During a normal year there might've been one across the state."
The witch began googling the claim just to be pedantic. Sarah wished her the best of luck; the more time Kaitlyn spent perusing the data, the less she'd have to spare on Sarah's fictious backstory. Besides, the animal part was true: it was simply due to all of the mana in the air, instead of the Offal Sea.
"So, what you're saying is we've got a bug problem? These hills fucking crawl, and I need to do my part?" Adam leaned over and ribbed his distracted companion.
Sarah waited patiently for him to get the joke out of his system. "That's exactly what I'm saying," she confirmed once she'd regained his full attention. "Timothy and I have spent a substantial amount of time combing the city in order to investigate each of these attacks. While my boyfriend prefers to focus on the human element, animals remain my bailiwick, and I'm certain I've found another who's been content to bide his time."
Kaitlyn looked up from her phone. "Like 'found' found or...?"
"I'm confident I can reduce our search radius to a two-kilometer stretch."
Mostly because Barkley was an atypical shithead. Unlike the rest of the Boston cell, their youngest member had broken with his peers by co-opting a non-human host. It was a huge pain in the ass. If Mannly wanted to go somewhere, he could just take the train; every time Barkley needed to make it to a meeting, someone had to go pick him up. Since half of their compatriots couldn't drive, Sarah got stuck with chaperone duty more often than she'd care to admit. It left her familiar with the bastard's stomping grounds at the cost of his host always peeing on her seat.
"A mile's still pretty vague," Kaitlyn groused. "What makes you think our target's stuck around?"
Because the asshole enjoyed his routine. "Trust me when I say it's a smaller area than you'd expect. These creatures are semi-aquatic, and there's only so many places one would feel at home. In this case, it's malingering near Constitution Beach. Unless the shoreline's packed, we should be able to narrow our search with a glance."
Sarah could sense Kaitlyn wavering after each counterpoint. It was also difficult for her to claim that Barkley wasn't their problem when they'd spent so much time chasing down the Light's interstellar castoffs. As for her persistent skepticism... well, the Network hadn't been kind to the narrow minded. Truth be told, the witch already believed in the supernatural; all Sarah had to do was convince her of this particular phenomenon's veracity.
Adam made it easy. "Awesome, I'm in," he exclaimed and slapped the table with his palm. The man had a big grin on his face until he noticed Kaitlyn's flinch, then he just looked sheepish.
Sarah refused to let him walk his commitment back. "I'm glad," she sighed while channeling her sincere relief. "This request is a bit time sensitive, and I didn't want to handle it alone. Fighting a body-jacker without backup struck me as the sort of ill-advised scheme you'd disparage on tv as poor writing. I couldn't just leave the creature be, though, since it might snatch an unattended kid. Hopefully, together, we can solve this problem for good."
A set of manicured nails dug into Adam's shoulder as Kaitlyn hissed in his ear. "Can I talk to you for a minute. In private?"
The words weren't soft enough to escape Sarah's notice; however, the parasite pretended to be deaf while Kaitlyn dragged her companion towards the door. The two of them retreated down the hall until they reached the walk-in closet where Pennant stored his taxidermized animal heads. In other circumstances, it might have been humorous to see Kaitlyn sequester Adam beneath their glassy stare. Today wasn't that day. Today, Sarah spun up her 'Air' core, so she could spread a haze of mana throughout the cluttered apartment.
It took a couple of seconds before she could get the vibrations to travel back to her ear. "...the fuck," Kaitlyn was saying, her voice distorted from the spell. "Have you forgotten why we're here? We don't have time to pick up a side-quest from every two-bit NPC you stumble across!"
"Come on," Adam replied, exasperated by her attitude. "Don't be that way. I'm sure Miss Blonde and Busty has an incredibly rich inner life."
"She's fucking Tim, Adam: the love interests in your hentai have more well-rounded backstories! It's also not the point! Deckard is dead. So's Ethan, and Anthony would have suffered the same fate if he'd been even half a second slower. This shit is dangerous! We can't just throw ourselves into things because you think it'd make a good story!"
Adam shifted. It sounded like he was holding her by the arm or maybe hugging her close to his chest. "Hey, those guys knew what they were getting into, okay? No one talked them into anything. Not me - not Ollie - and certainly not you."
The transmission blared with static as Kaitlyn choked back a bitter scoff. "Please, Ethan was half convinced he was suffering from a psychotic break. Deckard probably thought it was the Rapture."
