Two Weeks Ago

  Ferromancer was working on a gun that shoots you in the friends. More accurately, she was trying to harness principles of magical sympathy to create a weapon that could kill someone by shooting their best friend, closest sibling, or spouse. Shoot a husband, kill the wife.

  It was something of a novelty item. A long-time client had expressed interest in the idea years ago, and Ferromancer had given it a crack every now and then. It wasn’t exactly her field, but she could make just about any piece of tech with enough elbow grease and creativity. If she pulled it off, she’d make a small handful of assassins very happy; plenty of wealthy targets with good security had friends and loved ones with far worse security, if any.

  But she wasn’t going to finish it today. An alert on her computer let her know that someone was at one of the entrances to her dimensional workshop. She closed down the 3D modeling software she was using to concept components and checked the cameras.

  It was Rachel. The cute freak had come dressed up in her club look: shorts, tights, crop top, leather jacket. The red lipstick was different, and an improvement in Erica’s opinion. Her hair looked good tied back like that. The impish grin she was showing the camera completed the picture; it had a certain bratty energy that excited Erica like little else.

  The moment she saw Rachel out of costume for the first time, Erica had thought, “Here’s a girl I could enjoy wrapping around my finger.” The fact that the Jovians thought Rachel could be a weapon against Striga was a nice bonus; stealing that weapon for herself would make it much easier to get out from under Striga’s thumb after the world-saving was over.

  Except, in a cruel twist of fate, their supposed weapon was too in love to ever seriously turn against the heroine. She might yet cause problems for Strix Striga, but none of the kind that Ferromancer could exploit to escape the proverbial bomb collar around her neck.

  Messing with the girl would have to be its own reward. For now, at least.

  Ferromancer did her diligence and checked the sensors; no sign of any illusions, so it wasn’t Glamour in disguise, and a shapeshifted Echidna would have set off six different alarms. She buzzed Rachel in and came out to meet her in the central warehouse.

  Erica leaned against a crate and lit a cigarette. “What, no tribute? When you drop by unannounced, it’s usually to bribe me with food.”

  Rachel stopped in the middle of the space, laid a hand on one hip, and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I figured you’d be happy enough to see me in this outfit, but I guess I can go get changed and come back with a burger, if that’s what you’d rather drool over.” There was a pleasing bite to her words, and a suggestive leer to her expression.

  A covetous fire blazed to life in Erica’s core. Had the mad owl finally rejected her stalker? “No,” Erica said, “I prefer this.” She raked her gaze slowly, leisurely, across everything on display. “It’s a good look on you. I can think of one better, ‘course. You finally done denying yourself the things that you want, doll? Cut yourself loose of that albatross you been carryin’?”

  Rachel smirked. “Do you actually care? Does it matter?” She blew out a hot, angry breath, and said, “I’m so sick and tired of overthinking everything. I’m tired of all these stupid, unnecessary feelings. I don’t want to process, I don’t want to dump my trauma on you, and I definitely don’t want to talk about my day. I haven’t fucked anyone in seven years, Ferro. D’you wanna break my streak, or should I find some other emotionally unavailable jackass to shove me against a wall and screw my brains out?”

  Rachel was right; Erica didn’t care. She’d get the details later.

  In moments they were intertwined—hands wandering beneath clothing, slipping off Rachel’s jacket, pulling Erica closer. The warmth of two bodies, the soft friction of skin on skin. Erica growled hungrily as their lips met, and then—

  Pain. Icy, numbing, paralyzing pain. Rachel had bitten Erica’s mouth and something had stolen inside, spiking into Erica’s brain and down her spine, keeping her frozen in place as Rachel—the deimovore, somehow here in Forks, in her workshop—bit down harder and drank in Erica’s memories, her fears, her whole existence. She couldn’t move. Her hands wouldn’t even twitch.

  How? How did you get here? Through the cold fog in her brain, Ferromancer tried to reach out for her technology, her robotics, her systems. It was all too distant.

  The deimovore pulled out and Erica crumpled, shivering. The false Rachel wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and let out a pleased sigh. “Was it good for you?”

  Warmth was slowly returning. Ferromancer shoved her hand inside her coat and forced her fingers around the handle of her concealed pistol, but she stopped before drawing it. Deimovores can’t be hurt. But they also can’t leave the World of Glass. Something is very, very wrong. “What are you doing here?” she asked. She was stalling for time, waiting for the lingering effects of the deimovore’s bite to burn away.

  The deimovore was changing shape. A perfect copy of Erica replaced the perfect copy of Rachel. In Ferromancer’s own voice, the monster said, “Have a little patience, doll.” Then it said, “Hey, Joy: flicker the interdiction shield for three seconds. Override Lambda Rho Upsilon.”

  “Countermand!” Erica shouted. “Theta Mu Tau!”

  She was too late. Her virtual assistant, Joyeuse, chimed pleasant affirmation to one command after another. In the instant between, a new figure appeared in Ferromancer’s workshop: a gangly, disheveled woman in a leather jacket and a starry hat.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Erica shot her, twice. Both bullets went wild, pinging off an invisible force field. The stranger chuckled.

  “Afternoon,” she said with a shit-eating grin. “How about we have a nice, friendly chat, and then we can all go out for sandwiches?”

  “If talk was your intention,” Ferromancer said coldly, “you could have knocked.” She kept the gun leveled at the stranger.

  “Well yeah,” the girl in the hat said with a snort, “but then you might have thought you had the home field advantage. I’m being nice by removing that delusion. I’m Mordacity, by the way. You may have heard of me.”

  “I don’t—wait.” Erica furrowed her brow. “Rachel’s weird internet friend? That’s not a real fucking name, you know. It’s just a word.”

