Even I have to sleep sometime.

It’s not what I would call restful sleep. Or even real sleep in the strictest sense of the term, but I do have to sleep. It’s much the same as the way sleep happened in the Trials, once we got back around the campfire after a run-in with the Killer du jour and we would collapse into a half-sleep that kept us alert but always left a kind of leadness in our limbs.

Ironically, what characterises my own sleep is the most unsettling thing of all for me.

I don’t dream.

Maybe it’s some quirk of my nature, but going to sleep for me is more like getting knocked unconscious in the Hollywood sense. Once I get tired enough, I find a place to rest, lay my head down, and just… black out.

Wherever it is my mind goes, there’s nothing there. Just endless dark. I’m not even really aware of it until I wake up and have that unsettling feeling of having been somewhere else that I can’t quite account for, even knowing it’s not true.

I know it’s not true because it used to be that the only place I felt safe enough to sleep in was our apartment, and only when Tempest was home and could hold on to me. Otherwise, an irrational part of my mind was absolutely convinced that I’d close my eyes, then open them and be back in the grip of the Old Stain… cradled in those chitinous claws as it takes me apart, bit by traitorous bit, extracting all the parts of me that aren’t the obedient daughter and loyal priest.

Like I said… irrational.

If that thing was capable of pulling me back into its embrace so easily, it would have done it a long time ago.

Still, the notion of falling asleep terrifies me. It’s not insomnia—I will fall asleep eventually—but it is a completely irrational terror.

There’s a certain irony in being a somniphobic dream demon.

“Bayu bayushki bayu... ne lozhisya na krayu...”

My eyes snap open and consciousness floods into me in an adrenal rush that sends me jerking upright, and that fades only as I recognise the soft, insistent voice singing beside me.

“Sleeping here? Really?” Adagio asks as I rub at my eyes before shooting her a glare. “Isn’t that a little risky, dear?”

Sitting up from the long desk I’d fallen asleep on top of, I roll my neck and relish the series of cracks that come in reply. Adagio is seated on top of a student’s desk with her wood-ax propped up on the wall near the door to the classroom and her hatchets secured to an old infantry belt strapped around her chest. The familiar hare-faced half-mask is settled squarely at Adagio's hip, and she rests a hand on it as she watches me.

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. She just stares at me for a long moment, her dark eyes reading me more deeply than I care to be read at the moment.

“You have a bed, you know,” she says quietly.

No, Tempest and I had a bed. Now I have a mattress that’s stuffed with memories of betrayal that poisons every single night we spent curled up together talking, watching movies, or making love.

I don’t say that, though.

“I’m more comfortable here,” I reply, nodding around us.

The blood-rich stink of copper and ashes that fill the Fog fills my Trial too. I’d come back here after I’d gotten what I’d needed from the Ninth Precinct and the mind of a certain Detective to try and get some sleep before cobbling a map together.

“Starlight and Sour are worried about you,” Adagio continues.

“I’m fine,” I say through gritted teeth. “They’re the mortal ones, let them worry about each other. I’ll live.”

For certain definitions of the word.

Adagio shakes her head, and for a moment I can’t help but hate how motherly she can get at times. There’s a reason her nickname quietly became ‘Momdagio’ around the rest of us.

“You’re not invincible,” Adagio says.

“And I’m not made of glass either!” I snap. “Yeah, Tempest leaving me fucking hurt, okay? But people out in Canterlot are dying and that means my hurt feelings can come later! Now did you find that fucking grave or not?”

Adagio meets my glare pound for pound until finally, I look away, an ugly coil of guilt and rage tightening around my throat as I fix my eyes on the ground.

“One day,” Adagio starts, “you’re going to lash out, and you’re really going to hurt someone, Sunset, and it will probably be someone who tried to be close to you.”

“I’m aware.”

“Being aware isn’t enough!” Adagio stands up sharply, stalks the two quick steps between us, and seizes me by the throat.

A dull croak escapes my lips as she jerks me up into the air.

Shock rolls over me as she hefts me, one-armed, over her head. Eyes that are swallowed by blackness—the eyes of the Huntress—stare up at me with cold malice. Fury swallows my vision as my skin warps to red, ice floods my veins, and blades sprout from my fingers.

