Twilight In Plain Sight

Chapters

Making Ourselves At Home
The Hidden Heart-wood
No Place Is Safe
The Corpse At Every Funeral
Interrogations
Old Reflexes
The Girl From Tulsa
Tell God Your Plans
There Is Power In The Blood
Paying Attention
Opening The Door
Good And Bad Fairies
Last Chance
Now And In The Hour
Remember, Your Name is Skyla!

Making Ourselves At Home

Twilight's nightly night terrors were blissfully interrupted by the screams of a terrified child.

Oh, thank God. Wait, no…

Dusk Shine got up from yet another unfamiliar bed, and fumbled in the dark, bumping against a doorframe far, far too close to the bedframe. The light was still on in the TV room, which she left on because if she'd left the hallway light on, Flurry – Skyla would never have gotten to sleep.

Not that either of them had gotten all that much rest so far this first night.

It was only a few steps from Twilight's painfully tiny bedroom to the doorway into Skyla's slightly larger room, further towards the back of the crowded little converted apartment. Twilight's little niece was awake, and sniffing pitifully into her cheap Walmart-purchased comforter, trying to keep from waking her aunt.

"Too late, kiddo. I'm up, come on out of there and we'll get some of that milk, try again in a bit, OK?"

"M' still mad at you, Mom. Don' want any milk."

Dusk Shine was regretting telling Skyla about that little change in their paperwork more and more, especially after she got a good look at the cheap digital clock on the little set of dressers wedged between the inner wall of Skyla's cramped bedroom, and her bed, a twin to the one crammed in Dusk's own bedroom.

I'm going to be dead on my feet tomorrow morning, that'll look good to the principal when I show up to my interview.

Dusk Shine sat on her- on Skyla's bed, just far enough away from her that she wouldn't feel crowded.

"Look, kiddo, I can't help what the marshals put on our paperwork. Neither can you. We can only try and make this work, and not let it affect us too much in here, where you're just you, and I'm just me. We have to take the names, and make them us, but we don't have to take the roles that seriously. There's plenty of 'mothers' who let their brats stomp all over them, and call them by their given names. I can be a terrible hipster 'best friend' mom for you, if you want me to be."

Twilight continued to banter with Skyla until the little girl's eyes flagged, and she drifted back asleep beneath her comforter and her sheets. She had long since learned to not ask Flurry Heart about her nightmares, she'd done some experimenting after a few months, and had discovered that talking about the details only set them further in stone as far as Flurry was concerned.

PTSD was poorly understood when it came to very small children, and Twilight had had to pick and choose among the available literature on the subject. She'd chosen to downplay Flurry's symptoms, and to never, ever rehearse or remind the little girl about her experiences and memories.

The more you think about memories, as far as Twilight was concerned, the more deeply you burnt them into your recollection. Better to encourage Skyla to form new memories and new associations, and to get her to think about those as much as possible. All those months of horrible, grey motel rooms in flat, dull north Texas had not helped the project in the least, though.

Twilight tried not to think of her own nightmares that Skyla had interrupted. About what had once been a beloved family home, broken windows, broken furniture, blood splatters everywhere, blood pools everywhere… and terrified pale blue eyes looking out of a grate protecting the crawl-space within which Flurry Heart had hidden from the cultists.

The crawl-space with a clear view of the living room coffee table upon which they had ritually murdered Cadance and the elder Sparkles.

Skyla wasn't the only inhabitant of this stupid little apartment that didn't need to dwell on horrible memories.

After that, Twilight sat for hours at the tiny table in their tiny, weirdly shaped kitchen under merciless fluorescent lighting, bent over her crafting kit, weaving little charms and cantrips out of Crystal Fireline Jewelry Thread and other repurposed materials she kept on hand. She hadn't been able to bring much with them when they left their last motel-nest, and she exhausted some key portions of her supplies during that late-night session.

'Dusk Shine' would need to find an arts-and-crafts store. One that wouldn't ask uncomfortable questions.

It was only after Twilight ran out of bamboo and 4" pheasant feathers, that she gave in to her mounting exhaustion and went back to bed.

***

"OK, the thing to keep in mind, sweetie, is that our family situation is nobody's business but our own. We don't have to talk about it, we don't have to call each other anything in particular while we're in public, and you most certainly don't have to talk to the other kids about your mother or what happened to your daddy. Now, what are you going to say if someone asks about your mommy?"

"Uh, hey, where's the ice cream shops around here?"

"Deflection, good. But don't use ice cream, it's going to be getting cold soon. Or, you know what, that's good actually, let them say something about it being not summer anymore. But you'll have to be ready to be made fun of, if you use that one."

"M' tough. Like Daddy was. I'm gonna talk about Daddy if the other kids ask about you. Wasn't he some kinda soldier, 'Mommy'?"

"Yeah, yeah he was. Two tours in the Sandbox. I didn't think you remembered that, you were really little. And then a year and a half with the Crystal – with the Santa Monica Police Department, before the car accident."

"Car accident? Aw, really? That's lame. Can't he have died doin' something cool, like foiling a bank robbery?"

"It's in the paperwork they gave us, Skyla. Radio car smashed in by a runaway tractor-trailer on his lunch break."

"Radio car?"

"Police car, Flur- damnit!" Dusk Shine handed Skyla a dollar bill.

The little menace laughed triumphantly at Dusk's flub. "I'm going to have enough for that sundae at this rate, Mommy!"

Dusk smiled, and gave Skyla a half-hearted noogie. They were sitting on a bench outside of the local elementary school. There was a day-care across the street from the school, and Dusk had been sitting with Skyla for the last half-hour, watching the traffic along the road, and in and out of the various houses and shops along the way. They'd spent the morning introducing themselves to their landlord, checking on the utilities at the municipal offices, and researching pediatric options for Skyla.

She was overdue for some of her vaccinations – fruit of the way that their nomadic existence had disrupted both of their lives.

There was nothing suspicious-looking along the quiet road beside the elementary school. There had been very little off-schedule traffic into the converted two-story that her notes from the marshals had identified as a suitable day-care. Not that Dusk didn't trust the deputy-marshals' judgment, it was just that she preferred to look before she leaped.

And she'd looked long enough. "Come on, kiddo. Time to say hi. I need to show up twenty minutes early to my interview, and you need to go play nice with the little kids."

"You know I'm too old for this, right?" sniffed Skyla.

"You'll be too old for this when I say so, Skyla. And you need practice being sociable. I've let you slack off too much recently, what with all of the excitement. Time to be friendly, little girl."

"'kay."

Dusk Shine walked her 'daughter' into the day-care, and talked things over with the caretaker. They had a full house, and Dusk was a little worried about just how crowded it was.

"Oh, don't worry, honey, it's a couple days before classes start, half the neighborhood is over at the school for PTA stuff right now. We're not usually this crowded. You're putting your little girl into Griffinherst?" Bubble Berry was a middle-aged, heavy-set woman with an amazing shock of bright-red hair. She stood at the center of a swirl of wild-injun-screeching children, only barely kept in check by a number of sheep-dog-desperate assistants running here and there to keep them from crashing too heavily into each other and the battered furniture. Skyla quickly disappeared into the herd.

"Applying for a job, actually. I'm new in town, have to put my degree to work somewhere. But yeah, Skyla should be going there, if I get the job. Kind of want to keep her close, if you know what you mean."

"Of course you're new in town, honey. It's ahem, Dashville – I don't know you by sight, that means by default you're new in town. Course, everybody we didn't go to high school is 'new in town', ifn' you listen to some of the old sticks over there in the auditorium making each others' lives hell. Want to have a happy career here in Dashville? Stay out of the PTA's way. They play rough." The henna-haired woman paused, looking thoughtful.

"I'd offer to take you on, but we're getting into the school year any day now, and I won't have any spare full-time shifts to offer, just the occasional after-school and pre-school half-shifts. We only really go into overdrive during the summer and holidays, when the parents can't warehouse their darlings in class. But if you need extra income, let me know – you look reliable, and I can tell you're the sort that the kids love."

Dusk Shine left Skyla in the gregarious and oddly generous care of Bubble Berry. Time to go enter the lion's den.

Twilight had envisioned a dragon like the old horror who had made her high school days such a misery, icy, haughty and cold. What she found was a frazzled old man strangely self-defeated by his own paperwork. Two Talons seemed nice enough, and he barely looked at her paperwork, before stamping the top of the pile and tossing the lot into a manila folder, scribbling her name across the tag and shoving the whole into a handy filing-cabinet.

"Willing to teach third-grade, credentialed, and Hawk Flight vouches for you? Sold. I am down six teachers, Miss Shine. Don't drink in front of the kids, don't do anything illegal where I have to acknowledge your misbehavior. Talk to Missus Grass about your supplies and getting scheduled with Missus Lark to go over your instruction plans, and please don't come to my attention again if you can possibly avoid it. Good day, get out."

So Dusk Shine got out, brushing a blessing-charm against the doorframe of the clearly hag-ridden Two Talons' catastrophically disorganized office.

The school's front-office secretary was an elderly lady with an imposingly thick accent, and Dusk barely could understand what Blue Grass said. Concentrating intensely, and silently pleading her new co-worker to enunciate more clearly, Dusk eventually figured out what the secretary needed from her, and quickly agreed to a meeting scheduled for the next morning with the missing Ruby Lark, who was 'wirkin from holm, and wernt be heer t'day'.

"I have a daughter who I need to get registered here, as well. I have the paperwork?" Dusk Shine pulled the thick sheaf of meticulously curated materials from her rucksack, looking hopefully up at the office secretary.

"Aw, naw, y'all ain't likely to have all y'all's papers just yet, y'all just moved heah, right? Ah, ah guess nawt? Huh. Huh. Huh?" Missus Grass looked up at Dusk Shine over the lenses of her reading glasses. "I didn' think anybody lived on tha' block but the Waxes and Gawd. There's apartments up that way?"

"Yess'm," Dusk Shine said, unconsciously mimicking her accent, just a bit. "A brick two-story, ground-level apartment 'round the back."

"Tha place? I thought that was part of the fyuneral hawm. Nawt exactly th' place to rawse a chile, is it now? Always folk comin an' gawin'. Especially tha' fyuneral hawm. Th' outlaw clubs, they use tha' place for they-all's viewin's."

Dusk Shine frowned a bit, vaguely remembering a big, rambling Victorian house on the far side of their place, over on the street corner. They were living next door to a busy funeral home? She'd have to pay more attention when they went back to the apartment.

"Tha y'all go, honey. I most nearly nevah see payrents wit' their paypers so nice ahn neat. Thank yew. Shame th' principal has ta be hidin' in there from tha PTA laidies. Ah, well, y'all have a nice afternewn, and welcom' to Griffinherst!"

Despite all the paperwork she'd just waded through, Dusk Shine still found herself with extra time, standing outside of her new place of employment. It had all happened – far too easily. She found herself looking for the trap. She thought of collecting Skyla so that the two of them could explore the town, but it hadn't even been three hours – Skyla should be left to make some friends without her… mother constantly hovering over her shoulder.

Dusk went walking. Dashville was a fair-sized town, especially if you counted College Heights and the enclaves around the university as part of said town, coming close to Twilight's personal idea of what constituted a 'city'.

Dusk Shine's path led her through a number of mixed-use blocks, until she found herself standing at a rusted low fence keeping passers-by from plunging over a steep cliff. The cliff plunged down over a small river which bisected the town, separating the neighborhoods in which her elementary school and their little apartment was located, from the richer half clustered around the feet of the large state school rising up from the bluffs across the river. Trees were everywhere, growing from every crack and bit of soil, and in the near distance, the wooded slopes like walls rose around them all.

Dashville sat in front of a steep gap through Griffin Mountain, and was only really notable as being a terminus of the Wilderness Road. Not the one that Daniel Boone built, but rather a more easterly extension which had been part of a settlement wave a half-generation before the great pioneer came through the district. Hundreds of thousands of settlers had poured through Buzzard's Gap on their westward way to the more famous Moccasin and Cumberland Gaps celebrated in song and tradition.

Those gaps had gotten all the songs and the stories, but Dashville got the saltworks, and the people, and whatever limited prosperity that could be carved from the isolated soil of southwestern Virginia. Dashville had been important enough for the Union to burn it to the ground in the fall of 1864, and barely important enough for the locals to rebuild after the war.

The postwar rebuilding effort gifted old-town Dashville with beautiful Victorian architecture, all gingerbread and peaked gables and bright-colored shingles and mansard roofing. And above the lovely folk Gothic and Queen Anne rooflines? Mountain ridgelines rising high to the south and northeast.

These were hills enough to ease Flurry Heart's borderline agoraphobia, Twilight was fairly certain of that. Too bad that the apartment was so deep in town, they'd have to walk blocks and blocks to get to the nearest woodlots or parks.

By the time Twilight – no, Dusk Shine had found her way back to the day care center, the sun was starting to make its way down into the west, gliding for an almost perfect alignment with the gap. It was a strange, perfect alignment, and Dusk Shine basked in that Stonehenge-like propinquity. A few weeks later, the sun would have set over the ridge to the south, a few weeks earlier, the ridge to the north-east. It was like the town was offering a greeting expressly for Twilight Sparkle and Flurry Heart.

Celebrating the existence of Dusk Shine and Skyla.

Dusk Shine rushed to collect Skyla from Bubble Berry, before her daughter could miss the beautiful sunset.

Author's Note

Special thanks to TheStratovarian for regional cultural and dialect sanity-checks. Any off-tone elements are my fault alone, of course.

And, as usual, thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The Hidden Heart-wood

Dusk Shine sat in the afternoon sun, with one eye on the uncertain late-summer skies, and another on Skyla jumping about the playground with a scattering of other children about the right age, chasing each other and the occasional wayward duck. Dusk's class plans and assorted schedules, half-constructed check-lists, and references were spread out on the painted wrought-iron picnic table in front of her, every pile or piece of paper carefully weighed down by paperweights of exactly the right weight.

She'd been mostly ignoring the wittering of the other mothers and minders to her right, and doing her best to eavesdrop on the clique of cranky old retirees sitting in the shade of the currently-abandoned Norfolk Southern passenger station which served as the sclerotic heart of Metternich Park. Fat and happy ducks dotted the wide, empty green grass rolling over to the carefully-manicured riverfront; Skyla had required a few words an hour ago to get her to leave the ducks alone, and go make friends with the New Town children.

Metternich Park was one of the interfaces along which the inhabitants of New Town and College Heights met and interacted with the less-advantaged folk from Old Town and the Bottoms. Dusk Shine and Skyla walked down here nearly every day across the Norfolk Southern grading, and along the high street's extension over the masonry bridge into the park. Relatively few heavy trains came through the heart of town anymore – a bypass had been built in the Thirties on the north side of town that took most of the coal trains and the through-traffic from Knoxville heading overland to Roanoke and down towards the ports of the distant Chesapeake. But just enough came through to make the crossing something not to be taken lightly by pedestrians, with or without small children to mind.

The clique of retirees were mostly old Norfolk Southern hands, and the doings of the railroad were their core topic of conversation, whenever simple gossip and the current round of competitive bragging about grandchildren had been otherwise exhausted.

Dusk Shine found that people were most likely to talk openly in your presence when you appeared thoroughly busy and generally distracted, so she'd been milking this task for the better part of a week, while she learned about the actual town of Dashville from its most knowledgeable codgers. She now knew that her neighborhood looked a bit run-down, but was largely working-class and respectable, aside from the infamous Wax Brothers funeral home. The neighborhood maintained its respectability mostly because the three churches that surrounded the Wax Funeral Home on the other corners of that intersection cancelled out the mild disreputability of the Wax Brothers' inclination to take all customers, Old Town, New Town, or even Bottoms.

College Heights produced relatively little traffic for the undertakers; they were generally too transient and healthy to die in a convenient or locally-buriable manner.

And even the Wax Brothers had their defenders, or rather, defender – an elderly aunt, as far as Dusk Shine could tell, one of the bosom friends of the queen of the retirees. Bees Wax seemed to have been a switchbox operator with the railroad; her good friend Gentle Grade was the center of the twittering crowd of blue-haired gossips.

The retired menfolk were often found over by the picnic tables the other side of the station from the playground, playing endless games of chess. They muttered so indistinctly, so far away from her preferred observational station, that even Dusk Shine and her enhanced hearing couldn't make out what they were saying. The only reason Dusk knew some of their names was because of the gossiping of their girlfriends and wives.

The local strip malls and main drag were located on the far side of the old brickwork passenger station, where the old switch-yards had been torn up decades ago and re-developed into a prosperous ant-hill of fast food restaurants, shops, and retail outlets, servicing the New Town, College Heights, and the Bottoms alike. The developers had, with their typical imaginative panache, named it The Switch Yards.

The Bottoms were also working class, sort of, and true to the old cliché, was likewise located on the wrong side of the tracks, various small neighborhoods curling up various draws in the face of the bluffs, interspersed with metal-working shops, auto detailing outfits, and the like. Occasionally at night, up in Old Town, you could hear the tricked-out muscle cars and motorcycles come roaring down out of the Bottoms onto the local highways, or up the bluffs and through town to the country lanes to the north.

Dusk Shine had yet to have laid eyes on one of these mythical biker-gang wakes she'd heard so much of from the retirees and others in town. The biddies had been so charmingly concerned when they'd heard where "this darling little flower" was living, it had really been touching. Although Bees Wax had tripped all over herself to swear on her family's honor that nobody really got up to trouble at the funeral home.

It was a place of solemnity and regret, not to get drunk. They did that once the funeral was over and they'd returned back to whatever tumbledown shacks or converted warehouses they squatted in down there in the Bottoms.

Dusk Shine forbore to point out that Skyla and she were living in some sort of converted space, the details of which she was still trying to deduce from the physical clues. Bees Wax had confided that she'd thought it had been a nurse's association office or something like that, but the building, despite its proximity to the funeral home, had never been their property, belonging rather to a somewhat infamous slumlord.

Not Dusk Shine's current landlord, by the way. The gossips had gone off on a tear about the slumlord's infamous family affairs, and from the giddy chaos, Dusk had gathered that her current landlord had been some sort of mistress or girlfriend, and been given the building as a going-away present.

The retirees were clucking over the scandal of the hour, which was Amtrak's decision to shut down passenger service between Knoxville and Roanoke, again. It appeared from what Dusk Shine heard, as she finished the last touches on the latest stack of prepped check-lists, that the government-run rail service could simply not stick to a decision on whether or not they wanted to offer continuous service from the metropolises of the Chesapeake into the Applelachian interior, and every season, it was a crapshoot whether the passenger trains would be bumping along two-thirds empty over the rough grades curling through the Smokey Mountain corridor.

As economically and culturally fascinating as Dusk Shine found the Amtrak debates among the railroad retirees, she wasn't really here to write up notes on that particular policy question – she was collecting intelligence. And once the biddies got on again about the foolishness of Norfolk Southern and how they handled the bureaucrats of Amtrak, they'd be on about it for hours.

Dusk began organizing her notes, plans, and lists, putting them away in order, leaving her paperweights for last. Only a few of the paperweights had been properly crafted yet. She'd had to expend a number of them during the stressful trial, and hadn't had time to work up new ones, so most of the 'paperweights' were simple polished bits of rock and ore. But there were at least two which were properly retaining their enhanced-hearing cantrips, and Dusk Shine handled those with reverent and delicate care, putting them on the top of the rucksack.

The weather had held, and that was a very good thing.

Dusk Shine called out to Skyla, who was engaged in boosting another child on the swings, just another happy pair of kids reassuring their mothers about how well-adjusted and careless they were, and nothing at all to worry about.

Twilight was so pleased at how well Flurry Heart was keeping up appearances!

Dusk Shine smiled at her daughter, and rubbed her on her head.

"Where's your hat?"

Skyla pulled the wrinkled mass from where it had been shoved into a pocket. Dusk held the dusty thing up with some skepticism, eyeing the little girl.

"It fell down when I was feeding the ducks! It might have some bird poop on it."

Dusk Shine pulled a plastic grocery bag from a side-pocket of her ruck, shoved the soiled hat into the bag and wrapped it up, to go back into said side-pocket, where it wouldn't get duck or goose poop on her nice neat paperwork.

"Don't the signs say not to feed the ducks?"

"Why would they put those coin-operated feed machines over by the riverside if they don't want you to feed the ducks?"

"I don't know, Skyla, did you read the rest of the signs? I think those are for feeding the carp."

"Who needs to feed carp? They feed themselves. And they're creepy. Food is for cute things! Except the damned geese, they come wading in and steal everything!"

"Skyla! Language!"

"Sorry, 'Mommy', blessed geese. Except nobody who's not stupid would bless geese! They're mean, and bullies! Why are herbivores so mean, it's not like they gotta be eating other birds to stay alive."

"It's the way that nature works, sweetie. Some animals, it's easier to be aggressive than to be cute. Not everybody can live off of the love and charity of easily-swayed little girls with pocketfuls of quarters, and handfuls of food pellets! Speaking of which, you better have not spent all of your pocket-money on those damned birds."

"Mommy! Language! What will the school kids tell their parents about their potty-mouthed teacher!"

"Come on, kiddo. Let's go down to the woods while we still have some light."

Dusk Shine liked to reward Skyla when she'd been particularly good, and it had been a good day for the little girl. Most of Metternich Park was carefully manicured with open prospects and after-hours lighting, but there was an extension downstream away from the placid open pool-like bend of the river, beyond the dam and the old converted mill, and over a small foot-bridge that crossed the gentle old millrace. Here, on the far side of the mill, you could find a tongue of relatively wild woodlot between the millrace, and the river downstream from the dam. There were more picnic tables here, and woodchip-surfaced paths, and most importantly, lots of trees and relatively thin brush that Skyla could scurry through and be wild for a bit.

Always keeping up a front was a heavy burden for Twilight's little niece, and she occasionally needed a place to vent and be herself. Dusk Shine always checked the whole length of the tongue of wildwood to make sure there weren't any other kids or adults nearby, and then took up station at the picnic table nearest the mill.

The mill itself had apparently been a working restaurant as recently as last spring, but had gone under for reasons that the retirees hadn't cared to explain to Dusk Shine. It was too nice of a location to stay unoccupied for long, but for the time being, the fact that it was shuttered meant that there was relatively little foot-traffic along this side of the Park, and Twilight could be alone to work on her stones, and Flurry Heart to be 'the wildwood princess' where nobody could see.

Well, no, not nobody, not today. The local outfitters were set up on the opposite shore of the river, pushing canoes and kayaks out into the gentle semi-sort-of-rapids, and instructors were showing tourists how to conduct themselves in slightly rough water. Skyla exchanged solemn glances with Dusk Shine, and she sat calmly and demurely across from her 'mother' to watch as Dusk got her working kit out of the proper pocket of the rucksack.

"I'll need three – no four sandstones of even surface, Skyla. Can you find me those? Flat and smooth enough to take some paint."

"'kay." Skyla scurried off, to search the millrace side of the little peninsula, while Dusk Shine busied herself with working on one of her 'paperweights'. Fifteen minutes later, and one newly-prepared 'distance hearing' paperweight, Skyla came tripping up with an armful of a half-dozen rocks carried cupped in the front of her now-soiled shirt.

"Really, Skyla? It's a good thing I brought a spare shirt for you, or else we'd be eating at home tonight. Here, let's see what you've got. Nope, no – ok, these will work." Dusk Shine took out a cloth, and went over to the millrace side to rinse off the rocks. She dipped her cloth into the running water, soaking it properly, and rubbing down the 'flat' surfaces of the rocks. Then she used one of the discarded stones to scoop up mud from the bank, and carried everything back to the table.

As Dusk Shine daubed the stones with mud in specific patterns, Skyla watched, fascinated. Just beyond the thin screen of trees, the riverside rang with the laughing and splashing of bumbling tourists and students doing their best to drown themselves in shallow and gentle 'rapids', while frustrated instructors darted back and forth, pulling their charges out of almost-danger.

After Dusk Shine was done, she handed two of the prepared stones to Skyla, and took up the other two, one in each hand. Skyla followed behind her as Dusk walked down the path towards the furthest far tip of the tongue of land, where it laid lapping in the confluence of the mill-race with her mother river, rejoining the two currents. Dusk Shine placed the first of her ward-stones here, high enough off of the water that it wouldn't be washed clean by the simple splash of the gentle river.

They walked back upstream a little, and Skyla placed one of her own stones, likewise, and then Dusk her next stone, and then right by the guardian picnic table, the last of the stones sat high up the slope, almost where Dusk Shine's foot would be when she sat down again.

Dusk Shine concentrated, and made the correct gestures – and then Twilight Sparkle sang a little tune, with a few special little words.

And Twilight Sparkle and Flurry Heart were alone in a bubble of silence, the sound of the kids and tourists in their little boats cut off by the wards. Twilight knew that the boaters wouldn't see anything of importance on this, the farther shore, either, not while the wards were active.

"OK, Flurry Heart. We have forty-five minutes until we lose the light. Stay inside the stones."

"OK, Twilight! Come here, birdies! Come on out, Mr. and Mrs. Squirrel!" By the time Flurry Heart was half-visible in the brush beside the wood-chip path, Twilight could see a little procession of tiny animals following in their princess's train like the good little retainers they were.

When Flurry Heart went into Druidic Princess Mode, Twilight couldn't help but be impressed. Especially when she saw so many critters rise up to follow their leader, you wouldn't think that an acre and a half of woodlot would have so much life in it.

Twilight left the Princess of the Wild Wood to her subjects, and worked on her own projects, quickly going through what supplies she had brought with her. It was so handy, living in a town with a Hobby Lobby right across the river, anchoring one of the strip-malls in the Switch Yards. By the time the light failed, she had another half-dozen surveillance fetishes ready to be seeded around the Park and the streets leading up into the various neighborhoods feeding into the gentle heart of Dashville.

"Flurry! Come on out, it's time to close up for the evening!"

Flurry Heart emerged from her brush-fortress, covered in sticks and mud, her face painted like a savage's. Twilight roughly brushed out the twigs from her niece's hair, and used her last clean hand-towel to wash the muck off of her face and limbs. She put out Flurry's spare shirt, and turned her quickly out of the filthy original article, and shoved her just as quickly into the fresh bit of clothing.

Bundling up the filthy shirt and her pile of dirty little towels, Dusk Shine deactivated the wards, examining her daughter to see if she was decent for public consumption.

"OK, you're not dining-room presentable, but we can do take-out. What are you feeling like?"

Skyla named one of the fast-food restaurants along the strip, and Dusk agreed, it was on the right path for her to place one of her surveillance fetishes. Dusk Shine's daughter's excess energy had all been burned out, so the two of them didn't so much run, as amble towards their dinner as the dying of the sun in the sky summoned the flickering street-lights.

The day after tomorrow was the first day of classes, for both of them. Dusk Shine wondered if they were truly ready.

Author's Note

Thanks to Oliver and the general Company for emergency proofreading and editing service, I gave very little notice on this one, wanting to strike while the iron was hot.

No Place Is Safe

It was the morning before the first day of school, and Flurry Heart was tying up the bathroom. Twilight Sparkle needed to get Dusk Shine's warpaint applied, and she'd wanted to get that done before fully dressing in the only good pantsuit she owned. She felt awkward enough wearing the formal clothes she'd worn to the trial for her new job, but until the paychecks started flowing, this was it.

Only Twilight Sparkle would know that the pantsuit she'd used to send a drug kingpin into ultramax was the same suit that Dusk Shine would use to mold the minds of Old Town's youth. But it was enough that she knew, it would be uncomfortable, unavoidably so, really.

"Fl- SKYLA! Hurry up in there, or I'm going to open this door, I swear to Harmony! We're going to be late!"

"Mommy, just a moment, I'm almost done!"

They had to be careful in the parlor and the toilet. The walls were wafer-thin on this side of the apartment, and you could hear the neighbors eating breakfast if you sat there quietly and didn't make any noise to mask them.

The sink started up, and then the door unlocked, and Flurry scurried past Twilight for the front parlor and the TV, a sad, ancient little thirteen-inch that had come with the apartment.