"It was still their choice!" Adam insisted mulishly. "It was their chance to do more with their life than struggle to outperform a machine! Neither you, nor I, had any right to stand in their way. I'm certainly not going to second guess their resolve after the two of them have already passed. What would even be the point of that, save to beat myself up for a decision I had no business trying to influence?"
Kaitlyn had to force herself not to shout. "And what? That makes it okay for us to keep taking the same crazy risks?"
"In essence? Yes. We're not children. If I want to do some dumb shit, then it's nobody's problem except my own. The question is: do you? I can't answer that for you. You have to figure it out for yourself."
"Fucker," Kaitlyn spat, the expletive more soggy than stern. "Fine. But we're not doing this alone."
"...No one ever said we had to."
Sarah let the spell dissipate as Adam turned the knob. Kaitlyn took a moment to dry her face before following him back to the kitchen. In the meantime, Sarah pretended to be engrossed with Pennant's files. Whether either of them bought the act was honestly up in the air. Both were too human to challenge her on the little white lie, though, so ultimately, they let the pretense pass.
"I have reservations," Kaitlyn admitted while Adam nursed his lukewarm coffee. "I'm not going to say you're making all of this up, but I didn't plan to spend my day frolicking at the fucking beach. You said you recognized me from the news, so you can probably guess why. We've been in it - to put the past week gently. I don't know if the two of us are ready to go another round."
"I could offer you some compensation," Sarah suggested leadingly. "It's only fair if you're putting in a hard day's work."
"That's not what I meant," Kaitlyn denied even as Adam visibly perked up. "I'm not saying we won't help you; I'm questioning if we can. You, me and Adam? That sounds like a losing proposition. I'd prefer to bring a few of our friends along in order to stack the deck."
So long as one of them wasn't Pennant, Sarah didn't consider it a problem. Two people; ten; twenty - past a certain point it was all a numbers game. Maybe she'd be singing a different tune if she hadn't eavesdropped on their conversation; however, that ship had long since sailed. At this point, she'd gotten a feel for their dynamic, and they reminded her of peers on Earth. Needless to say, it wasn't a mark in their favor.
"I'd love the meet your friends, " Sarah said with a small guileless smile. "Please. Call them."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Of their six-man team: two were dead, two had been with Sarah at Pennant's apartment and the rest were some flavor of skittish or injured. Julien, the man who'd allegedly gotten the better of an engine block, turned Kaitlyn down when she asked him for help. He was willing, he told her. Very willing. But he was also beat to hell and having trouble getting out of bed. Maybe it'd be for the best if they found someone else to take his place.
Kaitlyn hadn't possessed the heart to call him out on his bullshit. Especially when their sixth, a young man named Anthony, was too noble to ignore her texts. Well, that or he was thirsty enough to disregard the danger. Sarah couldn't decide which was more likely until she met him by the gate of the yacht club. Then it was painfully obvious.
"It's a pleasure to meet you," the aspiring hero murmured as he held out a slim-fingered hand. "Please...uh... call me Piers."
Nineteen or so, with a bit of a bookish air, he was dressed in a worn overcoat and had a scarf wrapped around his neck. He was also a foreigner, judging by his accent. Italian, maybe, or possibly Greek. It was hard to tell. Regional differences in pronunciation tended to blend together once they were encoded by a warspawn nexus.
Sarah dismissed the wayward thought. She was supposed to be aping a decent human being, so she leaned forward to shake his hand. "That's kind of you to say. I know this isn't the best time to have this conversation, but you come highly recommended." Sarah pumped his proffered limb between her palms before eventually letting it fall.
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The young man's gaze lingered on the swell of her chest. Sarah had done her best to subtly emphasize her cleavage, and Anthony was crass enough to look. His pupils finally flickered towards her face. Sarah acted like she hadn't caught him staring. "Has anyone explained what we'll be doing here?" she asked him.
Anthony coughed into his fist. "Uhm, yes. Adam broke it down for me over the phone."
"And he spelled out the dangers?" Sarah pressed. Anthony nodded. That wasn't good enough for her, so she took a small step forward and squeezed his sweaty fingers. "Please... be careful. If this thing slips inside one of us, I'm not sure we'll be able to pull it out." Sarah could see Anthony's thoughts stutter as his fantasies nearly aligned with her words. She leaned forward until she was practically pressed to his groin. "Should the worst occur... can I trust you to take care of it?"
