Katalepsis 2.4

Katalep this? Katalep that!

Where we left off, Heather and Evelyn encountered an annoying library werewolf. Heather kinda wanted to smash, but then Evelyn literally smashed in the nose. They're trying to get back to the safety of Evelyn's office now, and the hot annoying werewolf with the broken nose is stalking after them. They think it might be time to get Raine involved.

Onward!

Ten minutes later, behind the locked door of the Medieval Metaphysics room, Evelyn provided a practical answer to 'what is magic?'

Magic, in this quick and dirty example, started when she noticed the smear of Twil's blood on her walking stick. She was still shaking, but her lips curled into that sharp, devious smile.

"Evee?"

She grunted in reply. That's all I got.

I was too busy crashing out on adrenaline.

Ooh, she got a blood sample. There's probably plenty of sympathetic magic she can use with that to remotely effect Twil.

Does she know any blood magic rites that cure Eldritch Rabies? If so, then that's the solution right there.

Raine would get here any minute. She'd had to skip straight out of a lecture. From the tone in her voice down the phone, she'd probably cross campus in record time. A twinge of guilt plucked at my gut.

Heh. I wasn't sure that Raine was an actual student until just now. Wonder what she's majoring in?

Guilt, however, paled in comparison to the high still racing through my heart and pounding in my head.

I'd acted tough and won. Was this what Raine felt like all the time? Powerful but spent, shaky and winded? I suspected not. I leaned against the back of a chair and focused on my breathing, one hand wandering up to rub at the bruise inside my chest.

Seemed to me like Evelyn did most of the work, but still, Heather did throw the first punch. For her that's significant.

Evelyn slapped her walking stick onto the table and dug around in her tote bag, pulling out odds and ends – a box of cotton buds, a hand mirror, a tub of Vaseline and a black marker pen. She dumped it all on the table. Her hands still quivered as she found an unlabelled bottle of pills and popped two slender white tablets into her mouth, swallowed them dry.

"What are those?" I asked.

Evelyn stared at the detritus on the table, her lips moving in silent thought.

"Evelyn? What did you just take?"

"Nothing. Painkillers."

Painkillers. Right. Are they the kind of painkillers that let Evelyn perform a certain kind of magic, or the kind of painkillers that help Evelyn deal with the emotional stress of performing that kind of magic?

In the latter case, sure Heather, you should ask for some. You're under a lot of stress, a drug habit could help you cope. No way you could regret it.

She grabbed the mirror and the marker pen, sat down in her chair facing the door, and got to work.

A visible, focused calm settled over Evelyn as she drew curved symbols around the edge of the mirror, her hands steady and working fast after the first minute. The bottle of painkillers tempted me too, but the bruise inside was immune to ibuprofen and paracetamol and codeine. Not to mention the pills probably weren't painkillers at all.

I like the minor afterthought at the end there. Heather isn't always the quickest on the uptake, at least when it comes to other people. Understandable given how she's spent most of her life.

Now, to remote-cure some werewolf rabies...

Evelyn finished drawing and grabbed her walking stick, then wiped at the sticky red patch with cotton buds.

With painstaking attention to detail, eyes tightly focused, fingers braced against the bare glass, she drew a spiral design in the centre of the mirror – in Twil's blood.

A deep sense of unreality crept over me, in silence half born of sudden exhaustion, half fear of violating Evelyn's unspoken ritual quiet, broken only by the scuff of the cotton buds and her constant stream of low muttering. The room was soaked in a deep twilight, with the lights off and blankets pinned over the back windows, the overstuffed bookshelves towering over us in the gloom.

I stepped over to the windows and the big desk along the back, flicked the switch on one of the lamps. Soft orange glow chased the shadows away, into the corners and under the bookcases.

Evelyn's head snapped up. She stared at me.

"It was dark." I hiccuped.

Expressionless, she bent to her work once more.

Heh. Looks like the darkness wasn't actually necessary, at least. Evelyn was just startled by the sudden change.

Evelyn seems to have gotten very hyperfocused very abruptly. If the pills that she took weren't magical themselves, then my next best guess is that they're something in the amphetamine family. If so then it could be prescription, or it could be black market, as there are both aboveboard medical treatments and extremely contraband drugs within that group.

I sat down and rubbed my sternum. The ache and the adrenaline crash fogged the inside of my head.