My teeth notch to sharpened points and my jacket flows out to the flapping black coat of my Killer form, but before I strike her she whirls about, tossing me like a ragdoll and driving me to the ground where she pins me with a closed fist as the air is driven from my lungs.

“Being aware,” she hisses, “just means you know that you’re going to hurt the people you love before you do it, and that’s not an improvement! And Killers like you and I can’t afford that kind of slip.”

Eyes of black bore into me. My fever-hot breath is boiling in my lungs and all I want to do is fight! I want to slice and cut! I want to drag her screaming into my Nightmare where I’m the Goddess and I’m in control!

“Then take me out if I'm such a danger!” I spit. “You promised.”

Adagio snorts then shakes her head as she lets go of my neck and stands straight before holding out a hand.

“Neither of us are finished with our work yet,” Adagio says blithely.

I glare up at her before sullenly reaching out with my clawed hand and taking a grip, palm to palm, careful to avoid giving her an extreme manicure. Adagio tightens her hold and heaves me to my feet. The P.A. system above us crackles with half-heard snippets of tinny music as I brush the dust from my coat before looking back to my sister.

“So?” I ask bitterly. “Did you find it?”

Adagio shrugs.

“It took some doing,” she admits. “I had to go to the funeral home where the break-in happened and track forward from there, and there wasn’t much to go off of.”

“How did you get into the funeral home?” I ask, giving Adagio an arch look.

She smirks at me, showing her teeth in a predator’s grin.

“The same way I got in here, sister,” she replies easily.

I raise an eyebrow at that. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I expected her to have lied her way in, not brute-forced her way through the walls between dimensions.

“You hate walking the Fog,” I say.

“If you think that, then you mistake me, Sunset,” she says quietly, earning a faint frown from me. “I stay out because it feels too natural… because I feel at home there, that’s all.”

That shouldn’t have been something she needed to tell me, but it surprises me all the same. The Fog is home for us. For Killers. It’s where we were born and where we were meant to live. I don’t know if our kind can ever truly die, but if we do, then I know in my bones that the Fog is where we’re supposed to do it.

“Okay,” I say quietly. “So what happened?”

Adagio shakes her head.

“It happened a while ago, so the traces were faint, but they were still there. Faint traces of something touched by the Fog. I found the records too, though. There were sections that had been removed. Other sections had clearly been changed.”

I frown. “What’s that mean?”

“That means,” Adagio replies, “that I’m not sure the family even knows what they buried.”

My eyebrows arch up past my hairline.

“My guess is that the funeral home advised a closed casket to cover up what was taken,” Adagio continues softly. “The break-in happened after the family had identified the body, so they may not have questioned it. And no parent wants to…”

My jaw tightens at the expression of grief that crosses Adagio’s face briefly before she masters herself and returns to the matter at hand. To this day, I don’t know how she does it; how she goes on knowing that her daughter is three centuries dead.

“But we have to know for sure.”

Adagio nods.

“Did you find it?”

She lets out a slow breath, then nods again.

“Call the others.

As children, death isn’t real.

Then we start to get older. Maybe we lose a grandparent or something.

There comes a time in everyone’s life where we become acutely—and at times uncomfortably—aware of death not just as a concept but as a fact. That, I think, is the reason that kids almost all inevitably go through a goth phase in their teens.

Sometimes, though… some of us are unlucky enough to become painfully aware of death at an age when we don’t have the faculties to really grapple with it. Kids like that often get called ‘old souls’ or ‘mature for their age’. Those are all very complimentary ways of admitting that the six-year-old you’re looking at has lost something fundamental to their youth far too early. It’s not something people want to think or talk about, so they couch it in terms that make it more palatable.

“So we’re really doing this, huh?” Starlight asks, hefting a shovel against her shoulder.

Snowfall is coming down in bitter force by the time we’re all gathered in front of the gates to Whitetail Cemetery. It’s an expansive plot of land that stretches over the hills of Whitetail towards the opposite verge of the Everfree where it curls around the southern edge of Canterlot. It’s so far out of the way of the commonly driven roads of the suburb that you’d only run across it if you were already coming here, going somewhere else overly specific, or if you lived nearby.