"Keep it turned down, Skyla, they don't want to hear your cartoons!"

"Aw, please, I'm too old for cartoons, Mommy!"

As Twilight got her makeup kit out from under the sink, she could hear, faintly, something that sounded suspiciously like an old TV western.

Only in Applelachia would they have old black-and-white westerns broadcast before 7 AM on a school day…

Twilight finally got Dusk Shine's face on straight, and nodded in approval at Dusk in the mirror.

"Skyla, turn that off and get back here so you can have breakfast! Now!"

"'kay!"

Breakfast for the two of them had been cheap store brand raisin bran and juice, and would be until, again, the money started flowing. WitSec had given Dusk Shine a small stipend for the first few months, but she'd been banking most of that against emergencies. Twilight used breakfast-time to get into Dusk Shine's head, and to grill 'Skyla' on what her kindergarten teacher and peers would be expecting.

"Keep in mind you're going to be at least a half-year older than almost all of them. No bullying, zero tolerance, Skyla. I'm not kidding. You're going to be the big kid in the class, I don't want you attracting negative attention. Think of these kids as your herd, and you're their sheepdog. No nipping, no barking, be a good sheepdog, OK?"

'Skyla' laughed at the image, and replied "Ruff!"

"Good girl. Are you done? Let's wash up."

Skyla was still too short to reach the relatively tall sink in the kitchenette, which was a tiny little pantry-type room separate from the room that held their little kitchen table and refrigerator. But Skyla could hand Dusk Shine the bowls, the spoons, and the glasses, for Dusk to wash and leave in the strainer to dry.

"Good job, now come on out here. Where's your backpack? Uh-huh, uh-huh." Dusk Shine looked through the notebooks and school supplies.

She found one of her X-Acto knives hidden in the box with Skyla's pencils and pens and erasers.

"We've talked about this, Skyla. You can't be carrying at school. That is definitely the wrong foot. Come here, we're going to have to do the full pat-down." And Dusk Shine wasn't kidding, she went over Skyla like a CO turning out a prisoner.

She found a second X-Acto wrapped in a pair of paper-towels and held in the elastic of Skyla's underwear.

"How exactly were you going to sit all day in class with that poking into your back, Skyla? You can't go out in public like this. You will get caught. And you don't need it! This is a safe town. This is a safe place."

"No place is safe."

Skyla had said this in the same even tone she had earlier used during breakfast to announce that a fog was obscuring the view of the neighbors’ lawn and shrubbery outside the window. Twilight felt tears welling under her mascara, and that broke something behind Skyla's hard, too-old face. The little girl's stubborn resistance melted away like an early frost.

"No, no, no – Auntie Twilight, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, don't do that – your eyegloss will run!"

They put the knives back into Twilight's workings kit, where Skyla had found and 'borrowed' them, and Dusk Shine touched up her mascara.

Dusk Shine locked the front door while Skyla hopped down the three rickety wooden steps to the side-walk beside the funeral home's employee parking lot. There was a roaring noise which hadn't been particularly audible from inside the apartment, but which was oppressively loud once they'd stepped outside.

The funeral home was burning a body in the crematorium. That was something that Poppy Seed had failed to mention when she'd briefed 'Dusk Shine' about their new place – the funeral home had installed a full-service cremation facility inside a one-story free-standing garage at the back of the property, and it was directly opposite of Dusk Shine's front door.

At least it was only emitting steam this morning – the first night it had turned on, it had belched forth a full column of green-yellow flame out of its stack, like some vision of Tartarus to come.

The two walked out to the street as the funeral home's big panel-van pulled into the lot. They turned right onto the street, and then right again at the four-way corner in front of the funeral home, walking the three blocks to the elementary school. They passed Twilight's blue Beetle, which had seen relatively little activity since Dusk Shine and Skyla had settled into life here in Old Town. One of the good points of living in an old town center like this was just how much was in walking distance, even if there were more empty store-fronts and 'for rent' signs than Dusk Shine was truly comfortable seeing.

The morning mist was fading as they arrived at the side-door of the big brick building. All signs pointed to a warm, even hot late-summer day, but the river produced cooling fogs every night they'd been here.

Dusk Shine looked down at Skyla.

"Well, kiddo, it's showtime. Game faces, Skyla."

"Game faces, Mommy."

And they went in.

The first day of school was always a madhouse for teachers, but it was worse for a first-time teacher like Dusk Shine. It would have been different if she'd ever had a chance to be a proper student-teacher, but the crisis had killed that dream deader than Twilight Sparkle's family.

Dusk Shine made do. The kids were kids, and although they could smell panic like dogs or any other pack of social predators, Dusk was too self-collected to project her fears. She struggled through the long, long day with a minimum of public flubs, and simply collected the errors and slips in a mental drawer to be gone through at leisure when there weren't over fifty sets of curious eight and nine-year-old eyes staring her down.

She barely had time to interact with the other teachers during actual class; that came afterwards, during the interminable meetings held by first the principal, and then the head of faculty. The working-groups ate up a preposterous amount of time, and towards the end, she found herself staring out of the nearest window at the dying twilight, then the darkness as true night descended on a work-day that just. Would. Not. End.

By the time Dusk Shine was able to get across the street and pick Skyla up from the equally frazzled Bubble Berry, it was very, very dark out. And Skyla was starving. The streets were full of traffic, loud and a bit scary. There were a lot of motorcyclists around, and Skyla kept close to Dusk as they crossed at the stop sign.

They kept on going down the road into the canyon instead of a left beside the school, and found a popular fast-food restaurant that sat on the nearest edge of the park, over the far side of a modest bridge that crossed both the railroad grade and the river, where the street defined the borders between the Bottoms and New Town. Motorcycles continued to roll out of the alleys that led up into the Bottoms, heading across the bridge and up onto the bluffs, as Skyla tore into a happy meal, and then burrowed through Dusk Shine's leftover fries.

The traffic had died down a bit as they crossed back over the bridge, and struggled up the steep street towards the cross-road back up towards home. Dusk picked up a tired Skyla as they passed the municipal building behind which the city kept its salt supplies and snow-plows. As they paused at the three-way stop at the top of the draw, another four Harleys came screaming up the street behind them, the first bike's horn bugling 'Dixie', and the rear-most bike echoing the tune like a roundelay.

Dusk Shine waited at the stop sign until the cyclists were safely up the hill, and away from Skyla.

They crossed over to the safer side of the street, and she hurried up the sidewalk, keeping to the shadowed side of the walk, beside the rowhouses and their stoops. As they approached her blue Beetle, she noted that the row-house inhabitants had turned off their stoop-lights, but their interior parlor-lamps were all blaring, leaving the sidewalks a strange mixture of shadows and half-light.

An older man was standing at Dusk Shine's car, bending over in a half-crouch beside the right rear tire. He was looking at the back of the car.

Dusk put down Skyla, and waved her onto the nearest porch, where she would be out of the range of any trouble.

"Hello, can I help you?" asked Dusk Shine, her hand inside her purse, tightly gripping a can of 'special' mace. Twilight Sparkle had had to use mace on more than one occasion, and had quickly figured out how to enhance the defensive method by her own, special recipe.

"Nah, I'm good," the old man said as he stood up, and up. "But I'd like to help you if you're interested. I take it this is your car?"

"H-how do you figure?"

"Ain't no pretty young lady like you carryin' a child gonna confront a big ugly guy like me if I weren't lookin' like I was messin' with your ride. Sorry 'bout that." And he wasn't kidding, the old man was even taller than the amazonian Poppy Seed, easily two heads taller than the intimidated Dusk Shine. He was bare-headed, holding a motorcycle helmet in one leather-gloved hand, a stars-and-stripes bandana knotted around his throat. His black biker-leathers were aged almost brown with age and wear, and every square inch of exposed skin that wasn't covered in tattoo-ink was knotted up in the sort of scarring left by inept or careless medical care. "Hello, there, I'm Silver Back. And I love what you've done with this beauty. I haven't seen an old Bug in this sort of shape in almost a decade."

"Thank you?"

"Really, I'd love to work on something like this. You're probably about due for some work on the tailpipe, though. Those things always take babyin'. Boy! Probie! Give the lady our card, ya idjit!"

A shadow detached itself from the next rowhouse's porch, unfolding itself from an unobtrusive crouch. As the figure emerged into the street-light glare, Dusk Shine saw that it was a blue-haired, sallow-faced young man with an impassive expression. Skyla eep'd from the stoop behind Dusk, and scurried deeper into the depths of the porch, away from the new man.

Dusk reached out with a steady hand, and took a business-card from the silent young man, who she could now see was wearing much, much newer riding leathers. She looked over his shoulder, and spotted the motorcycle helmet sitting on the stoop where he had been sitting.

"Th-hank you. Uh, Forge Road?"

"Yeah," rumbled the elder biker. "I run a place down in the Bottoms. We specialize in custom jobs and classic-car maintenance. This town might not look like it this time of year, but we're a hub for the classic-car circuit. Every Father's Day, Old Town fills up with car culture folk, thousands of 'em. All you'd need to do is get it registered, and I'm sure the festival operators will be willing to give a slot in the VW and station wagons section."

Dusk Shine took a deep breath, letting her panic-response pass through her, and back into whatever box it needed to be when she wasn't being threatened. This was not what it had looked like.

"Thank you, I'll definitely take it under advisement. We're new in town, and my car hasn't been in for maintenance for far too long." It was then that Dusk Shine registered the bustling activity further up the block, around the now-crowded funeral home entrance. Motorcycles were parked everywhere, three to a stall. "Is… is there a viewing?"

"Yeah," sighed Silver Back. "My good friend's oldest. Damfool idjit went out west, to find his own way. Came back in a goddamn box. Damndest thing, word was he'd hooked up with a decent family club, getting away from our bullshit, pardon my French. Getting away from the One-Percenters, hah? So much for that."

"We don't know what happened," said the blue-haired 'Probie'. "Could have been anything. Accident."

"Flash, you idjit, you haven't seen the body yet. That ain't an accident. Waco fallout, I figure."

"Everything ain't 'cause ah Waco."

"Enough is, and enough, this nice lady don't need to hear our dirty laundry. Sorry, ma'am. You have a good night."

"Thank you, Mr. Back. My name's Dusk Shine, by the way," Dusk said as she collected a wary Skyla, and started walking up the sidewalk in the direction of the commotion.

"Nice to meet you, Miss Shine. Probie, you go along with these fine ladies, and make sure none of the boys give them any trouble, OK?"

"Yessir."

Dusk Shine and a bristling Skyla swiftly walked the half-block between there and the corner, their biker shadow warding off the extremely rough men clustered around the Wax Brothers Funeral Home's front entrance. The usual formal attire of the 'civilian' mourners in the crowd were heavily diluted by clots of men, young and old, wearing riding leathers so stylized and regimented as to compose a sort of uniform, each with a terrifying sigil on their leather vests, a bat-winged horse's-skull with burning red eyes. The rest of those vest-backs were emblazoned with their club-name, the Steel Horsemen National MC.

There was a great deal of glaring and fuming going on outside of Wax's, but Dusk was somewhat reassured to realize that none of the anger was aimed at her or Skyla. They were just passers-by, innocents – civilians.

The Probie stopped following them as they got to the side-walk that led back to Dusk Shine's apartment, and he gave them a solemn wave as they started back into the parking lot.

The glaring spot-light which the funeral home used to light up their employees' parking lot wasn't on, and Dusk Shine's street-light-dazzled eyes strained to make out her own front stoop. Skyla scurried ahead of her mother, trying to get as far from the angry, whiskered mourners out on the street as she could.

So when Skyla came hurtling back towards Dusk when she was still twenty feet from her front door, Dusk couldn't really see what had spooked her daughter.

Skyla sped behind Dusk, and turned to face whatever she was running from.

"Body!" whispered Skyla, her fingers tightening their grip in the fabric of Dusk Shine's pantsuit-jacket. "Cold! Smells!"

Dusk Shine got her mace can out in one hand, and took out her new smartphone in the other, and fumbled to activate the flashlight app. She cast the weak light from her 'phone onto the front steps and small stoop of their apartment.

A biker was leaning up against the first step of their house. She knew he was a biker, because of the leathers.

She knew he was dead because of the cut throat and the blood-soaked shirt under the leather vest.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The Corpse At Every Funeral

Twilight's eyes darted around the shadowed parking lot, searching for threats, for knives, for cultists waiting for them to find the body, for –

Nothing. She reached behind her, grasping for Skyla.

"Stay right there, and keep an eye behind me, sweetie. Don't go anywhere."

Dusk Shine turned off the flashlight app, and brought up 911 on the phone, scanning her forward arc, keeping an eye on the shadows over by the two passages out of the back of the parking lot – the one leading out onto a well-lit alley, the street-lights showing no shadows of anyone lurking just out of sight; the other the drive-way that wrapped around the back of her apartment, separating their building from the funeral home itself. She couldn't see around corners, damnit.

"Hello, 911?" Dusk tried to force as much of her panic and fear into her voice. This needed to sound authentic. 911 calls were recorded. "I need the police. There's a body here! Ah, yes, 112 Woodsdale Road, the back parking lot."

"No, damnit, this isn't a prank! I'm not talking about a goddamn viewing! There is a man with his throat slit on my Harmony-forsaken front steps! Get the FUCKING COPS HERE! Oh, Skyla, I'm sorry honey, don't look, don't look – get them over here! Old Town, between the alley and the funeral home, yes! Ah, Dusk Shine. I live here, it's my apartment. Uh-huh. Yeah."

Dusk Shine ended the call, and dropped the act.

"Any movement back there, Skyla?"

"We're attracting a couple guys now. Game faces, Mommy."

"Face the garage, I need to take the lead."

Dusk Shine pocketed her phone, passed her mace to her right hand, and pulled Skyla to the left. They rotated ninety degrees, just in time for Dusk to face the Probie as he approached along with two other rough men in leather outlaw drag.

"Dead body!" squeaked Dusk Shine, playing the naïf as hard as she could. "Just called 911! Is he one of yours? No! Don't touch it! Cops will be here – I don't know, how fast do they move around here?"

"It's Old Town, the jail and the courthouse are here. They'll be here in seconds. I don't recognize him." The Probie had an actual steel-case pocket flashlight he was playing over the slumped corpse. "Not a Horseman. That's bad. Dumb Bell, go warn Wind Rider we've got a shit-storm. Mr. Crate – I think we need Thunderlane."

The two looming hulks looked down at the Probie, and Dusk Shine got the distinct impression that they didn't think the younger man had the authority to be ordering them around, but just as they were about to give him what for, a chaos of police lights heralded an imminent deluge of constituted authority over the scene. The older of the two hulks cursed, and grabbed the younger and they both scurried off at a double-step, while the Probie stood to attention and turned to face the oncoming police cars.

Skyla never moved from her post at the small of Dusk Shine's back.

As the police turned their spot-lights on the scene, Dusk Shine put away her mace, and took her phone back out, and hit one of the pre-loaded numbers.

"Hello, Miss Seed? It's Dusk Shine. We have a serious situation here. Yes. Yes. Police matter. There's a body. I'll do my best, yes." The Probie had shot Dusk Shine a look as she chose to make a call rather than engage the oncoming police, but was distracted by the second pair of cops as they tackled him and pushed his face into the asphalt.

Dusk hung up on Poppy Seed as quickly as she could, and turned towards the first pair of cops, one of whom was gawking at the crime scene, and the other of whom was painting the whole of the parking lot with a spastic flashlight, making the shadows dance and flit around like a riot of darkness being hosed down by tear gas.

Skyla had shifted around to Dusk's right, and was hiding her face in the fabric of Dusk's pantsuit jacket. Dusk Shine hugged her daughter tightly into her side and did her best to stay out of the drama. Her civic duty had been completed, and she badly needed to be seen not being involved.

As more and more police swarmed into that increasingly crowded parking lot, she let a female cop and that cop's partner move her and Skyla to a cruiser, where she pushed Skyla deep into the back seat, where they wouldn't be able to talk directly to her daughter. Dusk Shine took their questions, and did her best to limit her responses to head-nods, and brief, thoroughly public-knowledge acknowledgements such as 'that is my apartment' and 'just getting home from dinner' and 'work before that' and 'the elementary school over on Fin Street'.

It took Poppy Seed an hour to appear. As it was, she still beat the crime-scene techs. Dusk Shine had begun to suspect that Dashville didn't have any on the payroll. Especially once she spotted a pair of awkward-looking uniformed cops getting a set of forensic kits out of the back of another cruiser, pulling on their latex gloves.

The deputy marshal sidled up to where Dusk Shine was sitting in the back of the cruiser with her feet on the parking-lot asphalt. The Probie had been hauled away a half-hour ago, and the local cops were mostly just milling about, making a big production out of rolling out the yellow police-tape around the numerous entrances to the parking lot. The funeral home director was arguing loudly with a watch commander over on the far side of the front porch of Dusk Shine's landlady's building. The front porch where the other inhabitants were clustered, gossiping furiously as they stared daggers across the parking lot at Dusk.

Why couldn't we have gotten rooms inside the front half of the building?

"What was the first thing they told you, Miss Shine?"

"Don't come into contact with the police."

"Don't attract the attention of the police, right. Does this look like not attracting attention?"

"I'm trying to stay as far out of the way as I can. Miss Seed, they dropped a body on my stoop."

"They? Who they? Did you see anything?"

"Do I have to see anything? It's a body. On my front steps!"

"Might not be anything to do with you."

"What are the odds of that, I looked up the crime statistics when you all told me where I was going. There hasn't been a murder in this county in five years!"

"Well, no famous ones. You have to check for manslaughter in the stats, Miss Shine. Actually is about two or three a year."

"I'm not talking about bar fights!"

"How do we know this isn't a bar fight?"

"I couldn't even tell you where the nearest bar is from here. Maybe down in the Switching Yards?"

"Good to hear you've been staying away from unsavory elements, Dusk. Oh, well. It's not as bad as it looks."

"It better not be! The school will fire me!"

Poppy Seed smiled down at her charge. "That's good. You're better than I hoped. Keep that up. Offended schoolmarm's a good look. It'll fly. Especially if it turns out to be what you're afraid of."

"If it's what I think it is, you have to move us. How could we be blown already?"

"You can't be, the only way they could have found you already would have been if you had a Crystaller cultist hiding in your rear trunk when you drove out east."

"Beetles have their trunks in the front."

"Don't be pedantic. Unless you killed him yourself, this doesn't have anything to do with you. And we're not moving you. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to move a family?"

"Some idea, yes. And I've spent the last month working like a dog, digging into this town like a tick. All that effort…"

"Don't go looking for trouble, Dusk. If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you."

As they stared at the scene, one such trouble found its ditch, as the watch supervisor hot-footed over to the two uniforms with forensic kits approaching the body. The argument was brief but spectacular, the giddy neighbors, resigned funeral home employees and grim-faced outlaw bikers forming a fascinated if mixed audience. Poppy Seed turned so that she wasn't facing the scene or the crowd of onlookers. At least she hadn't arrived wearing her sunglasses at night this time.

"I don't want to be too obtrusive with all of these curious eyes on us. As far as anyone's concerned, I'm your friend. Your indeterminately professional friend from I don't know – Roanoke?"

"You got here too fast. Abingdon or Bristol."

"Abingdon it is. Lawyer?"

"Do you want to get roped into representing me?"

"True enough. CPA then. If anyone asks who isn't high-ranking police. We're in a city here, by the way. You'll be dealing with city cops."

"No, really?" Dusk Shine looked significantly down at the cruiser, whose doors were prominently emblazoned with the City of Dashville's municipal seal and proclaimed, proudly, DASHVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT – TO PROTECT AND SERVE.

"Yeah, right, OK," Poppy Seed conceded. "How's the kid?"

"Napping. It's been a busy day." Actually, Skyla was faking it, curled up but still vigilant, Dusk Shine could tell. But she didn't want to air family business in front of the bureaucrat.

"Maybe we ought to see if we can't get you a motel room for the night. You won't be getting inside for hours at this rate."

And just as Poppy Seed had started nonchalantly inching towards the watch commander, who was bent over his phone and yelling at someone, the CSI people came trotting around Dusk Shine's cruiser, arms full of equipment, and faces red with embarrassment and exertion. They wore cheap jackets with 'Dashville Police Forensics Unit – Solving Crime Through Science' indifferently printed in large, block letters across their backs.

The watch commander looked like he was about to tear a stripe off of both of the extremely overweight, gormless-looking forensic techs. Eventually the watch commander wound down, and let them do their damn jobs. Poppy Seed had drifted back to stand beside where Dusk Shine sat in the cruiser, and leaned back against the car to watch the dramedy. The deputy marshal was as much a part of the gathered audience at this point as anyone else.

The show went on, as the lab techs struggled into their gloves, and then started taking photographs. Eventually, they waved the two already-gloved uniformed cops to pick up the body, and move it into a body-bag and, presumably, into the gurney two EMTs had unfolded from an ambulance now double-parked in the increasingly crowded street. As the cops turned the body over, Dusk Shine could see the patches on the back of the corpse's riding jacket.

Club de motos Salvajes.

Los Salvajes.

Sombra had used a Salvajes chapter back in Crystal City for muscle. Not for the killings, that had been the cultists, but the street business. And the crystal molly distribution.

Dusk Shine looked up at Poppy Seed. The deputy marshal was no longer looking at the body, she was looking down at Dusk, scanning her face, her expression.

"What? What's the problem now?" asked the deputy marshal. "That's a good thing, isn't it? Last thing we need is the local MC up in arms about another dead biker. That's certainly not the cut of a local gang. Where is Venus, I wonder?"

"Texas," growled an older, male voice from over the deputy marshal's shoulder. Dusk Shine couldn't see who was talking. "About halfway between Waco and Dallas."

Poppy Seed stepped away from the cruiser and turned around, alert and suddenly dangerous. Dusk Shine could see the outlines of Seed's service weapon's holster in the small of her back, the deputy marshal's hand resting with one finger hooked around a belt-loop on her pantsuit near the holster's draw.

After Seed stepped out of the way, Dusk Shine could see the speaker. Tall, fat, black. Big bristling grey beard, bald. Wearing very worn, heavily patched riding leathers.

"Well that sounds specific," said Poppy Seed in a deceptively friendly tone of voice. "You familiar with the area?"

"We're going to be burying my friend's son tomorrow because a fucking Salvaje murdered him down that way last week. And it looks like they're not done fucking with us."

"Well, that doesn't sound great, Mister…?"

"Thunderlane. I'm the Dashville chapter's sergeant at arms. And you smell like a cop. I don't recognize you, you're not with the city. What agency? And can you get me my probationary member back? Some of the local badges decided to arrest Flash Sentry for wearing our colors in the vicinity of a dead body."

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Interrogations

None of the faces Dusk Shine saw had the look of a Crystal cultist to them. There was a certain resting-state that cultists' faces naturally fell into, a commonality that eventually burned itself into each and every member, given time and sufficient supplies of crystal molly.

Cultists always looked happy.

None of the people swept up in the vicinity of the unexpected corpse on Dusk's block were happy. They'd be mad to be delighted to be crammed into an aging police station at a quarter to ten on a school night, and even the cultists that Twilight Sparkle had come to know wouldn't have been able to quite achieve that sort of mindless cheerfulness, so this wasn't exactly dispositive evidence.

But the Crystallers – even the occasional disturbed or irate Crystaller – still carried under that surface layer of emotion an underlying substrate of bliss which colored every other emotion they displayed. After their anger passed away, their faces returned to their natural resting state – a placid smile.

The people that Dusk Shine saw sitting or standing all around her were by and large normal – pissed, tired, curious, worried. Her rather rag-tag neighbors, no longer amused by the chaos now that they'd been scooped up like the rest of the crowd. The funeral home employees, clustered tightly together around a set of chairs on one side of the outer lobby, like a herd of gazelles packed tightly together for mutual defense against predators lurking in the tall grasses around them. A scattering of older couples and their respectable-looking adult children, grouped by family resemblance in three or four-member clusters.

And the bikers and their women. Those just sprawled out wherever they found the space, in between those people who were not biker outlaws. You would have been able to tell them at a glance, even if they weren't dressed distinctively in the outlaw-biker fashion that might as well have been a uniform, for its supposedly-rebellious lack of variance or individualism. The men stood about in their identical leather vests and riding-leathers; the women slouched beside their menfolk in practical boots and t-shirts and jackets that were as close as possible to the leather vests the menfolk wore, without daring to actually be said vests.

Dusk Shine looked down at Skyla's head in her lap, and noted by the evenness of the little girl's breathing that she'd actually dozed off this time. Dusk gently brushed Skyla's hair, trying her best not to wake her up. She wished she'd insisted on Flurry Heart dying those distinctive colors out of her hair the way that Twilight had dyed the stripes out of her own hair; they made Skyla far too easy to identify in a crowd. But her hair was one of the few reminders to Skyla of her actual mother, and Dusk Shine couldn't take that away from her.

It made her too damn memorable, though. Especially that unique gradient which you only really found in that particular family. Even the baleful Sombra, with his jet-black hair, still had a strange look to him that drew the eye to his impossible head of hair. As far as Twilight had ever been able to tell, the impressively aged Sombra had nonetheless never used any sort of dye to maintain that lustrous mass of dark locks.

Dusk Shine tried to forget Twilight and her memories, and concentrate on the individuals in the crowd. The neighbors were scruffy, but harmless, she thought. The only one she'd put a name to was old man Chalk Stick, who lived upstairs and fought constantly with the two couples who lived on the first floor. The various families looked too stuffy and embarrassed to be here, to be part of this. The funeral home employees… some of them looked kind of shifty. She'd have to keep an eye on those. Especially the owner, Bees Wax's mustachioed, unctuous nephew Lost Wax. Dusk marked the ones that she didn't have names for, but still looked too studiously bored or unaffected.

The bikers were all over the map, some as stolid as cigar-store Indians, some strutting around like peacocks, ostentatiously proud to be in trouble yet again. Their womenfolk mostly rolled their eyes at the antics of the hyper ones. All except for a trio of girls at the far side of the lobby, who were clustered together more like the civilians than the other biker-culture barbarians. One towered over the other two, with a lustrous head of long, pink tresses, a terrified look on her face, and wearing a stupid-looking T-shirt proclaiming her 'Property Of Sapphists MC'. When one of the other two turned, Twilight saw that the leather vests the shorter ones were wearing said 'Sapphistic Motorcycle Chicks', in parody of an outlaw biker's cut. Both of the shorter biker-chicks had the look down cold, shaved bald on one side, with shocks of uneven, longish hair on the other side. The shorter one had white hair with streaks of grey the shade of fly ash. The slightly less short one was built like a whip-handle, but her hair looked like a pride parade flag.

That can't be popular in this crowd. What are they doing here?

Dusk Shine couldn't see Silver Back anywhere in the crowd, or his Probie, Flash something or other. Sentry? But Thunderlane and an angry, bruised-faced old man stood nearby, muttering angrily to each other. The one Dusk couldn't put a name to kept shooting furious glares at the three lesbian bikers at the back of the lobby.

Hopefully that doesn't break out into anything while Skyla and I are here.

A pair of harried looking desk-sergeants came stalking out through the crowd, and Dusk Shine shifted Skyla's head to the seat-cushion under her hip, and lurched to her feet to buttonhole one of the sergeants.

"Sir! Sir, please, my girl has school tomorrow, can I get to the front of the line for interviews? I can't be here all night. Please, today was her first day of classes, and mine, too. I need this job, and she needs the stability."

The sergeant grunted noncommittally, and disappeared through the doorways into the innards of the station.

The station was a breathtakingly ugly building, as modernist and horrible as the rest of Dashville was charming and heart-warming. It was as if they'd distilled all of the misery and brutality of Twentieth Century architecture in town, and bottled it behind the doors of police headquarters. It was all naked concrete, and nonfunctional 'exposed' aluminum, and mirrored glass.

Twilight found herself staring at Dusk Shine's face in the glass opposite of her in a window, and fixated on the strands of hair which she had to keep dyed to obscure her once-distinctive natural striping. She'd been slacking on that, you could almost see the pink and violet roots starting to show, down near her scalp.