"There," Evelyn said. She straightened up, tugged the blanket off the back of the armchair to settle it over her knees, and placed the finished mirror-design on her lap. She braced her right hand against the surface, thumb and two fingers resting at what seemed like very specific points of the design. "Not my greatest working, but it'll do. I hope Twil tries it on again, I really hope she does."

"I assume that's magic?"

"Just a slapdash job. Very little range, and it's only good for one use, but it'll give Twil a nasty little surprise."

"Evelyn, what just happened?" I picked through my adrenaline-fuzzed memories. "What was that all about? Who is Twil, exactly?"

"An idiot and an irritation. Really, there wasn't any need to muck about calling Raine. Twil is essentially harmless. That was all so much guff and drama."

"You use magic on harmless people?"

"This is to remind her not to fuck with me." Evelyn hesitated. "Us," she added. "I mean us."

Heather: "Is Twil harmless, or is she not harmless?"

Evelyn: "Yesn't."

I opened my mouth again but Evelyn whipped around to glare at the door. She waved me into expectant silence. My heart caught in my throat.

"Someone's-"

Then the triple-knock, the key in the door, the breathless rush.

Raine barrelled into the room, flushed and wild eyed, thankfully faster than Evelyn could panic-cast the blood-mirror bear trap in her lap. Raine jerked to a halt, as if she'd expected to throw herself headfirst into the middle of a fight. I admit, the look rather suited her.

"Bear trap?" Where's Heather getting that comparison from? Did I miss a description of the symbol or an explanation of its effect somewhere?

"You're both alright?" she asked.

"Yes, we're fine, we're okay." I smiled in relief. "Hey Raine."

"Hey yourself."

"Close the bloody door!" Evelyn snapped.

"Don't look so happy to see me then." Raine winked, but she did close the door and throw the latch. "It was Twil, right? On her own? What happened, where is she now?"

"Lurking, I suspect," Evelyn said.

I nodded. "Yes, on her own. I'd never seen her before. We were in the library, I-"

Evelyn raised her voice. "I suggest you get out of the way of the door."

Raine quirked an eyebrow at the mirror-and-blood construction in Evelyn's lap. "Oooh, Evee, you got some voodoo brewing down there?"

"No, I thought I'd expend all the effort just for fun. What does it look like?"

"What are you gonna do, blast the door into Twil's face?"

"Something along those lines."

"Can she actually do that?" I asked. "Is that possible?"

"Of course I can't," Evelyn snapped, as Raine shrugged and said "Sure, why not?"

Haha.

Not sure how serious Raine is being, but is Twil right outside the door just now? Maybe she just expects her to be there shortly? I feel like I missed something that hints at what Evelyn's spell is supposed to do that would make all this flow better.

They shared a look. Raine cracked a grin and Evelyn scowled before she resumed staring daggers at the door. Raine glanced between the two of us, wiggled her eyebrows, and stepped out of the way of the firing line with a flourish of one arm.

"So, you two were having a girls' morning out together, doing some bonding over library books, when Twil rocked up and ruined your day?"

Evelyn grunted.

"I'm sorry," I said. The guilt twisted in my chest.

Raine pointed two finger-guns in my direction, struck a dramatic pose, and grinned. It worked. I almost giggled, despite everything.

Raine was wearing a thick black polo-neck underneath her leather jacket. Her boots – not the faded rose ones today – looked sturdy enough to see off any foe all on their own. She had her hair swept back, as if she'd just run a hand through it, an effortless artful disarray.

There's a unique emotional spice, when you've met a person you like an awful lot, and they arrive in your day. You notice every detail, every little change, every minor adjustment of gesture.

Raine had a glove on her right hand. An exercise glove, old and tatty, with silvery wire wrapped around the plastic knuckle brace.

I'd never seen it before.

A glove with silver on its knuckles. Hmmhmm. What could you use something like that for?~

...well, actually, Evelyn's walking stick seems to have done damage just fine, and it doesn't have silver on it I don't think. Heh, never mind.

"It's really good to see you," I said, for more than one reason.

"Heather, I am not mad at you. You've done nothing wrong. Thank you, for calling me for help." The finger-guns swivelled to Evelyn, who steadfastly ignored the show. "I'm not actually mad at you either, Evee, just totally mystified."