“Yeah, we’re doing this,” I reply as I pull a set of lockpicks from my pocket and start fitting them into the padlock securing the doors.

It’s easier to do something like this when the cemetery’s closed, but that also meant delaying even more than I liked. Still, we had to know for sure. Plus, if we find what I think we’ll find, we may actually—literally—dig up a lead.

“We’re already abominations against god and nature!” Sour says cheerfully. “Why not add some graverobbing to the mix?”

“Technically we’re not robbing graves,” Aria points out as she leans on her own shovel. “We’re just taking a peek inside a coffin.”

“So we’re necro-voyeurs,” Starlight says blandly. “How comforting.”

“Hey, can the peanut gallery pipe down?” I grumble as I work at the lock. It’s a rusted piece of shit, so much so I’d doubt that the actual key would fit comfortably. “I’m trying to remember how to break-and-enter the old fashioned way.”

“Step back.”

Adagio slips between the four of us and I barely manage to yelp and roll away before she hefts her wood-ax and brings it down in a clean, sharp, woodcutter’s chop.

The Fog-forged metal passes through the steel chain attached to the padlock with barely a whisper and the smile of it ends buried in the concrete walkway. Adagio gives the ax a couple of tugs to free it before kicking the doors open with a deafening rattle and stepping through.

“I want to get out of here as quickly as possible,” she says as her grip tightens on the haft of the ax, making the wood creak.

“Right,” I mutter as I stand up. “Guess so much for going in quiet.”

Starlight chuckles at that. “You’re the lookout, Sunset. If anyone comes around just put them to sleep.”

I roll my eyes, but nod as she passes me. Sour and Aria give me a couple of nods, too, each hefting their own shovels as we make our way into the graveyard.

“Explain to me again why we’re not just going to the source?” Sour asks, not unpleasantly, but in a tone that told me she wasn’t going to take ‘because I said so’ as an answer.

“If we think it’s them, why not just shake down the redhead?”

“Because that would be going in blind in the worst possible way,” I say without pausing in my stride.

“The fact of the matter is that we know absolutely nothing about any of this. We know the bare fucking minimum about the Legion, we know tidbits about the gunslinger who watches over them, and jack-all about the Thief themselves. Now I don’t know about you—” I pause to look pointedly at Sour “—but I’m not going to try and ambush someone I know nothing about! If the Thief can create Killers, who’s to say they can’t take away their powers too?”

Sour Sweet meets my gaze steadily for a moment, then nods before looking thoughtful and meeting my eyes again.

“So what do we gain with this?” She asks. “Knowing if it’s them?”

“It means we can narrow our search,” I reply. “Even if I’m ninety-five percent sure, I don’t want to leave this to chance. I have to be totally certain. Otherwise, I’ll be fighting on the back heel again.”

That gets me an odd look, but I’m rescued from answering for myself by Adagio chiming in.

“It’s her magic,” Adagio says.

Starlight, Sour, and Aria share looks before turning to the elder ex-Siren who’s leading us deeper and deeper into the cemetery. Despite the dark, Adagio is as surefooted as can be, and even with the low-light the rest of us are adapted to, none of us have eyes like hers.

The eyes of the Huntress.

“Oneiromancy is no common art,” Adagio continues. “Unless you know whose mind you’re delving into, you’re exposing yourself to innumerable dangers.”

“Didn’t you deep-dive every Killer in the Entity’s roster during the Exodus, though?” Starlight asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, but there are three big differences this time around,” I say, holding up a hand. “One, they were my siblings, however distant. We Killers have an innate awareness of one another, so that helped. Two, fully-fledged Killers have pretty crude minds to begin with. It means my powers don’t work quite right on them, but it also means their identity is less complex… in short it takes less grunt to get to their minds, but Legion isn’t all the way Killer.”

“And third?” Aria asks.

“Third is the biggest problem,” I admit. “Third is that during the Exodus I was being fortified by my Trial ground. They were on my turf.”

Aria scowls.

“Right,” She says softly. “It’s like Tem—” she cuts off and grimaces, but I just angrily wave her onward “—like… Tempest said, back when Red first landed, Whoever’s Trial we’re in? We survive on their terms, not ours.”

