I lurched forward without thinking but was brought up short by Kristy’s vice-like grip on my arm. My head snapped to her and, while she was no longer smiling, she didn’t look too concerned either.

One of the machine guns went quiet, replaced by the sounds of large impacts and heavy footsteps.

There was a shoggoth in the room, Albright supplied. Roy is handling it while Greg keeps it distracted. What are you seeing, Walt?

It fucking stinks in here, Boss. Walt said, his voice subdued. Most of the floor is stacked with shipping containers that, if they are all like the first three I’ve checked, are filled with people. Most of them didn’t respond to seeing me, and those that did reacted with near-violent fear. I haven’t checked many of them, but the few I got a good look at have been branded.

As if summoned by the comment, the air coming from the open doorway reached us outside and it did indeed smell awful. A bouquet of sweat, piss, vomit, and shit wafted by us. I resisted the urge to dry heave.

What did it look like? The brand? I asked instead of gagging.

I didn’t recognize it, Walt replied.

Before I could say anything, an image formed in my mind. It wasn’t the clearest image, likely due to the interference of my shiny new amulet, but it was clear enough that I could make it out.

Fuck! Fucking cock-sucking motherfucking piece of shit—

I assume you recognize it? Albright interrupted.

God fucking damnit, I do, I said with a sigh. It’s a sacrificial mark, a tailored one. I don’t recognize the design in the center as the Distiller, by his very nature, doesn’t do a huge amount of dissemination… But knowing what we know—

You assume it belongs to the Distiller, Albright finished. He turned and shot me a measured look. It seemed to say “You and I are going to have a talk.”

I kept my expression flat and tried to convey a “you don’t scare me/I have nothing to hide” expression while also being scared and having many, many things to hide. The jury’s out if it had any effect.

As the conversation died down, so did the gunfire, but the sounds of violence continued. It was an odd experience to not hear the customary shouts and commands that I associated with fights. I nudged Kristy to get her attention.

Are they normally this quiet? I asked.

Oh no, Kristy said easily. The boss is filtering out their natter. Less strain on him than if he projected all of our thoughts to all of us all the time. Roy and Greg are just CONSTANTLY swearing when they fight. It’s funny at first but can get annoying when we’re trying to listen to Walt report in.

As if prompted, Walt spoke up at that point. I don’t see anything else in the warehouse, boss. Just more containers filled with people. Not even another shoggoth.

“Shoggoth?” I mouthed to Kristy.

“Later,” she mouthed back.

Of course, I know what a shoggoth is. One doesn’t become a warlock without picking up a little bit of Lovecraft. But as far as I know, they didn’t exist. There are several beings I know of that are big tentacled monsters that one could mistake for a shoggoth, though. Hell, I could summon and bind a few. But I was curious what these people would call a shoggoth, or if it was just a general term they use for a big monster.

Look for underground access, I said to Walt. My brother is somewhere under the warehouse, and we haven’t seen sign of the six guys Ida and I shot up.

I don’t take orders—

Enough, Walt, Albright said with some steel. It’s the next thing you’d check anyway.

If Walt replied, Albright didn’t share it with us.

The sounds of impact suddenly ramped up in intensity before ending with a crash.

Holy hell, Roy said, his mental voice sounding winded. Did that thing take some killing.

I hate fighting those things, Greg said slowly. They don’t make any noise.

Do you boys need a touch-up? Beats asked.

I’m fine, Roy said with an audible groan I could hear through the wall.

I just need a minute, Greg said.

Should be safe for you to come in, Boss, Roy added.

Albright nodded and ducked through the door, rifle raised and ready. After a moment, Beats followed. I went to follow but was brought up short by Kristy again. I swallowed my frustration and settled in to wait.

Clear, Albright said after a minute.

Kristy nodded at me and then ducked in the door, and I followed on her heels. The smell hit me like a haymaker. I dry heaved violently before pulling my stolen shirt over my face with the hand that held the blood stick. The shirt still smelled vaguely like vomit, but that was worlds better than the inside of this fucking warehouse.

My eyes were watering, I still wanted to vomit, and my vertigo from my probably concussed head was getting worse—but all that took a back seat when my eyes landed on what must be the shoggoth.