"As usual, then," Evelyn grunted.

"Like, hey, don't we have this, you know, arrangement where you let me know where you're at, ask me to come with you, organise things in advance, because otherwise spooky ghost lizards and super-zombies from dimension X might kidnap you and eat your brains. Ring a bell at all, Evee?"

Raine's good humour seemed genuine. Simple relief, perhaps, but from anybody else I'd have expected shouting, anger, or passive aggression at the very least.

"Yes, yes, I haven't suddenly gone senile," Evelyn said. "Ever consider that perhaps I've grown out of it at last? Don't you have other things to worry about now?"

"That's not what you sounded like earlier," I said.

Oh.

That's why Twil isn't dangerous.

Because if she was actually dangerous, then that would mean that Evelyn actually does need Raine to escort her everywhere. And Evelyn has decided that she doesn't need that anymore.

On one hand, magic is supposedly the direct application of human willpower to reality. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be working all that well for Evelyn in this case, because she's willing it really hard but reality doesn't seem to be changing.

Once again, this is making me think of the "I'm better now, I don't need to keep up my medication" pitfall.

I regretted speaking up; Evelyn turned the full force of her frown on me, silent reminder of the day I'd surprised her in this very same room. I resisted a gut-strong urge to curl up and vanish into the chair, forced myself to look her in the eye, get this nonsense under control.

"You were as scared as I was," I said.

Evelyn opened her mouth to snap at me – but then blinked and swallowed, her expression softening. "I … yes, Heather. I … you helped me. Thank you. I needed … " She glanced at Raine with obvious discomfort.

"Don't mind me," Raine said, barely suppressing a grin.

"And don't you pull a silly face at this! It's important. Heather and I shared a … moment. We came to an understanding." She sighed heavily. "And yes, she's right. You're right, Heather. I was scared, but only because Twil caught us off guard. She won't be doing that again."

Yeeeeaahh I'm not buying that even slightly.

Raine clapped her hands together and beamed at us. "Look, you're both safe, and that's all that matters. Please, Evee, if you need to rush out somewhere, just call me, yeah? You know I don't mind. Ever."

Evelyn grunted and returned to watching the door.

I wished I understood their relationship. Maybe with Evelyn, in private, maybe I could get her to talk about it, if I approached the subject the right way? I cursed myself for such intrusive thoughts, but I felt a burning need to know. Why was Raine so devoted?

Hmm. Yeah. Raine's willingness (and ability) to put whatever her own life consists of on hold whenever and wherever needed for Evelyn, without any boundaries, does suggest that there must be something more than just friendship or even romantic devotion going on.

Is Raine getting a salary for her bodyguard duties? Maybe from Evelyn's surviving family, despite Evelyn's own insistences that it isn't needed? That would fit. I could see them having done that, after Raine saved her ass once or twice and they found out about it. Evelyn's family must care about her at least a little bit if they're letting her use all these resources of theirs, and we know they've got money to burn.

Things might not have been as good between Evelyn and the rest of the family back when her mother was still alive, of course. In fact, I could see the current status quo being almost sort of an apology for her. Just speculation at this point, of course.

I guess it's also possible that Raine is just that crazy self-destructively in love with Evelyn and sort of in denial about it. That would be sad, and it would mean Raine is even more damaged than Evelyn is under the platonic-ideal-human exterior, but it's possible.

Or maybe Raine was actually brewed to life in a vat on Evelyn or a family member's desk, and she's just following her programming. Doubtful, given how much background detail has been suggested about her, but possible.

Raine leaned down to peer at my face, her hair hanging sideways and her grin at an angle.

"You are far from alright, Heather. I can tell, you know, especially with you."

"I'm … shaken. We both were. The ache is really bad. I think it was all the adrenaline."

Raine perched on the arm of the chair. She started rubbing my back in exactly the right way.

No idea how she'd learnt so fast. In the space of two weeks, she'd already figured out the precise way to melt my muscles. For a long few minutes she didn't say a word, just kneaded the tension out of my shoulders. Adrenaline and panic drained away. Raine was here. Safe now.

A little voice in my mind whispered those damnable words; 'damsel in distress'. I told it to shut up.

"So what did Twil do?" Raine said.

I told her.

The more I spoke, the further Raine sharpened into rapt attention, focused and listening, asking no questions. I recognised the change coming over her. Tense, quiet, ready. I found it deeply, astoundingly attractive.