Skyla had curled up like a kitten beside Dusk Shine, and Dusk now had nothing better to do with her hands than to open up her huge ruck-like purse, and fiddle with some of her projects hidden in the depths of that bag. She felt around and pulled out a completed device by touch, feeling the individual stones and crystals spaced out on the bracelet-like widget. It was complete, she could use it if she found an opportunity to emplace it. Not sure how far the transmission elements would extend without boosters, though.

Dusk Shine reached up to her earrings, and pulled one of the garnet-stone earrings out of her ear-lobe. She took her hand with the earring, shoved it back inside her purse, and fumbled around until the stud impaled the threading of the bracelet-device. The two earrings were entangled with each other, it wouldn't matter if the two of them were across town, she'd still have a circuit between them.

Just as she'd finished that particular bit of fiddling about, she looked up and found the desk-sergeant she'd accosted in front of her and Skyla, glaring down at her.

"Detective Soft Eyes wants to see you now."

"Uh, can I get someone to look after my daughter?"

"Do we look like a babysitting service, lady? I don't care what you do with her."

"Skyla, wake up, we're next, come on, baby."

Dusk Shine peeled Skyla off of the bench they'd been sitting on for what seemed like hours, and followed the desk sergeant into the back of the station, into what looked like a repurposed storage room, with a table shoved up against the back corner, and boxes full of files haphazardly stacked against the other walls.

Dusk sat Skyla in one of the two chairs sitting by the battered table, and looked around for a third chair, or for that matter, the detective. Nothing.

Dusk was speculatively eyeing a pair of relatively sturdy-looking crates next to a sleepy Skyla when the door burst open again, and a short, balding man came pouring into the room, a tall, pale kid in an ill-fitting coat and tie drifting in his wake.

"Heya, there, hon, I'm Soft Eyes, sorry it took so long to get around to you and your lovely little girl there. I guess we have things ta talk about, don't we?" The brusque little man sat in the first chair without offering it to Dusk Shine, and the other detective simply leaned against the wall next to the door. "Let's start with somethin' simple. Who are ya?"

"D-Dusk Shine, sir. I lived, I live at the back of 112 Woodsdale Road, apartment C. I found that horrible body."

"You found that body? Are you sure, you don't sound sure."

"Er, I'm pretty sure? I –"

"Mommy, it's OK," interrupted Skyla. "You can tell them. I found the man. Are you a detective?"

The lead detective looked at Skyla with some surprise, as if a box of files had suddenly began giving testimony, or the chair had accused the table of criminal behavior. Even the junior detective by the door turned to look at Dusk's little girl.

Dusk Shine took the opportunity to drop her primed bracelet behind the crate she'd been fiddling with earlier, while the detectives were distracted.

"Yes, sir, I'm afraid that's true. The parking lot was strangely dark, but Skyla ran ahead of me, and then came running back saying there was someone on our steps. That was the body."

"And that was the first time you ever saw that body?" asked the young idiot by the door. His superior frowned at him, but didn't say anything.

"Yessir. Never before in my life. Not that I spent much time looking at his face, or him in general beyond what I had to, in order to see that it was a he, and had been killed."

"You could tell that, could you?"

"Even I can tell when someone's opened up like that, it's not likely to be an accident."

"Oh, you'd be surprised. All sorts of horrible things can happen in accidents. Can't go too far in front of the evidence, you know."

"I suppose, sir. I got Skyla away from the body, and I called 911."

"You called a friend, too, didn't you?"

"Poppy Seed, yes. A friend of the family. The only person I really knew here before we moved into town."

"It's good to have friends, that's true. But I meant the young men in the leather vests."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. There were people out on the sidewalk, and up front around the funeral home. But I didn't know any of those people."

"None of them? Never met any of 'em?"

"Other than the young gentleman who escorted Skyla and I through the crowd, no, and him only because we encountered him over on Spring Street, where he and his friend – or perhaps employer, I wasn't exactly clear on that – had been looking at my car, which was parked on Spring. I hope it's still there, with all of those cops, I'd hate to think someone stole it in the chaos."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. The Steel Horsemen don't really dabble in stolen cars, nor would they steal in their own hometown even if they did. Not a worry, not a worry." The little man looked at a file that he had spread out in front of him. Skyla was peering at it, craning her neck trying to read the contents from the other side of the table.

"You moved here from Santa Monica?"

"Yes."

"Many bikers in Santa Monica?"

"Less so than in most other parts of Southern California."

"Expensive town, Santa Monica."

"It was why we moved out east, and to get away from places that reminded us of my late husband."

"Oh, yes, you were married to a policeman? So you're used to this sort of thing?"

"Not in the least, Santa Monica was a quiet, peaceful town."

"Not so peaceful your husband didn't die on duty."

"In an automobile accident. I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"How did you know Poppy Seed?"

"She was a friend of Gleaming's."

"That'd be your husband?"

"Yes, of course…"

It went on and on, the little man rattling off stupid, pointless questions, seeded dangerously with alarmingly appropriate ones. About halfway through, Skyla laid her head down on the table and dozed off again. Finally, the younger detective raised his watch and pointed at it, and Detective Soft Eyes closed up his file with the page and a half of written notes he had jotted down, and he got up to shake Dusk Shine's hand.

"Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Shine, but we need to be thorough. An officer will drive you and your lovely daughter home, the forensic techs ought to be done with your front steps by now. Please contact the city if they leave a mess. Good night."

And then a uniformed cop came into the room, and Dusk Shine and Skyla were hurried on out of the police station at high velocity, shoveled into the back of a cruiser, and driven the half-dozen blocks back to their apartment. Dusk got Skyla out of the car, her head spinning a bit, and they wobbled across the now-empty parking lot, past the police-tape and the bits and pieces of rubbish the crowd and the police had left all over the place. Dusk Shine lifted Skyla over the front step that neither of them really wanted to come into contact with.

At least there wasn't any blood on the pavement, or the sidewalk, or the steps. If it wasn't for the police tape and all the trash all over the place, you wouldn't even have known that a terrible crime had occurred not six feet from Dusk Shine's front door.

Dusk Shine slammed the door behind them as they fled inside, and Twilight Sparkle turned the bolt and the lock as Flurry Heart flipped on the hallway lights and kicked her shoes off into the box they kept by the front door for this purpose.
Flurry fled into her bedroom beside the front door, and slammed the door shut, locking it behind her.

"Skyla!" yelled Twilight Sparkle through her niece's bedroom door. "Get to sleep, now. You have very little time before we have to get up again in the morning. Are you sure you don't need some milk?"

"No! Go away!"

Twilight sighed, added her flats to the shoe-box, and stumped on back down the hallway into the dining nook, turning on the lights as she went. She sat down at the table and reached up to her remaining garnet earring, tapping it on.

Come on, come on…

"…so would you say that you deal a lot with dead bodies in your line of work, Mr. Lane"

Twilight fiddled with the earring again, and increased the thaumic gain.

"…Thunderlane, not 'Mr. Lane'. And my business has nothing at all to do with dead bodies, detective. Even my hobbies don't really have much to do in that line."

"Ah, so you have dangerous hobbies, Mr. Thunderlane?"

Twilight pulled boxes of energy crystals from under the table, and began to daisy-chain the ones from the charged box into a powered array with some prepped cording. She took some wire from a spool, and connected her power-array to the back of her garnet earring. The sound transmitted by the surveillance bracelet in that interrogation room in the police station half a mile away was now as clear as if she was listening over an intercom in the next room.

Twilight began adding obsidian recording-bead rings to the array, and set up a testing sub-device to check that the recording was saving to the data-rings.

While she worked, she listened to the detectives grill the Steel Horsemen's 'sergeant at arms'. Taking a brief break, she reached over to her refrigerator, and got out one of those caffeine-overdosed energy drinks. She probably wouldn't have much opportunity for sleep tonight. And she would desperately need the energy before she and Detective Soft Eyes were done for the night.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Old Reflexes

Twilight Sparkle bent over her workbench, chaining the chunky crystalline elements together as she'd planned. The whole array slotted, well, not neatly, but solidly within a box built out of chickenwire. She pulled out the earphones from the tangle of cords and wiring on the shelf next to her, plugging it into the array, and threaded the cords out of a narrow slot she'd left along the side of the box. The likewise chickenwire-lined lid shut firmly over the whole, and Twilight took one of the cords with its attached earbud, and put it in her left ear. The random background noise of a janitor going about her evening business was faintly detectable through the bud.

Here, sir! I've got a signal now. Put these on.

Twilight handed the earphone set to the dark figure who had been waiting patiently in her workshop, and he slipped them over his long, styled dark hair. Cadance's father was still a handsome man, even after all of these years, and still wore his hair long as he had in his youth.

Twilight could hear the subjects opening the door into the 'wired' offices she had placed her device earlier in the day, and the sound of the janitor's vacuum suddenly became oppressively loud through her ear-bud. Sombra laughed with delight as he listened in on the auxiliary headphones. His subordinates in the accounting offices began arguing over who had cleaned the coffee-maker last, as clear as a bell, half a county away in the Crystal Ministries office in downtown Port Crystal.

My dear, you did it. No electrical components whatsoever? Only crystal elements and your little… special treatments?

Yessir! This array is Faraday cage-shielded! The null hypothesis is definitively disproved. It isn't even a matter of P testing, it works one hundred attempts out of a hundred, as long as I use the same geometries, and the base silicate materials. Gain's a little weak with these unrefined crystals, but I think that if I use gem-quality silicates, I can get perfect clarity. No EM fields, no transmissions, no wires – just resonance and the principle of similitude!

Sombra beamed at his prize student, looking down at Twilight Sparkle. Nothing but crystals and pure magic! Indetectable by scientific means! Do you know what this means, my dear Twilight? All of our doctrines, all of Blessed Amore's teachings...

Magic is real, sir! Oh, I have so much to learn…

Twilight! Aunt Twilight, wake up!

The Master's approval filled Twilight with a warm buzz of self-satisfaction, with the feeling that the world was bright and full of wonders…

Auntie, wake up!

Twilight never wanted this moment to end.

"Momma Shine! Wake the heck up! It's morning, we're gonna be late!”

Twilight Sparkle jerked awake, and there was a clatter as some of the kibble her face had been pressed into fell back onto the dining table. She looked around in groggy confusion, surrounded by the fruits of her long night's work, everything scattered about and nothing in their proper trays or boxes or –

"Skyla! What time is it? When did I fall asleep?”

"How would I know? And six-thirty!”

"Augh! We're gonna be late. Come here!”

Twilight buried her nose in Flurry Heart's hair, sniffing deep. "You need to get washed up, go take a quick shower. Quick! No dawdling, and don't use up all the hot water, I'll be in right behind you!”

Twilight shoved Flurry Heart back into the hallway, and turned around to put away all of her supplies. The array and its chained recording gems and power-crystals were safely pushed to the back of the table, and she didn't have to worry about any of that. It would keep storing all of the feed from the bug in the police station until someone broke the bracelet or seriously disturbed it. Maybe coming into a contact with a person with a strong natural destiny-field? Some of Twilight's projects over the years had just failed for no apparent reason, and she'd only been able to theorize about what could and could not disturb her devices…

Finally, enough of the table was clear that she could feed Flurry Heart once she got out of the shower, and Twilight put out the breakfast fixings so that the little girl could eat while Twilight took a quick shower and put on Dusk Shine's face.

They couldn't afford to miss school, not on the second day, no matter what was going on otherwise in their lives.

Twilight thought about what she'd put together before passing out the night before. Well, morning, really, but the hours of darkness had always sort of blurred together for Twilight Sparkle when she was in the middle of a research project. In the bad old days, in the good old days that had birthed the bad, today – it was all the same.

Twilight Sparkle could change her name, but she couldn't change herself. She got absorbed.

As Twilight rushed through her shower and her morning ablutions, though, she mulled over what she had captured and overheard. It was too bad she hadn't been able to bug all of the interrogations that the police must have conducted last night. With all of those people in the police station, she'd only been able to listen in to a half-dozen or so. Luckily, the detectives had conducted all of their high-priority interrogations in the same room as the one Skyla and she had been in, so maybe it didn't matter?

As Twilight painted herself into the semblance of a Dusk Shine, she thought about the interviews. Mostly biker elders, but also the director of the funeral home. So, Thunderlane, the so-called 'sergeant at arms'. His boss, the chapter president, a gravel-voiced old coot named Wind Rider. Three other chapter presidents from neighboring towns and cities that hadn't sounded really all that relevant. And the director, Lost Wax.

Dusk Shine struggled into an outfit which really wasn't suitable for work, but was the best she could muster with her current wardrobe. Khakis and a button-up shirt. Made her look kind of mannish, in Twilight's opinion, but Dusk Shine figured that she wasn't exactly looking to impress anyone today.

She thought about the rumors almost certainly already circulating, and figured that she shouldn't look too good today. Tomorrow? She'd have to show the flag, but today, it would be OK to look a little rough.

Twilight made a mental note: Dusk Shine needed to get that dry-cleaner she'd found to take care of the pant-suit. And buy more suitable clothes for her Dusk persona.

As she bolted her own breakfast at the table, and made sure that the recording array wasn't visible from the nearly-ground-level window in their tiny 'dining room', she checked Dusk Shine's smart phone, whose battery was nearly dead.

Poppy Seed had left her a couple of texts, and Twilight scrolled through them quickly. Nothing specific – Seed knew better than to commit anything sensitive to texts, after all – but enough to let her know that the deputy marshal was deep into the investigation, and that she wanted to talk, tonight.

"Skyla! Get your bag! We're taking the car today, I have a bunch of errands we need to get done before school!”

”OK, Mommy!”

Classes were uncomfortable, to say the least. The kids had no idea what was going on, so they were fine, and Dusk Shine was getting a handle on who would be a problem, and who could be relied upon to not cause problems. She hadn't identified the kids who would be key to bringing the rest of them into line, but she was starting to get some ideas. Children herded like adults, really. Find the bellwethers, and the rest would follow, eagerly. The only question was identifying which ones were the natural leaders, and then co-opting them into your reign of terror.

Er, cooperative mutualism for common educational attainment, that is.

It was Dusk Shine's co-workers who kept 'happening by' as Dusk did her best to get her kids on target and on task, interrupting, dropping off paperwork, or just sticking their curious heads into her classroom.

Bah. It was enough to make Dusk Shine think dark thoughts about extending her behavior-modification techniques to her co-workers as well as her students. It didn't even have to be actual black magic!

Although sometimes you might think neuro-linguistic programming was black magic, from the results obtained…

But no, Twilight Sparkle had never been able to test out her adaptations of NLP techniques to pedagogy except in the course of experimenting with Flurry Heart, and she didn't need to pollute her testing environment by using said techniques on adults in tandem with her plans for the children.

She already knew it worked on adults. Well, drug-addled cultists and drug-dealers and police, but those qualified as adults, right?

Mostly.

She hadn't been able to think about her surveillance during morning classes, the children required all of her attention, but after she retrieved her now-charged phone and chucked it into her purse, Dusk Shine hurried out to the parking lot. She jumped into the Beetle and hurried on down into the Switch Yard to retrieve her pantsuit from the dry-cleaners, pick up some supplies from the dollar-store and the Hobby Lobby, and to get herself a rushed lunch. Dusk did her best to think through what she'd learned in between her errands and the wait in line at the sandwich-shop.

From the questions that the detectives asked Wind Rider and the other bikers, Rider's deceased son Soarin had died under more than questionable circumstances in Texas, in some town she'd never heard of out past Carl's Corner down towards Waco. And by 'questionable circumstances', they apparently meant a gun-battle over a blown meth deal between Salvajes and another biker club Twilight had never heard of, the 'Hussars'.

Silver Back had claimed that the dead boy hadn't been riding with an outlaw club, but gun-battles and crystal meth deals didn't exactly sound law-abiding to Twilight.

The deceased Soarin had been delivered to the funeral home early the previous morning, according to the interrogation of Lost Wax. That panel van that Dusk Shine and Skyla had passed as they left for school on the way out of the parking lot must have been the casket arriving from Texas. Twilight strained her memory, trying to recall details of what she'd seen, but she had been paying more attention to Skyla and her worries about the new job, than anything going on in the street or with the van they'd walked past.

Had there been the sound of motorcycle engines as they walked out to the corner? There might have been, but Twilight Sparkle knew all about the mutability of memory, and one's brain's capacity for self-modification under even the slightest suggestive pressure.

Damnit.

The older detective, Soft Eyes, had spent most of his time interrogating the dead boy's father, Wind Rider. He was the most obvious suspect in the death of a Salvaje on his own doorstep, after they murdered his son. There had been a great deal of talk about his movements, times and places, people he had been with. Twilight remembered all the chaos after the murders, and cringed to remember how badly she'd let down everyone in that. Much of the arrangements had been left to a distant cousin, and then an estranged aunt, who'd had to fly into the country from Quebec.

For most of the period in question, Twilight had been on the run, or in hiding. Or… doing more questionable things.

In self-defense, of course.

Dusk Shine, sitting at a sandwich shop in one of the strip-malls that dotted the Switch Yard, shook her head, and dismissed Twilight Sparkle's pointless reminiscences. She had more important things to consider. Such as paying for her lunch, and parsing her memories of the interrogations. Dusk wished that she could chance pulling out her notes, but she was in public.

Soft Eyes had as good as accused Wind Rider of getting his son killed in the course of expanding his supposed drug-empire's connections and supply chains. Something about transshipments of amphetamines? Or, as they called it on the street, 'crystal meth'. Twilight Sparkle didn't like that slang, it reminded her too much of Sombra's poisons, although she was well aware that they had absolutely no relation to each other, in origins, function or street character. If there were two sets of drugs with more polar opposition than crystal meth and crystal molly, she'd never heard of them.

The whole story struck Dusk Shine as horribly squalid and sad, but none of it sounded like anything that the Crystallers would be involved in. Meth deals and shootouts were not the way that the cult did things. They preferred sweet seductions and happy customers. Mind-controlled, empty-headed customers, ripe for recruitment into membership, mind you, but wired, paranoid, crazed meth-heads were really not people the cult's leadership cared to pursue.

As Dusk Shine drained her soda-cup, and began putting together her lunch-trash in preparation to leave, that clique of railroad-retirees came clucking into the restaurant like a flock of gregarious geese.

"Miss Shine!” squeaked Gentle Grade, waddling over to Dusk's table. "We heard all about your frightening experience. Such a terrible thing, for a mother and her child to find death on your steps! You must have been so terrified, so scared.”

"Miss Shine, I'm so sorry that my fool of a nephew let such a thing happen to you and your little girl,” Bees Wax added. "I'm sure that it's all some sort of ghastly filing mistake. One of his worthless employees will no doubt have just mis-placed a body for the next day's work while they were looking for their keys or something mundane like that. You'd be amazed the foolish things that these children get up to when they don't think the public are paying attention to how they handle the dead. Shockingly careless, all of them.”

"Bees! It couldn't have been something like that, didn't you hear? The young man Miss Shine found had his throat cut! How can that have been an accident, or some bureaucratic fumble with a misplaced body? You don't just leave corpses laying about in the employee parking lot, do you?”

It occurred to Dusk Shine that these innocent old ladies knew more about the situation than she did after a night bent over a surveillance rig, and having found the body in the first damn place. The jungle telegraph was truly awe-inspiring in its velocity and all-encompassing capacity for information collection and dispersal!

It was a shame that Dusk didn't have time to debrief these mistresses of the gossip world about everything they'd learned and knew, she was sure it would be an education.

"Thank you both for your concern, we're doing fine. Skyla was frightened, of course, but they're resilient at that age, and she didn't see that much. I just want to put it past her as quickly as possible. Could we talk about this later? I'll be late for my afternoon classes if I don't get going right now. Can't be slacking off on my second day on the job!”

The laughing little old ladies waved Dusk Shine on her way, and she rushed off to collect the Beetle and to get back to her students. As she did, she checked her phone again. She agreed to meet Poppy Seed for dinner at a restaurant in College Heights later that night; she'd have to arrange with Bubble Berry for Skyla to be taken care of while Dusk was meeting with her WitSec handler.

It was already a long day, and it wasn't more than half over yet.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The Girl From Tulsa

Dusk Shine didn't stay late that afternoon. They were between faculty meetings; there'd be more as the school-year wore on, but everybody had exhausted themselves with the first day's marathon session, and that second day, people were trying to settle down into a routine.

Dusk handed out some fairly heavy preparatory homework to her students after lunch, just to see how they reacted to the challenge. Also to see who would hand in clearly copied work, and copied from whom. It'd help her identify the clusters and the standouts down the line.

It would also bury Dusk under her own paperwork over the weekend, but she'd never minded wading through that sort of sea of paper. Nobody went into teaching if they were afraid of getting ink on their hands.

But burying the children under with assignments meant that she finished off the school day with nothing in her hands. She was free and clear, and as soon as she picked up a bored-looking Skyla from kindergarten, so was her 'daughter'. Dusk drove them both back to the apartment, and parked out on the street, arriving early enough that the parking meters were still running; she'd have to get into the habit of keeping a pocketful of quarters, the meter ate the last of her change from lunch.

"What kind of homework did they give you, Skyla?” Dusk asked as she helped the little girl take off her shoes.

"It's kindergarten, Mommy. Missus Blocks didn't say anything about homework. Nothing but songs. I think I'm gonna get bored of singing.”

"Blasphemy! You need practice, anyways.”

"It's not as fun when we're singing about counting fruit.”

"Come on, I have some work to do, and some new packages of beads and stones you can sort.”

"'kay.”

They settled themselves down at what was quickly becoming the work-table in their little dining-room, and Twilight Sparkle gave Flurry Heart the bag of supplies she'd swept off of the shelves at the Hobby Lobby down in the Switch Yard. The little girl started sorting the loot, whistling to herself.

Twilight untangled her recording arrays and the charging gem-batteries from where she'd haphazardly piled them where the sun could play over them in the now-departed morning sun. The recording gems were full of hours of interrogation captured while she and Skyla had been at school, and she had a couple hours until her appointment with Poppy Seed. Perfect timing!

The new interrogees sounded tired. These people had been kept sitting and waiting, some of them all night long. As before, the room she'd bugged was being used for the actual persons of interest. Twilight delighted in the luck which had led her into that room, and not some other interview-room full of confused mourners and uninvolved neighbors swept up by the police for having the bad taste to hang around watching the wrong street-drama.

Twilight raced through the recordings of tight-lipped bikers and confused mortuary cosmeticians, listening for keywords at half-again speed, and then double-speed. She jerked in surprise as Flurry Heart suddenly climbed into her lap and leaned her forehead against the side of Twilight's cheek, making bone-to-bone contact, so that she could hear what Twilight was listening to.

"Ha! They sound like chipmunks, Aunt Twilight! What does 'desairology' mean?”

Twilight honestly had no idea, but from context… ”Something to do with the way they make up the bodies for viewings, Flurry. I don't really know, this is the lady the Waxes hire to paint up their clients for the last time their families get to see them. Everybody wants their loved ones to remember them looking good, don't they?”

"I guess so? Can I listen in? There's stuff here, you can make another earpiece!”

"No, honey.” Twilight slid Flurry off of her lap, and broke contact, cutting her out of the circuit before she heard something traumatizing. Well, more traumatizing. "These aren't stories that little girls should be listening to, OK? Why don't you go get a book from the shelf?”

"Aw, I've read all of them already.”

"Pick out one you liked, and re-read it. And we'll have to go back to the library and trade in for some other books, won't we? This weekend for sure.”

"'kay.”

Twilight went back to the recording-obsidian rings. They didn't retain their charges as long as proper magnetic tape, so she had to get through these before they degraded beyond audibility.

"…Blitz. Naw, just Blitz.”

"Mr. Rider called you 'that Rainbow bitch', though…”

"He would, wouldn't he? Aw, yeah, some people call me 'Rainbow' Blitz, but I say I'm just Blitz. It'd be a waddya call it, a cliché otherwise, wouldn't it?”

"What are you doing in Dashville, Miss Blitz? And what's so funny?”

"Nah, nothing, man. I wanted to see my boy's hometown, before I said goodbye to him. And make sure that nobody messed with him before he could go to his folks. Not that I think mucha his folks now that I've met the bastard.”

"You and Wind Rider not getting along?”

"Ya think? He's a prick, no wonder Soarin moved a thousand miles away from his stank ass.”

"Your knuckles are broken.”

"Ain't that bad. Had a bit of a spill from my hog. I'm gonna have to tape them, though, you think?”

"Yeah, I think so. Wind Rider's face was kind of beat on, too. You think he had a spill off of his bike, too?”

"I don't wanna talk about that old man. I was seeing to Soarin, not his asshole dad. I almost wish I didn't come up here, but my boy needed his honor run, didn't he?”

"I'm havin' a bit of difficulty seein' how you and a Steel Horsemen were an item. Aren't you-"

"Hey! Soarin wasn't a Steel Horseman! His people might have been, but look, he was wearing a Hussar cut when I met him, and he was wearin' one when he caught that damn bullet. We ain't outlaw, that just wasn't our thing.”

"I was thinking of the whole 'Sapphist' thing, hon.”

"Oooh, Oh. Yeah, that. Look, it's the way things are done down our way. The old bulls can get bitchy about who gets to drive the hogs in their chauvinistic bullshit outfits. Sometimes you gotta ride dyke if you want to be the one with the engine between your thighs, you know? And the girls like me, I'm good advertising.”

"You don't dye?”

"Naw, man, this is all natural. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for the cause and all that. But nobody cared about Soarin and me. He was cool, the girls liked him, too. Hell, we met cross-riding for the Screaming Mimes.”

"The screaming… whats?”

"It's something we did now and again down in Austin. A charity thing, you know? And occasionally for loose cash for kids' parties. Painted up in greasepaint, dressed like cross-dressin' fools, clown noses, the whole nine yards. Biker clowns! Soarin liked to dress up like a clown bitch, and I'd wear a big fake beard, and stuff my vest like I was wearing an extra fifty pounds a-around the gut, y-you know?”

"Aw, honey, don't cry, come on, you're gonna make me… sounds like you two would have fit in just fine back home.”

"Yeah? Snkt, haa… where y'all from?”

And at that point the recording went off in a pointless digression as the clever biker got her interrogator bragging about his hometown instead of what Twilight cared about. She fast-forwarded, and found the next biker…

"Gilda.”

"Yeah, that's my name, don't wear it out.”

"What kind of a name is Gilda?”

"What kind of a name is Soft Eyes?”

"We're talking about you, Miss Gilda. What's a Sapphist doing escorting a Steel Horseman body into Virginia?”

"Aw, just riding escort. We do that sort of thing, you never heard of us?”

"Yes, actually, I have, or at least, outfits like yours. But usually it's more… political than this.”

"Yeah, the big city dykes do their political thing. We're more… social down in the sticks. Look, Texas ain't like out west, or some parts of the rest of the South. The clubs, they ain't nation-states, you copy? More like actual social clubs. Ain't nobody give a shit if your mom belongs to the Masons' ladies auxiliary, and your pops is Odd Fellows, you know? Maybe a couple goes and joins the Moose when they get hitched, but that's their business, they don't cut ties with the parents' clubs or anythin'. We got along fine with the Hussars, and the Sisters, and the Christers and the Sambos and even the Heathens, when they weren't bein' assholes that week.”

"Sounds like a Lone Star Paradise. What about the Salvajes?”

"Every Eden's gotta have a snake, man. Fuck the Salvajes, I say. Soarin had it right, he was all Love and Tolerate, he was righteous.”

"So you liked him, too?”

"Aw, it wasn't nothin' like that. Blitz and him were cute. He was good for the scene, you know? Before the war anyways.”

"Yeah, the war. That's why we're here, isn't it?”

"Hell, I don't know. You think that's what this is?”

"The first Salvaje we've ever seen in Dashville, and he's violently dead before anyone in town knew he was here. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what this is.”

"That sucks, man. We were just doing an honor run, I don't know anything about that.”

"Soarin was shot by a Salvaje?”

"I guess? I wasn't there. I don't normally ride with the Hussars. They say so.”

