Trent was really, literally, in his element. Once or twice, I watched him put his head and shoulders directly through the wall, as if it were water rather than solid stone. He did this if we couldn’t tell the contents of a room based on magical shielding, because Garnet didn’t like going into those rooms. I didn’t blame Garnet for being a bit of a worry wort.

Azalea giggled every time his head went blomp into the wall and disappeared.

We watched the first ritual circle go sliding down through a series of slots in the castle, plummeting down four different floors to smash into the ground below. The thing didn’t even break, but the materials that had been placed on there to act as foci and help fuel the ritual got scattered to the four winds. If we were correct, the gigantic slab of metal with the ritual diagram wouldn’t need to break, just be disrupted.

“Well, we got somebody’s attention,” Trent remarked with a smile, and we disappeared back into the castle.

With the castle being stone, Trent had no equal. No Wizards could figure out what was going on, no Guardians could get a bead on us, and every single Rogue and Ranger had been sent out to Saxwhacket to bring me in. We may have just made a gong of monumental proportions, but nobody was coming after us.

Plus, as soon as Blake woke up and found an exit to the room he’d been in, he was going to start rampaging around looking for a fight. He’d be a much more important target to neutralize in a hurry than little old me.

Trent’s sorcerer abilities were also useful for poking his nose up or down a floor. Then all three of the ladies were set off in a fit of giggles, watching as he knelt on the floor and stuck his head in the sand like an ostrich. Blomp! Ceilings were more impressive and less silly: Trent had the stone of the floor raise him up to the ceiling, where his head disappeared and he got a look around. Blomp!

“There’s a second one upstairs,” he said. “Except…”

“No stairs,” I said, and received a nod in return. The first room had been bad enough

He’d already found one secret room, shielded on all sides by runic circles on the walls, floor and ceiling. On the floor, on a raised dais of stone, was another magic circle like the ones Wizards were always using to cast rituals. These ones, though, were far bigger and far more complex than most of the ones we’d seen previously. The typical circle was just that, a carefully drawn out circle, inside a larger perfect circle, and runes made up the space between them. You could have smaller circles attached for different effects, and other attached circles for more Wizards to add their power to the overall effect. Since I’d only had Alan along for the purpose of utility spells and later communicating with HQ, I didn’t know much about the rituals.

I did know they weren’t easy to break. Trent could easily reconfigure this whole castle if he had access to enough mana, but these things were beyond his ability to crack.

The ritual circles were carved into the walls, then filled in with solid metal. Gold and silver were the two most common, but Trent also noted bronze, steel and titanium being used. He could erode the stone around the metal and drop the whole circle out of the wall, except that the ritual magic prevented that sort of thing from happening. Fresh chapters posted on n0velfire.net

Once again, we found a metal slab with an extremely elaborate ritual inscribed in it, piled with gold, jewels, phoenix feathers flaming, metallic powder and dead… whatever. Once again, it was lowered carefully onto its side in the room below, and after Trent created a number of notches through the three floors below it, it fell with a massive clang to the earth below. This time there were cries of alarm immediately.

“You’re so good at this,” I told him.

“Much obliged,” he said, smiling. “Mana is always a problem though.”

I pulled a prepared mana potion up. “We’ll make this one count.”

It took nearly an hour before we had all four of them down. By that point, my Post-Sharing Clarity resources were winding down. I chuckled.

I was going to have to make a sexy pit stop.

***

Reese—not Ranger Rick—was reasonably certain Fletcher was in there, but he became a hundred percent certain when Fletcher erupted out of the place holding onto a girl he thought he recognized.

One of Reese’s Ranger abilities was enhanced senses. These worked even better outside cities, because cities tended to overwhelm you with sensory data and confuse what you were trying to look at, hear, smell, etc. After he’d hit level 25 though, they had sharpened and the control over them increased. He’d been scanning the place with his sense of smell, and poking past the seafood smell of holy eels, when Fletcher flew skyward with the girl, just as he’d done before.

