“Alright, got that taken care of,” Carol said cheerfully, wedging the machine gun in the back of the sedan. The weapon was too big to fit in gracefully, and Carol spent a minute finagling it in diagonally, with the barrel over Tom’s left ear—something Tom was entirely not comfortable with.

Once that was done, Carol took the ammo boxes and heaved them into the rear foot space, then hopped in the passenger seat.

“So, Tom, where are these goons?” Carol asked.

…

“Tom?”

Tom opened his mouth, but he still couldn’t talk about it. It was the weirdest damn sensation. It was like all his volition just died the moment he decided to talk about the knights, and came back again when he decided to do something else.

But I was able to say ‘Kinzena took Ellie.’ How?

“Kinzena took Ellie.”

“Yes, this I know,” Carol said. “Now tell me where they are so I can kill their asses.”

“There were probably about fifty of them,” Tom said, testing the words slowly, looking for the point he couldn’t speak any longer.

“Yes…?” Carol asked impatiently, signaling for him to ‘hurry it up’ with bloodstained hands.

“They’re heading for mile seventy on the tollway in order to—” Tom’s words died again, leaving him unable to speak. Carol frowned.

I think I figured it out. I can talk about the group of knights that stole Ellie, but not the ones that attacked me. How does that work!?

“...in order to go home.”

“Tom,” Carol said, staring intently at Tom’s chest.

“Yeah?”

“How many people attacked your little hideout?”

“…”

“Ah, that’s it,” Carol said, leaning back in her seat. “You got hit by a Morkel curse.”

“They make people unable to talk about things?” Tom asked.

“Some of them do. Every Morkel has a slightly different curse. Some of them are more dangerous than others. This particular one seems to be a self-propagating magical NDA. Your soul is wearing away at it; you should be fine in a matter of hours.”

“I was wondering,” Tom said as he put the car into gear.

“It’s an added layer of secrecy, probably purchased by the Kinzena in advance to help keep Earth and everything they do on it under wraps.”

“Why can I talk about the ones who took Ellie, then?”

“I don’t know, did you ever directly learn about them?”

Tom hadn’t, actually. He’d learned about them with his ability. He said so.

“En’hol are generally immune to the things they see in their visions,” Carol said with a shrug. “It’s a natural defense mechanism, I think, because En’hols see a lot of crazy stuff, and the ones who let it get to them wind up getting weeded out. So En’hol are generally either emotionally resilient, or psychos.”

Tom glanced over at her, processing that statement. She told him En’hol were royalty on another planet, or closest thing to it, and that they were capable of seeing the future. Tom was not capable of seeing the future, but his ability fit very neatly in the same ballpark.

“You think I’m En’hol?” Tom asked.

“Either that, or a mutant human who spontaneously evolved the ability to scry, but that is so much more unlikely.”

Tom processed that as they drove. It was a lot to think about, and he didn’t even know how to put words to the welling surge of emotions inside. His entire life was…not a lie, exactly, but built upon a foundation that had begun to crumble.

Tom was Tom, the same guy that had breezed through elementary school, middle school, and almost finished high school. The same guy who liked playing FPS games with his friends and complaining about high school drama.

Late-night Taco Bell runs where everyone had to scrounge through their wallets to cover the bill.

Tom hadn’t been that Tom in quite a while, actually. Ever since Ellie had been born, really. He had done a Houdini transformation into Dad Tom, too busy with work and baby to hang out with his friends, who’d gradually ceased to ask about him. The only friends he had were work friends, like—Tom cut off that train of thought before he lost control.

Still, it was all him. Every piece of it. Tom was, through and through, a modern guy in a dead-end job, breaking his back for minimum wage. Not a seer from another dimension.

Just a little psychic, that’s all, Tom told himself, despite the vague unease in his chest.

He refocused his attention on Ellie, and where she would be.

It had taken several hours to get Carol’s intricate summoning address perfect, and another hour to round up the weapons.

Tom glanced at the horizon, where the sun was just beginning to pinken the sky… Well, past the smog and buildings of Chicago.