Or rather, I would have, if the puzzle pieces weren't slotting into place.

No longer buzzing with adrenaline and jumping at shadows, I hesitated at the clues in my own memory. I couldn't be right, it was too absurd. If I was correct then the world was dumber and more annoying than I'd dared imagine.

My god. That line. That last fucking sentence.

Heather, you should be an internet culture critic. You can do the exact tone and delivery for it. Better than I can.

I let my explanation trail off as I stared at Raine. She raised her eyebrows.

"Heather? It's okay, you-"

"What is Twil, exactly?"

Raine paused, split-second hesitation. Any other time, any other circumstances, I wouldn't have noticed. "Okay so, Twil Hopton, that's her name, here's the 101. She's not that hard to deal with, but she does represent some potentially dangerous people, depending-"

"No, that's not what I meant." My throat tightened. "What is she?"

Raine glanced at Evelyn for help. "Uh, Evee, this didn't come up?"

My friends shared a look for just a moment too long. Evelyn shrugged and Raine bit her lower lip.

Fuck. I don't think Heather is ready for this, but she's not letting it go.

I guess they'd better make sure there isn't an incinerator nearby.

I felt myself bristle, left on the outside of some secret communication. Is that what they thought of me? The hesitation all but confirmed my worst suspicions, that the world was bonkers. I couldn't believe this. Absurdity.

"I can put two and two together," I said. Raine raised a placating hand but I forged on. "The growling noises Twil made. The dog jokes you were throwing at her, Evelyn, which seemed to strike such a nerve. And you," I frowned at Raine. "Do you think I don't notice things? You've got silver wire wrapped around a weightlifting glove."

"Uh, that I have. Well spotted, yeah." At least Raine had the sense to look guilty. She raised the makeshift knuckle-duster and gave me a sheepish smile.

"I'm not completely culturally ignorant."

"I knew you'd get it, Heather, I just wanted to be gentle and-"

"She's a werewolf." I said. "Twil's a werewolf."

The word didn't seem real. I huffed and crossed my arms over my chest.

"Werewolf is hardly the right term," Evelyn said. "But you're basically correct. Don't be so surprised, I thought it was obvious."

I'll be honest; I was half expecting this to be the gnome joke from the Gravity Falls pilot, and Twil turns out to actually be a vampire or a goblin or something.

The word didn't seem real. I huffed and crossed my arms over my chest.

"Werewolf is hardly the right term," Evelyn said. "But you're basically correct. Don't be so surprised, I thought it was obvious."

"Werewolf." I jammed as much scorn into my voice as I could muster, which at that exact moment was rather a lot. "I can't believe this. This is nonsense."

My thoughts mirror Heather's in some ways, but are perpendicular to them in others.

On one hand, this is yet another incremental step toward generic urban fantasy and away from the more distinctly post-Lovecraftian vibe it seemed to be going for in the first arc. Seriously, why has it always got to be "the same short list of monsters that had Hammer Horror films made about them and also maybe fairies sometimes?"

On the other hand...in a world in which some mythical creatures turned out to be real and others did not, what if Hollywood just so happened to be mostly right about one or two of them? It's not the most unlikely coincidence ever, especially if you account for the possibility that a few authors and/or filmmakers in such a world might have had genuine experiences. Would that be "stupid?"

Maybe it would be. I don't know. Like I said, my feelings about werewolves being a thing in Katalepsis are mixed.

"She doesn't actually turn into a wolf," Raine said. "She just … summons it. Kind of."

"Oh yes, because that makes all the difference, great."

Summons it kind of.

The implication being that she summons some kind of wolf spirit into her own body. Or that it's constantly got a partial connection, perhaps, almost like Heather with Senor Ojo.

I don't *think* she actually conjures an external tangible wolf entity. If nothing else, she's obviously got something weird and doglike going on emotionally, so the link has got to be internal.

"You've dealt with far worse. It's not that wacky."

Memories of the confrontation in the library basement repeated in my mind, slotted into a new context, but one shone out above all the others. A cold hand crept up my spine.

"Evelyn," I said. "What exactly did you mean when you told Twil she needs to 'get over Raine'?"

"Ah." Raine winced.

