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magibrainTitle: someone's dread and darling boy
Requestor:sholio
Request Link: http://collarcorner.livejournal.com/27620.html?thread=936420
Prompt Details:
Rating: Yanked into an alternate universe where nothing makes sense and you're pretty sure everyone wants you dead? T, dammit.
Wordcount: 16,000
Additional Notes: This contains a great deal of magical detail cribbed from all manner of places – primarily the Lesser Key of Solomon – and a great deal of magical detail I made up on the spot. It should not be considered accurate or faithful to the traditions of ceremonial magic, goetic demonology, enochian magic, herbal magick, Catholic theology, or anything else.
Day One
As soon as the bag went over his head Neal knew he should scream, should make a scene, use the few seconds before he was taken God knew where to try to leave a witness behind, at least. Someone might call it in, and someone might put that report together with his anklet tracking data–
But as soon as the bag went over his head, his mouth filled with the taste of licorice (and something warmer, darker, more bitter below it, tanged coppery like blood) and his tongue refused to move. All his limb went sluggish.
They didn't even need to restrain him when they dragged him into what he suspected was a featureless van.
He felt the vehicle pull into traffic, and heard the scrape of shoes on sheetmetal floor as someone knelt in front of him. Then hands on his anklet, and a low murmuring. Then – he could feel this much – the anklet split, falling away from his leg.
What parts of him could react, reacted with surprise.
"Get rid of this," his tail-turned-captor said, and Neal heard a rustle from the direction of the front seat. Had a feeling they were going to toss the anklet; and he had to hand it to them, that was quick. Hadn't even brought him out of his radius. It could take hours before Peter even knew he was missing.
Or whoever was in charge of caring about these things, with Peter on his way to DC.
Still, a part of him thought, as hands explored his pockets, divested him of his phone and wallet, probably better that this happened now. Probably for the best that they hadn't waited a week or two. At least now the jaws of the FBI would be closing in on them, and he felt a thrill of preemptive schadenfreude at the thought.
"Slow and steady," the front man said, his voice angled toward the front. "Across the river, and no one's the wiser."
Who are you? Neal wanted to ask, but his tongue lay in his mouth like a lump of clay.
What he could do was listen, count, and mark out the stops at stoplights and the turns of the van. So by his measurement they'd turned east and crossed the East River, probably on the Queensboro bridge, and then turned south for a few minutes before they parked, and dragged him out of the van. So far as abductions went, they hadn't bothered to relocate him very far.
He could see snatches of the ground when they hauled him upright; his own feet and the feet of his kidnappers crossing from pavement to grass, and then he was on the grass, tossed down like a sack of sand.
His arms wouldn't move to catch him, and he flopped like a ragdoll. He could hear people, not too far away – usual city sounds, snatches of inane conversation, horns honking, people arguing. Like they'd just dragged him out in public with a bag over his head, and surely, even in New York, that would attract some attention.
"Right, steady him up," the front man said. Then there were hands on Neal's shoulders, pulling him into a rough sitting position.
He was about to try to speak again when his body tore itself apart.
Felt like it, anyway – a ripping, tearing, twisting sensation, like every molecule in him had been velcroed to every other one, and someone was going through and ripping up every grip at once. But there wasn't enough time to panic before it was over, and the world's sounds rushed in around him again, and someone snatched the bag off his head.
He flinched at the sudden light – still had that much range of motion, at least. The man who'd been tailing him was staring at him, chewing on something, a measuring look in his eyes. There was something – a joint, it looked like – smoldering between his fingers.
Where am I? Neal's tongue wouldn't say.
–there weren't any people. Neal registered that, not that he could examine that. Everything had gone quiet except birds and the river.
After a moment, the man brought the joint to his lips and took a long pull, cheeks puffing out. Then he leaned close, letting all the smoke – not marijuana, not tobacco; smelled herbal, like something Mozzie would stick in one of his bizarre alternative pharmaceuticals – stream over Neal's face. Neal flinched again.
But the licorice taste dissolved, and when he acted on instinct to bring a hand up and wave the smoke away, his hand obeyed. He found himself coughing, but he could move, and–
"What the hell!"
–speak. He could speak again.
He made an abortive bid to stand, but hands on his shoulders forced him back to the ground again. The man in front of him spat a wad of chewed-up leaves and bark into the grass.
"There," he said. "Welcome to our world, Mr. Caffrey. I'm afraid you won't be able to get home from here, but you shouldn't let that worry you. Live in the moment, is my advice." He stubbed out the joint. "Call me Lawrence."