Now, Reese hadn’t known any other Healers besides Rainer, the trainer in the HQ who healed people up and sent them off with healing and mana potions whenever they left on assignment or checked in via Wizard messages. He didn’t know what Healers were capable of. Flight, though, especially flight through the use of fairy wings, was almost assuredly not a Healer power. He’d heard about bond mate powers, so it could’ve been that… but then there was the scrying problem.

“You’re still in there,” he growled to himself. “I know you are.”

The familiar scents he’d been able to pick up were ginger, garlic, and turmeric, along with others he hadn’t come across. Floral, and earthy, like roots and stems.

The place was full of divine aspect eels, he also knew that much. He’d been able to identify them easily enough, since they could ‘swim’ through the air of their compound.

So, either the eels had hands of some kind and were cooking something horrid, or Fletcher was in there mixing up some Healer alchemy. He doubted it was the former.

Which just left the problem of what to do about it. His superior was a dick and wouldn’t take kindly to having his orders disobeyed, even if Reese knew the truth and saw what they needed to do. Another idea involved getting some of his old party members back, which wasn’t feasible. They’d been split up after the Flunt-on-the-Rustle situation and chastised loudly and publicly. The whole group had been scattered among different commands.

That left going in alone.

He was a single Ranger, with level 47 powers and skills, but he didn’t like the idea of facing off against dozens of divine aspect eels. He didn’t have any divine resistance.

“Why couldn’t they be the plain old electric kind?” He grumbled.

The eels had a walled compound, and that was no trouble to get over. Sure it had seashells running along the top. Sure it was eight feet high. But he also had an agility of 9. The large rocky temple building, his destination, butted up against one wall of the compound. He could hop the wall, skirt the edge of the temple building, and slip inside to get at Fletcher, but only if all the natives weren’t part of the picture.

“If I have a distraction,” he told himself.

***

I succeeded at the check for periwinkle, ginger, turmeric, and now garlic, with ascending difficulty numbers. It had gone from 20 to 24, then 28, and bumped up to 33 successes. So far I wasn’t in danger of failure, but that was coming to an end in an awful hurry. I was entering territory where it would become important to keep my Post-Sharing Clarity bonus, regain a Token by initiating orgasmic sex with a partner, and using all the Ingenuity Tokens gifted me by my teammates. It was darkly funny to me that I now needed to have sex in order to keep healing with the skill level I needed.

They were all captured now, save Cinzy and the HQ team. The irony of Trent, April, Azalea, and Vellenia being safer than my people here was not lost on me.

“You’re going to be fine,” I lied to myself. “Everything’s going according to plan.” It wasn’t. Still, I concentrated on folding the garlic into the cauldron’s present mixture, which had gone from a violent red and into a disturbing neon orange color.

Actually, the worst part was having to deal with the smell. The scent of a cancer cure, apparently, is the worst thing you could ever imagine, mixed with dirty socks and rotting garbage. I was taking care to turn my head before getting any air, and definitely not breathing through my nose. I wished I had a mask. The whole thing was causing me to laugh at the absurdity of it, and that was making mana infusion difficult.

With the wooden spoon, I kept flipping portions of cure from the bottom over to the top, ladling in a little mana under each fold as I made it. The required temperature had increased, so my mom had dutifully cranked the cauldron down the three inches necessary for it to be closer to Larelle’s Magmamander, which gave me the stink eye.

My mom then immediately retreated away from the workstation.

“I know, buddy,” I told it, still folding and infusing. This one was going clockwise at two second intervals per fold, just the right amount according to my instinctual knowledge of what I was doing. “I want Larelle back just as much as you do.”

Larelle gave incredible hugs and shoulder massages. If I were into muscle mommies, I definitely would’ve tried my luck with my muscly psychic Guardian.

In due course, the check came to add in the Celestine Myrallis.

This time the check difficulty was 39. It was around fifty percent of my total skill and attribute levels.

“Ugh,” I complained.

“What?”