He must have watched the same porn Adam did because he looked like he might combust. Finally, his head bobbed up and down. "Y-yes," Anthony stuttered nervously. "Of course."
Sarah turned away, confidant the earworm she'd planted had taken root. Now, the teen wouldn't hold back on the off-chance Barkley jumped ship. It'd honestly been a bit of a concern. As soon as Anthony's teammates approached the edge of the marina, Sarah couldn't stop thinking about what an infiltrator could do with their bodies.
Adam mistook her paranoia for interest in the snare pole thrown over his shoulder. "It's for our quarry," he explained after giving the shaft a brisk jiggle. "I figured it might come in handy once we finally pin down the Squiggly."
"I'm just curious where you got it," Sarah replied, feeling a little nonplussed. "Did they start selling them down at Home Depot?"
Adam scratched the back of his head. "I bought it off Etsy, believe it or not. I was going to get my brother some HEMA gear for his birthday, and the algorithm threw it at me in the 'suggested for you' section. It seemed like a smart purchase, so I figured 'why not.' Guess I was right on the money."
Sarah wasn't sure whether she agreed with him or not; the plastic-wrapped pole looked pretty breakable, even though it was backed by a core of steel. If Adam had brought the weapon with him to help her fight the owl, the polearm would've snapped in half once the bird had completed its dive. Townsend wouldn't have even needed to touch it; the mana he'd bound to his core would have let him mold the metal like taffy. Given the fact that Adam was currently batting zero for two across her lived experiences, Sarah thought it would've been wiser if he'd just brought a gun.
"Great job," Sarah told him, anyway. "I bet it works great."
The man beamed at her with childish glee. Sarah struggled to match his cheer and wished she had an excuse to bring her Uzi. Alas, it wouldn't have fit her image. She couldn't afford to tip her hand until the trap was ready to close.
Sarah bit back a sigh. At least, they'd have a few advantages over Barkley. Surprise; numbers - opposable thumbs. All her cousin had going for him was the ability to be mistaken for an animal.
And Sarah would never be that stupid. She tasted the local mana. It smelt like... storm and sea salt. Perhaps a bit of surf and sludge. Most of the pressure was farther to the east - out by Snake Island - however, the motes weren't escaping the undertow, despite their proximity to the nearby seed. The lack of interference made it easy to notice the invisible tethers wrapped around the wind-swept dunes.
'And there's his tripwire,' Sarah thought tiredly. 'It looks like he's using a Gatian Knot with about twenty meters between each instance. Sequential or... no, stand alone. Payload's probably something subtle. Sink hole, maybe?' Sarah watched a couple of pigeons fail to set it off. 'Odd trigger mechanism for a landmine. It isn't proximal - it can't be life-aligned. Weight-based? No, the sand shifts too much.'
Kaitlyn cleared her throat. The wet rumble wasn't enough to break Sarah's concentration, but it did convince her to switch gears. "Are we ready to get this show on the road?" the taciturn sorceress asked her.
Sarah nodded doggedly. "Absolutely. The beach stretches for approximately seven hundred meters, depending on how you measure it. From the strand to the road is about another three hundred feet. Since you're the experts, I figure you can take the seaside while I'll cover the curb. If we stagger ourselves between those two points, there shouldn't be a long delay in the event one of us needs help. Afterwards, we can rotate further north and conduct another sweep using the same formation. Altogether, it shouldn't take us more than twenty minutes per pass."
The adventurers exchanged three different versions of the same insouciant look. "That sounds... doable," Kaitlyn admitted, willing to be convinced. "What if we don't find the Squiggly?"
Sarah withheld a wince at Pennant's idiotic name for her species. "Then I'll try a magic trick. I'm hoping we can avoid the hassle, though."
Adam snorted in amusement. "What, no hint?"
Sarah waved the question away while emoting an embarrassed wince. "No, it's gross - I don't want to do it unless I have to."
"Damn," he grumbled curiously. "Now, I kind of want to know."
He'd have to get used to disappointment; scrying was complicated spellcraft, and she was already 'bad at fireballs.' Damaging that impression further could prove dangerous until it was time to put paid to the lie.