  “Lots of names are words,” Mordacity said, still grinning.

  “Don’t play along,” the false Erica muttered. As she spoke, she was shifting again, changing from Erica back to Rachel—except, not quite Rachel. Darker eyes, blue hair, and a softer face. “Don’t get trapped in her bits.”

  “I don’t believe I asked for your input, minion,” Mordacity said blithely. “Ignore the deimovore, it’s still uppity about our arrangement.”

  “How did you tame a deimovore?” Ferromancer asked. She slowly lowered the gun and put it back in her coat. There was another object in her coat that would be more useful: a communicator, magical in nature, paired to a copy kept in the Ossuary. With one press, the Morrigan would be alerted to trouble, and then she’d contact Striga.

  It galled Ferromancer to need Striga’s assistance, but there was an invader in her workshop and most of her defenses would be useless with that deimovore around to countermand all of Ferromancer’s orders to Joyeuse. The few defenses she could activate with just a remote wouldn’t be much stronger than the gun.

  “I wouldn’t,” Mordacity said, gaze shifting to the pocket that Erica’s hand was in, wrapped around the communicator. “You’d lose your one chance to get out from Striga’s noose.”

  Erica stopped. “What do you know?”

  “I know that you and Delilah had a falling out leading to the two of you trading deaths. I know that she poisoned you with her deadliest concoction, which cost her more than she ever wanted to admit. And I know that you lied to Rachel about what happened the night you met Strix Striga.” Mordacity’s grin faded, her expression taking on a cold, serious cast. “It wasn’t the night after Delilah’s poison failed to kill you; it was the night that Delilah’s poison was killing you, when you stumbled into the Ossuary, begged sanctuary, and made a deal with your own personal devil. You thought you were just bargaining with the Morrigan when you traded your freedom for your survival; a few favors here and there, for a witch who infamously didn’t get involved in stupid turf wars? A cheap price to pay. But you were wrong.”

  Erica clenched her fists. That night had haunted her for years. A mistake, but the only one she could have made. A contract under duress, deprived of the full terms until it was too late to take it back. And worst of all… “The poison is still there, kept in stasis by the Morrigan’s power. I scanned myself, after ending Delilah. I don’t know what it’ll do to me, now that Delilah is gone from our pattern, but that poison was made to eat my magic along with my life. That’s not a risk I can take. How do you plan to get it out?”

  “Like this,” she said, and then a vial of poison was in her hand. She stoppered it, a cord running through the cork to make it a necklace, and held it out to Erica. “You should keep it on your person, though, so they don’t suspect their leverage is gone.”

  Erica stared at the vial. This is a trick. That has to be a trick. She snatched it by the cord, then turned around and stalked away from Mordacity and the deimovore. She went straight to her workshop’s medical lab and ran the scan, searching her body for any traces of Delilah’s poison. Nothing. All gone. She scanned the vial and got a positive. The quantity matched what she’d recorded in her last scan.

  She was free. She was free, and now she could get away from her taskmasters the second she didn’t need them, the very instant the world was safe. No more restrictions on who she did business with, no more putting her neck on the line for their goals.

  She laughed. She laughed until she was nearly sick, and then she made her way back to the warehouse. Mordacity was waiting. In the time that Erica had been away, the intruder had apparently gone out for sandwiches and come back with them.

  “Consider that a gift of goodwill,” Mordacity said. “Like this food. No debts owed, yeah? I just want you to hear me out.”

  “My day is yours,” Ferromancer said, earnest for a rarity. “Let’s talk.”

  Over sandwiches in the kitchen, Mordacity laid out her pitch. “I’m putting together a crew. You’ve got a particular set of skills that I’m going to find real useful in the coming days, and my last technician got herself eaten in the World of Glass while I wasn’t looking. I don’t think you’ll have that problem.”

  Erica swallowed a bite of chicken and peppers. “So an inventor witch, a deimovore, and… what are you? It’s crazy that I haven’t heard about a witch with your abilities.”

  “She’s a wizard,” the deimovore said, cutting off Mordacity before she could speak. “Different source of magic. Manual control.”

  Mordacity glared at her companion and took another nibble of her cheesesteak. “Killjoy. Yes, well, that’s the basics of it. We can go over details later. Phoebe here is more of a temporary hire, though. Right now, if you’re interested, the crew would be you, me, and a couple of moles scattered across the big players. I’ve got someone in Visage, one in Vanguard, and another in the Coterie. You’d be working with the Visage gal on the project I have in mind. I have sketches I can show you of the machines I need built. They need to be installed in the Visage Spire by Valentine’s Day.”

  Ferromancer leaned back in her chair. “Tight deadline. This… sounds big. I’m interested, but I’m gonna need more detail. What’s the payday? And… how is this going to intersect with what Striga’s got planned?”

  Mordacity chuckled. “Striga lacks vision. She wants to keep Hastur’s throne empty. Well, she’s right that none of the egregores deserve it. But when all the gods are dead and the power to reshape reality is left there for the taking, what happens next?”

  Erica chewed slowly. Took another bite. Finally, she said, “You want to take that power for yourself. And, what, you’ll be the new god in the World of Glass, and the people who helped you, they become your champions?”

  “Power,” Mordacity mused, “is just one’s capacity to affect the world around them. As a raw number, it doesn’t matter. What I want, my new friend, is to change the world. To change everything. What I’m offering is a vote on how everything changes. To be a god not in name, not in strength, but in knowing that you had a part in making that new world.”

  “...Yeah, alright. I’m in.”

  TMGM goes on hiatus after the March 4th update. TMGM will return from hiatus on April 5th.