I'm surprised that part took longer for Heather to puzzle out than the werewolf part. "You need to get over Raine" is pretty explicit and doesn't require any supernatural assumptions.

Evelyn snorted with dark amusement. "This is what you get, Raine, your chickens come home to roost. Or wolves. Whatever."

"You have a werewolf ex-girlfriend." I gaped at Raine.

"No, no!" Raine put her hands up. "No, it was like, a week, or maybe two. And it was all her."

HAH. Perfect reply, Raine. Perfect reply.

Well, it may have only been a couple weeks, but you're never going to live it down. As "dogfucker" you shall always be known. It's a cruel world, I know.

"You have a jealous werewolf ex-girlfriend and you thought this wasn't relevant information that I needed to know?"

I don't think people usually proactively tell each other about jealous exes unless they're about to start dating or something. Which Heather and Raine aren't doing yet, though I doubt it'll be much longer to be fair.

"I didn't even know she still came up to Sharrowford. I thought she was gone for good."

"And she smelled you on me," I said.

Raine frowned, hair-trigger switch to serious. "She said that?"

"She said I reeked of both of you. She probably thinks you and I are … you know." I threw up my hands, too exasperated for embarrassment.

"A safe assumption," Evelyn muttered.

Evelyn, would you perhaps like some pepper to go with all that salt?

I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands. I felt a headache coming on, and this time it had nothing to do with impossible math.

"Heather, I'm so sorry I didn't tell you," Raine said. Her hands found my shoulders again and squeezed. "I really didn't think she was even around any more. If I thought you were in the slightest amount of danger, I would have warned you. I'd knock her lights out if she threatened you."

I knew I didn't have any right to be mad at Raine. After all, we weren't lovers. Just friends. Right? This was her ex, her past, her business. None of my concern. I had no right to demand anything.

Heather, I will extend that offer to you as well.

Her ex-girlfriend also happened to be an insupportable break with even my tenuous standards of acceptable reality.

"Magic and monsters and other dimensions I can just about deal with. Werewolves are a step too far. Let alone jealous werewolf ex-girlfriends. When did I end up in a bad supernatural romance novel?"

Okay, author, having Heather hang a lampshade on this isn't making it any better.

"Romance?" Raine's voice kinked with amusement.

I blushed furiously, amazed she had the audacity right now.

She kept rubbing my shoulders and I kept my face hidden, trying to accept this incredibly stupid addition to my incomplete model of the world.

"Do you want the full lowdown on her?" Raine asked.

"Oh, why not? I suppose I should at least try to understand. Can hardly make less sense at this point."

"You got it, Heather. Like I was saying, Twil represents some potentially dangerous people, depending on what they're after right now."

Evelyn snorted a derisive laugh. "Idiots and amateurs, begging to get their minds eaten by an Outsider."

"A cult?" I asked, looking up again. "She's in a cult as well? Oh, great, this gets better and better."

"Not actually from Sharrowford," Raine said. "There's a cult up in Brinkwood, two train stops north of the city. Pokey little village on the edge of the woods. You ever been past there?"

I recalled a rotting ex-mill town seen from dirty train windows, trees marching down to a valley in the mid-distance. "I think so."

"It's a run down place. They've got some fancy name for themselves, but we just call them the Brinkwood cult. They're a bit mad, but not screaming avocado batshit level like the Masonic-lodge wannabees in Sharrowford itself."

"'Screaming avocado batshit'?"

I've never heard the word "avocado" used to emphasize madness. This might be a British thing, or it might be a Raine thing, or it might actually pertain to some detail of the Brinkwood sect. They worship an ancient and terrible avocado demon or something.

Hey, don't laugh. A friend of mine wrote a short fantasy/horror story called "The Cult of the Eggplant" that was actually pretty effective.

"Let's just say the Sharrowford cult is real bad news. The Brinkwood weirdos, eh, I'd rather we never have to deal with them again, but they're not stab-happy."

"Probably because they're much older," Evelyn supplied without looking away from the door. "A little stability goes a long way."

Yeah, this supports my earlier inference that knowing is better than not knowing. There's a cult in Sharrowford that murders people, and the mentally ill (or those believed to be mentally ill, like Heather) are probably easy targets. Definitely better to know about this.

That piqued my interest for real. These people had history, local history? "How old?"