“Ideally, we won’t fight them there at all,” Adagio says wryly over her shoulder.

“Right,” I reply. “I’d much rather hit them outside their grounds, assuming they have any… which means knowing where it is. Anyway, tee-el-dee-ar, my powers aren’t going to be at full chat on the Legion unless I know precisely who they are. Not suspect… but know. And even then I’ll be stunted by the Fog shrouding their minds.”

“We’re here.”

Our little party stops in front of a long row of gravestones. Each headstone is different, with some being larger or smaller, some made of dark granite and others of veined marble. The one we’re in front of is a simple grey stone whose epitaph seemed almost offensively brief.

Scootaloo

Beloved Daughter and Precious Friend

Rest In Peace

“If you are down there,” I say quietly. “Then apologies in advance.”

I nod to the three girls as Adagio and I take our places around the stone, far enough away that we’ll be able to hear if a guard comes around. Aria, Sour Sweet, and Starlight Glimmer heft their shovels, plant them in the earth, and start to dig.

It’s grim work, and it takes the better part of an hour. The dirt goes in two large piles at either side of the grave as the girls go deeper and deeper.

The further they go, the more uncertain I feel. If I am wrong, and the Legion are really three unknowns, that means we’re starting from worse than nowhere. As tragic as it is, Legion really being those three girls is actually the best-case scenario. It means I’ll have a shot at making my magic work on them.

“We made it!” Aria calls from the grave.

I turn away from my watch and move to the edge of the pit. Beneath me is a yawning maw of dirt and filth where Sour Sweet and Aria are standing, with Starlight at the other side helping to ferry dirt up and away from the edge as the hole got too deep to easily remove.

“And?” I ask.

“Gimme a second.”

Aria kneels and starts brushing away dirt and grit from the coffin. It’s relatively plain, much like the headstone above it, and that rankles. Even if the family was of modest means—and if they lived in Whitetail they had to at least be decently off—then why would they be so miserly with burying their only daughter?

The look on Adagio’s face when I glance over at her tells me she’s thinking much the same thing in far more unpleasant terms.

“Are you okay?” I ask softly.

“No.”

The word is short, clipped, and carries a hundred lifetimes worth of regret and anger. I don’t push her. I can’t. Sister or no… I don’t have that right.

I’m not sure anyone does.

“Okay, we’ve got it!” Aria calls up.

“And?” I say again.

Wood creaks and cracks as Aria and Sour Sweet pry open the coffin. Part of me expects the charnel stink of old death to billow out, although if it did I have a feeling it would only bring on a sense of nostalgia.

No such smell wafts out, though.

“It’s empty.” Sour’s voice is thin and bitter. “No body, just some weights… probably so the pallbearers wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“Then she’s alive,” I say as I crouch at the edge of the grave and look down.

Sure enough, the casket has nothing in it but a few pieces of shaved-down concrete that probably approximated the weight of the girl they were supposed to be burying, which meant there weren’t even all that many of those.

“For certain definitions of the term,” Adagio says. “If she was brought back from the brink I can guarantee it wasn’t by wholesome means.”

“Gee ya think?” Sour grumbles as she puts out a hand. I take a grip and haul her up and out of the pit as Adagio does the same for her sister. “If she’s up and running around after getting twelve to the chest then it’s only because she’s a Survivor like us. We’re not made to die.”

I nod at that as Sour Sweet brushes dirt from her pants and walks over to Starlight who slips her arms around her girlfriend and hugs her tight. I look away from the display of affection as an unfamiliar spike of pain and jealousy digs into my gut, and turn back to my sisters.

“I’m putting a map together, we’ll go over it tomorrow,” I say. “Between this, police reports, and our own footwork, we should be able to narrow down where they’re based.”

“Do you really think they have one?” Aria asks as she turns to me with a deep scowl. “A Trial, I mean.”

It’s a good question, and one I don’t have a clearcut answer to.

“We can’t know for certain until we find them,” I say. “But at this point, I’m hedging my bets on caution over optimism.”

Maybe the Thief doesn’t have the magical grunt to create a fully-formed Trial, I hope they don’t, but I can’t afford to assume that. I can't afford to assume anything is in our favor anymore. Now that we know it’s them I have to tell Rainbow Dash, then we have to gather our forces, pin them down, and end this threat once and for all.