"Lawrence," Neal said, testing the word on his tongue. He had a feeling it wasn't the man's real name. "You're making a mistake."
"Because the FBI will be after me?" Lawrence asked. "Doesn't concern me."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "It should. The people who'll be looking for me aren't the type to give up easily."
"Oh?" Lawrence said. He was humoring him, Neal thought. Or he thought he was. "And what would you have me do?"
Neal didn't think this would work. If nothing else, though, it might dislodge some new piece of information, some insight into his kidnapping. "If you let me go, you might get away."
Lawrence's mouth curled up.
"I thought you might say that," he said. "I thought you might fail to comprehend the situation you were in. That's why I brought you here. Do you know where you are?"
Neal glanced around, though the hands on his shoulders prevented him from getting much of a field of view. Still, there were benches nearby of a very particular design, and he could see the lawn, and hear the water behind him. He could guess how long they'd been driving, and he knew how the sound of the van had changed as it passed over a bridge. "At a guess? Gantry Park."
"They said you were clever," Lawrence said, and stood. He motioned for Neal's guards to let Neal do the same. And they did, hauling him up to balance on his own two feet, and turning him around.
And the view slammed itself into Neal's gut.
He surged forward without thinking about it, and his guards restrained him; a startled cry escaped from his throat, even when he couldn't believe his eyes. The Manhattan skyline stood shattered across the river, like a model someone had thrown against a wall; the Empire State building skeletal and beginning to buckle, the Chrysler building beheaded, all the offices of Midtown gaping broken-windowed and brought low. Along the line of the coast hulked shapes that had once been buildings, which were now piles of rubble and debris. Up north, the Queensboro Bridge twisted and dove down into the water, graceful as a swan's neck in its ruin.
It looked like a bomb had gone off, or a hurricane thrown its full might against the city, but what–
Lawrence came up beside him.
"Like I said." His voice was sardonic. "Welcome to our world, Neal Caffrey. You don't have to worry. Everyone you know is just how you left them. Your pretty city is just the same as it was – probably won't even notice you gone. But it's my world that needs you now, and I don't intend to disappoint them."
–
They pushed him into the van again – or, a van; Neal had to admit that he wasn't sure it was the same one. But they didn't pull the bag over his head this time. Still, he was sitting between the people who had grabbed him (hired muscle, he thought; no chatter, no banter, just a solid, present threat), and he was rattled more than he'd like to admit.
The smoke, the paralysis, the shattered Manhattan – it was a trick. It all had to be a trick, though he wasn't sure how it could be; even he wouldn't be able to pull off that view, with the open air of Gantry Park, with the sky above, without a mural stretching the whole length of the island. And he was pretty sure that, if they'd soaked the bag in something to dose him, the effects wouldn't be that clean, and the antidote wouldn't be that simple.
"All right," he said, after a couple streets went by. There were no windows in the back, but he could catch glimpses of the windshield through the mesh barrier that separated the cab from the cargo. He couldn't tell much, but it seemed like the places they were driving through didn't look much better than Manhattan had. He kept catching glimpses of torn-up roofs, of telephone poles listing at uncomfortable angles. Kept feeling jarring bumps as the tires ran over some roughness. "You can let me in on the joke now."
"Everything in its time," Lawrence answered easily, from the front seat.
And that was it for conversation.
Neal kept trying, but there was only so much he could do with the stony-faced goons and Lawrence's self-satisfied silence. Eventually he gave up, and leaned back against the wall, categorizing his options. So long as he was hemmed in on both sides by men who could probably snap him, they were more or less nonexistent. No one was going to believe a conveniently-timed misdirection or illness.
So, he had to wait until they got where they were going. And damn, but that took time.
He supposed it could be worse. They could be driving cross-country on these awful roads. As it was, he thought it was a full hour, maybe two, before the van rolled to a stop, and Lawrence opened his door and got out.
Neal could hear his footsteps crunching on gravel outside, and then the back door swung open. Lawrence beckoned them out, and the goons all but hauled Neal into the sunlight. He had to stand, blinking, until his eyes adjusted again.
He saw a gate and a palisade. Old, uninspired buildings in military rows. People going here and there, though most of them with a furtiveness to their steps. A few of them had gathered, some distance away, to stare at Lawrence, but they didn't come close, and Neal couldn't quite read their expressions. Out past the buildings stood something that looked like a silo. And from not too far away, he could hear the crashing of waves – the ocean.