Speaking of ending deceptions, Sarah kept an eye on Barkley's as the four of them spread out along the coast. If she'd planned this right, then the trio should wander through his mine field while she skirted the northern edge. With a bit of luck, it'd draw her younger compatriot out of hiding while impairing her would-be 'allies.' In the worst-case scenario, it'd kill all three of them leaving Sarah to face Barkley alone.
'That would be... manageable,' Sarah decided woodenly. Unfortunate, but it'd be a solution to her problems all the same. Hell, in some ways it was almost ideal. The opportunity to remove a liability without pulling the trigger herself would be fine compensation for the inevitable fight that would follow. Let Barkley wash his hands in their blood if he was so eager to make a name for himself. Sarah was more than happy to stand aside and let the chips fall where they may.
Of course, when Adam traipsed across the dunes without losing his legs, hesitation stopped being an option.
'Damn,' Sarah grimaced while she pressed her tendrils against the underside of her skin. 'Not even a wiggle in the matrix. It's like the ward's divorced from its anchor. Did Barkley screw up the casting?'
Only the parasite could say for sure. The sand was simply too good of an insulator to let anyone peek at his linework. Not without digging the whole formation up, anyway.
'I guess I'd better give the waterfront a wider berth,' Sarah concluded as she paced beside the fence. 'There's no need to stick my nose into a noose when I can have the others beat the brush for me.'
And beat it they did. From one end of the bay to the other, the four of them traced the edge of the shoreline until they reached the peak of the inlet. It was almost funny; when Sarah finished walking past a long row of moored yachts, she actually ran across another ice rink. 'Dellago's,' this one was called. Or maybe the 'Triple Eight Figure Skating Club.' The sign on the building made the owner a little ambiguous.
"You find something?" Adam called out from his side of the rusty bulwark.
Sarah shook her head. "Nah, just a weird coincidence."
At least, it had better be. Half the reason she'd chosen Barkley as her target was because he was incapable of spilling the beans. If Mannly or Townsend were here... if ice rinks were becoming some kind of kitschy gimmick for their faction...
A raucous shout dragged Sarah from her spiraling thoughts. Down by the water, near where the tide was recoloring the sand from beige to an earthy brown, there was a small crowd of people squatting amidst the pounding surf. They looked like graduate students to Sarah's inexpert eye - ones from a marine biology program or some other related field.
Sarah squinted through the blinding afternoon light. A couple of the co-eds appeared to be wrestling an animal onto a tarp while their classmates hovered nearby. For a second, Sarah wondered if Barkley was the specimen in question. Then she took a closer look and saw an eight-hundred-pound dolphin of all things. The beast must have been agitated by the seed until it had beached itself by accident.
"What are the odds," she muttered distractedly. "You'd think it'd be a jellyfish or -" Mana flared behind her back. Water-based. Five motes in a complex spiral.
Sarah threw herself onto the pavement before she could figure out where it was headed. This was a wise decision because the answer was 'through the side of her skull.' Now, with her nose pressed against the asphalt, it was only 'four feet above her back.'
The sand beside the parking lot rose in a brief plume. Soundless and transparent, the projectile wouldn't have caused much alarm even if it'd been visible to the naked eye. Water was simply too underwhelming for most observers to grok the danger. Granted, that was a bit different from saying the attack wasn't a threat. Had the jet landed as intended, it would have split her dome like a melon.
"A little help?" Sarah screamed as she rolled onto her side.
Across the street, near the decorative treeline separating the beach from the road, a doggy form leveraged itself from the mulch. Its maw parted in a far too human grin. Sarah had half a second of warning before a second needle-thin line drilled into the dry particulate.
She was already up and moving. 'Earth-pulse - fifty meters - who else is in that fox hole? Air-wall - four feet from his position - fifty-degree incline.'
The third shot banked wildly as her conjured breeze pushed it off course. Barkley didn't care; his aim was more than sufficient to adjust for the heavy wind. Two additional shots formed. Sarah quickly spun up her own barrage in order to foul his timing.
'Flower - twist to poison - three-pronged bracketing shot. Earth - twist to stone - edges aimed for his paws.' Sarah didn't have enough mental bandwidth to monitor the toxic darts headed for the hostile warspawn. Between sprinting for cover and tracking Barkley's position, it was all she could do to get the meridian's soil to compress into a sharpened length of slate.
She managed an eight-foot wedge that was about half an inch thick near the center. The base was fragile and rapidly collapsed into the dirt; however, she still heard a pained yelp when Barkley tried to weave between her projectiles.
