“How are you feeling?”

Anna looked up to see Izzy, standing in the door of her room in the LC’s infirmary.  “Weak,” she replied.  

“Is that all?” he asked, coming in and taking a seat beside her bed.  She was in a hospital gown, an IV still hooked up to her arm, feeding her a concoction of drugs to slowly wean her off all the other drugs she’d been forced to take while in captivity at the asylum.

She knew she should feel relieved, elated even.  She was free.  Lady Sapphire had talked to her when she first woke up, explained to her gently where she was, that she was safe.  Anna had wanted to know how long, how long she’d been kidnapped and held prisoner in that hell.  When Lady Sapphire had told her she’d been missing for 25 days, she’d almost blacked out again.

Three and a half weeks.  Almost a month.  It was so long.  How could it be so long?

Anna studied Izzy’s face.  He wasn’t expecting her to be grateful to be free.  She saw only sorry in his brown eyes.  “I’m broken,” she said, a fat tear welling up in the corner of her eye.

“Oh Anna,” he said, finding her hand.  It felt so cold and small in his own as he squeezed it.  

“I’m broken,” she repeated, a choked sob escaping her throat as more hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

“No, you’re not broken, just a little dinged up.”  He pulled her close, and she sobbed into his chest.  



Izzy’s eyes narrowed.  Lady Sapphire stepped between him and Aegis.  The rising tension between the two was the last thing she needed.

“Israel, we need to know if there’s anything she remembers that could help us.  We need to debrief her.”

“Interrogate,” he corrected.

“No, debrief,” she said, sternly.

“Semantics.”

“Barrage, move,” Aegis said, his voice a growl.

Izzy bit his tongue.  Telling Aegis to move him was an invitation the Legend was more than capable of.  A rationale part of his brain was still stunned by the sheer level of brazenness he’d been allowed to get away with.   A step too far over the line could invite the wrath of his superior.  “She’s a wreck; she has good reason to be.”

“And what of your sister?” Lady Sapphire asked, trying to try a different approach.

Izzy pulled out his phone, dialing.  He put the phone on speaker and held it up while it rang.

Finally, it reached the recorded message.  “Yo, it’s Mira, I’ screen my calls, and if you’re hearing this, I don’t want to talk to you.  Leave a message, if you sound desperate enough, I’ll think about calling you back.”  BEEP.

“She won’t even answer for you?” Lady Sapphire asked.  

“Oh, I’m sure she knows I’m not the one trying to get in contact with her,” Izzy responded.

Aegis took a step forward, and Lady Sapphire held up her hands between them.  “Look, we’ll give her some time to recover, but we need to find out if she knows anything.  Find out what you can from your sister.”

“Thank you,” Izzy said, giving the sorceress a polite nod.

Aegis said nothing.  Izzy gave him a wide berth as he walked past, heading back to his room.  He pulled his phone back out, dialing again.

“Ugh, can this wait?” Mira answered after the first ring.

“No.  What do you know?”

“I just missed her.  She showed up at the asylum I found Siren in like twenty minutes ago.  She used some voodoo on the head nurse; she’ll be useless.  I doubt the rest of the staff will be much help.”

“Do what you can.”

“I’ll get their surveillance, see if I can pick up a trail.”

“Find it quick and get out.  Then text me the address.  I’ll give it to the LC.”

Mira snorted on the other end of the line.

“I have to give them something,” he replied.

“I don’t know why you stay.”

“Yeah, well I might not be allowed to stay after this is all over.”

“They’d be doing you a favor.”

“I bitch and moan a lot, but they’re good people.  They’ve lost their path somewhere along the way.  We all have.”

“Whatever.  I’ve got to go,” she replied.

“Mira.”

“What?”

“Be careful.”

She laughed.  “I always am.”

A faint click followed as she hung up.  Izzy put his phone back in his pocket.  He was back in his apartment, a sparse, two-room affair that was the right blend of comfortable and barely lived in.  He leaned against his wall, looking up at the ceiling as he began to formulate the next piece of his plan.



Anna stared at her reflection in the mirror.  She’d slept for most of the past two days, drifting between spans of deep sleep that bordered on a comatose trance, and shallow, fitful sleep filled with nightmares that hung on the edge of her memory.  Despite the rest, there were dark circles under her eyes.  Her skin was pale, the effect of an unhealthy diet plus not seeing the sun in almost a month.  Her hair was growing back out, about a half-inch long fuzz, flattened and matted all over from spending two days in bed.  The hospital gown hung loosely on her skinny frame, and she knew under the fabric she was all skin and bones.  Her muscles had withered and atrophied during her captivity; the mere act of getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom had left her winded.