With a snap, he recognized where he was. This was Fort Tilden, but a Fort Tilden he'd only seen in historical documents: back home, most of the old military buildings were abandoned or destroyed. Here, it was though the place never went out of service.
Fort Totten, Fort Tilden. His life had been full up on forts, of late.
Lawrence motioned them ahead toward one of the outlying buildings, and his goons dragged Neal forward by the arm. Still, it was only a few steps later when a voice boomed out, "Lawrence!", in a tone that said someone was about to have the Riot Act read.
And a welcome voice, too. Though this had to be breaking some records, even for him.
Peter.
But then he turned and saw him, and saw that Peter... looked wrong. Not as wrong as the Manhattan skyline, but wrong, nonetheless.
He was dressed in work clothes – hard, outdoor work clothes; laborer's clothes, not an FBI suit and tie. And he looked haggard. Like he hadn't remembered to shave in a day or two, like he hadn't had a full night's sleep in longer.
His eyes, though, were clear and burning sharp, and hit Lawrence with a force Neal could almost feel biting him. Lawrence, though, seemed less than impressed.
"What the hell did you do?" Peter snapped. "I said no. I said, under no circumstance–"
"You carrying your agrimony, Burke?" he said. "Agrimony, bay, and black snake – that what they were rationing you?"
Peter stopped up short, anger in his eyes, coiled violence in the set of his shoulders. But he didn't reach out to cuff Lawrence, or take his eyes off him.
"How'd you find him?" he asked, finally. "Dig up a scrap of bone from somewhere?"
"Nah," Lawrence said. "His little friend provided the materials."
Peter's face twisted into a show of incredulity. "Mozzie?" he demanded.
"That surprise you?" Lawrence said. "You think you'd talked him around to your side of the law?"
Peter's jaw worked for a second. Then, he seemed to file that away, presumably until he could corner Mozzie and interrogate him on his own terms. "I don't care," he snapped out. "Whatever our Caffrey might have done, as far as this world is concerned, he's an innocent."
That was accompanied by a jab of a finger in Neal's direction, and met with a derisive snort. "I doubt Caffrey's innocent in any world," Lawrence said.
"...excuse me," Neal said. He'd been hoping – trying desperately, actually – to feel out the balance in this situation, maybe get a sense of what he had to work with before taking the chance of speaking up. But he wasn't liking where this was going. "Can I just–"
"Shut up!"
That caught Neal like a bucket of ice to the face. He jerked back, but Peter hadn't even glanced in his direction.
"I'm still the law here, Lawrence," Peter said.
Lawrence barked out a laugh. Neal knew the tone of that laughter – Lawrence didn't give a damn for the law, but he sure as hell gave a damn about letting the law know it. "Burke, you're a lucky survivor with a halfpenny contract with Agares. I'm not scared of you. There isn't a sorcerer left in New York who scares me. Including this one."
That was all the warning Neal got before Lawrence's hand smacked into the back of his head, and he stumbled.
"Don't," Lawrence growled, voice a sharpened threat, "insult me."
Lawrence gestured, and the goons holding onto Neal spurred him forward. Neal cast a glance back to Peter, but Peter's eyes never left Lawrence, and his expression never changed from hate and rage.
A few steps later, with Neal still being dragged forward, Lawrence stopped and turned back.
"When this is over," Lawrence called, "I'm going to be a hero. What about you, Burke?"
"Not like this," Peter called back. And that was the end of the conversation.
The goons dragged him through the fort and to a solid brick-and-mortar building, then inside, up a winding and narrowing set of stairs, and tossed him through a door.
Beyond the door was a garret. Maybe twelve feet by eight, with a composting toilet set up in the corner and a mattress left as far away (not far) as possible. A glassless window sat on the wall, just about chest-height. Neal turned, and there was Lawrence in the doorway, looking at him with that same measuring gaze.
"Your little friend will probably bring you up a pack of cards," he said. "Burke might stop by. Never mind either of them. There's a Great Occasion in two days. Just bide your time until then."
"What am I doing here?" Neal asked. "What occasion? What's going on?"
And there, again, that thin, sardonic smile. "Don't waste time worrying."
The Lawrence turned away, and the door swung shut behind him.
Neal listened, but didn't hear a latch. But he didn't hear any footsteps walking away, either, so he decided to wait on pushing open the door. He turned, and walked to the window.
The window was about a yard high; slightly less wide. Large enough to wriggle out of, though the brick wall below was smooth to the touch and didn't look like climbable without equipment. The ground below was bone-breaking, organ-rupturing ground: rocky outcrops, some too uniform to be natural. Not like the Fort Tilden beach he was familiar with.
