C’mon Walt, take the fucking shot, I thought as I watched Conner briefly convulse in the leader’s grip, wrenching around to look at me. The look he gave me shocked me. For the first time since I entered the room, I saw recognition in his eyes.

  I didn’t know what to do at that point. I had been pushing that eventuality to the back of my mind whenever it came up, but now it was literally staring me in the face. How the fuck did he recognize me? My voice sounded like it was from a horror movie, I had four fucking arms and tentacles, and—if my face looked anything like the rest of me—my face was pitch black.

  Thankfully Walt started moving again and pulled my attention away from my little mental crisis. I refocused on the tendril I was growing from my foot while keeping my eyes on the leader and Conner, with one of my eyestalks keeping track of Walt’s activities on the other side of the room. The tendril was incredibly thin so it could move through the blood coating the floor of the chamber without—hopefully—being seen. It was surprisingly difficult to grow a tiny tentacle and keep it moving, especially for how long I needed it to be. With one eyestalk watching Walt, I had another keeping track of the tendril's progress as it crawled through the blood.

  As I watched Walt sight along his old style rifle—is that a Sparks?—I spent a little brain power worrying about how my danger sense was behaving. It had been acting erratic ever since I learned Conner was missing, but now it was strange. When I had first gotten the ability, it acted purely in a double-sight function, except one side would be three seconds in the future. It had been hell to live with, and I used a mental exercise (the same one I used to suppress my psychometry) to relegate it to the background, with a kind of mental fail-safe that would alert me to anything weird popping up (like bullets, twins suddenly glomping Alice or explosions). But during the fight, I hadn’t gotten any visions popping up like I normally do. I just… knew what was going to happen. Like a Jedi. I just wish I knew WHY it was suddenly working way better than it ever had.

  “Who is he to you?” The leader asked, getting a better grip on my brother. My brother was still looking at me with fiery intensity.

  “He’s the last in a series I’m collecting,” I began, not sure where I was going until the words were out of my mouth. “I prefer to get one mint in box, but scalpers have nabbed them all up and I’m not willing to fork over five grand.”

  The leader frowned in confusion. Conner’s stare lost some of his intensity, mostly because he was convulsing. No, he was laughing. Dammit, Conner, don’t blow my cover. Also, Walt, what the FUCK is taking so—

  As my attention switched back to Walt, I answered my own question. He was channeling a complicated spell into the gun. I kept myself from frowning in thought, but I really wanted to, because Walt wasn’t aiming at the leader. What the fuck are you aiming at? I thought at him, silently wishing we were still connected via Albright. I gently shifted the eyestalk aiming at Walt, trying not to let vertigo get ahold of me as one of the three things I was looking at shifted up, and up…

  To the cynosure.

  Albright had said Walt had the tools to take it out. I just had to hope that whatever it did to the magic disco ball was enough to distract the leader to give me time to finish my own little plan. Speaking of, I focused on the tendril's progress, adjusting the many shapes that were taking place along its length. I returned my attention to the leader right when he looked to be about done with the conversation, his hand on the dagger tensing.

  “If you aren’t taking this seriously,” he said, fury in his voice. “I don’t see a reason why I should.”

  Who talks like that? I lifted all four of my hands like the Vitruvian man. “Well, you’re taking this seriously because I single-handedly killed most of your cult and all your little demons,” I said, lowering all my arms save one that gestured at a particularly tall pile of shoggoth bodies. “And because you know that if you kill that man, what little restraint I have will go out the fucking window.”

  Whatever calm I was enforcing upon myself slipped at the end of the sentence, the power I was barely holding onto seeping into my words with enough force to make the blood around my feet vibrate like water on a speaker. I saw Walt give me a complicated look that I couldn’t interpret. Wait, is he warning me? Is he about to—

  Walt fired his rifle.

  Several things happened at once. The first was the cult leader got startled so badly that he hopped to the side. At the same time, almost as if he had been waiting for it like a starting pistol, Conner shoved the leader away with surprising strength likely born from pure adrenaline and managed to put a few feet between himself and the cult leader but took a nasty cut on his shoulder for his trouble.