She turned from the mirror and sat on the toilet, dropping her head into her palms.  Anna stayed like that long after she’d relieved herself.  It was different, in the LC tower, but in a way, it was the same.  She was just as much a prisoner here as she had been in the asylum.  She wasn’t restrained, but the door to her room was locked, and escape was just as impossible.  She tried to focus on the fact that it really was different.  This was for her protection.  A temporary measure until Ursula was dealt with.

But the idea of even the LC dealing with a monster like Ursula seemed like a fantasy.  She knew how powerful they were.  They were formidable, the most powerful team in the world.  But because she knew them, she was aware of their flaws.  Ursula was a nightmare.  Something that had reached out of some dark netherworld and grabbed her, stealing her voice, her power, her life.  

She hadn’t even realized she’d drifted off again, still on the toilet, when a knock on the door jarred her awake.

“Just a sec,” she called, pulling up her underwear and stumbling out of the bathroom on shaky legs.  She opened the door to her room, her cozy cell, to find Izzy standing outside.

“Get dressed,” he said, stepping past her into the room.  He tossed a bag onto the bed, clothes and shoes falling out onto the sheets.

“What?” she asked, confused.

“Hurry, you can’t stay here.”

“Izzy please, will you at least tell me what’s going on?  Everyone’s asking me questions but no one will talk to me.”

“I’m sorry.”  He sighed and sat on the edge of her bed.  “We’ve got a couple minutes, but get dressed.”

“Alright,” she said, emptying the bag.  Sneakers, socks, sweatpants, a t-shirt, hoody, baseball cap, sunglasses, car keys, a phone, and cash.  A lot of cash.  “Jesus,” she said.

“Sea Witch is going to come looking for you.  I don’t think her stealing your power is permanent.”

“It’s not,” Anna answered, pulling up the baggy sweatpants up her painfully thin legs.

“What?”

“She came back and stole my voice again.  She has this,” she shuddered at the memory, “magic ritual.”

“When?  How long ago?” Izzy asked with a growing sense of urgency.

“I don’t know.  I couldn’t keep track of time.  It could have been a week, maybe two, I have no idea.”

“Could you feel your power coming back?  Anything?”

She shook her head.  These were all questions she’d been asked already.  She hadn’t told Lady Sapphire that Ursula had stolen her powers a second time.  She didn’t know why, instinct, an attempt to repress it maybe.  “I don’t know, and I didn’t get to talk much, I don’t know if it had any effect or how it works.”

Izzy bit his lower lip.  “And you didn’t tell Lady Sapphire about this?”

She shook her head again.  “No.”

“Good.  That’s for the best.”

She turned around, shucking off her robe and pulling on the shirt.  “You don’t think…” she started.

“That the LC would use you as bait?  I wouldn’t put it past them.”

She thought about it.  “That might not be the worst idea in the world.”

“I don’t trust anyone right now.  You know what your power is capable of.”

Anna froze as she started pulling the socks on.  She eyed Izzy, searching his face.

“And after this, you shouldn’t trust me either, but right now, I need you to.”  He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, handing it to her.  “It’s a list of a several of my safe houses.  Pick one, and don’t tell me which one.  Only stay a couple of days, and then move on.”

“I can’t just disappear.  I mean, has anyone even told Macy I’m alright yet?”  She’d asked everyone she’d talked to if she could talk to Macy.  Just to let her know she was alive.

Izzy shook his head.  “I’m sorry.  She’s better off not knowing anything until you’re actually safe.  Look, I know it’s hard, I’ve been in touch with her and I’m assuring her we’re doing everything we can.  It’s the best I can do right now.”

Anna understood the logic.  But the idea of Macy not knowing where she was or if she was even alive was tearing her apart.  “And what then?  I just go into hiding, waiting until, what?”

“Until things come to a head.  The Sea Witch has a plan, she’s working towards something, I just hope she doesn’t have your power when she puts everything into motion.  Just keep an eye on the news.  Now hurry up, we’re running out of time.”

Anna pulled on the hoody, her face disappearing into the shadow cast by the heavy hood.  “Promise me this is a good idea.”

Izzy let out a long breath of air.  He’d never thought of this as a good idea, but merely the best option he saw before him.

“For all I know you could be under her sway, and you’re walking me right back into her grasp.  I need you to promise me that this is the right thing to do.”

“I promise that I’m going to do everything I can to help you and stop Ursula.”