What to tell her? My arms were getting tired from holding Cinzy against my chest as we engaged in a high speed aerial pursuit? I was nervous about what we’d find in the HQ once we broke all of Claudius’s ritual circles? If he’d put Blake in the one, what kind of paranoid final boss were we going to have to deal with when finding the inner sanctum? Or that I was worried that in the clutch moments of finalizing this cure, I’d screw it up and all this would’ve been for nothing?

I succeeded the check with a whopping 46 successes, enough to accelerate this portion of the cure by only fifty percent.

“Hey,” my mom told me. “You’re doing great.”

I was doing great. All I had to do was convince myself that she was right and I should believe her.

“I love you, and even if this doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world.”

Okay that was definitely true. It might be the end of our careers in this Agency and the end of our time in this world, but the worst they could do was deport us back to earth, then take us a CIA black site and have us executed for some kind of treason-like charge.

“Don’t do that,” I told my own brain. “She’s your mother and she’s a lot smarter than you.”

So I got on with the cure.

***

The report came in to Richter, explaining that his people had multiple sightings of Fletcher flying around the city, with a girl in his arms, but then they’d vanished. And immediately on the heels of that report, was the report that he’d been seen in a completely different area of the city, flying, still carrying the girl. The second team, along with the Rogues and Rangers from the main team, had been closing the net, only to have him slip through their fingers at the last minute.

“What do you mean ‘slipped through their fingers?’” He roared. And the timing couldn’t have been worse, because the aide entering his normally-soundproof tent was pulling the flap aside. His words carried, and the answering shriek from the mayor made his eye twitch.

It had been well over an hour and a half, and the only thing they had to show for their efforts was less than half of Fletcher’s team.

Oh, he knew them well. Four Guardians, two of them natives, two Rangers, one Sorcerer, one Rogue, one Wizard, one Bard. The Nakamamon bonded to them included a Slitherwind, a Vulpetunia, a Magmamander, a Rochidna, a Mystixie reported to have transformed into a Luminixie, a Gemineye, and a rumor that the Rogue had a forbidden dark aspect.

They had in their custody one Slitherwind, the most important bonded Nakamamon for him to have in his possession, one Ranger, two Guardians, one Wizard, one Vulpetunia, and the Rochidna.

Based on these numbers, he was going to get shitcanned.

Richter snarled, threw his table aside for maybe the fourth or fifth time, and stalked out of the command tent. The mayor leered at him, all teeth.

“Come to apologize for the DISRESPECT, have—“

Richtor grabbed the native around the face and lifted him bodily into the air, with the last of his rational mind hoping this didn’t constitute violence for the purposes of breaking the treaty. “Put this thing in shackles. I want it in a ritual circle for the sound and to keep him from escaping. You throw anyone who gets uppity or violent with us into that same ritual circle.”

“Sir, we have all the Wizards tasked with making flight potions—“

He rounded on them, eyes blazing and spittle flying. “I AM CHANGING THE GODS-DAMNED ORDERS!” He bellowed.

He waited, staring into the terrified and furious eyes of the yellow monkey man, while the Wizards prepped an area of dirt, etched the runic circle into it, transmuted it to stone, and poured the silver dust into the runes they’d just carved. It took a surprisingly long amount of time, but he put that down to holding a futilely struggling native in his hands. The clawing only made him tighten his grip on the thing’s face, until it stopped struggling and went limp.

Soon enough they proclaimed that the detention area was ready. With the last shreds of his better judgement still flapping around in the wild storm of his fury, Richter placed the mayor carefully inside, instead of flinging the yellow bastard like he deserved. The Lemonkey sprang up, screeching and bellowing, spittle flying, but for the first time, there was no noise. He heaved a soul deep sigh.

“Order all the Guardians here, on me. I need two combat casters from among the Wizards. Stun spell specialists.”

They were getting used to the idea of being a military unit by now, and scrambled to obey. Soon enough, he had thirty people at his command, marching resolutely forward into a wall of small, adorable natives arrayed against him.

This is Christopher’s time running out.