At least now, we actually have something to work off of. We finally have some progress.

“Well if it’s all the same to you ladies,” Sour starts as she turns to us, “I’m gonna go take a shower, and then we’re gonna grab some food.”

“Only after we fill in this hole,” Aria says, gesturing at the open grave.

Sour Sweet and Starlight both grimace, then sigh, and I start laughing quietly.

“You take us to the nicest places,” Starlight grumbles at me as she picks up her shovel.

Silver claws breach the Wall of Sleep as I step out onto the roof of Canterlot General, and my boots follow them. It’s cold and windy up here, but it’s also quiet and empty, plus I know this place well enough that I can get here from almost anywhere in the city with a minimum of effort.

That’s very on brand for me.

Minimum effort.

I fold out of the Fog and into the Real, and leave my Killer shape behind me before reaching into my pocket and pulling out my phone to open up the list of contacts and find the one I never thought I’d use again.

//Roof of Canterlot General Hospital. Main Building. ASAP.//

She doesn’t reply to the text, but I don’t need her to. The little ‘Read’ marking pops up a second later and now all I have to do is wait. I don’t like waiting. I hate idling. It’s the thing I’m worst at. It’s the reason I ended up here in the first place.

All my life, I’ve been unable to wait and it’s continually bitten me in the ass.

I couldn’t wait for power as a filly, so I pushed myself and took shortcuts. I learned magic at the cost of anything and everything that might have actually made me happy. Then I saw myself as an alicorn and couldn’t wait for that, so I pushed and pushed until Princess Celestia herself expelled me from her tutelage, and then, even knowing she would probably take me back, a mixture of wounded pride and impatience drove me through the portal.

One day, maybe I’ll learn patience, but today is not that day.

The Fog ripples behind me, and I turn to face the girl—now young woman—that I hate most in this world.

“Hey, Shimmer,” Rainbow says, smiling from beneath her hood of crude leather as she plants her cane on the roof. “How’s it hanging?”

“Short, shriveled, and to the left,” I snap. “I’ve got some bad news.”

“Is there any other kind?” Rainbow asks, my venom missing her completely.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and draw back on the urge to lash out. That won’t help me here, and it won’t help my friends. For now, I need a little more information and I need this extraplanar junkie on my side.

“Did you know about Scootaloo?” I ask, opting for the ‘knife-to-the-heart’ approach.

Her look of confusion and the raised eyebrow I get tells me most of what I need to know.

“Know what? I cut ties with all three of them the night we escaped,” She says, a touch defensively. “I didn’t want anything to do with her after what she and her stupid friends did to you.”

“Completely self-focused, like usual,” I say bitterly.

“Hey!” Rainbow snaps, anger blooming across her features for the first time as she jabs her cane at me. “You, of all fucking people, don’t get to tell me who I should and shouldn’t be friends with, okay?! I cut them outta my life because of what they did and that’s fucking fair! I didn’t owe them a god damn thing!”

I open my mouth to rebuke her but stop halfway through. The fact is, I don’t really have a rebuke.

“I…” I start, then step back and shake my head. “You’re right, I’m… I’m sorry.”

The anger fades from Rainbow’s face as she steps back, replaced with a shade of still-defensive confusion.

“You mean that?”

“What?”

“The apology.”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I shrug, then nod. To my surprise, I find I actually do mean it. Rainbow had a point. She’d done the same thing I had and for pretty much the same reason. Scootaloo had been like Rainbow’s little sister. Finding out that she’d been betrayed by someone she loved—someone who’d been so close to her—must have hurt like hell.

“Yeah,” I say after a moment. “I was out of line… you’re right, you had no reason to keep talking to them.”

Rainbow relaxes back, the belligerence fading from her posture as she plants her cane down by her feet again.

“To be honest,” Rainbow continues quietly. “I haven’t really kept up with anyone since I dropped out of CHS. At least, not since the shit with Applejack. Fluttershy is still pretty sore about that.”

“Can I ask what happened?” I can’t deny I’m curious. I can’t imagine what it took to rip them apart like this.