  As the bullet smacked into the cynosure, I reached down and sliced off the tendril I had been growing. I was surprised at how much the pain felt similar to cutting off a skin tag. I dashed along the line the tendril had made, my tentacles reaching out every few feet and cutting the tendril in specific ways. Ways that I hoped would work to spell runes in Elder Futhark.

  I didn’t know what the ritual circle did. I’d need several hours to go over the sheer amount of symbols carved into the floor of this big ass room. I could tell from the general flow of the symbols and all the goddamned blood that it has something to do with using sacrificial energy. But the main thing I spotted was that, aside from its primary purpose, no one had bothered to tell the ritual circle who was friend or foe or who was allowed to alter it.

  Rookie mistake.

  Just because you’re in an extra-dimensional bunker with the best door guard I have ever seen, and dozens of monsters and cultists willing to die for the cause doesn’t mean you don’t make sure your doors are locked at night. Emergencies are prevented with a little forethought.

  Not that any of these assholes will live to regret it.

  I’m not taking control of the ritual. I don’t know what the fuck they are doing and I don’t care for the most part. I’m adding a line of instructions to let me through the barrier and to knock out anyone who’s linked to the ritual. It’d be easier to turn the barrier into a bead curtain and let anyone through, but I worry they’re doing a really big summoning and didn’t want to take down the only thing that may stop it.

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  While I worked, the cynosure was going crazy. It pulsed, bulged, and jerked; looked like it was about to explode one second and shatter the next. It began to speed up so fast it became a blur, the light it emitted kind of… rippling around the room.

  “Colm!”

  I paused and looked behind me. Walt was standing about twenty feet away, holding his automatic. He wasn’t pointing it at me, which was nice of him. I waved at the other side of the room, toward the entrance. “Go! Get the others and get the fuck outta here! The captives need the help and reinforcements only you can bring.”

  Walt opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. He shook his head and turned to run. “I knew there was something fishy about you, but…” he trailed off. “For whatever it’s worth, I’ll try to keep my trap shut about what I saw down here.”

  Then he activated his magic and was gone.

  “That’s nice of him,” I muttered, turning and carving another symbol into the ground. The tendril I had grown hadn’t reached this far and I had to complete the circle the old-fashioned way. Why in the blue heavens did these assholes have to make it so big?

  I didn’t expect Walt to be able to keep my secret. His boss was a telepath, after all. They probably had protocols and other crap to check to see if they were reporting everything relevant. Added to that, I’m sure the rest of the team all had their suspicions after seeing me work. But it didn’t matter. So long as I got Conner out of here safe, I didn’t care. I’ll deal with the consequences when it comes.

  I reluctantly cast a glance inside the circle, half expecting to see Conner dead. To my utter relief, he was dragging himself as far away from the leader as he could. The leader was now in the center of the ritual again, chanting something in that strange language and holding the dagger he’d used to kill so many high in the air. Uh oh. Looks like he might be trying to rush the end of the ritual. I picked up the pace.

  The one saving grace of having a ritual circle so stupidly big was that it gave me a lot of leeway with my symbols, and I wasn’t worried about needing to check my work. Still, as I carved the last symbol into the floor, a part of me worried I had fucked up and that I’d have to spend several minutes—

  I felt the connection to the circle take place. I pivoted and jumped into the barrier, the once hard wall of energy now as resistant as day-old Jello. As I picked up my pace, I warred with myself as to who to go after first. Do I kill the leader to prevent him from threatening Conner? Or do I go and grab Conner to better protect him?

  The leader took the choice out of my hands as he plunged the dagger into his own heart. “Aw fuck,” I muttered and changed course to Conner.

  “You may have ruined my cell,” the leader said with a cough that bled over his chin. “But His will is… done.”

  I slid the remaining distance to Conner, adjusting my body so all the sharp bits were gone by the time I slid into him. “Liam?” He asked, his voice heavy with exhaustion and fear.