The knights were likely going to be breaking camp soon. Tom did some mental math. He only had about six hours left until the knights got where they were going, and that was assuming a walking pace.

Too many assumptions. Tom got onto the 88 and started heading west, driving carefully in order to avoid getting pulled over with a military grade weapon in the back of his car.

Suzie was in the backseat, awkwardly sitting on the edge of the seat that wasn’t dominated by cold steel. She was going to stay in the car and funnel any kills Carol made toward repaying his debt. Her range was high enough for her to stay relatively safe from sword and sorcery.

Tom’s stomach churned at the thought of killing. He was still clamping down his reaction from a few minutes ago, honestly. The sheer efficient brutality with which Carol had dispatched those gunrunners was staggering. It didn’t even feel real.

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And here I am planning on murdering dozens of people and using their souls as money.

Tom wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead and took a deep breath. They took Ellie. They killed Jacob, Gramma, Grampa. They didn’t deserve to die… They asked for it.

‘Live by the sword, die by the sword’ was a very apt saying. In all the chaos that’d been flooding his life recently, Tom had never personally taken that first step into the world of murderers. And once he was in, there was no going back. He would die by the sword.

Tom’s fingers started shaking on the steering wheel.

“Are you bitching out?” Carol asked. “Because if you are, I need to know so I can plan accordingly.”

Tom shot her a grin. He probably looked even less confident than he felt, because Carol scowled back at him. Or maybe that was just Carol.

“I’ll do what I have to do,” Tom said.

Carol studied him for a moment before her manic grin stretched across her face. “Now that’s what I like to hear. I love humans with no options. They’re almost as single-minded as Outsiders. Almost.”

***Later***

After nearly an hour and a half of silent driving, Carol grabbed Tom’s arm just a short ways past mile eighty.

“There!” Carol said, pointing. From their vantage point on the road, they could make out the glimmer of armor in the fields in the distance. Tom pulled off to the side and peered out into the corn. A moment later, he made out the tiny figures in the distance.

The entire train of horses was making their way single file into the forest beyond the farm. They were downhill, across a couple football fields’ worth of corn.

Did they simply pull an all-nighter? That made sense, after the commotion. They’d probably decided it was better to get home faster.

Shit.

They were not in an ideal position to start shooting at the knights. The armored goons were tiny little specks from this distance, and Tom had no idea where Ellie was. They needed to get closer.

Tom patted the dashboard goodbye, then threw the door open, earning himself a blaring honk from the truck passing by them at full speed. A moment later, Carol hopped out her side and grabbed the machine gun.

“Stupid laws of physics,” Carol muttered as she staggered around under the weight of the machine gun and ammo. She might be unbelievably strong, but her body weight was still that of a slender woman, making it a challenge to move around a gun that weighed as much as she did… I stand corrected.

In front of Tom’s eyes, Carol morphed into the demon-thing, packing on at least two hundred pounds of muscle, horns and armor.

“There, that’s better.”

Carol jumped off the road and into the ditch, sprinting for the cornfield, prompting Tom to grab his AR-15 from the trunk.

He mentally checked off the crypts he wore on his person.

Healing crypt, check.

Shield crypt, check.

Ghostwalk crypt, check.

If anything, he could run away if he had to.

Goddamnit, NO! I can’t run away!

Tom was smart.

Running away was the smart thing to do.

But doing the smart thing wasn’t going to save his baby.

Tom took several steadying breaths before he snagged Suzie and threw her over his shoulder. The oversized toad barely fit, but managed to awkwardly cling onto him.

Mr. Fluffybottom arrived a moment later, his gaze already tracking the tail end of the knights riding single file into the Illinois wilderness.

Alright, Mr. Fluffybottom, your role is to support Carol. Try to keep her from getting swamped and killed. I’ll do the same.

Since Carol was their most powerful piece, the longer they could keep her in play, the more damage she could do. Keep her in play long enough, and they might even win. Tom’s stomach churned as he reduced their planned massacre to a tactics game. It helped distance his mind.