"You aren't carrying?”

"Your guys patted us down, you know that.”

"Were you carrying?”

"Shit, no.”

"Ever see that Salvaje before, since you're from that end of the country?”

"Yeah, man, we all tight like sisters. No, goddamnit! We don't all know each other. And there are like five billion Salvajes, those fuckers breed like maggots.” There was a distinct pause, and then… "Also, I ain't seen your corpse. You sure it's a Salvaje, and not just some hombre in a leather jacket?”

Twilight listened closely to the back and forth, but Soft Eyes didn't get this Gilda to slip up again. Did the detective catch that? Twilight couldn't tell from just a recording.

Then Twilight looked at her phone, and realized that they'd be late.

"Damnit, Flu- Skyla! We're gonna be late, you need to go to Bubble Berry's, and I'll be even later…”

"I'm hungry, uh – Mommy! Come on, I'll be good. I don't want to go to the day care, nobody will be there now!”

"Oh, fine.”

Dusk Shine locked up behind them, and they piled into the blue Beetle, hurrying across town in the evening traffic. The restaurant was on the far side of College Heights, out towards the highway. Dusk was only fifteen minutes late when she burst through the front door of the restaurant, Skyla in her wake.

"Uh, hi?” Dusk greeted the somewhat wary-looking hostess. "I think I have a friend waiting on me?”

The hostess eyed Skyla before grabbing a kid's menu, and led the two of them into a back room, where Poppy Seed was nursing a coffee, looking more than a little tired. She looked down at Skyla, and then gestured for the little girl to take the back corner seat, opposite of where she was sprawled, sitting with her back to the mirrored glass at the back of the booth.

"Think you could have been a little less stealthy there, Shine? Thought you were going to be all squirrelly, but this is something else. Did you have to bring your sidekick with you?”

Dusk Shine sat primly on the remaining portion of the bench opposite of Poppy, her heavy purse balanced on her lap. "I ran out of time, and couldn't find a sitter. You said you had news? Are we going to have to move?”

"No hello-how-are-you, Poppy? No cheerful greetings, no talk about the weather? Where were you raised, a damn barn? Bah, west coasters! None of you have any manners.”

Dusk Shine wasn't really sure where Poppy Seed was from, but wherever it was, she didn't approve of it. Only utter boors complained like that about others' manners. Intolerable dominance power-games…

"Good evening, Miss Seed. How are your relatives-of-which-I-know-nothing? How was today's fine weather in whatever mysterious box the marshals keep you in when you're not dealing with our life and potential deaths? Have the niceties been satisfied? What is happening with that body on my front porch?”

Poppy Seed's eyes slid to the right, taking Skyla's impassive expression in with an unsettled, fading smirk. "Uh…”

The waitress, with impeccable timing, chose that moment to come swirling into the back to take their orders, and nobody at the table but Skyla was able to come up with anything. After a few minutes of fumbling, the waitress marched off triumphantly with her trophy-orders, leaving a gaping hole torn in their half-started conversation.

"Right,” said Poppy Seed. "The current headache. Nobody seems to be tying you or the tyke to the dead body. Initial word is that he'd been dead for at least a day, maybe more. Uh, should we be talking about this in front of…”

"Skyla, here's my phone, and my earbuds, listen to that album, why don't you?”

"'kay.”

"Please continue, Miss Seed.”

"Right… wasn't killed on your stoop. Might not have been killed in town at all. They're sniffing around for ways that somebody might have dumped a corpse without anyone having seen anything. You didn't see anything, right? Anything you mighta not wanted to tell local cops about?”

"I am not at all sure at this point what I have seen, nor what it might mean. I believe a white panel van passed us while we left the house that morning, but in retrospect that must have been the biker boy they were holding the viewing for at the funeral home.”

"Yeah, Soarin, late of the Steel Horsemen. One-percenter outlaws.”

"Was he?”

"Yeah, that's what they tell me. Got killed in a shootout in some nameless burg down in central Texas last week, and they released the body to family. No big mystery there, there's a gang war going on in Texas right now, between your good friends the Salvajes and pretty much everyone else who isn't a Salvaje. "

The waitress arrived with an order of garlic breadsticks for the table. They waited until she left before Dusk Shine began again.

"So, a random gang war. Charming. Are my in-laws involved, does anyone know?”

"Who knows? The Salvajes are a huge damn outfit, and the various parts don't necessarily communicate with each other. Literally tens of thousands of members, and hundreds of chapters. Did you ever see any out of towners during your time…”

"The bikers was always the business of Sombra's other organization, not the one I was involved in. We saw them now and again, whenever things went truly south. But in general, we did not mix, no. And I never saw a patch mentioning any town more than a hundred miles from Port Crystal.”

"So you know how their cuts work, then? The patch system?”

"What I've read in the popular media. And heard here and there. The basic club logo and motto, a home chapter designation, and additional 'rockers' designating ranks or posts or additional associations, I believe?”

"Yeah, you've been reading those websites. Eh, close enough. Anyways, the stiff was a waste of oxygen named Stormbringer. Had a pair of outstanding warrants in his jacket, and plenty of priors, including two different sexual assaults. Bad guy, nobody's going to miss him. So there's that, we know who he is, and who he isn't, which is anyone associated with your little girl's gramps' particular brand of Salvaje. Far as I can see from his jacket, he's never been north of Denver or west of the Pecos.” Poppy Seed paused her monologue to take a deep drink of ice-water.

"Anyways,” Poppy continued, "the local cops think that their local big-swinging-dick – a choad named Wind Rider – is somehow at the center of all this bullshit, but they're being locals. Wind Rider is a small-fry meth pusher, a local bully-boy in a local market. Everybody always thinks their own troubles drive the world, but the Salvaje's war against the rest of Texas isn't about the damn Steel Horsemen. They probably haven't even heard of them, if you ask me.” She paused to shove a breadstick into her mouth, chewing furiously.

"I'm trying to get a hold of a Salvaje expert from one of the Texas districts, but you know bureaucracies. Dashville PD are being cooperative, but they're curious about what my interest is in this. I'm going to have to figure out a reason for the marshals to be interested in a mundane biker gang war. It'd help if one of the local bikers had been outstanding on a federal warrant, but the closest was one of the old bulls not paying his child support like a good boy.”

"Which one, might I ask?”

"Why on earth would you care? No, I'm not telling you that. Keep your nose out of local police affairs, Shine. You're here to be quiet, and to not make waves. Go be a schoolteacher. Forget about this, it isn't your damn cultists.”

They were interrupted at that point by the waitress returning with the pizza, and then the conversation sputtered as they dug into the food. The conversation was further limited by the fact that Dusk Shine had made Skyla take her earbuds out, so that she could eat like civilized people.

Just before the waitress returned with the check, Poppy Seed tried to wrap up her interrupted speech. "I'm serious, Dusk Shine. You're a civilian now, stop bugging me about this. There aren't any ghouls hiding in the shadows, here. It's just stupid, brutal people being awful to each other in the darkness where they think nobody else can see them being horrible. Let it go.”

Dusk Shine drove Skyla home, as the little girl, her stomach full of rich food, nodded off in the passenger seat. Dusk didn't believe Poppy Seed; she didn't believe in coincidences. That body - that Stormbringer had been left on her front steps for a reason, and she was going to find out what that reason was.

Dusk Shine looked down at the sleeping girl. She would never let them be surprised again.

Dusk Shine carried Skyla back to the apartment, juggling an armful of sleepy girl and her purse and keys before getting the door open. Skyla woke enough to get her own shoes off, and then stumbled into her room and slammed the door behind her.

Dusk locked the front door behind them, and took her own shoes off, and then Twilight Sparkle went back to the dining room to continue playing her recordings.

More bikers, and then an extremely dodgy-sounding driver for the funeral home who admitted to being the one who'd driven the late Soarin's body home from Texas. Twilight stopped and listened closely to his interrogation. Then she rolled back the recording, and listened again.

What kind of sadistic monster names their darling baby boy 'Hayseed Turniptruck'?

"So you get to Texas, you pick up the body, and then you turn right around and drive straight back here. No stops?”

"Well, I spent the night down thar, in a motel, like? They pays for it, I'm nawt alwawed ta drive that many hours in a row, yeah?”

"And you picked up these ladies as escorts while you were there, in Texas?”

"Aw, uhh, uhuh? Yup. The dykes. Nice ladies.”

"You call nice ladies 'dykes'?”

"Well, yeah? Thaas wat dey said ta call em? Why, what's it mean?”

"Nevermind, hon. Where do you live when you're not driving for Lost Wax?”

"I's got a room in one a the painted ladies over on Nob Hill.”

"One of the efficiencies?”

"Yup.”

Twilight went through the rest of the interrogation of the dubiously named Turniptruck, but there was nothing, nothing she wanted. She wished she could reach through time and space and shake the foolish detective for getting distracted by how dumb the driver sounded. They're missing something there.

And then there was the third of the Sapphists…

"Hey, there, hon. How're ya doin'? What's your name again?"

"Bu-Butterscotch."

"Uh-huh. And where are you from?"

"Tu-Tulsa."

"Really? 'cause your girlfriends say that you're from Texas. Why's that?"

"Oh, I just met them a couple weeks ago. They've been so good to me."

"Really? Where'd the shiner come from? One of your girlfriends a little fast with her fists? I saw broken knuckles on both of 'em."

"You shouldn't say things like that about people you know nothing about. Uh, you know, I guess. Gilda's been very good to me."

"Gilda do that to your face?"

"Nobody did this, I fell while riding. See? Roadburn, too. I'm still learning how to ride."

"Those look newer than the shiner."

"It's nothing. Really. Gilda's been the best boyfriend I've ever had."

"What was that?”

"Nothing."

"So, Tulsa. That's not a Tulsa accent you've got going there."

"You've been to Oklahoma?"

"Well, no, but I've talked to folks from there. It's a drawling state.”

"It's a big state, Oklahoma. And Tulsa's got all sorts. I'm from Tulsa."

The detective got frustrated, and passed the interrogation over to his mostly-silent partner, the awkward Whet Stone. But that dim boy got no more from the sweet-toned, quiet voice on the recording, which Twilight was pretty sure belonged to that tall, beautiful girl in the demeaning t-shirt. She thought about something she remembered from the recording of Gilda's interrogation, and checked her notes.

Then she spooled up the relevant obsidian gem, and brought up the section she hadn't paid proper attention to before.

"Nah, that's not it, man. Only folk who matter in the clubs are the riders. Nobody gives a shit about the bitches.”

"You came in with two others, a… Blitz, and a Butterscotch?”

"Yeah, we talked about this. Blitz is solid, but she don't have a savage bone in her body. She's cool.”

"No, I wanted to talk about Butterscotch. Why is she with you all? Why is she on an 'honor run'?”

"Aw, she don't matter. She don't ride. She's just a bitch. Don't mind the big dweeb. She's sweet, but don't think too much about anythin'. Just said she wanted to see the Smokeys, that she'd never seen proper mountains. Forget about Scotchie, damnit, lemme tell you about the time Soarin and Blitz went and grabbed a protest sign from these church dorks down in Austin…”

Twilight stopped the recording, and sat back. Butterscotch doesn't ride? Where'd the road burn come from? None of the rest of them had roadburn, you don't catch that from riding on the back of a bike, unless the biker wipes out the same as you. And there's something about her accent that I don't like. Like, it kind of sounds she's putting one on.

She needed to talk to some bikers.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Tell God Your Plans

Twilight Sparkle slept in Dusk Shine's bed that night, and found herself awaking at a reasonable time the morning after, long before the sun rose. She used the time to clean up the dining room and box away her excess supplies and assorted kibble, and to listen again to the recordings of the detectives' interview with Wind Rider.

The recording-stones were already losing their clarity; a few more re-plays and they'd be nothing but static, stone and stone's natural resonance alone. Twilight committed Wind Rider's beaten-iron voice to memory before it was lost to mystical entropy.

No, I don't know what's going on. I was burying my son. Isn't there some young boy- fffzzzztt -should be buggering, faggot?

Oh, honey, you know you're more my type. Big, strong man of business, of authority. I was always a Ginsburg twink, don't you- ffftzzzttztt -'Saintly motorcyclists'… mmm.

Bah. Never could get a real rise out of you, could I, Eyes? I know that they find your bullshit amusing down in Baltimore, but how is- ffftzzt -drive you out of town with torches and pitchforks?

Aw, you know they love their country queers up here, when the pastor's out of- fttztztt*click*

Twilight frowned at the rude by-play. It wasn't any more palatable now than the last time she'd heard it. She started up the decaying recording again.

No, you couldn't, Rider. Sorry to hear about your boy. Soarin was a good sort. Shame we saw so much of him.

Yeah, well… we'll see about all that.

Ah, Rider, you better not be making threats in the hearing of police detectives.

No, I'm not taking my people a thousand road-miles into some damn place we don't know from Adam. No… no. The boy just walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. Do they even have a suspect?

I couldn't tell you, even if I knew, you know that. It's as crazy out of my jurisdiction as it is out of- ffffzzzttt -it sounds like one of those situations where there were a dozen people pulling triggers, on both sides. For all anybody knows, Soarin could have gotten shot by one of his own. Happens more often than you'd think.

Die by the sword, yeah. Boy shouldn't have been carrying. Boy told me he was getting away from-

fffzzzzttztttzttztztztttttt

-me to believe that, Rider? The Rangers say it was some sort of big meth deal. You weren't expanding operations?

What the hell do I know about Texas, detective? I'm just a- ffffffzztztztztttt -got too much sunk into the Bottoms, and my businesses. We don't have the manpower to go chasing Salvajes in injun country. I just wish- fffftststtsttst -boy would have been safer at home. 'Tell God your plans'- ffftzttzttzt -old bastard's laughing now, isn't he?

So, about the second- fzzzztztztttttztztztz -don't you think? Hell of a coincidence.

I was too busy in the funeral home, Eyes. Fighting with that damn rainbow-haired bitch. Can you believe this? Little dyke has a hell of a- ffftztztztzt -don't know what I'm gonna do. At least the boy's momma's gone, she'd have died all over again to have that mean little viper show up and claim to be her Soarin's old lady. Honor run my ass.

The second body, Wind Rider. Whet Stone here's been listenin' patiently, but- ffffztztztt -just come clean, nobody will think the worse of you. It was your *boy*, Rider.

I don't know where that corpse came from, detective- fffztttatzzttzttt -claim it if I knew who it was- fztztzttztttttt….

And that was it, the rest of the recording was nothing but static and whispers Twilight couldn't make out.

It wasn't enough. The Wind Rider Poppy Seed had described to her was a petty drug dealer and a mountain nobody. Poppy thought the local cops were fools. The detective in the recordings was no fool, and knew Wind Rider enough to snipe back and forth with him like old college roomies.

Was Wind Rider another Sombra? They said that Sombra had never been the same after he lost Cadance's mother. That something went out of him. Or maybe something crawled into the hole left when Radiant Hope died. Was this what Twilight was hearing through all of that static and poor recording-quality? Was this a man who had gotten his revenge on the world?

Wind Rider sounded tired. Sombra, for all of his other qualities, had never been… weak.

Twilight looked out the dining room window, and saw that it was getting light out. She went to wake up Flurry Heart.

***

While Skyla was using the bathroom, Dusk Shine kicked on her shoes, and unlocked the front door to take in the morning. The sun wasn't quite up, and the parking lot was misty, diffusing the glare from the replaced spot-light. Someone at the funeral home had been busy, looked like. It gave Dusk plenty of light to work with. She stood at the top of her small flight of stairs looking down towards the pavement, and eyed the bottom step and the cheap concrete in front of the steps.

So the late Stormbringer hadn't died here? Now that Dusk knew that, it was obvious. No bloodstains, no signs of a struggle. She thought back to the little fractured glimpses she'd seen in the dodgy light of her smartphone's weak flashlight. Arms arranged crossed in front of his bloodied shirt, eyes closed, not twisted around or distorted or otherwise disturbed.

Someone had laid the body there on the sidewalk, as if they'd needed their hands free for something. Or laying down a heavy burden while… what? Waiting for someone, or something? Why would someone bring a murdered body into the heart of a small city, in the middle of the evening? They had to have broken the spotlight, it had been intact the evening before, and she was pretty sure the morning before they'd left for school.

Dusk Shine looked around the parking lot. And then over at the sign advertising the funeral home's crematory services on the garage, Dashville's Victorian Crematorium, a fancy sign in an artsy fin de siecle style she'd seen elsewhere in town.

Someone had brought an inconvenient corpse to a crematorium. Dusk Shine felt stupid for not having seen it earlier. She wondered if the cops had made the connection?

They must have, Soft Eyes didn't strike her as that sort of stupid.

Dusk Shine walked down into the parking lot, and spun around, looking at all the angles. A passage to the alley twenty-five feet to her right, the back entrance to the funeral home was, say, sixty feet directly in front of her, past Skyla's and her bedroom windows, the dining room window, and the funeral home's turnaround.

Where was the panel van? The cops must have impounded it. Wouldn't they have?

Dusk Shine started to walk over to the passageway into the alley, when she heard something, a muffled wail – and her head whipped around to her own front door.

Flurry Heart!

Twilight Sparkle kicked into a run from a dead start, dashing across the parking lot and leaping up those stairs, her front door banging wildly as she burst into Dusk Shine's apartment.

A streak of pink and blue and purple hit Twilight just above her solar plexus, and she grabbed the sobbing little girl, dropping to her knees on the cheap carpeting in the hallway.

"Shush, shush, shush, I'm here baby. I didn't go anywhere, see? I was just out in the parking lot."

"Don't ever do that, mommy. Don't go away."

"I'm not going anywhere, Skyla. Now let me get my shoes back off, I need to shower up and get ready for school. You want some orange juice?"

Dusk Shine agreed to take Skyla to the library that evening, and between babying a clearly stressed little girl, and working on grading her students' returned homework from the assignments she'd given the day before, she didn't have time to worry about corpses and bikers until very late, and by then, it was too late to do anything but make plans for the weekend.

Twilight discovered the next time she checked the police station bug that the thaumic charge had run out. All she was getting was dead air. She disassembled the surveillance rig, and listened to the last few interviews she'd captured while she'd been busy at the school. Nothing of interest, right up to the moment that the sound cut out.

In a few days, even the record-obsidian would be nothing but dead stone again, and the only evidence that would exist that she'd illegally bugged the authorities would be a rather New-Age-ish bracelet in the lost-and-found basket at the front desk of the police station.

Twilight made a call on Dusk Shine's smart-phone, using the number on the business card that those two biker-mechanics had given her before all of this nonsense began. She got an answering machine.

Twilight Sparkle didn't leave a message.

***

Dusk Shine left school for lunch again on Friday, driving the blue Beetle across town and down into the Bottoms. She followed the directions she'd saved on her phone, finding Forge Road where it diverged off of Water Street, back along the railroad. A cluster of aging shacks and warehouses ended in a crowded parking-lot half-full of the sort of mix of battered junkers and gorgeous vehicles that was the mark of a good custom place.

Dusk Shine could tell that whomever had made the sign for the Wax Brothers' 'Victorian Crematorium' on the garage outside of Dusk Shine's front door, had painted the sign that advertised 'Silversmith Custom Motors', despite the completely different subject matter and superficial style. The sign had a beautiful fifties-advert-style rendition of a hot rod racing a chopper into the name of the custom shop, done up Kustom Kulture-style. Dusk was beginning to want to meet the artist or artists behind these signs…

Dusk Shine pulled the blue Beetle into an open stall in the Silversmith parking lot, and went looking for the front office. She failed to find anything that really resembled Twilight Sparkle's idea of an office, but in her explorations came across the Probie in one of the garages, leaning over a low-slung and exotic-looking motorcycle that she didn't really know enough about to describe except that it was all chromed-up, and half-disassembled.

"Hello there, uh, Probie?"

"Mmm, what? Oh! Hello, Miss! How'd you get in here?"

"Garage door's wide open, Mr. Probie. Is Mr. Back here?"

"Ah, Sentry. Flash Sentry. 'Probie' isn't a name. Call me Flash, please."

"Mr. Sentry, is Mr. Silver Back here? He said something about taking a look at my Beetle. It's been too many months since my last maintenance visit, and that was on the other side of the country. Mr. Back was right, I needed to make arrangements here, now that I'm living in Dashville. Is he around?"

"Ah, nah. He's… visiting a client. Should be back in a few minutes, maybe fifteen?"

There was an awkward moment, and Dusk remembered her manners.

"Sorry about the other night. I didn't say anything when the cops just up and pushed you down, and hauled you away. You got out OK?"

"Yeah, naw, it wasn't nothing. Part of the life, yanno? They didn't have anything on me, I just got to see the inside of the tank. Again. Won't even be a mark on my jacket. Aside from, well, the scuffs on my cut." Dusk followed his eyes over to where the leather article of clothing was carefully draped over a wire hanger on the wall, next to a rack of tools. You could see a bit of a mark where he'd been dragged across the concrete sidewalk.

"I appreciate you asking, though. Nice of ya, after we left our business on your front steps, or so I hear."

"Is that what it was, your business?"

"Well, hell, what else could it be? Bikers attract other bikers. It's like we've all got asshole magnets stitched into the back of our cuts. Ah, it's nothing I should be talkin' about to a nice lady like yourself. Uh… I could look at your car until Silver Back gets back, if you like. Not like I'm really up on my Volkswagens, but I could give it a glance."

"Is there much difference between a Bug and any other car of the time?"

"Are you having me on? Each company, it's like they speak different languages, or at least dialects. Some of 'em, you can sort of figure it out, if you know one of their relative languages. Like figuring out Spanish from knowin' Italian."

"Does it take much study, becoming an auto mechanic?"

"Seems like, yeah. We don't really do the newer cars, though. It's getting so ya have ta take a degree in computer programming to keep up with all of that crap. Easier to just work on classic cars and motorcycles."

"Surely the newer motorcycles have computerized fuel injection and so forth?"

"Yeeeahh…" the biker drawled, squinting a bit at Dusk. "That's true enough. But every company has a different way of doing things, and different manuals to wade through. We're set up for Harleys, mostly. The MCs up here are pretty conservative when it comes to their hogs. The hobbyists and the daytrippers, they get their work done elsewhere for the most part. Down in Asheville, I think, some of 'em?"

"So you're saying that you can deal with one way of programming your engines, but not another, slightly different way? Aren't you kind of young to be this set in your ways?"

"I'm not set in my ways, I'm still learning! I-"

Dusk Shine blushed, realizing what she was doing. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sentry, I didn't mean to poke at you. Yes, of course, you can look at my Beetle. Not that there's much to look at, it's pretty much factory standard."

They stepped out into the early-fall sunlight, and Dusk went around to the back of her car, cracking open the engine compartment.

"So what is it, a '76?" asked Flash Sentry.

"No, I'm pretty sure it's a '73 or '74. Sixty horsepower, of course, or else I couldn't take it out on the interstate, not with- with Skyla riding along. Just wouldn't feel safe, I don't think."

"Yeah, you see the older underpowered models on the Cruise occasionally, but I hear tell they're pains in the ass to keep running. Looks to be in pretty good shape. Of course, air-cooled makes for limited ways that your radiator can mess things up in the engine compartment. Had it checked over recently?"

"Uh, I think so, last time? It may have been a year or two." Twilight's father had been the one to deal with maintenance issues, he always had her drive back to Canterlot City to use the family's favorite mechanic, an ancient expert named Gearshaft.

"Huh, a manual transmission. The later models had automatics, you're cool with stick?"

"This was the car my father taught me to drive. I'm not sure I'd know what to do with an automatic transmission."

"Well, then. Silver will want to do his own evaluation, of course, but it doesn't look like a crisis job. Probably start with an oil and filter change, and go over it stem to stern for rust-checks and the like. Not sure if we have Bug filters on hand, probably have to special order…"

Shouting suddenly interrupted Dusk Shine and Flash Sentry's cozy little consultation, as a door slammed open across the parking lot in a one-story building on the next lot over. Dusk couldn't quite hear the beginning of the argument, but the rest of it –

"-I ain't gonna do it, and that's final! I don't care what you and the rest of them idjits do; it ain't my business, and you can't make it mine! Piss off, Rider!"

"Who else am I gonna get to do this? Thunderlane? Are you fucking kidding me? See reason, Silver!"

"See shit and die, you old ditch-diggin' dumbass!"

"BOSS!" yelled Flash Sentry, his face as red as his sallow complexion allowed. "We gotta customer!"

"What? Oh, hell. Hello, little lady. Sorry about all that. Uh, Wind Rider, this is that sweet little thing with the mint Bug I mighta mentioned before. Uh, Sunshine Dusk was it?"

"I don't remember you sayin'-" "My name is Dusk Shine-"

Dusk blushed herself, mortified at having talked over the big scary biker-king. He was somehow bigger close up, taller than anyone she'd met since- well, a while now. Looking kind of pale, though, and baggy around the eyes as she stared steadily up into their weak and watery grey haze.

You couldn't look away from a predator, they might take it as an opening.

"Huh. Another hardassed twist. You're crawling out of the woodwork all over the place now, aren't you? Stay out of my way, lady. Silver, this ain't over. See reason. I gotta go take care of – oh, what the hell now?"

Two huge motorcycles came rolling down Forge Road just as Wind Rider had turned around to stalk back into whatever hole he had crawled out of. On their broad backs were the two small biker-girls who Dusk Shine had seen earlier in the week at the police station, and behind the grey-haired one was the tall pink-haired one, curled up like she was cupping the much smaller woman behind the handlebars.

Dusk put names to the faces – Blitz on her own bike, Gilda and Butterscotch riding tandem. All of them looking stern and serious.

Or, in Butterscotch's case, scared enough to wet herself.

"Hey, you old fucker! I want what I came for! I came to bury Soarin, and I'm gonna do it if I gotta bury you over top of him!"

"You rainbow twat! Get out of my town! Get offa my property! You got my boy killed! Get outta here before I go get my shotgun and paint the street with your innards!"

The rainbow-haired one dropped her kickstand and leaped off her 'bike, blood in her eye and her gloved hands curled into fists. The ash-haired one elbowed the big pink-haired one, and as the taller girl slid off the back of their bike, the rider gunned it forward so that the third girl's charge was cut off.

"Fuck you! This was your goddamn fault, and I came here to tell you that to your face, you miserable bastard! We didn't have nothin to do with the Salvajes, or any of that crap, until you started with those damn phone calls. I didn't get Soarin killed – you did! Whatever the hell you told him, he just started getting crazy. Started pushing for deals. We woulda never been there when it all went to hell if he hadn't been listening to your damn calls. So come and get it, old man! I'll give you a matching pair of black eyes, make you goddamn symmetrical!" Blitz spun around and tried to get around the back end of her friend's big steel barrier, and Gilda backed her motorcycle up so that she kept it between the raging little kaleidoscope and the target of her fury.

When Dusk Shine looked back at the outlaw biker, she saw that Silver Back was holding him back. The smaller man had grabbed the taller man around his waist, and both of them spun to maintain eye contact with the girls. Silver Back's powerful arms squeezed like a pair of pliers, keeping Wind Rider from advancing to meet Blitz's frustrated charge. Wind Rider's face was growing an alarming mottled mixture of red and grey, and he looked more like he was having a stroke than a fit of temper. As Twi- as Dusk Shine watched in fascinated horror, she thought she saw the old man's legs were shaking. The way Silver Back was hugging Wind Rider, she couldn't be sure if it he was holding him back, or holding him up.

"Hey, goddamnit!" barked the struggling Silver Back into his friend's ear, his muscles bunching and straining. "This here ain't your property, Rider, it's mine! I don't give a damn how much I owe you, the land's mine, the shop's mine! And I say who beats down who on my property. Settle the fuck down."

The alarming blend of choler and greyness in the old bull's face was fading as Dusk Shine watched. She could have sworn she saw his eyes re-focus, and then glance down with renewed intelligence at the snarling rainbow-haired Blitz, leaning over her friend's revving engine and restraining arm.