  I made sure the power in me was as muted as I could make it. “Yeah, it’s me, bud,” I said as I grabbed him in a princess carry with my two lower arms. I swiped a finger through the blood on the ground with one of my extra arms and wrote a short Elder Futhark word on his forehead, keying him to the barrier as I had myself. “It’s a long story.”

  “No shit,” he muttered.

  If he had the energy to mock me, he was in better shape than I had any reason to hope. I glanced over at the leader, who was now a corpse on the ground. As I watched, the blood oozing from his chest and mouth wasn’t joining the rest on the ground, but gently lifting into the air in little streams. The streams met some ten feet in the air and were forming a ring.

  “Yeah, I’m not sticking around for that,” I said and stood, Conner in my arms.

  “What about—the others?” Conner asked.

  I grimaced, glancing back at all the other prisoners. “I’m just one guy, man,” I said softly as I started trotting to the stairs and double doors. “I came here for you, and now we’re getting out of here. Help is on the way. Hopefully, they’ll be here in time to help these people.”

  I didn’t believe that last bit and neither did Conner. The barrier didn’t stop me, but my rune work on Conner must have been a little sloppy because it clung to him before letting him through.

  Internally, my emotions were all over the place. I was still filled with rage, but it was largely muted by the fact that I had actually gotten Conner. But underneath those mixed emotions was a sea of fear and anxiety. I had pulled heavily on the knowledge and power of my silent passenger, and I could sense the effect it was having on my psyche. I could only pray that it was temporary, or something I could work through with Alice’s and Ida’s help.

  God, I miss them. It’d only been a few hours, but I never realized how much I relied on their presence until it was gone.

  I was congratulating myself on getting away free and clear, my foot hitting the top step of the stairs to the landing when the huge double doors slammed shut with enough force to hurt my ears.

  “No!” I shouted. “Goddamnit, NO!”

  I rushed down the stairs, holding myself back from leaping to save Conner from the bumpy ride. I grew my claws back on my two extra arms and attacked the seam between the doors, as there weren’t any handles on this side. My tentacles joined a second later, and I strained mightily to pry them apart.

  To no avail.

  “Liam?”

  I briefly considered using my pyrokinesis on the door but didn’t bother. If my claws couldn’t cut it, then fire wouldn’t have a hope. I changed tack and moved to the side, hoping to find a hinge I could damage. But there wasn’t one. I tried digging through the rock of the wall, but the progress I made was pitiful. I could score the wall, but that was a far cry from removing enough stone to allow a full-grown male and eldritch whatever-the-fuck-I-am through.

  “Fuck!” I looked around, trying to think of a solution.

  “Liam?”

  “Yeah, man,” I said distractedly. “What is it?”

  “Are you… evil?”

  I paused and looked down at him. His eyes were looking up at me, but they weren’t focusing anymore. Whatever burst of energy he had when in the ritual had left him. Holding him close, he looked truly pitiful now. He weighed barely anything, his lips were cracked and caked in old blood, with dried puss gathered at the corners.

  From his tone, though, I got that he was more worried about me than himself. I almost laughed at how ridiculous it was. Conner didn’t deserve this life. He deserved a father who didn’t beat him, a pretty girl at his side, and a world that didn’t know magic existed. My lips trembled with a sudden swell of emotion, and I turned and looked up at the cynosure for something else to focus on, just in time to watch it burst in a flash of energy that shook the entire domain.

  Total darkness took over the room. Slowly, it was replaced by a crimson glow. I couldn’t see it from down in the landing, but I’d bet it was coming from whatever was forming from the leader's blood. I sighed and gently placed Conner on the ground, his back propped up against the wall. Before I stood, I checked him over. The cut on his back was ugly but shallow and had already started to scab over. The cut on his shoulder was deeper, but wasn’t bleeding heavily. I don’t know if it was because it wasn’t bad or because Conner was so dehydrated that he simply didn’t have that much blood to go around.

  “Only to those who fuck with us,” I answered finally, taking his hand and placing it on the wound. “Keep pressure on that.”

  His bleary eyes got a little clearer as he gave me a weak smile. “Show them what happens when they do.”

  I gave his hand a squeeze as I stood. “You bet your ass I will.”