Suzie do? Suzie asked from his shoulder.

Tom patted the modified crypt in his pocket, and after a moment of deliberation, he shifted Suzie’s connection to the shield crypt.

Keep this thing topped off.

Sure, a brutal ambush was a great opportunity to pay off a large chunk of his soul-debt, but the point was moot if he didn’t live through it.

And if you see an opportunity to retrieve Ellie, Tom thought at Mr. Fluffybottom, take her as far away as you can.

The cougar nodded once before bursting into motion, disappearing into the cornfield.

Tom settled the demon toad on his shoulder, walked down the embankment and paused in front of the dense green plants growing taller than him. They formed a sort of barrier in front of him, a physical representation of the stark division between his former life and his future.

Suzie patted him on the cheek, and Tom set aside the thinking.

It was time to start running.

Tom quickly settled into a ground-eating jog, following the row of corn to the north, aiming for the woods.

He couldn’t see anything in front of him but endless green, and the path back to the car had vanished. Tom had a feeling he wasn’t going back.

It took a good fifteen minutes of steady jogging, carrying a combined thirty pounds of familiar and rifle, and by the time Tom got to the edge of the farm, he felt like his heart was going to explode.

He froze and slowly lowered himself to the ground as soon as he heard the soft nickering of horses. Heart slamming in his ears, Tom crawled forward until he was able to see out of the cornfield. The knights had finished filing into the woods, leaving behind them a wide trail seemingly cut out of the woods.

Here and there, in the ground that had been chewed up by the passage of horses, was a tire tread from Jacob’s truck, the wheels sunk deeper into the ground by the sheer weight of its macabre cargo.

A bit of motion caught Tom’s attention from the left side of the trail. It was Carol, waving him forward.

Tom climbed to his feet and carefully trotted over to the tree line, joining Carol at the edge of the woods. Together, they tracked the sound of horses and that of the knights chatting with each other in a foreign tongue.

After what felt like an hour of sweat-soaked tromping through undergrowth—not nearly quiet enough to qualify as stealthy—waiting to get spotted and summarily executed, they finally happened upon the camp.

Carol guided them to a small hill with good visibility over the enormous camp in the middle of the woods.

No less than three hundred people bustled around the camp, and only a small fraction of them were wearing armor. The rest seemed to be cooks, porters, cleaning ladies, stablers, children, etc.

The entire camp was a frenzy of activity as people packed up and flooded toward the…

Giant glowing blue portals dotting the camp. Tom squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. Yep, still there. It was one thing to theorize it based on a hunch. It was entirely different to see it in front of your eyes.

There were no less than ten different circular planes of glowing energy, and people were filing into them at a rapid clip, seeming to lead with the noncombatants. Tom spotted a man with a long white beard who seemed to be in charge.

To say he looked displeased was underselling it.

The old man loomed over one of the knights Tom had seen in the group that had taken Grant. The knight was savagely beaten, trying to crawl away. Tom thought he could see red on the old man’s gauntlets.

Probably lost a nephew or something. Tom thought back to the cocky smirk that had exploded when Reese shot it.

Tom’s stomach roiled with guilt for a moment before it settled.

Good.

Tom directed his gaze away from the knight’s punishment, scanning the camp for Ellie. It was damn hard to spot an infant in the middle of the huge camp. If she was swaddled up, she would look like no more than a rolled-up blanket.

Come on, Ellie. If there was ever a time in your life when I needed you to start crying…now would be the time.

Almost like his baby girl had heard him, a full-throated cry erupted from the west side of the camp, snapping Tom’s eyes to the left.

There. Tom spotted a wagon with an iron cage; some kind of mobile prison cell. Inside the iron confines, Tom spotted Grant, Chris Campbell, some woman he didn’t recognize and on her lap…

Ellie!

Then the wagon slipped through the portal, vanishing into the glowing blue energy.

Tom’s blood turned cold.

“Carol. Start shooting.”