"Get," started WindRider, weakly, and cleared his throat, Silver Back's arms still gripped tightly around his waist. "Get this bitch out of my sight. The boy's not in the Bottoms, anyways. Lost Wax is preparing him for the last ride. Which I will give him. As is my right. You, you little shit, have done enough to this family. Go-"

And now Dusk Shine was almost positive that it was Silver Back's arms keeping the old biker upright, rather than 'restraining him'.

"Go away, little girl."

He finally slapped away Silver Back's supporting arms, and turned away, walking with a wounded sort of gravity in the direction of the building across the way that the two old men had emerged only a few short minutes ago.

Silver Back turned away from his friend, and glared at the three biker chicks, who were looking as if they were trying to decide between confusion and anger.

"And this is still my property. You three. Get off of it. You're not welcome here."

"But-" started Blitz, trying to build up another head of fury.

"Go. Away. Th' last ride will be on Sunday morning. They usually do some something stupid and showy to choose who carries the urn. Wind Rider's forgotten it, but the man's got things on his mind, no thanks to you, you dumbass. I swear, you're worse than Rider is right now." The aging biker, who had looked smaller beside the towering Wind Rider, was suddenly the tallest person in the parking lot, and he loomed over the tiny Texan like an an undercut creekside bluff thinking about throwing a little bit of a landslide downslope.

"Because of you idjits and his boy, Rider ain't in a frame ah mind to remember much, so I'll have to remember it for him. And probably organize it, goddamn it. It's usually something stupid and cliche, like a wrestling match or fastest rider to figure out who carries the urn on the last ride." The burly old man turned away from the tangle of biker chicks and excessively large motorcycles.

"The boys'll be meeting up at the clubhouse out on Benham Road. Opposite of the country market at the Benham and Reedy Creek crossroads. 8:30 AM. Now get outta my sight. Oh, Miss Shine. Sorry again about all this. We're generally better than this. I'm afraid I won't have time to look at your Bug until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Can you come back then?"

Dusk Shine was a little distracted. She couldn't help but stare at the tall, lanky pink-haired girl scurrying forward to rejoin her fellow biker-chicks as they got back on their bikes and left. Butterscotch had held back from the confrontation, arms crossed and her eyes hidden behind that long fall of model-class hair. Now she was muttering worriedly to the little grey-haired one, Gilda. She'd come here, knowing there would be trouble, but she'd stepped back from the chaos and just let it happen. What was this Butterscotch's game? Why was she here?

"Uh - yes, sir, of course Mr. Back. I have to get back to work, I'm going to miss my afternoon classes if I don't hurry, thank you. Mr. Sentry, thank you for your suggestions."

Dusk Shine strode forward decisively, and shook hands with Silver Back. She grasped his hand firmly with her right, and grabbing his arm with her left, an aggressive gesture she'd seen Sombra use whenever he was politicking and in 'King' mode. The biker looked a little astonished at this close contact from a random would-be customer, but rolled with it. He really was a big old teddy-bear, Dusk decided.

As Dusk Shine got into her Beetle, she discreetly hid a grey strand of hair in her fist. She'd spotted it hanging from Back's arm- pulled from the disheveled Wind Rider's scalp in the confrontation. That would be useful. Twilight Sparkle knew a trick you could pull with hair, if the emotions were strong enough.

In the end, Dusk Shine was only five minutes late for her afternoon classes. Blue Grass gave her the stink-eye, but she didn't say anything as the school's newest teacher half-sprinted through past the office and back towards the third-grade classrooms.

It was only halfway through her first lesson of the afternoon that Dusk Shine looked down, and spotted the big grease stain on the sleeve of her best jacket. She blushed, and took it off, choosing to work in shirt-sleeves for the rest of the day.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Seriously, y'all, thanks for going above and beyond the call.

There Is Power In The Blood

Dusk Shine and Skyla spent Friday afternoon and evening hanging around the local library, as Dusk did some research on the public-access computers, and Skyla amused herself by going through the children's section shelf by shelf, all the ones she could reach. Dusk had given Skyla a secret mission, and it had sparked a certain twisted enthusiasm in her little girl.

The secret mission tied into the assignment she'd handed out to her class during literature studies. All the children were supposed to go to the library, and just pick out a book that interested them. Not any particular book, and Dusk hadn't given them reading lists – just a book. They would read it, and write her a one-page summary. She wanted to see what they produced, absent any further guidance.

But Dusk Shine also wanted to see when her students went to pick up their books. Who were the grinds who would get everything done as soon as the assignment was given? Who were the 'do it at the last moment' sorts who cruised on natural talent or adrenaline cramming sessions? Were there any actual enthusiasts hidden among the herd?

And so, Skyla was lurking about, stalking any children of the right age that came into the library, to see who went into the children's shelves, mostly, but also to see if anyone was reading ahead of the curve. Dusk kept a list of names beside her borrowed computer, and as Skyla came by to point out this child or that, Dusk checked off their names.

By the end of the evening, when the library was ready to close, she had about a dozen out of fifty-four names checked.

So much for her job. Meanwhile, Dusk Shine was fiddling around online, looking for evidence of the dead man. For a brutal outlaw biker, Stormbringer hadn't really left much of a trace in the online world. Dusk guessed that bikers weren't big on social media? The same mostly went for the biker girls, although Dusk had half-guessed that the names they were currently using weren't the ones their families had given them.

Blitz was an exception. Dusk had found a good number of tagged photos of the flamboyant, nominally lesbian biker and her pretty boyfriend. Soarin had been strikingly handsome, and he had glowed like sunshine for the camera. Most of the photos came up in association with various biker events in and around Austin, Dallas and Plano. The two of them had gotten around in the last year and a half, and everywhere they went, people took pictures.

Dusk found herself laughing at the biker clown photos. Soarin had looked good in a dress.

Texas media was full of the latest skirmishes in the 'Great Salvaje War', as the papers and bloggers were calling it. Soarin's death-notices were already fading away in the wash of other arrests, woundings, and shootouts. Central and North Texas was basically a war-zone. The Rangers dealing with the mess were all over the newspaper front pages.

A random Salvaje body showing up in a Virginia hill-town wouldn't even rate the back of the A sections, Dusk suspected.

Wind Rider, on the other hand, was a mainstay of the police blotter for Dashville and the surrounding region, going back decades. No actual deaths were revealed by Dusk's admittedly non-expert research methods, but she found plenty of violent crimes and associated wickedness. By her back-of-the-envelope estimate, Wind Rider must have spent more than half of Soarin's childhood behind bars.

Dusk Shine thought about the curl of grey hair she'd gotten into an old pill-bottle she kept in the Beetle, which was waiting on her preparations. She'd started charging the relevant stones before she and Skyla had left for the library, but these things take time. It wasn't exactly something grand mère Clair would have approved of, this particular ritual. But once Twilight had put together some of what she'd learned from her grand mère with some of Sombra's more aggressive ideas… It had worked in the past, when they hadn't been able to get recordings.

And it had worked when Twilight had finally put together the clues about what Sombra had been doing with the information she had dug up for her mentor. Twilight refused to feel guilty about using dark magic to expose worse – the things she'd learned about her mentor had been so abhorrent, so monstrous – well, it was worth the blood it cost her to know the truth.

But had it been worth the consequences that followed from those discoveries? The terrible consequences of Sombra's subsequent wrath... on most days, Twilight was successful in wrestling down the guilt and the self-loathing... would she have been happier if she'd never come to know exactly what her mentor had been, was doing, was making of her gifts and her complicity? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Sombra had been escalating all the time Twilight had known him, mostly when Twilight hadn't been there to witness his sins, but more and more often in her presence. A break had been coming, whether knowing and prepared, or in some hypothetical, catastrophic collision Twilight couldn't even imagine...

The cost in the event had been almost more than she had been able to bear. Sombra's demonic rage had broken upon the whole family, had broken the family like a half-rotted stick.

In the end, on the run with Flurry Heart in her train, Twilight found the mountain of mundane research – needed to generate the parallel construction justifications and proper evidence that she could bring to the authorities – a welcome distraction from the screaming horrors and overwhelming regrets.

Well, Twilight's regrets could live with Twilight. In the light of day, Dusk Shine was in the driver's seat.

She took Skyla home after the library closed, and they had a nice, uneventful evening before going to sleep at a reasonable hour. It was almost homey, and Twilight Sparkle did her best to enjoy a simple night at home with her Flurry Heart.

She'd need her rest for what she had to do in the morning.

Twilight Sparkle woke an hour earlier than usual, and made sure that Flurry Heart was safely asleep and showing no signs of disturbed rest or restlessness.

She didn't want Flurry walking in on this.

Twilight went back into the dining room, and took out the crystals which had been soaking in vinegar. She set the stones out to air-dry, and got out the other materials, and the pill-bottle with the old reprobate's hair.

Twilight found the package she'd bought at a Walmart a few weeks ago and left in one of the top shelves in the kitchenette. She opened up the box, and took out the sealed syringe and broke the seal, setting it aside while she waited for the stones to dry.

Twilight began to coax the grey hair into a weave built out of Crystal Fireline Jewelry Thread and simple twine she'd rubbed river-mud into, while she kept watch over one of Skyla's visits to her little bit of secret forest down in Metternich Park. As each stone she'd set aside was sufficiently dry, she threaded them into their prepared portion of the web of twine, crystal-fireline and the biker's strand of hair.

So far, Twilight hadn't done anything reprehensible or wrong, not by the standards by which she'd been taught, by either of her teachers.

Twilight picked up the syringe, and searched for the vein in the pit of her left arm. She missed the vein on the first try, and had to pull it out and try again before she got the blood-vessel. She pulled back the plunger, and filled it to two-thirds with her hot blood. After she pulled the syringe out, she dabbed at the little wound with a bit of paper towel soaked in rubbing alcohol, and then covered it up with a band-aid.

Then Twilight took her syringe and depressed the plunger, slowly dripped her blood over each stone in the device, muttering the right words. She watched the crystals turn red, one by one.

The one thing upon which both of Twilight Sparkle's mentors in magic had been in agreement, was that there was power in the blood. Clair Voyant had been a cautious and taciturn old woman, more interested in the esoteric meaning of her weavings and her patterns than the effects of either. She'd hand-stained her threads and her yarns – and yes, one of the stains she'd used, while her wide-eyed petite fille had watched, had been her own veins'-blood. She'd emphasized that one always, always used your own blood – using the blood of any other living being was damnable, intolerable. True witchcraft, hated by man and God alike.

Sombra had done more than use others' blood in his experiments. And this ritual was how Twilight had uncovered that fact. Twilight Sparkle centered herself over the completed device, thinking of what it was she wanted to learn. Then she remembered one of the minor consequences, and found a pencil to bite down on.

And she pulled the blood-magic fetish over her right forearm.

He always hated the smell of disinfectant. The pain that summoned that smell, he could take or leave. He wasn't a masochist, after all. But the pain just meant he'd accomplished something. Beat down a rival. Survived a crash, or a wipeout. A rough time with an enthusiastic lady. All part of the life, and fine enough, even when he came down with the clap or broke an arm or a hand or, once, nearly got his throat cut. It was a hard life, and pain meant that he was still living it.

But he hated the smell that came with emergency rooms, and the surgeries, and the doctors' offices. They smelled of death.

"…the tests are definite, and conclusive. Your bloodwork is just full of metastatic cells. We did the procedure to check the last most likely place we could biopsy. It's definitely your pancreas. Now, we used to call this Stage III, but practice is now to assign g-levels. This is at least G3, and may very well be G4. It should have shown itself in additional symptoms before this; pancreatic cancer is infamously secretive, but not to this extent…"

The doctor was still going on as if any of his jabber mattered worth a damn. He'd heard the death sentence already. This – the rest of this was just legalities, boilerplate. The bullshit that he had to say, the boxes he had to check. Speaking of checking boxes…

"Doc, shut the fuck up. There isn't any cure? No radiation, no chemo?"

"Ah, uh, well. If we'd caught it earlier, then maybe. But's pancreatic, everybody knows about pancreatic. Pancreatic hides until it's too late, until it's thoroughly metastatic. I don't understand why you're not in debilitating pain. These numbers are very high. I can prescribe a course of pain medication, but radiation or chemotherapy? It would kill you before it killed the cancer. 100% certainty."

"Gimme the damn pills. I like my hair right where it is."

"Even with the most extreme regime of pain medication I can legally prescribe, you'll be in absolute agony fairly soon. Mr. Rider, this is very, very advanced."

"Pain means I'm still here, Doc. Gimme the script. And triple it while you're at it. We're going to need an additional revenue stream for a while. Here, I've got that list of 'patients' for you."

"I really think you ought to concentrate on your own care at this point, sir. Our 'arrangement' can – "

"Shut the fuck up, write the scripts. The usual guy will be by to pick them up as always. You'll get your money, like you always do. The machine keeps on rolling, it don't care if the driver's got a hangover."

"Advanced terminal pancreatic cancer is not a hangover! You need to be under care! A hospice! A homestay nurse! Something!"

"Write the damn scripts."

Twilight Sparkle awoke to herself, her mouth full of something - the pencil she'd bit down on to avoid making any noise. Or, rather, the splinters left behind after her spasm had broken it into a foul-tasting mess. Her jaw ached. Wind Rider's memories had hurt. An awful lot.

Twilight stepped into the bathroom, and rinsed the taste of graphite and cheap wood-pulp from her mouth. Twilight looked down at the still-charged red baubles on her ritual-bracelet. She swallowed, dug a newly-purchased wooden-handled spoon out of a drawer in the kitchenette, sat down in the dining room, and bit down again.

The boy wasn't listening. He tried again.

"Just come home, Soarin. I need you here. The boys keep asking after you. Hell, those girls that were sweet on you keep asking after you."

"Dad, I was a teenager! And half those 'girls' are ten years older than me. It was always skeevy as all hell. I've been talking with folk down here, they say those women took advantage. I mean, I don't really think I didn't get anything out of it, but it's kinda embarrassing in retrospect, you know? Nobody down here knows any of all that-"

The boy wasn't taking the hint. Damn it.

"I'm dying of cancer."

"…and I've got this great girl who's got all these things going that- wait, what? What did you just say?"

"Pancreatic cancer. I got maybe three months, maybe four, maybe five. But no more than nine according to that little faggot we have feeding the pill mill. I need you up here. I need you to stop fucking around in Texas, and come home."

"I – I – fuck! Fuck, Dad! How do you just drop that on me? How long has this –"

"Told me two months ago."

"Two months? What the fuck!"

"So I need you up here. I need to get the succession in place. Need you to be here long enough that the boys accept the transition."

"I am not one of your Horsemen, I can't just show up and be the old man's boy, they'll never buy it!"

"I'll make it work. Get up here, while I'm still strong."

"Look, I have to take care of some things down here, I can't show up empty-handed. Let… let me figure some things out on my end. I'll be up as soon as I can get free down here."

The boy never did listen.

Oh, Harmony, that hurt like all perdition.

But it was still not what Twilight was looking for. Even so, the more she looked into this man's life… Wind Rider was getting ready to die. He wasn't making deals with cultists. He wasn't going to war with cultists. Really, in the grand scheme of things, this awful old man had nothing at all to do with Twilight, and would only be a threat to Flurry Heart if she provoked him into something. Why was she poking at this?

Twilight thought of the body arranged placidly upon her steps, his neck opened up like a half-gutted fish.

She put the now-heavily-chewed spoon-handle back into her mouth to bite down onto, and dove into the hair and the blood one more time.

The little rainbow twist was standing in the funeral home's parlor like she belonged there. She was alone, and furious, and ranting at him about god only knows what. He was so tired, he didn't have the energy to deal with this little bitch…

"I can't believe you are what he was always talking about! You, you you – look at you! You're not even listening to me, are you, you old bastard! Soarin's dead, damnit! He was happy until you started picking at him!"

"Fuck off, cunt. Get out of –" suddenly the funeral room parlor was eclipsed by a flash of white, and when it cleared, he was – where was he?

That was the ceiling, wasn't it? Why was he looking up at a ceiling?

There was a commotion over his head, where he couldn't see, and then he put together what must have happened.

The little rainbow twat had hit him. He hadn't even felt it, let alone seen it coming. Still didn't feel it, really, not under all of the agony that was his daily, constant companion. There was yelling, but somehow he couldn't parse what they were yelling about.

Then Silver Back was there, helping him up off the carpet. And the ringing in his ears died down enough that he could make out what was going on.

And then the cops burst into the funeral home, and started grabbing everybody.

Twilight Sparkle woke up to find herself curled around one of the legs of the dining room table, every last muscle in her body aching terribly. She spat out the ruined spoon-handle, and cursed, foully and comprehensively. She was out of time, and out of materials. That last vision had burnt away the last of the old bastard's hair, that was that. And that was all she'd get from Wind Rider. Not that you could pay Twilight to spend another agonizing minute in the sea of misery which was Wind Rider.

And she'd swear on a stack of Blessed Amore's Crystallinum Continet Scriptura that Wind Rider hadn't had a damn thing to do with the death or disposal of the late Stormbringer. The blood-magic pulled at recent memories of strong emotions, especially those associated with violence. If Wind Rider had murdered someone, or ordered such a thing in a fury, it would have registered.

On the other hand, he hadn't registered the news of his own son's death. Maybe he was too far gone to register normal emotional responses?

Twilight looked at her phone on its charging-cord, and realized that Flurry Heart would be waking up any minute now. She started cleaning up her mess, putting especial effort into cleaning up any stray droplets of blood.

Twilight pulled the now-grey crystalline stones out of their web of threads and twine, and dropped them back into the vinegar. She put the vinegar bath into one of the upper cabinets in the kitchenette, where Flurry couldn't get into it.

She might need the ritual again. This wasn't over, all she'd done was eliminate a suspect.

Sort of.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Paying Attention

Twilight let Flurry Heart sleep in, since it was the weekend. The little girl had few enough moments of childhood normalcy, might as well let her come to the day in her own time.

Twilight nursed one of the leftover energy-drinks she'd bought the last time they went to the Family Dollar. She had a notebook now full of her notes on the interrogations, her deductions, and sundry observations. Twilight had to get the results of the ritual down, before any of it faded from her recall.

Twilight hung her expended stones in the window, but it was west-facing, and would have to wait until the afternoon before they caught any sun. It was still pretty, like an oversize spider-web hung heavy with crystalline dew-drops. She watched the sun's rays burn away the night's mists in the back yards and hedges and low roof-tops and alley-ways between their apartment and the school on the rising slope across the way.

Eventually the thumping and muttering from down the hall heralded the last raising of the day, and a sleepy Flurry Heart came barefoot down the hallway, rubbing her eyes and looking for cereal.

"Where's your socks? It's going to start getting cold in the mornings, Flurry."

"Mornin'. I dunno, do we have anything that isn't raisin bran?"

"You know all that sugar isn't good for you. Huh. Well, we can get something with some honey in it next time we go down to the grocery store." Twilight gathered up her notes, shoved them into her note-book, and joined Flurry in a rather dull breakfast.

They were out of orange juice.

While Flurry went into the bathroom to take a much-needed shower, Twilight looked one more time over her note-book. Then she looked through her supplies, and found a magnifying glass and a cheap personal grooming kit she'd bought a while back. She took out one of the pairs of tweezers from the grooming kit, and got up.

"Skyla!" Dusk Shine shouted through the bathroom door. "I'm going out on the front stoop. I'll be right outside the front door!"

She listened until she heard, over the drum of the shower thrumming through the pipes, "'kay!"

Dusk Shine opened her front door out onto a sunny Saturday morning, summer making another stubborn stand against the creeping chill of an oncoming autumn in the air. She ducked back into the apartment, and took a cheap, thin jacket off a set of hangers hung over their box of shoes.

Armored against the clear, sunny chill, Dusk fumbled for the magnifying glass, and bent down to examine the tread of the steps leading up to her little wooden porch. Cheap non-skid tape had been shakily applied by someone to the wooden steps the last time they'd been replaced, with one of the strips curling slightly where the adhesive hadn't quite set right.

She went over the stairs one tread at a time, looking for her target with the magnifying glass, a pair of pill-bottles in her jacket-pocket, and a pair of tweezers in her free hand. She found a couple strands of both Skyla's and her own hair, and tucked them away in the first pill-bottle for later disposal. But as for what she was looking for…

His hair had been… a sort of pale orange? No, proper blonde.

Dusk Shine found nothing on the steps proper, not even the first stair-tread. She expanded her search across the concrete pavement of the sidewalk, and then, with a revolted sigh, under the steps themselves, filtering through the leaves and disgusting kibble that always falls through the stairs into the neglected asphalt underneath.

As she was sorting through the filth under the porch, and keeping an eye out for curious neighbors or funeral home employees, Skyla came tromping out onto the stoop, and looked down to see what Dusk was doing. The little girl ducked back inside, and then a moment later, came out with her own jacket on, and a dangerous gleam in her eyes.

"Hey, Mommy, I wanna play, too. Can I come out?"

"Stay within eyesight, Skyla, and let me know the instant anyone shows up, OK? Don't go wandering."

"'kay."

The little girl went scurrying about, walking between the parked cars, and crouching here and there. Dusk Shine continued her finicky, foul exploration of the vicinity of her own front steps.

The early autumn sun baked away the chill, and Dusk got up to put away her suddenly-stifling jacket, leaving her pill-bottles sitting on the edge of her stoop. After another ten minutes, Skyla came skipping back to hand her own jacket back to Dusk, and Dusk hung it on the hangers inside their front door, which she left open to air out the apartment a bit.

It was a small space for two women to share – it wasn't quite stinking yet, but it would definitely start to smell off sometime soon. Dusk Shine resolved to buy a vacuum cleaner next month.

She sat down on the second step, looking at the neat pile of rubbish, leaves, and disgusting trash she'd accumulated. Nothing she could absolutely be sure of, nothing she could point to and say, 'this was the hair of one Stormbringer, late of the Salvaje Outlaw MC, dead of uncertain circumstances.'

Dusk Shine wished briefly that she had become a police officer, that she could get access to the body without so many questions as to utterly destroy her beginnings of a quiet life in the process.

That wasn't happening.

And perhaps it was for the best. She'd never done the bloodstone ritual over a dead man's hair before. Who knows how it would work? There might be – there almost certainly would be – consequences. Consequences she really ought to respect.

Dusk Shine, sitting on her sun-warmed stoop in the early autumn, pondered the cautionary story of the Witch of Endor. Perhaps It was far too close to necromancy.

The sun was suddenly eclipsed by the shadow of a little girl, holding out something in her own pair of tweezers, the second pair from the grooming kit, taken, no doubt, from where Twilight had left it on the dining room table.

In Skyla's tweezers was a long, beautiful strand of pink hair. The little girl's eyes glittered in triumph.

"Was this what you were looking for, Mommy?"

"W-where did you find that, Skyla? Show Mommy where you got that."

Dusk Shine had Skyla lower the fine strand of pink hair into the empty pill-bottle, and Dusk palmed the bottle protectively. She got up, and had her little girl lead her across the parking lot, beside the garage across the way. Further down the asphalt, into the shadowed cool of the passageway that led behind the garage into the alley that ran back into the heart of their block, the alley that eventually terminated in a cross-road short of the back end of the school Dusk Shine worked at, and Skyla attended.

The passageway was roofed against the elements, open on either end, running all the way through the garage, but not actually being in the garage. It was lined with clapboard, an ancient coat of paint curling and fading, which hadn't been renewed the last time the garage exterior itself had been painted. Exposed nail-heads were working their way out of the neglected wood here and there, and Dusk Shine eyed the dangerous conditions, resolving to have a word with Skyla about staying out of this tetanus wonderland from now on. Skyla had finally gotten all of her vaccinations a week or two ago, but still, this wasn't…

The little girl pointed at one of the nail-heads, right at the level where a six-year-old could easily reach it. Two or more strands of hair were tangled up there, right where a tall woman might have leaned up against the side of the passageway, out of the sight of anyone lurking in the parking lot or the alley, where such a woman might have gotten her impractically long hair snagged upon a rusty nail-head.

Dusk Shine suddenly had a vision of clarity and revelation, her mind's-eye conjuring an image of a certain biker-chick, maybe two, crouching here for hours on end, waiting for darkness. What was sitting by their feet? What were they waiting for? Who was they waiting on?

Dusk looked down at the pill-bottle in her hands, and got out her tweezers, and took the rest of the hairs from the nail-head.

For insurance.

Twilight Sparkle didn't want Flurry Heart watching her as she renewed her preparations. It wasn't something a little girl should watch.

"No! I wanna see, Mommy!" Flurry Heart was fading, bit by bit. She talked more and more like Skyla, even inside the house. "Why don't you want me to see it? Is it something bad?"

Twi- no, this was something for Dusk Shine. Even sitting here, inside, at her own dining-room table, she needed to be Dusk Shine.

Dusk Shine looked down at her daughter, and remembered sitting at a much, much larger table with her grand-mère. The old woman hadn't hidden things from her petit fille. Was she doing the right thing in depriving Skyla of knowledge, of understanding about what was going on around her?

"You don't touch anything, you don't even breath on anything, and if I ever – ever! Catch you imitating anything I'm about to do, I'll tan your hide. You know I will." This was an empty threat – Twilight had never laid a hand on her niece, nor had the little girl's parents while they still lived. But Shining Armor had been fond of that particular threat, and his father before him, and Twilight Sparkle associated that phrase with nec plus ultra – beyond which, no tolerance for childish shenanigans, no room for horse-play.

Dusk Shine took the vinegar bath with its soaking stones out of the cabinets, and another sealed syringe. She laid out the pill-bottle with the pink hairs, and the rest of the prepared threads, and the vinegar bath, and her syringe. A wad of paper towels soaked up excess vinegar as she set out the stones to dry, and she began the weaving of mud-daubed thread and twine, of several of the pink hairs, and bits and pieces, as Skyla watched in silent fascination.

When the stones had dried, Dusk Shine wove them into the net of thread and hair, replicating the steps from earlier in the morning exactly. She paused a minute before breaking the seal on her second syringe, looking at Skyla.

"Blood," Dusk said, channeling Skyla's great grand-mère, "has a great moral power in it. To touch another's blood, is to step beyond what is proper – for a practitioner, for a sinner, even for a saint. It is a violation of everything sacred within another, within that which is not you. We are given certain limits, certain boundaries. This is also why we are not to dally with those with which we are not bound, heart and soul, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. A practitioner must take these things deathly seriously, because we tread so closely to the line in every other particular.

"A practitioner may only touch her own blood." Dusk Shine removed the bandage she'd placed over her prior wound, and pierced her vein again, drawing the blood with one swift motion. She picked up the alcohol swab, wiped down her twice-abused arm-pit, and re-bandaged herself.

The rest of the ritual proceeded as before, the bloodstones in their weave taking that unsettling crimson hue. Dusk Shine laid the fetish on the table, and looked at it.

If this Butterscotch was a practitioner herself, this might alert her that someone was gazing into her soul. Sombra had certainly detected something, when Twilight had used this against him, just as things truly had begun to spiral out of anyone's control.

Dusk Shine looked up at her wide-eyed daughter.

It had to be done.

Dusk Shine thought of Twilight Sparkle, and pulled the bloodstone fetish over her arm.

Everything was better when she was stoned.

The world was still what it was, she was still where she was, and the predators circled around her, sniffing, snarling, barking, raging at her and each other.

And that was fine.

It was easier when she thought of them as beasts, as animals. She'd long since fell in with people who made more sense as savage animals than as people. If she got high enough, she even saw them that way. The big, shaggy men in their leather vests and their riding-leathers faded and shifted, until she rode on the back of a growly centaur, or a big snuggly bear, and she could just delight in the rush and the joy of living without a thought for the future.

It generally took a lot of pot to get into that mind-set, though. And Steam Roller didn't like pot; he was more of a tweaker. Fluttershy wasn't nearly stoned enough today, not for this sort of thing.

Steam Roller was yelling again, pissed about the way she hadn't looked some of his fellows in the eye. Everyone was on edge because of the shootout. They'd lost almost a half-dozen members down in Waco, and even for Salvajes, that wasn't something you just shook off.