You know, when you watch a sci-fi program about virtual reality or AI, there’s a common effect they use for visual “glitches,” where the image kinda jumps around rapidly or breaks apart randomly. The entire shoggoth was like that. It was hard to look at. Now, I don’t remember exactly how Mr. Lovecraft described shoggoths, but I do remember he tended to use “indescribable” as an adjective. While that is not technically true for the monster in front of me, I can see why the team used the shoggoth moniker. Eyes were all over the thing, appearing, disappearing, detaching, and floating around only to blink out of existence. Even while it was clearly dead, arms appeared, grew, disappeared, reappeared, shrank, floated, split off, multiplied, shuddered… it was actually hurting my eyes to look at. The arms mostly belonged to something humanoid, but they were always wrong in some way. Too many fingers. Too long. Too thick. Three hands. Two forearms.

I averted my gaze and focused on my shoes, breathing through my shirt heavily.

Pay up, Walt, Kristy said.

He still might pop, Walt replied emphatically.

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I looked up and met Kristy’s eyes. Placing bets on whether I lost it?

She nodded with a big smile, unabashedly unashamed. I rolled my eyes as my opinion of Walt took another nosedive. He may be dangerous, but he isn’t too bright. He was just told I had fought the Doorman and a cadre of warlocks; it stands to reason I could stomach some weirdness.

Though, to be fair, if I hadn’t already lost my lunch out near the highway, I would have probably done it here.

While we were talking, Beats had been tending to Greg, who looked… “Beat up” doesn’t quite fit. He looked like he was beaten near to death, but he was standing and having a silent conversation with Beats like nothing was wrong. As I watched, his dislocated shoulder suddenly wrenched back into place with an audible “pop.” His shattered ocular cavity shifted, the bruised skin changing colors like an oil slick until, after half a minute, his eye was back to normal. Greg took a wet wipe from Beats and ran it over his face, cleaning the blood off. There was nothing left to show he had been grievously injured.

He has strengthened bones and increased regeneration, Roy said from my right. I had to stop myself from spinning and putting a bullet in him—I had not heard him approach. So don’t go out of your way to save him if you see him take a bullet or a particularly nasty blow. So long as the majority of his spine remains intact, he can recover from pretty much anything.

I gave Roy a once over. Aside from a few scuffs on his shield, he seemed to have weathered the fight with the shoggoth without trouble.

Roy noticed, and I saw him wink in his helmet. I’ve got my own tricks.

Right, I muttered. How does that work, anyway? We’re talking with our minds. Does Albright pick up on the intention and make the thought have less impact on the fly?

Walt appeared in a blur next to Albright, and they had a little pow-wow that I wasn’t involved in. I decided to do something productive and created a little telekinetic construct that’d keep my shirt around my face so I didn’t have to hold it there with my hand. Unless I got really distracted, it would stay there without me having to pay too much attention to it.

Beats finished with Greg and made her way over to me. She produced a face mask like you see doctors wear. One of the good ones that actually sealed around your nose and mouth.

Thank you, I said emphatically as I dropped my shirt from my face and put on the mask, pinching the metal piece so it sealed over my nose. Walt and Albright finished their discussion, and by some silent accord, the entire team gathered around Beats and I.

Walt found the entrance downstairs, Albright said without preamble. The bad news is that it’s a domain.

There was a round of cursing. I raised my hand like I was in school. And for the uninitiated, that means…?

Albright took a deep breath, seemed to regret it, and let it out through his nose. A domain is a magically imbued territory that bends the rules of space and physics. Some domains have lower or higher gravity, for instance. Most are bigger on the inside. In our line of work, a domain usually means there has been summoning going on.

I glanced at the corpse of the shoggoth. And that was their doorman.

Albright nodded. You seem to grasp the picture.

I frowned in thought as I looked over the immediate area. Thankfully, I couldn’t see any victims from where I was standing. What do we do about them? I asked, gesturing at the nearest container.

We don’t have the resources to help them all, Albright admitted with some reluctance. Elysium is a specialized force. SOP is to clear out the area of aggressors and hostile magic and call the mundane authorities once the area is safe.

I didn’t like it, but I understood. People in our community (the semi-secret magical world) were probably an extreme minority. It’s not like there’s a huge personnel pool to recruit social and rescue workers from.

I’d once asked Alice why magic and real magicians aren’t more prevalent. She had said that the official line from the powers that be was that the world wasn’t ready to openly embrace magic and the unknown, often citing the Salem Witch Trials and the Spanish Inquisition. More pragmatically, it was because of situations like the one I ran into. Some kid or group of kids gets their hands on some spell, start experimenting, and usually end up dead.

Which I get. Magic in the hands of the uneducated is like placing a machine gun in the hands of a child who didn’t know what a gun was. He might live through the experience, like I did.

Most don’t.