"Approximately three hundred years, at an educated guess," Evelyn said. "My grandmother had them well-documented, from a safe distance. They probably started as a group of Quakers, tried to rebuild the abandoned church out in the woods, where Lowdon village used to be. That's about three miles north of Brinkwood. They found something there in the basement, hibernating, and they've been worshipping it ever since. At least, that's what they tell themselves."

"What did they find?"

Evelyn shrugged. "Something washed up from Outside. Stranded and crippled and half-dead, I suspect."

If that's just what they tell themselves, then what's the true version? You can't just say that and then not explain yourself, Evelyn.

"Well," Raine said after Evelyn fell silent. "Cut a long story short, Twil's the cult's greatest success story. The reason I know all this is we were friends for a bit."

From the sound of things, they successfully infected Twil with eldritch rabies extracted from the half-dead thing in their compound, turning her into something like an artificial werewolf. I'm guessing that either a) attempts at repeating this process ended in failure, or b) there just wasn't enough rabies to go around.

The purpose of this was...to make a supersoldier? To try and create a liaison between themselves and their not-very-healthy god? Could be any reason I guess. Twil is around the others' age, going by her description, so she must have been pretty young when she underwent the procedure. I'm guessing the cultists thought a kid would be better able to fuse with this thing for whatever reason, and they may have been correct.

I wonder. Was Twil born into the cult? Was she an impressionable teen from a troubled backround who got sucked into it? Was she a kidnapped child who they brainwashed into compliance? I suspect option 2 most strongly, but they're all possible.

"Friends," I echoed.

"Yeah, friends, really. I mean, yes, she had a crush on me, I think?"

"You encouraged her enough," Evelyn said.

"Ahem, well." Raine spread her hands in an apologetic shrug. "I may have. Poor decision, I know, yeah. Fair cop, I admit that."

"I don't want to know," I lied. I was dying to know.

Hmm. Evelyn thinks they were more than friends. Twil thinks they were more than friends. Raine is...kiiind of denying it, but not really? She doesn't seem like the type to lie about this sort of thing, unless there's an aspect of it that's much more shameful than just loving and leaving. Something really weird must have happened between her and Twil.

"Twil wasn't born a werewolf," Evelyn said. "As far as I know, werewolves don't even exist. She's the product of a experiment a few years back, to bind a demon or a spirit or some other Godforsaken thing to human flesh, without displacing the human soul. Her back's covered with a mural of binding tattoos. Keeps them carefully hidden, but Raine saw."

Raine winced again.

Okay, pretty much as I'd inferred.

There's an important unspoken detail here, though. Evelyn says that werewolves don't normally exist and Twil is a unique experiment. However, she's also vulnerable to silver just like werewolves are said to be in preexisting pop culture and folklore. That doesn't seem like it could be a coinidence. The folklore must have grown from an element of genuine experience with one or more people like Twil in the past. So, even if Twil's creation was a one-off experiment, those cultists must have been rediscovering something that earlier magicians already discovered.

Looking at Wikipedia's article on werewolves...oh, this is actually interesting!

If wiki can be trusted, the concept of werewolves being harmed by silver seems to have first been popularized in England and Germany in the 19th century. The antecedents of this, the article claims, include a) a general western European folkloric belief that various supernatural beings are repelled by specific metals (fairies fearing iron etc), and b) alchemical lore in which silver embodies purity and temperance, making it a countermeasure to wildness and degradation.

The author probably did much more research while writing this than I did in this five minute google session, so I might be missing some important aspects, but in broad strokes: I suspect that in the world of the story, some 19th century alchemist created a "werewolf." Possibly using the very same hibernating alien corpse thing trapped in the same English church basement that the cult currently inhabits, possibly using a different vector they found elsewhere. People talked, some aspects of this creature made it into pop culture in the following decades. Then, a century later, a different group of occultists independently reinvented the procedure with Twil.

That's my working hypothesis. It may or may not get a chance to be falsified within this arc.

"Right," I said, voice tight.

"She showed me!" Raine said. "I wasn't getting her naked, I swear."

Once again this seems like a lie, but it doesn't seem like something Raine would bother lying about, so there's probably much more behind it than is being said.