One of Steam Roller's buddies had nearly knocked Fluttershy off her feet, when she'd not gotten out of his way fast enough. And now Roller was explaining to her exactly how she'd shamed him.

In public.

She wasn't stoned enough for this.

She hadn't been stoned all the time before, even when she'd been living with that terminal pothead. She'd thought that guy had been an improvement over the last guy, the one with the quick fist and the hair-trigger temper. But at least the guy who'd loved to beat her, hadn't been the sort who'd just up and sell her to a biker club for a primo bag of kush, and the settlement of his outstanding debts. No, that kind of betrayal had come from the kindly, empty-eyed marijuana enthusiast.

Fluttershy didn't even recognize herself anymore. She might as well be another person.

She wanted to be someone else.

She looked up from the pain, as Roller's fist shook her by the handful of hair he had in his grasp.

And looked into the astonished eyes of Rainbow Dash.

Things got kind of blurry at that point, arms swinging, gloved fists flailing about. Steam Roller had been stupid enough to discipline his bitch in public, alone. And, in the event, seriously out-numbered.

His bitch looked down at him, bleeding into the asphalt of a convenience store parking lot, and told him, "Roller, I think this means we're breaking up. If you can't protect me, you don't own me."

She thought for a second, looking at the blood and the broken bones.

He'd live.

She walked away with the bikers who had just won her from the broken Salvaje. She looked down at Dash, who'd shaved off half of her hair, and was looking pretty good, all things considering. Even if she hadn't grown any since the last year of high school. It'd been years since Rainbow Dash had dropped out of school and disappeared.

Sometimes she'd wished that Dash had taken Fluttershy with her.

"Hello, Rainbow. How have you been?"

"Better than you, it looks like. And I don't use that name anymore. Don' want to have anything get back to the parents, you know?"

She thought about Dash's crazy parents, and all that drama, and shuddered in sympathy.

"What do I call you?"

"Hey, Soarin, whaddya call me these days?"

"Honeybunch? Momma? Mistress Pain?" joked the handsome young man in the Hussars cut, starting up his big Harley.

"Smartass. Hey, Gilda – what's my name?"

The other short biker, her grey-white hair styled in the same hacked-off, half-shaved fashion as Dash's, was incredibly butch. She looked up from her own bike.

"Shut the fuck up, Blitz. We need to get out of here before that clerk inside calls the cops. Or hell, maybe the Salvajes. Never can tell around these parts."

She looked back and forth between the bikers, and wondered who was going to take her. Who did she belong to now?

"Hey, dweeb," said the hot little biker with her shock of white-grey hair. "You ride bitch? You look like somebody who rides bitch. Where's your helmet?"

Hell, if they'd won her, they won her stuff. She went back to Steam Roller's abandoned Harley, and retrieved her helmet from where it was hanging.

She ignored the groaning, half-conscious outlaw biker bleeding into the pavement.

"What's your name, dweeb?" asked the tiny biker. Gilda.

"Call..." she thought of Dash's new name. She could be someone else. She thought of a former boyfriend's term of affection, when he'd been sweet and seductive, before it went bad like it always did.

"Call me Butterscotch."

Butterscotch strapped on her helmet, and got on the back of Gilda's Harley.

They sped away from the scene of the crime.

Interesting.

Dusk Shine looked up at Skyla, and spat out the wooden spoon-handle. It was barely gnawed at all, this time. Butterscotch had been… not restful, but not the constant agony that had been Wind Rider.

That wasn't the mind of a cult agent. Or, at least, Dusk didn't think so. She was certainly the vulnerable sort, the sort who could easily have fallen into the orbit of Sombra's people. The drug use was certainly a very bad sign. How long ago had that memory been? The ritual didn't grab for particularly old memories, but these hair strands had been very long. Who knows what the differential might cause in terms of retrieval?

No, she'd been thinking about the big gun battle in Waco. That had been all over the news for weeks. It had been relatively recent – less than three months ago.

So…

"What did you get, Mommy? Was it the bad guy?"

"I don't know, sweetheart. I didn't get any read on why she was lurking out back by the alley."

"Waiting to put that dead man on our steps, obviously!"

"That's obvious to you, is it?"

"There isn't anything else to do back there. Only animals are some big bugs down by the baseboards. And termites are boring!"

Mental note – talk to landlady about possible termite infestation in neighborhood.

"Well, I still have plenty of charge on this. I'm gonna go back in, give me back that spoon."

"'kay!"

Butterscotch had been happy when they hadn't taken her to the big deal. Gilda wouldn't let her go out after she came back the last time with a dime bag. For a rough, tough biker dyke, the little ash-haired woman was surprisingly puritanical. She'd flushed Butterscotch's pot down the toilet in the room they shared these days.

Gilda had gone with Blitz and Soarin to the big drug deal. See? Totally hypocritical. But Gilda had said that just because Soarin had developed ambition out of nowhere, didn't mean that she'd tolerate her bitch flying on 'that garbage'.

Honestly, it had warmed something in the pit of Butterscotch's stomach, melted something that had been sitting down there, frozen, for a very, very long time.

She played with her hair, thinking about that feeling.

But it was in the aftermath of Soarin's big damn drug deal, that… Butterscotch's little world had barely begun to re-form, and already, something had cracked it like an egg.

The good humor and joy that Blitz, this new version of Rainbow Dash, had shone on everything around her, went out like a snuffed torch. The lifeless body of Soarin they'd brought back instead of a duffle-bag full of meth… that had smashed up Blitz pretty bad. Butterscotch couldn't imagine how it could have done otherwise.

She thought about seeing Blitz's old man like that. Why wasn't she more upset about it? The man was dead. A boy who'd helped save her… and there he was, dead, ugly, brutally dead. The girl she once had been would have been horrified. Fluttershy would have fallen apart like wet newsprint if she'd seen something like that. Before… everything. Was this who she was now? Was this who Butterscotch was?

She tried to keep out of Blitz's way after that, half out of respect, and half for fear that her old friend would see something in her eyes, that thing she didn't want Blitz to know about. And it wasn't as if Blitz was good company after the shootings. It had left her in a near-constant state of vengeful rage. Gilda had felt compelled to pour whiskey into her friend for several nights running, to get her so drunk that she wouldn't be able to go riding out into the sultry Texas darkness to hunt down and murder any Salvajes she might come across.

This fury was part of why Gilda had fallen in with Blitz's wild scheme to do a 'honor ride' for her dead boyfriend, to go riding deep into darkest Applelachia, wherever it was in hillbilly country the once-handsome biker had come from.

Unstated was the idea that it might be a good idea to get Butterscotch out of Texas, which was currently crawling with heavily armed and murderous Salvajes, many of which might recognize the tall, distinctive bitch as runaway property of their outlaw club.

Butterscotch could stand to see mountains again. She'd gotten tired of Texas and Oklahoma. Little good had happened down here in the flatlands, as far as she was concerned.

So this was what she was thinking about as she rode behind Gilda, where they'd taken rear escort behind the panel van that contained the refrigerated remains of poor, dead Soarin. He'd been nice enough, so Butterscotch thought she understood what Blitz saw in him, but she was sort of over men in general.

She snuggled deeper into Gilda's back, a little giddy at the warm feeling of freedom, of escape. Her chin fit right over Gilda's helmet, and it almost felt like they had been made, built to sit exactly like this, the engine rumbling between their legs, the highway screaming under their tires…

Butterscotch didn't pay attention to anything at all, not even when Gilda went into the rest-area's lady's room with Blitz to 'take a shit'. She just sat on a bench beside the parking lot, keeping an eye on the Harleys, and tried to figure out if she was a bad person for feeling so happy, when her friend Blitz was mourning her Soarin.

She didn't even notice the Salvaje, until he was close enough to grab her up off of the bench, and punch her off her feet, right in the face. Butterscotch, her face stinging from the blow, looked up, astonished, at the greasy blonde biker snarling down at her.

Storm something? Storm Shower, Ice Storm…

"You fucking bitch! I knew it was you in that truckstop! I've been chasing you bitches for fifty miles! I'm gonna punt you into the concrete, and then I'm gonna fuck you up some more! The doctors say Roller ain't never gonna ride again, you fucked him up so bad!" Then he picked her up, and punched her in the gut. Butterscotch folded like a fan.

There was a battle-scream as Butterscotch bent over the pain in her stomach, and she looked up to see Gilda hurtling towards the Salvaje standing over her, with Blitz a good dozen paces behind her. The Salvaje stepped into Gilda's charge and –

Knocked her right off her feet, catching her square in the chest with a fist like a hammer. Gilda fell to the sidewalk, and gasped like a fish dropped onto dry land.

Stormbringer! That was his name. Stormbringer whipped out a revolver, and pointed it square into Blitz's face as she caught up.

"Stand the fuck back, cunt. I'mma gonna just take what belongs to us, and you fuckers can do whatever the fuck you're doing here, I don't care. Get up, bitch!" The Salvaje grabbed Butterscotch by her left arm, not looking at her, and hauled her up to her feet.

He wasn't paying attention to her, he was looking down at Gilda, who was scrambling back to her own booted feet. The dumbass driver of the panel van had just gotten out of the men's room, and was staring at the confrontation with a stupid look on his face.

The Salvaje was waving his pistol back and forth, trying to cover both biker chicks, who had spread out, their hands spread, crouching to present smaller targets.

He wasn't paying attention to Butterscotch. He had let her go.

She reached down to the big knife that Gilda had given her on the first night they'd spent together. The one in the leather holster that looked like a bit of decoration on the side of the fancy leather boots Gilda had bought her new bitch. The knife that Butterscotch had sworn she'd never need.

Butterscotch thought of the corpse of Soarin that they'd brought back from the deal, his left eye a gory ruin, and she looked at Gilda and imagined that sharp yellow eye destroyed by a bullet.

Butterscotch took her boot-knife, reached around the Salvaje's throat with the blade, and pulled as hard as she could, grabbing his shoulder for leverage.

Blood. She hadn't expected so much blood.

Butterscotch checked out for a bit after that.

She curled around her knife, gripping it tight and crouching on the asphalt beside the dead body. She watched them arguing. Blitz was screaming something at Butterscotch, and Gilda was yelling right back at her, but Butterscotch couldn't make out anything they were saying. Then both of them started yelling at the dumbass from the funeral home. Something about the other cargo in the van?

Gilda coaxed the bloodied knife out of her hands, and Butterscotch out of her ruined shirt. She dragged Butterscotch into the bathroom, washing the blood off of her, wiping her down with those parts of the shirt which wasn't already a gory ruin. When they came back out into the parking lot, the dead Salvaje had been rolled into a tarp that the driver must have gotten out of the back of his van.

Gilda wrapped up Butterscotch's knife and the dead biker's revolver in her ruined shirt, and put it into one of her bike's panniers.

Butterscotch picked at the new shirt Gilda had forced over her head, and listened as her friends explained the plan, telling her how they were going to make this right. It was a good thing that Steam Roller had found it amusing to make sure his bitch could participate in the 'bitch rides' the Salvajes occasionally staged when they were stoned or drunk enough. She wasn't a good rider, but she could keep a Harley on the road, sort of.

They couldn't leave the dead Salvaje's bike here, not with all of this physical evidence right beside it.

They got back onto the road, with a third motorcycle added to the 'honor escort', and a second corpse in the van.

"Well, huh," said Dusk Shine, as soon as she had spit out her gag, and sat on the floor, leaning against the refrigerator. She looked over at Skyla, who was curled up on one of the chairs, staring down at Dusk with a sort of cockeyed fascination. "OK, I know how the dead man got on our steps."

"Are we gonna have to leave?"

"I… have no idea."

There wasn't anything about the cult in the tall biker bitch's memories. Plenty of drugs, plenty of serious social dysfunction. But crystal molly, or Sombra's glassy-eyed followers? Not a sign.

Dusk Shine looked at what she had left of Butterscotch's hair. She had some people to meet. But first? Skyla needed lunch. And maybe so did Dusk.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Opening The Door

As the noon-hour trickled by, Dusk Shine did her best not to think as she thought, her mind racing uncontrollably. Skyla spent the time nibbling at her baloney sandwich, and eyeing Dusk's nervous fussing at her own sandwich, and they both killed off the remnants of the milk from the fridge.

The bloodstone ritual had a number of unavoidable side-effects, of which the most important was a certain empathic resonance with the subjects. The faded notes of Wind Rider wailed discordantly under the half-harmonies of existential confusion, terror and romanticism which was Butterscotch. The whole made a confusion in Dusk's echo-chamber, made it difficult to hear herself, be herself, hear and see her own interests, think her own thoughts.

The sum total of all of these foreign, alien impulses rattling around in Dusk's brainpan was a restless, counterproductive need to move, to be doing something. To be knowing, to be finding an understanding, to be doing.

To establish Dusk Shine as Dusk Shine, and Butterscotch as Butterscotch, to be oneself, and another again. To no longer be confused.

She looked down at the smartphone that Poppy Seed had given her. This was one option. In some ways, it was the easiest. She could meet with her deputy marshal, and drop some hints. Come up with some plausible lies, spin a tale about biker girls lurking around the alley, something seen that morning that hadn't been seen.

That was one option. There were others. Magnetic, oddly demanding options. She was so much like the little hippie girl. Twilight Sparkle thought of that girl in Port Crystal with her ratty red-orange dreads and her victim eyes.

Butterscotch wasn't the victim here. She wasn't. She'd killed a man, butchered him like a pig in a slaughterhouse chute. Why was Twilight Sparkle's conscience trying to cast her as the victim in this ugly mess? Dusk Shine shook off the memory of the Washington-state runaway for whom she'd… leave it to the finished past, and to past's Twilight.

As Dusk came down off her memory high, the need to meet Butterscotch faded. The dangers re-emerged. Dusk struggled to close doors blown open by magic and empathy.

Doors… She'd remembered a trick Grand-mère Clair had taught her.

Dusk Shine cleaned the dishes from their modest little lunch, dried off her hands, and went digging through the little pile of unopened boxes that held the remnants of Twilight's former life. Memories it was no longer safe to keep out in the open, inheritances and books and irrelevant this and that. Her mother's jewelry-box.

Dusk Shine looked at the old piece of jewelry laying in a tumble of heirloom jewelry, and her mother's pearls and old earrings. She'd first seen it as a child, younger than Skyla was now, looking under her mother's arm as the older Twilight had been sorting through her jewelry and picking out the silver-chased bits and baubles to be inspected for tarnish and damage. Twilight Velvet had pulled the dazzling strip of gold and twinkling, tiny gem-stones, and had sighed at it, looking pensive.

"Mommy," the child-Twilight had asked her mother, "Why do you have a rainbow ring?"

"Twi-twi, this isn't a rainbow ring. They used to call these 'mother's rings'. Your great-grandmother Starlight Twinkle had it made, after she had her 'change'. You see here? Seven birth-stones, seven living children. Her pride and her joy."

"Why does that make you so sad, Mommy?"

"Your great-grandmother said it was cursed, Twi-twi. You see, after she started wearing it... well, things started going wrong. Badly. The family went through a very rough time. First your great-uncle Golden Grain had that accident with a thresher. Then his brothers Burnished Shield and Narrow Way didn't return from their service overseas - in the war, you know. And after your great-aunt House Proud died in childbirth... well. After House Proud's funeral, Grandmother Twinkle put away her ring, shoved it into the back of her jewelry box, and never wore it again.

"Grandmother Twinkle always said afterwards that pride opens doors you can't shut. This- this is pride cast in gold." Twilight's mother had put the gem-studded ring back into the back of her own jewelry box, closed the lid, and picked up her cleaning-cloth and the tarnish remover. "We never wear that ring. It opens doors."

Dusk Shine took the two remaining strands of pink hair, and wrapped them around the golden band, so that both of them laid over each gem birth-stone in turn. She didn't believe in curses, or fates, or luck.

She held up the ancient golden ring with its flecks of garnet, of amethyst, of emerald, of ruby, of aquamarine, of citrine, of turquoise, and of sapphire. It glittered in the early afternoon sun. Dusk Shine believed in magic.

She looked over at Skyla, who was packing up her bag, and getting ready to go out. Dusk took the ring, and pulled it over her finger. Dusk Shine believed in choices.

She looped a little bit of crystal thread between her great-grandmother's ring, and the bracelet of powered crystal she wore on that wrist, and knotted it firmly each to each. Ready to go.

Dusk Shine locked up the front door behind them, and they went walking out to the street. Dusk examined the skies, which were starting to cloud up a bit, but weren't quite inclement yet. Dusk unlocked the Beetle long enough to grab the two little umbrellas she kept in the back. She shoved Skyla's little blue umbrella into the little girl's new backpack, next to her pencil-box. The pencil-box rattled metallically.

Dusk Shine froze, and looked down at a little girl who wasn't meeting her eyes. Then she looked around the street, counting witnesses.

Too many.

"You won't need your pencils at Bubble Berry's, Skyla," Dusk said, and opened the Beetle's door again, throwing the pencil box into the back seat. The pencil-box did not, thankfully, crack open, spilling pencils and who knows what into the full view of anyone who cared to look inside.

My x-acto knives again, most likely.

As they walked the several blocks between home and the daycare, she argued with Skyla over whether the little girl was capable of using the crayons and pencils that the day care center provided. Meanwhile, the magic of the tracking-ring began to resolve, and as Dusk Shine achieved some parallax, some semblance of direction was forming in her peripheral vision.

As Dusk Shine stood in the foyer of Bubble Berry's busy business, overrun by the usual Saturday afternoon crowd of rugrats put into temporary storage by stressed parents, she idly observed the rainbow glitter as it shifted back and forth, indicators of possible directions, distances, vectors. Dusk looked down at Skyla, who was still sulking about having been disarmed again.

"Be good for Bubble and the other kids, Skyla. And remember, if anything happens…" Dusk didn't finish the statement. Skyla's eyes widened a bit.

"No, Mommy, I'll be good. No more acting up." She glanced down, towards the basement of the converted house that Bubble Berry used as a place of business. Skyla had told Dusk weeks ago about the hiding places she'd found down there, in a boarded-up old laundry room. The little girl had always been good at getting into crawl-spaces you'd think a cat couldn't get through.

Dusk Shine left her little girl in what little safety and obscurity she could arrange on short notice. She followed the rainbow glitters, doubling back on her trail, passing the front entrance of the funeral home on her left as she came to the little portico behind the Concordant church, the one with the balcony that hung out over the cliffside, and gave a view of the river, the park, the Switch Yard, and College Heights beyond all three.

In Dusk Shine's mind's eye, rainbow motes danced across the city that unfolded beneath her like a theater, or like a diorama of miniatures arranged on a table-top by a finicky model-train enthusiast. Dopplering lights lit upon the landscape, laying out paths taken. Paths considered? Paths almost chosen? Twilight Sparkle had rarely experimented with this particular magic, it was energy-intensive, and required pure gemstones. And, she had been told, made her look like she was drunk or stoned. It had gotten her in trouble once or twice before she'd moved to Port Crystal to live with Shining Armor's new family.

Sombra had thought it was a parlor trick, and unnecessary. He knew where his people were, he didn't need light shows for that. Twilight had suspected it was the light show itself which repelled the patriarch of the Crystallers. Something about the colors and the lights disturbed him, made him restless. The actual value of the ritual faded before that unease.

As Dusk Shine watched her rainbows, she saw the path that the subject had taken across the little river-valley laid out before her, woven like a garnet ribbon stitched lightly across the landscape, knotted here, there, heading into the Bottoms, crisscrossing the Switch Yard and the high street, racing back and forth along the water street, crossing the hills again and again in the same direction, out towards the distant interstate exchange beyond New Town.

They're staying somewhere out beside the highway. One of the motels by the strip, or the hotels that clustered on the far side of College Heights, that serviced the school's vistors?

That was a good sign, it meant that the biker girls weren't venturing that closely to where Dusk and Skyla lived. Wasn't it?

The strongest, brightest stretch of the garnet road curved down the access road on the far side of Metternich Park, down into that parking lot behind the old railroad station, and behind the shell which had once held a great grist-mill.

Into, though it was hard to see at this angle – the trees and brush were hidden behind the Victorian gables of the railroad station and the heavy utilitarian bulk of the old mill – into Skyla's little pocket-wilderness between the millrace and the river.

Into Flurry Heart's heart-wood.

The light faded as Dusk Shine left her vantage-point on the cliff behind the Concordant church, and weaved her way down the sidewalks along the spring street and over to the main road, the high street. She waited patiently, eyes dazzling with the topazes and emeralds and sapphire glitter. But most of all, she saw the garnet, that peculiar, pinkish hue which grew more and more saturated as her feet found the path across the concrete of Dashville's city side-walks.

Dusk followed a ribbon of pink light like a banner snapping in the breeze, over the river, and into the park. Rain began to fall as she crossed the paths around which dozing ducks clustered sleepily here and there on the grass. As Dusk approached the benches and tables clustered between the railroad station and the playground, she saw the last of the retirees fleeing the darkening skies for the coffee-shops and restaurants in the Switch Yard, or perhaps heading home to their apartments and little mid-century Cape Cods over in New Town.

Dusk Shine opened her umbrella, and tried to look pensive and aimless as she drifted across the park's grass and gravel pathways. A bit of effort, and the intensive light show faded, so that her eyes were not totally dazzled by the intensity of the effect.

She's in the park. She is, most likely, over by the mill.

Dusk fetched up under the eaves of the railroad station, and put up her somewhat-dampened umbrella as she sat on one of the safely dry benches hidden beneath those baroque Queen Anne gables.

The rain swept the park in sheets, an intense little cloud-burst that came and went in the course of a brief half-hour, as Dusk sat and fiddled with her great grandmother's ring, and stared into the glittering distance, details washed away by the blurring rainfall.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you.

What was she waiting for? What was she doing here? There was a killer in Flurry Heart's woods.

She must be getting soaked in there.

Across the way, the bulk of the old mill was visible as a muddy blur of old red brick and orange roofing-tile. There had been a few benches over there as well, for park patrons waiting out rainbursts exactly like this. Was the biker girl waiting out the rain over there, behind the mill? Was it only Butterscotch, or was it all three?

Dusk Shine fingered her can of mace. There were more than enough charges for multiple assailants, if it came down to that. She'd practiced with the infernal devices, playing at target-practice like Twilight's brother had practiced with his service revolver, emptying chamber after chamber's worth of .357 rounds down-range as his admiring sister had watched, her ears stuffed up with cheap orange earplugs offered as a courtesy by the gun-range. The mace-practice had reminded Twilight of archery practice in high school, but somehow she'd found more interest in the peculiar dynamics of the foam's near-liquidity, how it arced, how it clumped.

Dusk Shine was confident of her skill with a can of mace. She thought she could defend herself against attack. But so had the dead biker, she thought. So arrogant, so prideful.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Dusk's phone buzzed. She looked down, and swiped open the texting app. A message from Poppy Seed.

The cops had arrested Hayseed Turniptruck, and seized the funeral home's panel van. Well, that was that. The Texan bikers' little conspiracy to cover up their killing would unravel, come apart, and that fool would turn over the actual killer to save himself.

The rain storm trickled to a halt, like these things do, winding down like a child's plaything, its hidden main-spring turning more and more slowly until the whole came to a stop. The ripples in the puddles faded away. Rays of late afternoon sunlight glittered through the cool humidity, cooking away some of the haze.

Dusk Shine could see the mill clearly now, and the wooded peninsula beyond as well. She could see a single hulking motorcycle parked, slick and damp from the rain, in the otherwise-empty parking lot beside the mill.

In the distance, above where she knew there was an unsheltered picnic table sitting just under the dripping limbs of the trees at the edge of the wood, bowed a pink blur, Twilight's fading magic swirling around its object in excited, agitated orbital gleamings.

Dusk Shine took off her great-grandmother's ring, and put it and its attached bracelet into her heavy bag. She fingered her still-damp umbrella.

Dusk folded the umbrella up, and shoved it in an outside pocket of her bag. Then she got to her feet.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, said some half-remembered bit of poetry from one of Twilight's literature classes. That bent head's hopelessness wasn't Dusk Shine's business. The world would come crashing down on her head, as it should, as it ought. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

Dusk Shine had spent the last months, the last year and more, hiding behind closed doors. Hiding with her broken little bird, hiding her little girl away from the world. Dusk thought about the knives she kept having to take away from her little girl, the need those knives expressed – a desire for strength, for protection, for agency. She thought about a knife in the hands of another scared girl, seeing in her mind's-eye the death of hope, of faith, and love.

She opened the door, and started across the rain-slick grass beside the children's playground, her eyes dazzled by the after-image of magic's promised connection.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The bits of verse are, most of them, from T.S. Eliot's haunting 'East Coker'.

Good And Bad Fairies

Dusk Shine fingered the crystalline medallion she always wore under her clothes. Twilight had made a habit of looping feedback from all of her remote sensing fetishes and widgets to this focus, and over the past few weeks, Dusk Shine had emplaced a good many devices in and around Metternich Park. A half-dozen around the playground, three tucked under various benches and tables by the rail station, a handful under the bushes around the old mill, and a full array surrounding the little woods that Flurry Heart had adopted as her own.

There was someone napping on one of the sheltered benches beneath the eaves of the old mill. Gilda, the ash-haired biker. Butterscotch's guard-dog was asleep on the job.

As Dusk crossed the grass and walked across the access road to the mill's parking lot, she got a better look at her target. Butterscotch had been soaked to the skin by the skyburst, and wasn't paying attention to her surroundings. Her back was to the woods, which was now bustling a bit in the aftermath of the rain, and a few birds and critters were emerging from the brush around her, nosing about here and there. Had she been trying to feed the animals?

Dusk Shine strode up to the rain-dampened picnic table, and grimaced at the wetness. Butterscotch jerked to attention, suddenly aware that she wasn't alone.

Dusk sat down on the driest section of the bench, and tried to ignore the water soaking into her jeans. Dusk looked up at the confused pink-haired woman. She looked to be about Twilight Sparkle's age, but Dusk knew that the street life aged girls quickly. Butterscotch could be as much as five or six years younger than Dusk Shine.

She decided then and there on a direct approach.

"You scared my little girl."

"Oh, oh I am so sorry, I didn't see anyone, I'll go, I didn't mean to-"

"I don't mean just now. We're alone right now, although I suspect your friend is somewhere over by the mill, where I can't see her." Dusk frowned censoriously at the now-flustered Butterscotch.

"I mean the other day, when you left your mess on my front porch," Dusk continued. "I mean the other day, when you left your kill on my stoop like an alley-cat offering up a mouse to a family she wanted to adopt."

Butterscotch jerked back like she'd been struck, wide-eyed.

"I can deal with this sort of random disorder, random violence," continued Dusk Shine, evenly. "I am like you. I am an adult, who can make her own choices, and make her own decisions. My little girl, on the other hand, is not. She's still figuring out how the world works."

Dusk Shine thought back to some of her recent studies, and improvised, maintaining steady eye-contact with the now thoroughly alarmed biker girl. "That's what children do. They test the world, they make hypotheses, and they evaluate these little theories against the world that they see. They discard the ones that don't match what they see, and keep and imprint upon the ones that explain what the world presents them. Some researchers call this 'reality-testing', but others insist on reserving that term for schizophrenics and others with psychiatric issues. I like to generalize the idea across all individuals, not simply the stressed and damaged. Because sanity is a continuum, and madness is not a precipice."

Dusk Shine wished she could get close enough to use physical contact, but this was a flighty bird, and she'd be off like a flash if she got too touchy-feely. "You see, you remind me a great deal of my little girl. The world did something horrible to her at a very young age. It betrayed her. It proved to her that it wasn't predictable, it wasn't kind, it wasn't safe. Children need, before all things, predictability. She has all the wrong reflexes now. I've seen her survey a room like a combat veteran, and sit facing the entrances and exits. I've seen her put on a face when we go out into public. She is far older than she should be."

Dusk sighed. "And this is my fault. I did not intend for my little girl to see what she saw, but I was responsible, that's on me. We do what we think is right and necessary, but our choices imply our consequences."