Shrugging, Rainbow raises her cane, jabs it down at the ground, then lets go, and the thing just stands there, upright, like a magic trick, as Rainbow moves in front of it to us it like an impromptu stool.

“It’s complicated,” she says as she sweeps a hand over her short hair, brushing her cowl back as she does. “I got into some bad habits after I lost you, and then I got worse.”

She shrugs an arm out of her long leather coat and rolls up a sleeve from her linen shirt to show off a swathe of flesh covered in a network of scars that barely manage to obscure the track marks along her veins.

“We talk about it a lot in group,” Dash admits quietly. “Drugs, alcohol, razors, they’re all just different ways of hurting yourself… unhealthy coping mechanisms and stuff.” She gestures out toward the Everfree. “I ended up living with AJ right outta the hospital, and I guess I was hoping we could talk about what I went through, but like… when I showed her all this,” she points at her arm, “she just bolted.”

Despite myself, I wince.

“That’s shitty,” I say softly. “Bet she felt like shit, too.”

Rainbow snorts and nods.

“Yeah, she apologised but Fluttershy never forgave her,” she replies, before shaking her head and sitting up a little. “So what’s Scoots gotta do with all this? I never get out to Whitetail anymore between all my other shit, and I know Flutters basically cut ties with everyone but Pinks, and I hear Rarity’s fallen off the map.”

By way of answer, I pull out my phone and bring up the article that Adagio had dug up back under the canal about the shooting in the East End.

“Catch.” I toss her my phone and she nabs it out of the air with a flick of the wrist.

“What am I—” Her words die unmourned as she scans both the title of the article, and the photograph underneath it. “Oh… Scoots.”

Tears well up in Rainbow Dash’s eyes as she slips off of her cane and drops to her knees clutching the phone. Her breath comes in heaves as she reads the article over, and she has to wipe her eyes several times before she finally gets to the end, shakes her head, and holds my phone back out to me with her head hung low.

“Don’t take it too hard,” I say as I reclaim my phone. “She didn’t stay dead.”

Rainbow stiffens, then looks up with wide eyes.

I start to open my mouth—to tell her what I and the others learned—but I never get the chance to as Rainbow says the word I was about to explain.

“Legion.”

One eyebrow crooks upward into my hair, and I laugh quietly. Rainbow is kind of dumb, that’s no secret. She’s a himbo with a murder complex and the backing of a daemonic god. But with that said, of all of the girls, Rainbow was always the most likely to make those weird and sudden leaps of logic that connects a dozen seemingly unrelated points.

She’s a creature of instinct, and for whatever it’s worth, her instincts are usually pretty good.

“Yeah.” I point out towards Whitetail. “There was some really hinky shit about her burial we followed up on, and sure enough her grave is empty.”

“So someone made Scoots and the others into…” Rainbow trails off but gestures between the two of us.

I shake my head. “Not exactly. They’re unfinished, but they’re also incredibly dangerous. Right now, we’re trying to narrow down their turf. Even if they don’t have a real Trial ground, they’ve gotta be living somewhere and once I know I’ll call you, in the meantime, keep an eye out, will you?”

“Sure thing,” Rainbow stands and wipes at her eyes, “what about you?”

I tap the side of my head as I step back from her, back and back and back until I’m at the edge of the roof.

“I’m gonna make a map,” I say as the wind catches me.

“I’ll call you when I have something.”

The last thing I see is Rainbow’s smirk as I drop off the edge of the building and fall into the Fog.

I fall through the darkness of the Dreamtime, and as I do I catch the strands of reality with my fingers, tighten my grip, and pull. My momentum turns, reorients, and then comes to an abrupt, painless halt as my boots hit concrete. I take a step, then another, until I step out of the Fog and onto a bridge.

As I do, I reach into my jacket and draw out the cheap map of the city I’d picked up to do my work on. I could go back to the apartment and do this on a proper desk but honestly, it’s the last place I want to be right now. Starlight and Sour Sweet are going to be going out again and Aria is definitely going to be with Redheart, and I really don’t want to be there alone with my thoughts.

It’s easier to concentrate here.