She stared into his brown eyes, searching.  “Alright.  Get me out of here.”



Anna chose the safe house closest to Bristol, about an hour from her apartment she was most likely evicted from, her job that she’d surely lost by now, and her adoptive sister who didn’t know if she was alive or dead.  It was a bad idea, she knew, both in that her choice was predictable, and she was just tempting herself with what was surely a bad idea.  

She had no idea that this was the safe house her rescuer had been using while looking for her, all traces of Mira LeBlanc’s mess cleaned up like she was never there.  Izzy’s safe house was on the edge of a row of townhouses, a third of them vacant, with the rest full of people who lived by a strict code of “look the other way.”  

So this is freedom, she thought as she finished her tour.  Two bedrooms upstairs, a refrigerator and pantry stocked with non-perishables in the kitchen, and a TV and an old computer in the den.  She didn’t have the password to get onto the computer, and the cable wasn’t hooked up to the TV.  She noted the old VCR, and rifled through the collection of old VHS tapes.  All westerns.  It was definitely Izzy’s safe house.

Still, this was the most activity she’d had in a month, and sitting on the couch to rest for a second quickly turned into a nine hour nap.  She awoke feeling sick with hunger, but she felt too weak to get up and eat.  She rolled off the couch and onto the floor, wishing she could pass out again and enjoy the paradise of unconsciousness.  

“Get up, Chica,” she croaked to herself, trying to summon the voice of her mentor who had gotten her through her time in the asylum.  There were no hallucinations of Callie to motivate her, but she still found the strength to crawl and finally stumble her way into the kitchen.  It wasn’t until she was at the fridge that she realized that passing the bathroom was a mistake.  Anna looked back at the bathroom, all the way across the house.  In reality it was only about twenty feet away, but it might as well have been twenty miles.

It took her four attempts to hoist herself up onto the sink, but she got up and managed to pull her pants down enough to pee into the sink.  She turned the water on and rolled over onto her side on the counter, hot tears welling up in her eyes again.  

This was freedom.



Adam Fry ducked back under the police barricades.  It was a familiar scene, this time a private collector with his house robbed.  Several artifacts believed to be magical in nature missing.  The Sea Witch wasn’t making any attempt to be subtle anymore, just commanding the owner to disable his security systems and then she took exactly what she wanted, no red herrings.

Adam whistled to Impaqt.  The Brazilian former athlete excused herself from the police detectives and walked over to meet him.  “You get a look at the surveillance tapes?” she asked.

“Yeah, she’s wearing the mask, never lets the camera get a clear look at her face.  She talks to the guy, he lets her in, she walks out with two books ten minutes later.”  

Impaqt frowned.  Since the Sea Witch had started hitting private collectors, it had gone from almost to completely impossible to predict her movements.

“You believe that guy had no idea what was in those books?” Adam asked her.

She shrugged.  “He bought them because they reference the occult, but he doesn’t know shit about it.  That’s not just an act for the cops.”

Adam furrowed his brow.  Knowing nothing wasn’t really much different from the smattering of facts they reliably had on other items the Sea Witch had been collecting.  For every scroll that prophesized the end of days, there was a tome that held the secrets to thicker, more full-bodied hair through magic.  “I’m gonna take another lap around the property,” he said.

Impact nodded, heading back to the throng of detectives.

He never found anything; how the Sea Witch traveled was a still a complete mystery, but he always felt the need to double check the whole scene, as if one of these times he’d find tire tracks or evidence of a teleportation circle on the grounds.

He meandered along the tree line, his eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary.  

“Stop,” a cold voice said behind him.

Adam’s body froze.

“Tell me, what’s going on with Annabelle Carillon?”

“We don’t have her anymore,” he answered, not turning around.

“What?” the voice hissed.

“Barrage turned her loose.  Word is even he doesn’t know where she is.”

There was a long period of silence.  Finally the voice spoke again.  “Forget we spoke.  Go back about your business, and keep checking the grounds at the robbery sites.”

Adam nodded, and started walking again.  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and he whirled around, drawing his gun, Arquebus.  The woods were empty.  He holstered his weapon again, taking one last look around him before he started walking again.  Wishful thinking, he thought.  This was a waste of time.

Ursula watched him go from deeper in the woods.  Her black dress shimmered, bending light around it, hiding her from sight.  Even the engineer’s instruments wouldn’t be able to detect her.

Her face was frozen in a scowl.  Barrage was starting to be a real nuisance.  It was high time she did something about Anna’s watchdog.