Butterscotch hadn't said another word, just sat there, curling up tighter and tighter, as if she was trying to disappear inside that fall of pink hair. "I said that you remind me of my little girl, and I'll tell you why. I had to disarm her this afternoon, as we left the house. She sneaks knives and blades from my art supplies, from the kitchen. Six years old! And she feels the need to always be armed. You've got another blade on you, I can tell from your posture.

"But you aren't a little girl, are you?"

Dusk Shine stared at the teary-eyed woman who was a good four inches taller than her. She'd broken eye-contact, and was staring at a pair of budgies who were worrying at a pile of feed someone had spilled out onto the gravel path wending its way back into the woods. She's closing down, turtling up. How do I…?

Dusk leaned forward, waving her left hand in front of Butterscotch's distracted stare. "I'm going to have to ask you to talk about it," she said, forcefully. "I can tell you, the world can tell you that you did wrong, but that doesn't mean a thing, does it? That would be just giving you another thing to endure, to survive. And that's kind of a cheat, isn't it? Another way of regressing, another way of remaining a child. Waiting in your room until the big people's fury passes. No, we're not doing that. Butterscotch, what did you do? I need you to talk to me now, Ma'am."

Butterscotch was looking at Dusk Shine now, meeting her gaze with huge, shining eyes. "I ki-killed a man," she stammered.

"Yes you did. And what else?"

The tears were starting to fall, now. "I ran away from my boyfriend."

"Hrm, no, I don't think that's what we're talking about, here. Why does that come to mind?"

Butterscotch's reddening eyes darted left, right. "It - it was why I had to kill him. I walked away, and the rest fo-followed. I tried to start over, and-"

"I don't think that's true. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's not true. That's a malformed theory, a hypothesis which should be discarded. That man attacked you and yours because he was wrong, he was selfish, and he was arrogant. Your responses were, perhaps, extreme. They certainly were an offense against order. And the things that followed… let's talk about that. What did you do after the man bled out?"

"Stole his Harley, drove it somewhere where they wouldn't find it." The biker chick pursed her lips, thinking.

"So you covered up your crime? That is itself an offense. Perhaps, worse than the original act. Certainly in the eyes of the authorities."

"I-I know. It makes me look, look-" An aborted gesture with both hands, defensive.

"The lawyers call it mens rea. I've spent a great deal of time recently listening to that particular argument, yes. Worse, it makes your friends look guilty. Are they?"

"No! No, nobody helped me, nobody's to blame for this but-" Opening up, shoulders back a little - ready to surrender? But her friend was awake, and approaching. In a second, the sound of her boots on the gravel would be audible...

"Miss Butterscotch, you know that isn't true. Isn't it, Miss Gilda? Do you want to join us?"

"Nah, that's ok, Spooky. Dweeb, you OK?" came a raspy voice from over Dusk's shoulder. Dusk didn't turn to look, she kept staring into Butterscotch's mesmerized eyes.

"I'm... I'm OK, Gilda. I'm sorry, Ma'am. I don't know what you're talking ab-"

"Let's not backtrack, Butterscotch." Quickly now, running out of time and space here…

"I won't call you by your old name," Dusk Shine said quickly, rapidly, "because you killed Fluttershy with that knife as surely as you did that Salvaje biker you left moldering on my front steps. And please don't waste time. We don't have much of it to spare. You all botched your disposal, you surely did. And the authorities just picked up your weak link. You three, you're loyal to each other, that's admirable. But you included someone who has no reason to be loyal to you. Hayseed Turniptruck is in custody. I see no reason why he won't give you up, aside from simple animal stupidity. You have very little time at all."

Dusk Shine heard a thump in the grass behind her, and she finally turned to look, seeing a wide-eyed Gilda laying flat on her ass, cringing away from Dusk as if she was holding a gun on the diminutive biker.

Dusk Shine turned back to Butterscotch. Because Butterscotch was the person who mattered in this situation, whose fate was in the balance. "Miss Butterscotch, I won't ask who you are, because you've told the world that with your knife. I won't ask what you want, because the world doesn't care about wants and desires."

Dusk thought swiftly, planning what she had to say. "The time for victimhood is over. You're not a child. You are now responsible for the things you do, to defend yourself, to defend others. I could argue that what you did to Stormbringer was self-defense. It's a hard case to make, but a justifiable one, I think."

Dusk Shine leaned forward, and rested her clasped hands on the drying planks of the picnic table. "How are you going to show my little girl, show all the children that the world is orderly and safe? How are you going to make restitution for the chaos which you've brought here with you? Because I don't think that you are beyond saving. I think that you have choices here. I just need to know what your goals are, what you're looking to be when this has all unfolded. Who do you want Butterscotch to be? What do you want for her?"

Dusk finally broke eye-contact with the poleaxed pink-haired woman, whose clothes were still soaked from the rain, whose makeup had run down her face like rust-stains across an old park bench. More birds and chipmunks had emerged from the woods and found the piles of fish-kibble laid in an arc around the still-silent biker girl. Must have gotten it all from the feeders. Making friends with Flurry Heart's subjects and woodland minions?

"Who the hell are you, Spooky?" asked the ash-haired biker. "You don't look like a cop to me. You look like the woman who taught second grade at my old school. Does anyone know where you are? Why are you poking your nose in here? We might just slice it off." Gilda was trying to seize control of the situation, blustering. It was, apparently, what she did. Dusk didn't like to mess with these girls' relationship, their dynamic. But she needed to keep this conversation under control.

"You will do nothing, Miss Gilda," Dusk Shine said, sharply, dismissively. "You've already screwed up badly enough as it is." Principal Cinch's words, my voice. "The idea to dispose of the body? Aggressive, ambitious. Too much so. You really messed this one up. And I'm pretty sure it was your idea, wasn't it? The other two, they're in mourning, and in shock, respectively. You're the one with the initiative. Why didn't you just dump the body somewhere in Tennessee or Arkansas?"

The biker's defiant body-language decayed a bit, turning awkward as Dusk Shine stared her down. Dusk's medallion sparked a bit, and in the back of her head, she felt a vehicle approaching them from behind her. The park was starting to fill up again, as the usual crowd emerged from their dry refuges, and the afternoon sun dried away the remains of the rain. A motorcycle was driving up the access road to the parking lot behind Dusk.

"We- that idiot said he did it all the time. People just – nobody keeps track of the ashes that come out of the crematorium. Evidence, yeah, but bodies sometimes." The biker was rubbing the back of her ash-colored shock of hair, looking mortified. "If that kid hadn't come running out when she did, the idiot would have just unlocked the garage, and that woulda been that!"

"Why not just store the body inside the garage? Why was it out in the open, in public? This was all so unnecessary, Miss Gilda."

"Damned if I know, I guess the moron didn't want to share his side-gig with the rest of 'em?" Gilda's favorite posture was legs planted, left hand grasping her right elbow. Left-handed? Irrelevant.

"And so you and your girl here sat with a corpse for hours, waiting for darkness?"

"It wasn't that long," said Butterscotch, interrupting them. "He left it in the van for most of the day, and we stayed out of the way until the funeral home people were distracted with the viewing."

Bootsteps crunched across the parking lot behind Dusk. They weren't reacting with alarm, rather, both were opening up a bit. Must be Blitz.

"But why my front steps?"

Butterscotch shrugged, embarrassed. "It was just, the easiest place to lay it down. While Hayseed went to collect the keys. And while Gilda moved the van."

"And you hid back by the alley."

She nodded.

"What the fuck are you two doing?" demanded Blitz from behind Dusk Shine, interrupting what had been developing into a pointless waste of time, as far as Dusk was concerned. Nobody was telling her what she needed to know, which was…

"Miss Blitz!" she improvised. "Please, come and join us. We're discussing the mess you've all made of things."

The rainbow-haired bantam came stomping around, absently kicking one boot through a pile of feed in the grass, and scaring away Butterscotch's critters.

"Who the hell are you?" A tangle of braided muscles, rainbow-tinted hair, and rather watery fury. Yet more bravado?

"Hello, Miss Blitz." Dusk dragged more of Cinch out of her traumatized deep memories. "Or should I call you by your proper name, Rainbow Dash? I know why Butterscotch here has taken up a new name, but you? You've been living the life of Blitz for so long, I can't get a read on the whys and wherefores. But if you must know why I'm here, I am taking your friends to task because they scared my child with their body disposal antics."

That was interesting. The third biker had twitched when Dusk had said 'child'. Let's poke at that, and see why she's jumpy about mention of children.

"Did the doctors help you with your stomach bug, Blitz?" asked Butterscotch, looking concerned, even worried for her friend, almost to the point that it looked like she might have half-forgotten having confessed to manslaughter not ten minutes earlier.

"It wasn't a stomach bug, 'Shy. Er, Butters. You! What's your name!" Dusk wasn't the only one at this table trying to keep control of the situation.

"My name is Dusk Shine, Miss Blitz. I'm trying to figure out why you all have inserted yourselves into my child's life in the way that you have."

And there it was, the twitch again. And maybe weakness in the legs? Blitz sat down at the table opposite of Dusk Shine, next to her dejected friend. Twitchy about the mention of children, and a stomach bug that wasn't a stomach bug?

"I rather think that you and yours could use a fairy godmother, Miss Blitz. The hammer's about to come down on all of you. You're running out of time."

"Hammer? Butters, Gilda, what the hell has this grifter been telling you? What have you been telling her?"

"We ain't been saying shit, Blitz. She just knows shit. She's a fucking bruja." It was becoming impossible to focus on all of their microgestures, Dusk was losing her grip on the flow of the discussion. Focus!

"Ain't no such thing as witches, Gilda. You know that. She's been pulling that cold reading bullshit on you all. We've been through this! They're always frauds. Damnit, what do I always say? Stay away from the fortune tellers, Gilda!"

"Miss Blitz, I think you should stop insulting me, because you are in a very delicate situation." Ha! Another twitch, another tell. Was Blitz educated enough to recognize what that was a euphemism for? Maybe.

"And I rather think your future is such that you will be wanting more good fairies than bad, come the christening." And that was the fifty-ring. "You want me to be a fairy godmother, Miss Blitz, because you're in all sorts of trouble, aren't you. It's the dead boy's, of course?"

"Fuck you! You could have put all that together from these jabbermouths! I know your kind! You're reading me, you bitch!"

"Your friends don't know you're pregnant, Miss Blitz. I'd wager you didn't know yourself until – just now? Been to the Urgent Care? I'm new to town, so I can't be sure which one you've just visited, but I'm willing to bet it's the one out on the far side of College Heights. No. I think you knew. Yes, look at you. You just didn't want to know, did you?" Dusk Shine leaned back, and looked at the colorful little biker, like a twist of rawhide knotted around itself. She's so thin… Butterscotch isn't the only one on the edge here.

"And congratulations, by the way. I'm guessing you'll be keeping it? I would, if I were you. But I admit I don't know you very well just yet."

Well, that certainly got their attention. And it hadn't even required any magic. Blitz was easier to read than Goodnight, Moon. Which, thank Harmony, Flurry Heart had finally grown out of demanding every night before bedtime a few months ago, though the worn, almost tattered book still sat on a little shelf at the foot of Skyla's bed.

Wind Rider's grandchild, Dusk Shine suddenly realized. And under the warmth of that realization, a seed sprouted. Not just a seed, an idea. A plan.

But only if it was what Butterscotch needed.

Dusk Shine turned to the tall woman with an evil man's blood on her hands. "I asked you before, Miss Butterscotch. What is it you want? Do you want judgment? Do you want to be saved? What do you need? Because we can do nothing for you, until you decide who you're going to be."

The tall girl who once had been Fluttershy, and now was Butterscotch, looked desperately to her right and left, to her friend and to her lover, begging for help. But they can't make your mind up for you. Only you can do that, child, thought Dusk Shine.

"I want to start over," Butterscotch said. "I want to be a better person than I am. I thought I wanted to be stronger, wanted to- and then this happened. I just want to start over again. Can I start over?"

"I think," Dusk replied, "That might be arranged. Miss Blitz, you will have to reconcile with your man's family, I'm afraid. There's no other way that doesn't lead to you and your friends being arrested for murder and accessories after the fact. Let me explain…"

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Last Chance

Dusk Shine sat in her Beetle under the floodlights of Silversmith Custom Motors' harshly lit parking lot and procrastinated. She hadn't thought this part through properly, and wasn't ready to see the one man who could make these things happen, or wreck her entire project right here and now.

The flat fact was that Wind Rider had very few reasons in this world to save the fools who had fallen into Dusk Shine's lap, and every reason to let them drown. He was a misogynist, a misanthrope, in constant pain bordering on agony, and had very little time left to him. Dusk Shine's acquaintance with this minor drug lord and biker alpha-dog amounted to a contemptuous sentence-and-a-half tossed off in this very parking lot.

She wasn't even sure exactly where the man lived these days. She'd had to guess at his location, since she'd expended all of his hair in the bloodstone ritual. Her 'memories' seemed to indicate that he had an apartment in the back of this brick building she'd seen him and Silver Back come out of the other day. The lights were on, and she had seen some movement through the dirty glass front door which sketchily declared the existence of an Easy Rider Mortgage, Title, and Loans.

The biker girls weren't here. She'd left them in that fast food joint over beside the river, Butterscotch and Gilda competing to see how many dollar burgers and chicken sandwiches they could trick their too-skinny friend into eating. Dusk had taken Butterscotch aside at one point during their discussions, and they'd exchanged some words on the subject of fat layers and their role in gestation. They had proven to be on the same page as far as that was concerned, and Dusk thought she'd seen a heartening determination in the still-slightly-shocky pink-haired girl's eyes.

Dusk Shine wasn't the only young woman who'd found a project that day. Some people only really blossom when they have purpose in their life. You best helped them by asking them to do something difficult, by offering them a challenge, an excuse to stretch and grow.

Wind Rider wasn't one of those people. He had purpose, he had status, stature – the respect or fear of his peers and community. The one thing that loomed greatest in his world was the fact that he was leaving it. Dusk Shine couldn't save a dying man, nor was she inclined to do so, even if she could.

The man filled his world with poisons. He was a polluter. His one good contribution to society had been his son, who had been better than he ought to have been, at least as far as Dusk could tell. The world would forget that Wind Rider existed as soon as it realized that it no longer had to fear him. When he was dead? His name would be an entry on a ledger. The world would continue to spin without him.

The man's son had been the only guarantee that Wind Rider would be remembered after he died. That chance died with Soarin. Wind Rider's name had no future.

Blitz didn't seem to realize it, but she could offer Wind Rider the only thing he truly needed. The dying old man and his yet-to-be-born grandchild were both blessed that the prospective mother wasn't the sort to think of an infant as an opportunity, as a tool.

Blitz had Dusk Shine for that, it would appear.

Dusk pocketed her keys, and got out of the car.

Nobody was in the cluttered, filthy front of the title insurance office. Dusk could see the lights on in a back-office to her left, and she leaned forward across the counter to see if her target was in place. There didn't seem to be anyone in there now…

A flushing noise from Dusk's right drew her attention to a door apparently hiding a restroom on the other side of the ancient, under-maintained office. Wind Rider came shuffling out of said toilet looking like a man twice his age, dead-eyed and shrunken in on himself.

He hadn't washed his hands, the pig.

Dusk Shine stuck out her hand, almost shoving it into the old man's face, but she couldn't keep the look of disgust from her own.

"Mr. Wind Rider? We have business tonight. I am Dusk Shine."

Dusk could see him gather himself, too self-collected to startle like a lesser man might have done. He seemed to gain a full foot in height as he pulled down her insistent hand, shaking it with a pressure that increased as he drew his masculinity around him like a cloak.

"Very good to meet you, Missus Shine. I'm afraid my secretary is out this evening, you've caught me short-handed. We were handling your…?"

"Somehow, I did not expect to find you selling mortgages, Mr. Rider. It doesn't really match your reputation."

He grew somewhat sharper-eyed, truly focusing on Dusk's face for the first time. She really had caught him off guard.

"Should I be asking to see a badge? You're too alone to be here officially. Should I extend greetings to Soft Eyes over the wire, or are you federal?"

"Mr. Rider, I am not about to stand here and strip to reassure you that I am not wearing a wire. For one thing, I could have simply have hidden it in my hair, and I could stand here as skyclad as a heathen witch, and you'd never have been the wiser. No, you will simply have to take it on faith that when I discuss crimes and wickedness, we are not performing for an audience of law enforcement officers, but rather for we, ourselves, and that which sees every last act, cradle to grave.

"Please, may we retire to your office? This is not a matter for counters and front offices. Because neither of us have time to waste. You especially. You look like you're about to fall over. Have you had your pills today?"

"Who the fuck are you to- what pills? What are you talking about? Who have you been talking to?"

"Please," repeated Dusk Shine, as she invaded his personal space without his permission, stepping around the counter and into the side-office. "As I said, we have no time. Since we're on the subject of surveillance, do you sweep this office?"

The irritated biker followed Dusk into his office, and she darted back around him to slam the door shut. Dusk turned to examine the room. No cleaner than the front office, and full of ledgers, paperwork, and… hah, pill-bottle. She reached into a pocket, and grasped a special charm she kept in the glove-box of her Beetle. She pricked herself on the thorn on the side of the charm, and there was a brief flash. The laptop sitting on Wind Rider's desk suddenly dropped into sleep mode.

Huh, no sparks. The police may have not bothered to get a bug in here.

"Wait, what the fuck just happened? What was that flash? Who are you?"

"Sit down before you fall down, Mr. Rider. Hmm, haven't had many visitors in here recently, have you? Sorry if this deranges your filing system, if you even have such a thing." Dusk grabbed a disordered pile of folders and stapled forms, and dumped them onto the floor, clearing enough room for her to sit on the office's couch. "Please, Mr. Rider, sit down, if you would be so kind. I will do no more damage to your office. We have much to talk about, and I don't have to tell you that you've no time at all.

"Before we start, may I express my condolences for the loss of your son. From all that I have been able to uncover, he was a much better man than you have ever been, and the world justly mourns his loss."

The old biker's impotent rage banked a bit in the face of this courtesy. He sat down heavily, and looked over at the pill-bottle sitting besides his inexplicably turned-off computer. Then he turned to look at this pushy young woman who'd invaded his place of business.

"Thank you, Ma'am. We're having the funeral run tomorrow. I guess you didn't know him, then. Where do I know you from… wait. You're the twist that Silver Back had out in the dealership the other day. Were you casing us? Who sent you? Who are you with?"

"Nobody sent me, Mr. Rider. I am with no-one but myself. I am, however, with you, right now, and that's the important point. Because as I said, time is not your friend. Your cancer will take you very, very soon if I am not mistaken. You've been carrying it through main strength, I think, and now that you're alone in this world? The collapse comes very soon now, I believe."

The old man looked like he wanted to surge to his feet with righteous fury, but Dusk could tell he wasn't getting back up out of that chair without help. Yes, he's definitely been sampling heavily from that pill-bottle. Look at his eyes.

"Mr. Rider. You've got nothing left in this world, now that your boy is gone. He was all that was good in you, all that was left of his mother, was he not? You poor, damned man. You just wanted to see his face, didn't you? And you got him killed."

The stoned old man just stared at her, his face almost frozen between rage and heartbreak. It looked like he was working his way towards a stroke.

"The one thing a parent desires, before all other things, is to never outlive their children. You fucked that up good, didn't you?" Kindness is cruelty to this man. "You called him home, and instead, he got himself killed, trying to be you. Why did he do that? Why did a good boy suddenly try to play the gangster?"

"Thought… thought I needed him to be that, said the wrong thing to him… fuck you, lady, how long have you been bugging me? Where's the tap? I could have sworn…"

"Mr. Rider, you could never find my 'bugs'. My sources of information are impossible to screen against. But I must walk back your self-incrimination on one particular. Soarin wasn't simply trying to impress you, I do not think. No, he was trying to act a role, play a part. The boy's tragedy was that his role-model was you, you fool. His conception of 'father' was a drug-dealing bully, the poor thing."

The dazed old man's lips moved, echoing the word 'father' soundlessly.

"Yes, I'm afraid so, although I cannot prove it, certainly not in a court of law. We have less of the angels in us, and more of the animal than we like to think. I believe that Soarin knew what nobody else, not even the mother knew yet. Something in her scent, something in what she smelled like. Something that made him go out and try to bring in one big score, to make a nest in the way you showed him, the way you've always provided.

"She only really figured it out today, you know. Soarin wasn't the only one operating on sheer primal instinct, animal impulses."

The narcotics slowed Wind Rider's reactions, but he eventually worked through the haze. "You're talking about the rainbow bitch. The one who keeps stalking me."

"Yes, the rainbow bitch who keeps exchanging obscenities with you, as if you were two primitive savages whose only common tongue was profanity. Your boy's woman. The mother of his unborn child, if you two fools don't get the poor thing dead through mischance or miscarriage. A miscarriage, mind you, which I don't need to be a prophetess or a seeress to predict coming very soon now if someone doesn't take that girl in hand."

"What are you talking-"

"She's a biker, Wind Rider. A motorcycle is not the safest environ for gestation. For an expectant mother. I'd expect someone with your experience to know that. And her physique isn't helping matters. If that woman has an ounce of body fat to spare, I'd be astonished. Did you know she's a circus worker? Or she was, before she just took off to carry your boy home to you. Worked for some travelling festival down in central Texas, so I gather. Explains why she looks like an Olympic athlete, I imagine. But Olympic athletes aren't known for carrying babies to term, are they?

"She's too strong for her own good, Mr Rider. She'll lose the baby if someone isn't there to help her be… a mother. That rainbow bitch is carrying your grandchild, if the two of you don't get it killed before it can make it through childbirth. Mr. Rider, I'm telling you that you have one last chance to leave something behind you besides drug addicts and a name on the wall of your clubhouse. You don't deserve it, God knows that, but you have it nonetheless. Do you have the strength to grab hold of this last chance, this very last chance that the world will offer you before the cancer liquefies your insides?"

The old man started crying. That was how Dusk Shine knew it was over.

She'd given him what he needed.

She gave Wind Rider Blitz's cell phone number, and he called the biker girls where they'd been waiting at that fast-food joint. Blitz herself was kind of woozy and withdrawn when they showed up at the title insurance office, half-asleep and on the brink of a food coma. Gilda and Dusk Shine did most of the talking, with Wind Rider filling in the gaps when they didn't have the necessary information, or correcting their assumptions where Dusk didn't understand a particular point or Gilda was ignorant of local relationships between the police, the bikers, and the courts.

After a half-hour, Wind Rider's pet lawyer showed up, having been imperiously summoned by the aging biker king. The lawyer had been about to go up to the county jail to talk to his other client, Hayseed Turniptruck when their call came. The lawyer, the girls, and Wind Rider moved the meeting from Rider's impossibly crowded office to his equally filthy, but more spacious living room in the attached apartment at the back of the building. They talked through scenarios, discussed where the physical evidence could be found, how they could be manipulated, what Hayseed's part in this would have to be, who could confuse matters with this alibi or that.

Wind Rider broke out a separate set of pills from a cabinet part way through this discussion, and washed down a handful with a glass of water. His glassiness faded, and Dusk Shine began to see the sharp-eyed devil that had been hiding under all of that fatigue, misery, and defeat.

The one thing during the planning that left Dusk Shine unsatisfied was that nobody saw any way to salvage Hayseed Turniptruck. Every other part fit with each other part as if they'd all been manufactured to the same tolerances, like they'd been made to fall into exactly this configuration. Only Hayseed laid against the pattern. He stuck out like a single broken piece of porcelain woven into the heart of a web of crystal, gemstones, and jewel-wire. The authorities had him dead to rights. The poor boy was going to have to 'ride the rap', as Wind Rider put it. The lawyer promised to get the best plea deal for the fool that he could get.

After another hour of discussion and debate, Gilda and the old biker left on his personal Harley, roaring out into the autumn darkness to find the dead Salvaje's motorcycle, hidden in plain sight in some big-box parking lot west of Nashville. The lawyer left to give Hayseed Turniptruck his reassurances, and his instructions.

Dusk Shine took the other two biker girls to their motel room out by the interstate, dropping off Blitz and Butterscotch to get their rest. Butterscotch promised with fire in her eyes to keep her friend in bed as long as she could. They'd left their motorcycles in Silver Back's parking lot, so Blitz couldn't be tempted by the prospect of a leisurely morning drive, not until Butterscotch could get her friend to slow down - to stop threatening the life of her unborn child with every wild, thoughtless ride on that rumbling abortifacient she called a motorcycle.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help with this chapter to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Now And In The Hour

Dusk Shine and Skyla attended mass the next morning, in the closest approximation of 'Sunday Best' Dusk had been able to put together for the two of them. Their best wasn't very good, not just yet. She had concentrated so far on work clothing, and thus had been forced to come to church in her cleanest pair of slacks and a nice blouse, with a cross-shaped crystal brooch she'd made herself. Skyla was a little more dolled up, but it was easier to get frilly second-hand clothing for children at short notice.

They grew out of even their best clothing so quickly, after all. Children's finery could often be found barely-worn in the second hand shops.

Our Princess of Heaven in College Heights was the closest local Harmonist church; the only one in Dashville, really. This part of the country was overwhelmingly, fiercely Accordist, but those churches were just too austere, too stern, too… too much for Dusk Shine. Even a Harmonist church like Our Princess was more familiar, more comforting. The church building itself was, sadly, a modernist horror, all swooping curves and weird materials. It was one of those asymmetrical postwar architectural oddities that sometimes looked as if some alien species had descended from outer space to leave behind unsettling fortresses of steel and concrete, with gravel and stones embedded randomly and roughly in the concrete.

The parishioners of Our Princess were likewise a peculiar mix of railroad retirees, university employees, students, and the odd professor or two. The priest was a young and bulge-eyed Friar Minor with an astonishing afro poof of hair; Dusk had heard from a pew-gossip that the bishopric had brought him in from some poor country in the western Sahel. All she knew was that his French-inflected lilt reminded her of Twilight's grand-mère; it made the pastoral sermon strangely nostalgic for Dusk.

This was Skyla's second mass here in Dashville. Her second, ever, honestly. As far as Dusk could tell, Cadance and Shining Heart hadn't even had Flurry Heart baptized. Dusk didn't know how to address that without exposing them both to gossip and examination she didn't care to invite. For the time being, she had explained baptism to Skyla, and told her to deflect questions on the subject as part of being 'Skyla'. The little girl sat piously in the pew next to her 'mother', watching the ceremony, the ritual and the choir with innocent eyes, not at all overly intense or hawk-like.

Their voices rose to join that of the rest of the congregation "…full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed are you…" Dusk could feel the strange shape of the old, half-familiar words, half-forgotten. They sounded different in English, and she had to keep close watch on herself lest she sing the responses in her grand-mère's church's native tongue. Twilight's parents had been, at best, holiday Harmonists, and most of her experience of mass had been during her summers spent with Grand-Mère Clair, who had been oddly intense on the subject of regular church attendance. Twilight Sparkle had been less than enthused by the experience of French-language mass, and when she'd moved north to join her brother and his new Crystaller family, she'd shed the habit of church attendance without any real twinge or sense of loss.

She wasn't sure what Dusk Shine thought about church, not really. She was still learning how to be Dusk. Dusk Shine needed to be seen as pious, Dusk thought. It was another piece of protective coloration that would help establish the two of them as themselves, and no-one else.

The resources of Our Princess of Heaven would also help when it came to taking care of Skyla when Dusk Shine couldn't keep an eye on her. Bubble Berry had lectured Dusk extensively when she'd finally been able to break free and retrieve Skyla from the put-upon child care director. It had been very late, and if Bubble Berry didn't keep a second shift for the children of women who worked the evening shift, Dusk would have been in a great deal of trouble with the henna-haired Bubble Berry, indeed.

After finally winding down, Berry had taken a deep sniff, leaning uncomfortably close to a flustered Dusk Shine, and conceded that Dusk hadn't smelled 'like smoke and whiskey', and dismissed her with a warning to 'never do that again, y'hear?'

So… yeah, Dusk Shine needed to expand her circle of acquaintances, and among the respectable and unobjectionable, if she could possibly manage it. Respectability was an armor, and associating yourself with the respectable extended, in a limited way, that armor over yourself. So she and Skyla were pretending as hard as they could, sitting piously among the congregation.