Unfolding the map, I shake it loose and look it over before pulling out a sharpie and making dots at where I know their hits took place. I start with the murders that the girls and I confirmed. Those go quickly, it’s something we did before when we started collecting the information to begin with but just like back then there’s no clear pattern. There are kills scattered all over the city, none of the murders are localized, none of them have any clear motive beyond bloodlust.

But that was before we accounted for the non-murder crimes. We’d been treating these three like bog-standard Killers despite knowing that wasn’t accurate. We’d done it out of habit.

The acts of vandalism and petty theft go onto the map in a different color. Dots here and there noting break-ins. The notes the Detective had access to showed stills from CCTV security cams, sometimes from the places they hit, other times from places across the street.

Either way, they’re all confirmed cases.

All told it takes me a little less than an hour to put it all on paper, and when I finally do—

“Nothing.” I tighten my grip on the pen as I glare at the map. “No pattern… just a bunch of fucking dots.”

“You’re back.”

I jerk out of my frustrated stupor and my pen clatters to the slush-and-frost covered ground as I look up.

Wallflower Blush is standing a few meters away, her arms wrapped around herself, and a look of wariness on her face.

The sharpie rolls across the paved sidewalk, the only sound other than the faint wind and the icy flow of the River Canter until it stops against her shoe. Slowly Wallflower kneels down and plucks the pen from the ground, then wipes it off on her jacket.

“I… I should be the one saying that,” I say softly as I fold up the map and tuck it away. “I uhm… I didn’t think I’d see you again. Or I figured you’d run away even if I did.”

Wallflower shrugs.

“You saw me that night,” I say, and she raises an eyebrow. “The real me, I mean… the monster.”

She swallows visibly, then takes a few tentative steps forward.

“It was real?” She asks, her face unreadable.

“Yeah.”

Neither of us speaks for a long moment as she stares at me. Honestly, I’m really surprised she can even meet my gaze. She seemed so shy the few times we talked, but now she was showing more backbone in a few minutes than most people show in their whole lives.

“Can I see it again?”

My jaw drops. I cannot have heard that right.

“Can you… what?” I ask through a surprised chuckle. “You’re kidding right?”

Wallflower shakes her head.

“No, uhm, but if you don’t want to…”

Holding up a hand, I take a step back and deep breath before laughing and looking back at her. She saw me—she saw my real face—and now she wants to see it again? That’s easily the most absurd thing I’ve heard all week and that is a real trick considering what I’ve been up to lately.

“Y’know what, sure,” I say, waving a hand dismissively, “why not? This night is already a huge disappointment, I may as well double down, right? Let’s do the full monty.”

Wallflower frowns but I don’t give her a chance to say anything before I shift.

My jacket flaps and flickers in the wind, elongating to a long dark, ragged coat, and my hair flicks around my face like a dark pennant, the red dye masking the gold streaks in my hair washing out as the full, curling strands turn heavy and lank around a face that’s suddenly red, feverish, and sliced with blue veins.

I brush the hair from my eyes with my fingerblades and grin.

“So?” I say as I brandish my claws. “How do I look? I knew I shouldn’t have skipped my manicure last week.”

I’ve never really considered how harsh my voice sounds in this form before, but it really is unpleasant.

Shockingly, Wallflower doesn’t run away screaming. She barely even moves. She just stares at me. Her eyes rove across my face, and I can feel it almost like a tangible force. She takes in my sharp teeth and my burning eyes. The fever-red flesh and the cold blue rage in my veins.

And she doesn’t draw back.

She looks at me, and at my face, and at my hands and claws, and then back up to me before walking closer and closer until we’re so close that I can smell the faint scent of summer grass off of her.

Right now, she should be more scared than she’s ever been in her life. Wallflower Blush should be terrified and running. She should be screaming and fleeing from a thing of literal nightmares, but she’s not. Even more surprising is that I don’t want to hurt her. The voice in the back of my head is actually quiet as Wallflower raises her hands, tugs her gloves off, and puts her palms to my cheeks.

“You’re so warm,” she says.

“I…” My breath mists harshly in the cold air.

I try to resist the urge but I just don’t have it in me. It’s been so long since someone has just… just touched the real me, and not been afraid. So I close my eyes, bow my head a little, and let myself rest in her hands.