A ray of liquid froth suddenly cut the corner off the pickup truck she was hiding behind. Sarah kept moving towards the concealing brush and grabbed some broken glass while she ran.
By this point, Adam seemed to have realized something was wrong and approached at a slow jog. Blind to the flares of mana that Sarah and Barkley were putting out, it was only when he heard the truck's plastic frame crack that he resolved to pick up the pace.
Barkley was a lot faster. The smell of blood swept across Sarah's tendrils as his muscles bulged in a veiny flex. Then, with a crack of bone and sinew, he burst into a ground-eating lope.
'Enhancement spell,' Sarah noted. 'Primal-variant. Minimal modification.'
Unlike the Pelinese, who epitomized the art, Barkley seemed to be holding himself back from undergoing a full transformation. Sarah figured it was a logistical issue; he probably didn't have enough mana to support the technique's demands.
His reserves were still replete enough to let him qualify for an Olympic heat. If Adam hadn't thrown his hand out, and tried to catch Barkley in the side, Sarah might have had to join them on the ground. As it was, she could feel the asphalt rumble after Adam hit a parked car by mistake.
'That was the same spell he used to blow up the van,' Sarah realized with a flinch. When she'd seen its effects on tv, she'd assumed he was employing a crude form of pyromancy. Now that she'd witnessed the explosion in person, she knew it was nothing of the sort.
'Is that fucking salt?' Sarah boggled silently. 'No - wait - salt's merely the base. It's got a chemical component baked into the sequence. Saltwater into salt and then into Sodium. The molecularly pure version. He's mixing it with the left-over water at the impact point.'
There was a second bang as Adam took another shot at Barkley. This one was closer to the infiltrator and convinced him to reprioritize his targets. Barkley turned on a dime. He began chasing Adam, lest the wizard land a lucky blow.
"That the-" Adam was bowled over before he could finish the sentence. A spray of blood arced up from his arm after he interposed it between the dog and his throat. Barkley growled. The scattered droplets rained down across the blacktop in a series of muted pops.
Sarah rubbed the glass against itself until it was reduced to tiny chunks. "Hold him there! The others are on their way!"
Kaitlyn more than Anthony. The sorceress had been in the middle of their formation, so she was beating him by a country mile. Her magic likely helped her stay ahead. Buoyed up by the mana being emitted from the soles of her feet, Kaitlyn bound across the precarious dunes with more grace than gravity typically permit.
Barkley flicked an ear. A knot in the middle of the beach unraveled with a short dull snap. Sarah wasn't sure what happened next; all she knew for certain was the earth heaved, and a thick beige cloud blossomed between the skirmish and the sea.
"Kaitlyn!" Adam screamed, his neck straining to twist around.
There wasn't a reply. None save Sarah's as she enchanted an edge onto the broken pane. "Close your eyes!"
"What?" Adam called out, half-deafened by his own spell.
Sarah made sure her attack synched up with his open mouth. It helped ensure the scintillating hellscape went down his throat when she flicked the shards forward atop an arcane breeze.
Barkley attempted to stop his host from inhaling the razor-sharp splinters. Adam didn't even think to avoid them, despite being granted a measure of forewarning. They both ended up on their backs, writhing amidst the rubble. A few seconds later, a set of footsteps resounded upon the asphalt as Anthony stumble through the rolling cloud. He swiped at the floating grit. When that failed to have much effect, the teen brought his hands together in a loud clap. His core vented; a hole was blown through the hovering obstruction.
'...Sonic aligned,' Sarah deduced after metaphorically licking her lips. 'You don't see too many of those.' Usually, because it was a pain in the ass to find a pure enough source of mana. Chronomancers had a lot of similar issues building up their reserves. It was why Sarah's 'Time' core was half the size of the other three and why she didn't pay the boy much mind. Instead, that prize went to the dolphin as it thrashed about in the surf.
It was practically going hog-wild in its eagerness to join the fight. The students should have taken the hint and given the beast the space it deserved. Instead, they held onto its tail until it finally flicked them loose. The animal's wardens went flying through the waves. The dolphin itself began to activate its core.
Sarah was too far away to catch the astringent scent of its spell. She was close enough to see it dive into the strand, though, like a particularly ornery shark.
The dolphin burrowed towards the battle, invisible save for its fin. Barkley hacked up a wad of bloody phlegm and snorted at its approaching wake.
Sarah conjured another toxic lance.