Roy broke the silence. So expect heavy resistance, he said solemnly. We’ll do an initial reconnoiter, but if we run into too much heat, we’ll pull back and do a joint push with Gendry. How’s that ritual looking, Kristy?

Meaty, Kristy said after closing her eyes. It’s easier to see here, but there’s still a lot of interference. The impression I’m getting is… not great. I can’t tell if it’s a summoning or a gate—

A gate! A much better word than “doorway” for a magical portal. I guess I got fixated on the word “door” because of the Doorman.

—but there’s enough power gathering for either to be extremely bad news.

Lead the way, Walt, Albright said.

Walt nodded and took off in a light trot, leading us deeper into the warehouse. We passed opened shipping containers, the squalid suffering within making me more and more angry. By the time we passed the third dead child, I had to force my eyes away from the surroundings and keep them glued to Roy’s back.

We have to do our job, Albright said to me, which I instinctively knew was a private line. If we don’t, more than just these people will die. That said; we do have a medical team coming to do initial triage. They’ll be arriving once we’ve secured the entrance to the Domain.

Albright glanced at me over his shoulder, to which I nodded woodenly. The resentment that’d been building up, which I didn’t even notice until just now, settled out and was replaced with hatred for the cultists.

We came to a roughly square space, surrounded by shipping containers. On the floor was a double trap door like you see in older buildings out east. The right door was open, revealing a dim staircase.

Goes down about thirty feet, which is as far as I got, Walt said without taking his eyes off the opening. The threshold is just beyond.

Let’s—

Albright was cut off as another shoggoth boiled up from the opening with a violence of silent motion. Walt disappeared in a blur as Roy took a step forward, his foot hitting the ground like an anvil. His second step cracked the cement and shook the surrounding containers as it brought him within reach of the shoggoth. His sword leaped from its sheath as he brought his shield up and slammed it into the central mass of the shoggoth.

I expected a giant crash. Instead, I felt the impact through the floor as the shoggoth was knocked back six feet. Its form rippled as dozens—possibly hundreds of arms bristled from it like the fur of a startled cat. One section of arms shot out, looking like silly string fired from a cannon, and latched onto Roy’s shield. As if expecting the attack, his sword came down an instant later and severed the arms.

With a roar that cut off as soon as he made contact, Greg tackled the shoggoth, slamming his fist once, twice, thrice into it as it reoriented on him. Hundreds of sharp nails and claws raked across his back and face, opening vicious wounds that disappeared a few seconds later.

Walt appeared behind the creature, his sword out of its sheath and moving with blurring speed. Arms of every shape and type imaginable flew through the air as the Naruto wannabe sliced and diced with the speed that would put a Benihana chef to shame.

I lifted my gun, trying to get a clear shot. Kristy pushed it down with a shake of her head. Too much risk of hitting a bystander, she said, indicating the shipping containers with a tilt of her head.

I swore, realizing she was right. Is that thing susceptible to magic?

It has some resistance to energy attacks, but that’s about it, Kristy said.

That’s all I needed to hear. I tapped into the strength of the mantle and gathered my magic, shaping it into a four-sided spearhead. When it was as dense as I could make it, I waited for a clear shot and rammed it into the center mass of the monster. It was completely soundless, but it let out the visual version of a scream as the distortion that embodied it seemed to go batshit. It hurled Greg to the side, his scream of surprise suddenly cutting in as soon as he was no longer in contact with it. More arms appeared as it dashed straight at me.

Roy pivoted, his movements smooth as a dancer even as his every step shook the warehouse. In a smooth motion, he got between me and the shoggoth, reversed his grip on his sword, and drove it down, pinning the monster to the ground.

With a scream of effort, I ratcheted up the power I was pushing into my magic and forced the four sides of the spearhead apart.

You ever get frustrated trying to open a pomegranate? Do you just, dig your thumbs into it and rip?

Yeah. It was like that.

The soundless nature of the shoggoth made it so I was denied the ripping and tearing noise, but my mind supplied them anyway as the shoggoth was suddenly split open like a gross, fleshy flower. Greg, who had recovered from being thrown and had been charging back into the fight, slowed down to a stop at the sight. Walt was looking at the creature with wide eyes. Roy’s helmeted head slowly turned to look at me, his gaze less warm, more assessing. Beats' expression seemed to say “Not bad.”

Kristy clapped and hopped in place.

Sweat poured off my face and I panted, but I would be lying if I said their surprise wasn’t gratifying.

Maybe you should stop antagonizing the guy, Walt, Beats said after a pregnant moment.