“I knew you weren’t really a monster.”

She smiling at me when I open my eyes. Her face is so soft, and from this close, I can count the freckles that scatter across her button nose and dimpled cheeks to frame her warm brown eyes.

“How can you say that?” I hiss. “Look at me.”

“I am,” Wallflower replies. “And I don’t see a monster.”

Soft fingers trace across my face and brush my hair away from my eyes before trailing down to my jaw, then lower until her hand is resting on mine.

Then she does something that not even Aria or Tempest has ever had the courage to do.

She takes my hand in hers, brings it up between us, and touches my claws.

“I think you’re beautiful.”

I can’t breathe. I can barely swallow as she holds on to my hand, and I do my best to keep my hand relaxed and still. If I don’t I might cut her and for once that’s the last thing I want to do. Usually, I have to fight my impulses to keep from cutting people, but not her.

Not Wallflower.

“How?”

She shakes her head and shrugs.

“Because some of us grew up with real monsters.”

Of all the things I expected, of all people and all places, none of this was among them. This isn’t fair. I resigned myself to being dead. To being the monster of Canterlot’s darkest dreams. I’d let myself cling to the vestiges of humanity by staying with Tempest in order to keep myself sane, but I’d never let myself believe for a moment that she wanted anything to do with what I really am.

This… ugly thing.

It’s so much easier to accept that I’m a monster. That I’m a demon without remorse that lives for one purpose and one purpose only, and who fully intended to commit themselves to that purpose once all of this Canterlot business was done with.

So it’s not fair, now, this late in the game, for me to find out that someone might actually want me for me.

It would be so much easier to believe that Wallflower is lying, but I don’t see how that’s possible. She’s touching me. Touching the cold, silver, Fogforged blades that my fingers taper off into.

She’s not afraid of me.

No one’s poker face is that good.

“I wish I’d met you before all of this,” I say, my voice coming out more haggard and raw than usual. “I wish I’d met you before I fell… before I lost who I used to be.”

“Maybe you didn’t lose anything,” Wallflower says, brushing my cheek with her other hand. “Maybe you found who you were supposed to be.”

I don’t bother holding back as I lean my face against Wallflower’s touch. I can’t even remember the last time I felt someone put their hand on me like this. The sensation is alien and yet at the same time, I crave more of it, and I hate it.

This isn’t fair. I don’t want to feel human again.

To feel vulnerable again.

It’s not fair.

My phone rings, saving me from any more heartache, and I pull away from Wallflower as I swallow hard to try and find my breath again.

“I uhm, I have to—” I don’t get any further before she jumps a little, then pulls out a cell phone of her own which is vibrating.

“It’s okay,” she says, laughing softly. “I should take this, too.”

She puts her back to me as I shift back to my human form, pull out my phone, and tap the answer button as Adagio’s name flashes across the screen.

“Yeah?”

//They took Aria.//

My heart goes cold at the tight, ragged fury in Adagio’s voice.

“Wha—”

//And I can’t reach Sour or Starlight.//

“Where are you?”

//Home.//

“I’m on my way.”

I turn back to Wallflower who’s looking down at her phone in concern before glancing up at me.

“Sorry, I have to go,” I say as I shove my phone in my pocket. “Something came up.”

“Will you come back?” She asks in that soft tone of hers that I find I like quite a lot.

‘If I survive this,’ I think bitterly.

Instead, I just nod, then sweep my hand out and gather the Fog around me. It’s getting easier and easier lately. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but it’s convenient, and probably has something to do with how much time I’m spending in my ‘Real’ body.

“Okay,” she says.

Then she steps close again, goes up on her toes, and presses her lips to my cheek.

“Good luck.”

I blink in confusion as heat flushes across my face, and I put a couple of fingers on the spot where the sensation of her lips still lingers.

“With what?” I ask.

Wallflower shrugs. “I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to say.”

As I let the Fog swallow me, I smile a little. Maybe there’s a little hope after all, or maybe not. Right now, I have bigger things to worry about, and I touch the little warm spot on my cheek again.

But either way, I’ll need all the luck I can get.

Author's Note

Most will end up here, covered in the poisoned earth, awaiting merciful oblivion.

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