Elaborate trick, his instincts said. Some kind of misdirection. But there was too much that didn't add up, even for that explanation.
The window faced out over the fathomless expanse of the Atlantic, the white light of afternoon shattering on the water's surface. Something vast and dark moved within its depths.
–
It took, by Neal's reckoning, two hours before the familiar cadence of Mozzie's speech started up beyond the door, in which time he'd heard one set of footsteps leave and the other two stick around, occasionally pacing a few steps here or there in the hall. He'd gone through the room, and discovered nothing more interesting than a line of intermingled Greek and Latin inscriptions twining their way around the room on the baseboards. He'd never paid that much attention to learning dead languages – not when there were so many living ones that were more useful – but he thought it was mostly to do with demons, kings, and angels.
Curious, that. Especially as it was far too neat to suggest the rantings of a raving lunatic.
But now the door was swinging open and there was a familiar face, shuffling in like he was on business. Neal straightened up. Maybe there would be some answers, here.
"Mozzie."
Manhattan was ruined, Fort Tilden was still standing, and Peter didn't give him the time of day. Neal had no idea what to expect.
Mozzie, it seemed, had the same reservation. He eyed Neal the way he used to eye Peter, back home – because wherever Neal was, in his mind or out of it, it certainly wasn't home. "Neal." A moment passed, Mozzie studying everything from Neal's haircut to his shoes, then he said, carefully, "Briarpatch?"
A jolt of familiarity hit him. It was an old passphrase, and there was no telling if it would work here, but Neal answered, "Romain Bouquet?"
Mozzie nodded, though. Closed the door, and looked satisfied. "Well. That much is the same, at least." He bustled to the window, peering out; the sun was beginning its trek down the far side of the sky, and the vast dark shape had swum away. It had swum away twice before, and always come circling back.
Mozzie turned back to Neal.
"It's good to see you again, mon frere."
Something in Mozzie's voice made Neal's stomach twist. "I wish I could say the same," he said. "What's going on?"
Mozzie raised a finger. Then, in the silence, he touched his forehead, and mumbled something.
"Ateh," it sounded like.
Neal's brows furrowed.
Mozzie didn't seem to notice or care. His eyes were focused on something entirely different, in some middle distance which probably exceeded the span of the room. He moved his hand over his heart. "Malkuth." His right shoulder. "ve-Geburah." Left shoulder. "ve-Gedulah."
Neal watched him, entertaining the idea that maybe everyone he knew had gone insane. Maybe he had gone insane. Maybe the bag they'd pulled over his head had been soaked in ether and he was lost in some kind of remarkably internally-consistent hallucination. He hadn't come out of it with that breath of smoke.
It was that, or believing that he was actually in another world, where all of this nonsense made sense.
Mozzie had moved on to drawing shapes in the air with some small device he'd produced from some pocket, somewhere, and Neal shook his head and went to sit down on his mattress. He counted up to fifty, back down to thirty-eight, and Mozzie finally finished whatever he was doing and turned back to him, brushing off his hands. "There," he pronounced. "Now we can talk freely."
Neal wasn't sure what he was supposed to say to that.
Granted, that had been the case back home frequently enough. So he cleared his throat, and said "What's going on?" again.
Mozzie looked at him, and it wasn't often that easy to see that there were things Mozzie wanted to say, but wasn't saying. "You're in another world," he said, after a pause. The pause had been laden with implication, though Neal wasn't sure what was being implied. "We need your help. I convinced Lawrence to do a Soror Cardea translocation to bring you here – sorry about that, by the way. He's the only one left on the East Coast who can pull off that kind of a working. But for our purposes, consider him a patsy – a very dangerous patsy, mind, but we can use him to our aims." And then he stopped, turning a look on Neal that was almost desperate. "There may have been a... slight miscalculation in one of our plans."
"Okay," Neal said. "But why me? There have to be plenty of people in this... world... who can fix whatever we did."
Mozzie sidled. "Not exactly," he said. "It has to do with a contract you made." Then, after Neal apparently failed to produce the correct response, "A demonic contract."
Neal shook his head.
"...you're really not a sorcerer?" Mozzie asked. "How did life conspire to allow that? That's an unconscionable waste of your skills!"
"As far as I know, sorcerers don't exist in 'my world,'" Neal said. "Neither do demons. This is all a little weird."