"Lucky for us, the Brinkwood cult had some kind of internal power struggle right after they made themselves a werewolf foot soldier. Since then – nothing. Twil's basically been left to have a mostly normal life. Her grandfather died, which I suspect meant a change of cult leadership. They seem more concerned with tending to their crippled God these days. They took some interest in my library about a year ago, but I sent them packing. That's how we met Twil, she's developed a bee in her bonnet about us. Blame Raine."

Ah, her grandfather was the cult's leader for a time. I guess it was option 1, then. Twil was born into the sect, and probably raised to believe that it's a great honor to be used for magical experiments.

And, with their interest in Evelyn's library, their functional-but-not-terribly-impressive magical ability, and their werewolf princess' obsession with Raine, it's likely that these are the people who sent that flimsy servitor to spy on them back in 1.1. Maybe the reason Twil is unexpectedly back in Sharrowford is because their seaweedy spy drones have been getting destroyed.

"She hasn't been around in at least six months," Raine said. "She's probably here on actual cult business. They could be up to anything. Including spying on us. Wish I knew why. Maybe I should beat it out of her."

"So what do we do? Break out the wolfsbane? Wait for a full moon?" I couldn't quite keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

"I need to find her and shoo her back to the sticks, that's all. Seriously Heather, I won't let her hurt you, even if she did smell my scent on you. She can take it up with me."

"Oh, I can't sit here and listen to this nonsense," Evelyn snapped. "Stop trying to scare her, Raine, it's not going to help you get into her knickers any faster."

"Evelyn, please!" I said. Raine laughed and ruffled my hair.

I don't think Raine is under any illusions about her needing to expend effort to get into Heather's knickers.

"Twil's not going to bother Heather one bit," Evelyn continued. "She's going to come here, to finish up what she started, with me. Why in hell would she bother Heather? She doesn't even know her. She was on the same old hobby horse as usual, pissing and moaning about the books. This time I'm going to teach her a lesson. This is the last time, last time she does this."

"Evee, you're my friend and I love you, but why didn't you call me the moment you saw her?"

"Certainly, I should have taken out my mobile phone while trapped in a corridor with her. 'Just a moment, Twil old dear, I'm going to call Raine to come punch you in the face for me.' That would have diffused the situation very handily, wouldn't it?"

"Better than breaking her nose with your stick. She might have hurt you. Or Heather. I wish I'd been there."

"Oh, nonsense." Evelyn pulled herself around to face the door again. "She wouldn't have dared. It was all front and bluster. You know her, Raine. You know she's not dangerous, not really."

I raised my hand. "I do seem to recall her winding up a punch at me."

"See, Evee?" Raine turned back to me. "Damn, she didn't actually hit you, did she?"

"No. And to be fair, I did slap her first."

"You … what? You slapped her?" A grin crept across Raine's face. "You slapped her? You slapped Twil?"

"I know! I don't know what came over me. It's not a behaviour that should be encouraged, please."

Raine raised her hand for a high-five. I blushed and hesitated.

"Come on, Heather, you earned it."

"F-fine." I touched my hand to Raine's. Not much of a high-five.

Heather finally realizes her latent aptitude for the universal art, and finds herself a talented art teacher while she's at it. Ys atn varama presh.

"It does complicate things though. She was provoked. I struck first. I slapped a werewolf. Oh, that's such an intolerable word."

"From the sound of things, she deserved it."

"It makes absolutely zero difference," Evelyn said, punctuating her words by jabbing the arm of her chair. "She wouldn't bother with Heather, she's waiting outside for me to leave. But I have more patience."

Raine sighed and spread her hands in a wide shrug, a good-natured grin on her face. "Can't leave you two alone for five minutes, can I?"

"Believe what you want. Perhaps you should listen to-"

A knock shook the door of the Medieval Metaphysics room. Three sharp raps. My heart jumped.

Eh? Is Twil actually expecting to be let in if she knocks?

"Ha! I told you so," Evelyn said.

She stared at the door with an evil glint in her eye and re-oriented her fingertips against the bloodied glass once more.

Well, they're going to open it. And Evelyn is going to shoot her with an anti-werewolf laser powered by her own blood.


That's a chapter. Still not much to say. We're seeing more foibles and nuances in all three of the main characters, including Raine now that we're seeing a bit deeper than her glamorous first impression.

Unsure what to think at this juncture about Twil the not-actually-a-werewolf who nonetheless is vulnerable to silver and generates dog jokes wherever she goes.