And so we pretend to be what we wish to be, in faith that masks mold the face that wears them.

Dusk Shine listened to the hymns, and thought about what she'd done the day before. The consequences were unfolding as she and Skyla sat, inactive, here in a church. The bikers were gathered, somewhere, north of town, doing whatever it was that biker outlaws did to celebrate the life of one of their dead. What heathen ceremonies were they performing to remember Soarin, fool, lover, clown, and now never-father?

Dusk didn't even know if Gilda and Wind Rider had returned from their Orphean travel into the black night, to retrieve the proofs of manslaughter and death left somewhere in darkest Tennessee. She could only put her faith in those she'd met, that they would find the motorcycle and the murder-weapon, that they'd bring it back here, to Dashville, for the police to find in the possession of the right man.

She saw, in her mind's-eye, the old man, tired beyond belief, riding on a dead man's motorcycle, panniers full of incriminating evidence, appropriately covered in misleading fingerprints. She saw him riding in state, among his chapter's loyal fellows, carrying his son's ashes on that boy's last ride in this world. She hoped that they'd gotten Blitz to ride in a side-car or something like that, to convince her that she needed to stop riding about like a wild-woman, until at least, her unborn child was better-seated in the woman's small and under-stocked womb.

Dusk Shine looked up at Our Princess's Mother-statue, in a position of honor beside the chorus. She raised up her voice with enthusiasm as the Hail Mother resumed, "…Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

Dusk Shine returned to her life as a school-teacher and a mother, biding her time. She did not contact any of the principals of her little conspiracy, kept away from the police and didn't even seek out Poppy Seed. Not that this kept Poppy from her door. The deputy marshal stopped by the apartment the next Wednesday after school, to look in on Dusk and Skyla.

Poppy Seed, over-tall and awkwardly crowded in Dusk's apartment's narrow hallway, looked around uncomfortably, unsettled and nervous.

"I could have sworn we'd gotten you something bigger than this. How are the two of you fitting in this shoebox?" Poppy shuffled into the living room, which was itself fairly narrow and crowded, a worn couch facing the television shoved up against the thin interior wall, and a pair of armchairs shoved into the room's spare corners, their leather cracked, their wood frames battered and just short of splintered from decades of abuse.

"Have a seat, Miss Seed."

"Nah, that's OK, I just wanted to look in on you two, and make sure you weren't in any sort of trouble, or having any issues. I thought I'd hear from you about this body business, but you've been quiet. Nobody's been bothering you?"

"No, ma'am, not at all. It's been a quiet week. We've been careful, and kept a look-out, but nothing so far. Has there been news I should know about?"

"Well, it turns out it had nothing at all to do with you, just a stupid, crazy coincidence. They found the dead man's property. Being ridden around by the murderer, if you can believe it! The balls on these bikers. Like a damn Mongol lord, stealing the horses of the men they killed."

"They made an arrest?"

"Oh, yeah, a couple of 'em. The local drug lord ambushed the victim over in Arkansas, we think over a drug shipment the dead man was tracking for his own gang. Maybe planning to rip off a shipment?"

"Oh, my. How terrible. They found the drugs?"

"Yeah, you can put a pin in the performance, we're not in public. And no, it wasn't crystal molly. Common household meth, typical biker bullshit. So, a simple gangland killing. They just got interrupted getting rid of the evidence. A wild coincidence, that's all."

"A coincidence birthed by you people putting us in an apartment next door to a criminal enterprise, it appears."

"Look, nobody really made the connection between the funeral home and the bikers in a business sense before this. God knows how much evidence has gone up that chimney stack over the years. They're getting the funeral home to install a set of motion-sensor cameras to record what goes in and out of that crematorium from here out, now. The funeral home operator swears on a stack of scripture that any misuse of the damn thing was the responsibility of individual employees, etc, etc, the usual ass-covering. You know how that goes."

"So we'll be under observation now as we come and go from this apartment?"

"Aw, nah, the cameras will be inside the garage, I think? I dunno, I didn't pay close attention, I can ask if you like."

"That would be nice…" and then they went onto other subjects, such as the management of the assets which Twilight had paid into the program when they'd first been signed up, and so forth.

The arrest of Wind Rider finally made it into the newspapers a few days later. It made an impressive story, matching in most particulars Dusk Shine's imaginings of how it should have happened. The detective Soft Eyes had waited at the end of the Steel Horsemen's 'final ride', and stood surrounded by uniformed police as they watched Wind Rider and Blitz empty Soarin's ashes over a county road as a strong westerly wind blew the dead biker's remains across the fields and the asphalt.

When the outlaw bikers had finished with their 'illegal disposal of a corpse', Soft Eyes and his men advanced on the old biker, and took him into custody for the crime they'd just observed. It was at this point that one of the uniformed policemen had noted the Texas plates on the motorcycle Wind Rider had been riding. Shortly after someone discovered those plates listed as the other dead man's vehicle, all hell broke loose.

Even now, Wind Rider was refusing to confess to anything, but the newspaper reports insisted that they had the murderous biker-king dead to rights. Salvaje violence had been savagely reciprocated, and the authorities had intervened. This was not Texas, after all! He had it coming was not the letter of the law in law-abiding Virginia.

Bail had been set, and paid. Wind Rider was already out, and no doubt sitting back in his title-insurance office, fighting his rear-guard action against cancer and its endless hosts of misery and agony.

The mechanics at Silversmith Custom Motors left a message for Dusk Shine at some point that week, letting her know that the parts for her Beetle's scheduled maintenance had arrived. Saturday morning, she stopped by with the Beetle to drop it off, planning to walk the relatively short distance home.

While Dusk Shine was talking with Silver Back outside of his garage, she looked up to see Gilda and Blitz leave the title insurance office across the way. She thought maybe she'd seen the grey head of the dying man through his office's filthy glass door, but that might have only been Dusk's imagination.

"Oh, hello, ladies. Miss Shine, these two are new arrivals, I think maybe you saw last week-"

"Yes, Mr. Back, I remember the conversation. I trust you ladies have settled your dispute with that angry man?"

"Aw, don't take Wind Rider too seriously, ma'am," said the solid biker-mechanic. "He's got a hell of a bark, but his bite's been over-stated by some."

"Wasn't he in the papers this week? The man was responsible for that corpse on my stairs! I think his bite has been stated exactly!"

"Yeah, well, I don't care what the papers say, some people just have it coming, and that Salvaje boy definitely had it coming, don't you think, ladies?"

"Uh, yeah." "I guess?"

"Anyways, these folks are from out west, same as you. Where'd you say you were from, Ma'am? Somewhere out on the coast?"

"Southern California. Santa Monica."

"Right, right."

"Silver, Texas is over fifteen hundred miles from Santa Monica!" laughed Blitz.

"The view from Forge Road according to the New Yorker?" Dusk Shine smiled. "I think I saw you at the police station the other week. Weren't there three of you?"

"Aw, Butters is at work right now. We're going to pick her up, she should be done pretty soon. It's a nice day, thought we'd maybe go feed some ducks or something."

"Metternich Park is nice this time of year, isn't it?"

The two biker chicks climbed on board an old-fashioned motorcycle with a classic side-car. It hadn't been a vehicle either of them had been driving the last time Dusk Shine had seen them. She couldn't help smirking.

"Goddamnit, lady, don't make fun of me!" fumed Blitz from her somewhat comedic perch in the side-car. "They won't let me ride a hog anymore, the overprotective so-and-sos."

"Shaddup, Blitz, you're embarrassing us. Nice to meetcha, Miss Shine. See you around," And off they roared.

"Well," said Dusk Shine, turning around to the bemused Silver Back, "that seems like rather a turnaround. They reconciled with Mr. Rider?"

"Yup. Th' prospect of a pup in the kennel will bring even mean old junkyard dogs like Wind Rider around, if you give them them time to get used ta th' idear. Almost enough to bring a tear to yer eyes, ain't it?" Then he turned to discussion of labor and parts charges, and they dropped the subject.

Dusk Shine and Skyla found the biker girls sprawling around the demolished remnants of a picnic lunch in the grass sward between the still-abandoned mill and the riverside woodlot at the back of Metternich Park. Blitz was dead asleep, curled up on a battered blanket in the afternoon sun, and the other two were sitting closely together on the picnic table bench, leaning backward against the table and gazing fondly down at the sleeping woman.

Skyla suddenly spooked, and went dashing past the three intruders into her world, racing into the woods before any of the women could react to her presence. This left Dusk Shine standing embarrassed, staring somewhat irately in the direction her daughter had disappeared.

Finally, she looked down at the two bikers, who clearly couldn't decide whether they should be ashamed or amused by the situation. "Oh, go ahead and laugh, it's better than crying, I suppose."

"Is- will she be OK? I knew we shouldn't have come, uh-"

"Oh, shut up, dweeb, you can't help it by curling up like that. Sorry we scared your little girl, Miss Shine. Wasn't sure you'd come after Blitz and I dropped the hint. Sorry she didn't stay awake long enough to greet y'all, but, well."

Dusk Shine looked at the obliterated lunch spread, and made the obvious deduction. "Food coma?"

"Oh, sort of?" equivocated Butterscotch. "We've been feeding her a lot of carbs, that can make you sleepy."

"Well, good enough," said Dusk Shine, set down her own picnic basket on the table, and sat at the far side of the same bench, trying not to crowd the two of them in their cozy cuddle. "I brought my own contributions, but that can wait until she finishes her nap, I suppose. And Skyla will emerge once she's determined that you haven't done anything to her sanctum. Or maybe when she gets hungry enough, I can't be sure, really."

"Your daughter's name is Skyla?" asked the tall pink-haired woman. "That's an interesting name. What's it mean?"

"Honestly? I have no idea. Family name, her great-grandmother named her, wouldn't tell anyone else what it meant." That lie was starting to get well-worn, it almost had the shape of truth.

"Funniest thing," said Gilda, looking lazily over her shoulder at Dusk. "Dweeb here and that slugabed on the grass down there are from California, too. Some obscure northern city I'd never heard of before. Both of 'em left that burg separately, went through seven kinds of hell, and somehow ended up tripping over each other in a Dallas convenience-store parking lot thousands of road-miles away from where they started. Hell of a thing, coincidences."

"Yes, quite a coincidence. What town in northern California are you two from, originally, Butterscotch?"

"Oh? You don't know? You seemed to know so much, I just assumed…"

"Irrelevant details sometimes don't come up if I'm focused on other matters. What town?"

"Uh, Canterlot City? We went to Canterlot High School together, before Blitz dropped out. I suppose it doesn't matter after all of these years. I got my diploma, and she didn't, but it didn't really help me that much."

"Hell, girl," objected Gilda, "you got more than that, didn't you? Sounded to me like you're at least two-thirds of the way to a degree in veterinarianism or something like that."

"Veterinarian science, Gilda, and those credits belong to Fluttershy. I'm not sure how I'd start that back up again as who I am now."

The two of them started in on what sounded like a well-worn argument, gently fought but heartfelt for all of that. But Dusk Shine was having difficulty focusing on the girls' plans for the future.

Twilight Sparkle had grown up in Canterlot City. Gone to a private academy, never actually set foot in Canterlot High School, but she knew where it was, passed by it now and again with its preposterous, over-sized marble horse-statue and imposing façade right up against the south side's main drag. What are the odds?

Skyla finally crept out of the woods an hour later, as Gilda and a drowsy Blitz argued about whether to go buy some more food from the coin-operated dispensers way the heck over on the other side of the park, or to just feed the critters gathered around Butterscotch from the crumbs and remains of their picnic. Butterscotch's soft-spoken description of where they were living now – an apartment courtesy of Wind Rider, a generous loft in a converted warehouse deep in the back of the Bottoms – came to a halt as she caught sight of the skittish little girl.

Skyla's gaze bent down towards the animals – the birds and chipmunks gathered around the feet of the shyly smiling pink-haired woman. Then she stared up at Butterscotch, looking for all the world like a wary alley-cat assessing the threat presented by a kindly-faced old lady standing over a bowl of dry catfood on a back porch.

"Hello," said Butterscotch gently. "What's your name? I'm Butterscotch. Do you want to help feed the critters?"

Skyla nodded, silently. Dusk Shine watched her daughter step out of the shadowed woods to join mommy and mommy's new friends in the warm sunlight.

Author's Note

And that's a wrap for this story. Dusk Shine and Skyla should be back in the future - no murder mystery or detective series is complete at just one book! And the mysterious Crystaller cult still lurks out there somewhere in that anonymous sea of humanity that washes between the American coasts. It would be a much different story if Dusk Shine was simply a paranoid young lady playing with crystal handicrafts, after all.

I really must thank Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company for their invaluable advice, pre-reading, and editing help.

None of this would have been written if not for the peculiar inspiration provided by that great piece of art. Thanks again to Racoon-kun and the actual commissioner of the artwork, Axelstripe, for letting me use it on the story.

See y'all next time.

Remember, Your Name is Skyla!

As her classic little Bug rolled further and further from Memphis, the tightness in Twilight Sparkle's chest loosened more and more. It was as if the moment they crossed the great bridge over the Mississippi, her brother's father-in-law's lidless gaze had finally been drawn away from the two of them. Perhaps the old book had been right about running water and their effect upon remote-viewing magic!

Not that Twilight Sparkle believed in magic. She'd had enough of all that, enough for a lifetime, and more.

But Shining Armor had insisted on marrying into that horrible, mad family, and sometimes Twilight could swear that crazy was catching. Harmony knows she'd seen enough inexplicable things in the last six years to last a lifetime!

Or two.

Flurry Heart was waking up again. She'd been so good at the sentencing hearing, solemn and quiet, like a good Sparkle. Twilight looked at her again out of the corner of her eye, and she could see nothing of the mad Crystals in her beautiful little niece. Flurry was the best parts of her late mother and father, and Twilight wouldn't have traded this moment for anything in the world.

Nothing that she could afford, anyways. And 'King' Sombra's conviction and life sentence was demonstration enough of what came of bargaining with lives for 'dark magic' and its wicked promises.

The two of them had spent almost a year in Fort Worth, pretending to be some other purple-haired young woman and her 'daughter'. Twilight was more than glad to leave 'Midnight Glimmer' and 'Fussykins' behind, along with that series of ugly, miserable back-road motels that WitSec had stored them in like a pair of mis-matched shoes in a bus terminal locker.

Flurry was already almost a year behind in her schooling. She really should be going to grade school in a couple days, not simply kindergarten. But Twilight had to acknowledge the logic of the deputy marshals. They had to fudge the details of their new lives and personas as much as the painfully obvious facts could allow.

As they passed the exit for Jackson, Twilight thought about pulling over for lunch, but Flurry was already asleep again, and she didn't want her niece cranky and disagreeable for the rest of the trip. At the highway speeds her old Bug could maintain, they still had almost seven hours before they would even be nearby the new place that the deputy marshals had supposedly found for them.

Twilight hoped that they had done what they said they could, and she would be able to use her training at a nice school. She'd kept up on her classwork, despite the miserable conditions in Fort Worth, and had passed her final exams remotely, over an off-the-shelf video-conferencing piece of rentware the marshals had gotten for her somewhere. Her college had been very, very understanding, and so had been the teaching college in Dallas that they'd let her use for her last batch of exams, sitting before the camera of an anonymous laptop in an empty classroom.

Even if Twilight had recognized a face reflected in a window behind the exam-proctor in the last exam she had taken, lurking in the video background. Twilight had almost not aced that one, especially after she lip-read the threats that disciple had made while she struggled through the social-science methods exam, barely keeping the doubled-mentality required to regurgitate the current dogma they were insisting upon that semester.

Technically, Twilight was short a semester of student teaching, but the marshals hadn't been willing to put her in a classroom full of grade-schoolers while using her paper-thin Fort Worth cover. They were just going to… 'waive' that part of her degree. By which, Twilight believed, they meant 'forge'.

If only Cadance's father had waited another year before he went and murdered half the family and most of his neighbors. He could have taken my pedagogical coursework into account, damn it!

This was not as insane a regret as it appears, from Twilight's perspective. 'King' Sombra had always taken a weirdly paternal interest in his daughter's sister-in-law, and Twilight had spent more time with the old lunatic than she was really proud of these days.

The Wit-Sec marshals had repeatedly emphasized that the witness protection program was primarily concerned with, and constructed around, the criminal class. They had been extremely suspicious of Twilight's claims that she was blameless and innocent of any crimes associated with Sombra's mad spree.

Even though this was totally true.

Really!

Twilight had broken no laws of man, and any laws of God – well. She may have bent a few, some as far as they would go, but she'd killed no-one, materially harmed no-one, and damaged – well, almost nothing.

Nothing she had cared to testify in court about, anyways.

Twilight looked up in the rear-view mirror, and eyed the modified dreamcatchers hanging on both sides of the rear window of her Bug. The one on the left was a little scorched, but she couldn't tell if it was more scorched than it had been before the bridge over the Mississippi west of Memphis. She hadn't smelled any more burning hemp, though, so it was possible they'd lost the haints that had kept after them, even after the end of the hearing in Tulsa. Twilight had re-woven the special 'catchers according to her own grandfather's recipe while Flurry had slept in yet another hotel room outside of Tulsa, deputy marshals laying in wait in rooms on either side of them.

Not that the poor hapless marshals would have been able to stop a death-hex if one had come their way. Twilight had been careful to leave specially woven lint-tags on every deputy marshal she came into contact with – it had become a part of her greeting ritual with new faces in the program – grab their hand during the shake, grab them on their free arm, then while they recoiled at the overly-handsy young woman's dubious grasp of personal space, flick the protective tag into their pockets or against a belt.

Twilight had never seen one of her little charms fall off of its own accord, but more than one had gone up in nasty green-black flame during one of the Crystal cult's various ambushes and manufactured 'confrontations'.

OK, a concession must be made. Twilight did her best to not believe in magic, but magic had a distressing insistent tendency to believe in Twilight. And Twilight certainly believed in self-defense. It was just a matter of – well. The Second Amendment was a thing. And the federal government didn't believe in registering dark magic practitioners, no matter how good of an idea it might be.

Mostly because the federal government didn't believe in dark magic - and Twilight sympathized, she so desperately wanted to not believe in dark magic, too! - but the point remains.

Twilight pulled off of I-40 east of Nashville, and found a famously carnivorous fast food joint for a late lunch. Flurry was being Fussykins again, so it was just in time. Twilight fed her niece a pair of sliders, and enjoyed a leisurely French dip, letting Flurry dip her curly fries in the leftover sauce-bowl, while Twilight went through her messages on the phone the 'program' had given her.

They were going to be confiscating the phone when she met her new handler in Dashville. And giving her a new one. This would be the fifth phone she'd had in the last fifteen months. Even if she'd wanted to retain any contacts with her old life, this constant juggling of disposable phones had managed to get her contact-lists hopelessly deranged, and then, finally, lost.

The only people Twilight and Flurry knew anymore were deputy marshals. It was as if their entire world had shrunk until Twilight could only see two rings of acquaintances – the marshals that protected her and little Flurry, and those shadowy cultists who were determined to murder them.

Twilight got Flurry packed out of that mecca for meat-loving obsessives, and back in her Bug for the last leg of their trip eastwards. They followed that great interstate up into the Smokey Mountains, and Flurry bounced in her seat in delight at the view. Their time in Texas and Oklahoma had been more than a little depressing for Flurry, and Twilight suspected that she associated the flat and featureless plains with their enforced loneliness and isolation.

Twilight found an oldies country station on the radio, and the two of them sang along with John Denver and Willie Nelson and others she didn't quite recognize. She hadn't really been a country-western fan in her old life, but she'd had a friend who had been, and it was a bit nostalgic, remembering…

They made a game of chasing country music across the dial as the old Bug labored eastwards and upwards, and tiny little low-wattage stations came and went.

About an hour out of Knoxville, Twilight's phone rang.

"Flurry, honey, can you answer that? Auntie doesn't have her hands free."

"'Kay!" The little girl picked up the smartphone, and swiped at it a bit, until she got the phone feature to activate. "Hey-llo. This is my aunt's phone. May I innn-quire who is calling? Uh-huh. Uh-huh."

Flurry turned to face Twilight, and chirped, cheerfully – "Agent Seed says we're supposed to meet her at the next exit beyond the state line! And that the safe-word is 'chitlins'."

"She called herself an agent, Flurry?"

"Naw, but I think they ought to call themselves that, right Agent Seed? OK, bye-bye." Flurry ended the call.

"Wait, no- dang it, Flurry, I wanted to find out what our new names would be, first."

"We're gonna meet her in Virginia, ain't we?"

"Aren't we, Flurry, and the sooner we get the new names, the easier they will be to remember. I don't want you calling me by one of our old names, or introducing yourself for that matter. We need to what?"

"PRACTICE!"

"Good girl. Now what about this Seed person?"

"AGENT Seed! 'Cause she's a secret, agent man! Secret, agent man!"

Twilight regretted letting Flurry listen to that song so often, but their music selections had been so limited… "They gave him a number, and took away his name…"

Twilight would only be able to sing along with her little niece for so long, before she got older and too sullen for car-trip singalongs.

They pulled into the rest area just beyond the Tennessee-Virginia state line just as twilight gave way to true night, the glaring lights along the interstate fighting away the encroaching darkness. Flurry was asleep again, having conked out after one last chorus of her favorite song. But at least she'd told Twilight what 'Agent Seed''s vehicle would look like – a 'big blue Ford pickup!' Which was…

Four out of two dozen vehicles on the 'cars' side of the rest stop.

Southerners!

Twilight got out of her Bug, and looked around for any motion in the vicinity. As usual, there were families milling about, and people quick-stepping towards the rest-rooms, or ambling slowly back to their cars.

The dome light on a late-model blue F250 lit up not too many stalls away from where Twilight was standing, and the truck's driver-side door opened up, discharging a tall blonde woman wearing sunglasses.

At night, wonderful.

Twilight stepped forward, tentatively. She looked over her shoulder to make sure that nobody else was approaching her car with her sleeping niece inside while her back was turned. Then she tried her best to focus on the person actually in front of her.

And Twilight blushed because she had come to the realization that she was behaving like a crazy person.

"Hello there! I hope you're Deputy Marshal Seed, because if you're not, then I'm so very screwed. Tell me you're who I think you are?"

"Yeah, you're exactly like they said you are. Hello, honey, I'm Poppy Seed. Uh, 'chitlins', I suppose. I'll be your handler while you're living in your new home. Just to be sure – where are you going?"

"I'm going to some town I've never heard of, called Dashville. I guess it's a city somewhere further down the highway?"

"Yeah, another twenty-five minutes from here, assuming that ludicrous antique you're driving will make it that far. Do you think you could have found a more distinctive car? Did you try?"

"What's wrong with my VW? I love that car. My late parents gave me that car."

"Looking at the age of it, I wouldn't be surprised if your grandparents gave your parents that car. It's going to stick out like a damn hammered thumb here in the sticks."

"If I sold it, the title trail would just lead right back to me. And I have… attachment issues when it comes to this car."

I can't tell her I've got it counter-hexed five ways from the Sabbath and so layered in protections that most traffic cops don't even see it on the road.

"Can- can we change the subject? Do I have a job? Do we have an apartment? Do we have names?"

The tall blonde finally took off her sunglasses, and looked down at Twilight.

She makes me feel like a pygmy. Where did they find this woman, Themyscira?

"In order, yes, yes, and we've got paperwork for you as Dusk Shine and, wait a tick-" Deputy Seed looked down and rummaged around in a fanny pack she had strapped behind her, pulling out couple pieces of paper, and fumbling for the right one, squinting in the indifferent glare of the lights far overhead. "Skyla. Skyla? Really? Were her parents supposed to be hippies? What kind of a name is 'Skyla'?"

"No… no, that's fine. We can live with that. Her grandfather would never in a million years think to look for a Skyla." Twilight – no, Dusk Shine thought a bit, trying to find her place in the conversation. "Wait, you named me Dusk Shine? Isn't that a bit on the nose?"

"Pfft. Do you have any idea how many time-of-day names there are in Virginia phone-books? Anybody who goes looking will find themselves at least fifteen Dusk Glimmers, Dusk Shimmers, or Dust Twinkles to bother before they get to you. Relax, we've got you covered, Miss Shine. Oh, by the way, congratulations, you're a mother."

"Oh, no – no no no no, Flurry – ugh! Skyla will not understand that one, not at all! She knows who mommy is, and I am definitely not her! She'll break cover inside of a day, I know it!"

"Not my problem, Miss Shine. A purple-haired young teacher with an orphaned niece will attract the wrong sort of attention. You have no idea how much the goddamn internet has complicated my job in the last ten years. Enough to drive you crazy."

Dusk Shine looked up at her new WitSec handler, and thought that if she had been working as a deputy marshal ten years ago, then they must be recruiting them out of middle school these days.

"Fine! Can you get me directions to the new apartment, and any paperwork I'll need for tomorrow? And they said you'd have a new phone for me?"

"Yeah, here you go. We'll need the old one. Hey, Bill! Come over here!"

Another blue F-250 disgorged another deputy marshal, who sauntered over to where the two women had been talking on the sidewalk.

"Give Lading Bill here your phone. He's going to drive it up into the North East somewhere, let anyone tracking your phone see if they can't go looking for you in Connecticut or the Hudson Valley. Get going, Bill, thanks."

The silent deputy saluted Seed, and ambled back to his pickup, getting in and barely letting the engine start before he squealed out of the parking lot and headed back out onto the superhighway.

"Your directions are on that phone, it's temporarily unlocked. Put a passcode or something on that before you forget, you know how important security is. I'll meet you at your new place, and we can go over your new papers and so on, there."

Twi- no, damnit, Dusk Shine stepped closer to her new deputy-handler-whatever-they-wanted to call themselves, and grabbed her by what looked like her non-dominant hand, and flicked one of her last prepared charms against the deputy-marshal's belt-buckle. "Nice to meet you, Poppy. My parents always taught me to start a new friendship off on the right foot. My apologies, I almost forgot my manners."

Poppy Seed stared down at her charge, and then snorted, smiling a little bit. "Huh, my mistake. I think maybe you'll settle in here just fine, you've got the reflexes for Southern living. But try not to be so grabby, the hillfolk can be touchy about their personal space, Miss Shine."

After settling a few other details, Dusk Shine returned to her VW Bug, where a little girl had awoken from her nap, and was now rubbing her eyes and staring at what she no doubt still thought of as her aunt. Dusk Shine stepped around to the driver's side, and got back into the car.

"Hey, there, sweetheart. Have a good nap? I've got your new name, and directions to our new place. We're getting an apartment, one we can decorate the way we want, won't that be nice?"

"Uh-huh. Name. OK. Wait, will there be hills?"

"I don't know, sweetie. Maybe? I hope so, but I can't be sure, I haven't seen it yet. Your name, sweetie – you're going to be Skyla from now on." Dusk Shine looked anxiously down at her- her-

Agh! I cannot possibly think of Skyla as my daughter! This is preposterous!

"Sky-la? It's kinda short, isn't it? What's it even mean?"

"That's something we're going to have to figure out between the two of us. And that's not the only thing. Skyla, they kind of… arbitrarily changed our relationship in the paperwork. It's going to be something new! We're going to get to play a new game!"

"What's arbitrarily mean?"

"Uh, for no good reason, Skyla. They just decided it, without asking me or anything. And I wish they hadn't done it, because-"

"What'd they change, Aunt – uh, weren't you supposed to get a name too?"

"Here's the thing, sweetie, I'm not going to be your Aunt anymore. Say-"

Oh, shit, might as well just rip the band-aid right off, right?

"Hello, Skyla, I'm your mother, Dusk Shine. Nice to meet you."

Author's Note

This was an accidental prompt yesterday, the artwork by Racoon-kun was making the rounds, and I ended up generating an embarrassingly dark story from what is really a quite innocent and impossibly cute piece of art. Thanks to Racoon-kun and the actual commissioner of the artwork, Axelstripe, for letting me use it on this story.

And, as usual, thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.