"Seriously?" Mozzie burst. "How does that – I fail to understand how a global economy could even develop, absent the resources provided by the underworld."
"I fail to understand how one could with them," Neal parried, and didn't notice until he had that he'd been run around into taking the conversation at face value. "Aren't demons... I don't know, evil?"
"Ah, the prejudices of the pre-Enlightenment era," Mozzie said. "I can tell we have some remedial lessons in theology in our future." Then, before Neal could bristle too much at that, he went on to say, "Anyway, your blood wouldn't have found you if you weren't still – you know. You. At least for the purposes of expanded ceremonial magic."
That didn't sound pleasant. "My blood?" Neal asked.
"I had a phylactery," Mozzie said, which didn't explain anything.
"A scroll? A – a tefillin?"
Mozzie gave him an odd look, which Neal felt was unfair. "No," he said, "a vial of your blood."
That sounded unnecessarily morbid. "You had a vial of my blood in storage."
"You had one of mine!" Mozzie protested. "We needed a way to get in touch with each other if something should happen. A simple astral communications spell, using the blood as an anchor–"
"Like a burner phone," Neal said.
Mozzie looked taken aback. "I guess you could use a phone for that," he said. "But why would you? Those things are insecure; the feds control all of the satellites."
"...right," Neal said.
"There's not much you can do with someone else' blood, anyway," Mozzie continued. "Communications spells, tracking spells, one or two of the nastier curses, though those usually end bite you, in the end. A Frater Elah's invocation."
Neal shook his head. "Okay, but why did you need to grab me from another world, if you had something you could use to track–"
Halfway through the sentence, with Mozzie looking pained, he got it.
"...don't tell me I'm dead in this – here."
Mozzie shifted unhappily.
Neal took a moment to breathe. Given all the scrapes he'd been through in his own world, he probably shouldn't be surprised by that. Still, he didn't really like having an awareness of his own mortality thrown in his face, and certainly not by sorcerous alternate-world versions of his friends. That was all sorts of discomfiting.
He thought about asking Out of curiosity, how did I die?, and wondered if he really wanted to know.
"Okay," he said. "So I'm dead, you need someone to fix a mistake I made–" A mistake that your me made, he thought, but that just sounded clumsy. He wasn't sure about the grammatical rules of talking himself in a different reality. "–and you were expecting me to know about sorcery. Does the fact that I don't put a crimp in your plans?"
"I taught you once," Mozzie said. "I can do it again. Though I had hoped you'd come with some expertise; the Great Occasion is the day after tomorrow."
"I'm guessing that's bad," Neal said.
"No," Mozzie said. "Not bad, exactly. Just a rush job." Then, before Neal could ask what the rush job was, Mozzie looked at him and got a glint in his eye. "In a way, you could look at this as the quintessential eucatastrophe," he said. "Lawrence said he found you on an anklet. But in a mere two days, you will have accomplished the score of a lifetime, and be free forevermore from the bindings of the FBI. Songs will be sung and tales told."
A chill wound down Neal's spine. Oh, he'd like freedom, sure. And once, he'd have been excited about ultimate score. These days, it just started him wondering what was about to go wrong.
But Mozzie was on a roll, now. He waved a hand out the window, eyes lit up with an enthusiasm that, admittedly, was good to see. "I'm sure you've noticed our companion in the waters? That's Pandomaine, a Great King of Hell, only discovered in the 1940s by German demonologists. It grants 'powers vast and overwhelming' to those who seize his contract – that is, assuming they execute the contract correctly. Which we, unfortunately, did not."
"I'm guessing this is what got me killed?"
Mozzie paused. "No," he said. "That was... extraneous. FBI-related. ...Kate-related."
Oh, and Neal could see where this was going, and wished he couldn't. "Plane-related?"
"It was bad," Mozzie said, in a small voice. That seemed like agreement to Neal.
Silently, they both reached the decision that the less said on that topic, the better.
"Anyway," Mozzie said, "as a result of the error in our contract the first time, Pandomaine is currently at loose ends, and expressing its boredom... destructively."
Two and two came together in Neal's mind to create a four he wasn't happy with. "We summoned the thing that destroyed Manhattan?"
"There was nothing in the literature to suggest it would do that!" Mozzie said. "The literature was incomplete! The Germans lost the war before they could complete their research! It's not like we were trying to deal in weapons of mass destruction – a career choice, I should note, which has been made available to me at various points, and which I have always taken a principled stand against." But then he seemed to melt back, a little. "That said... you see how important it is that we correct the contract, as soon as possible."
If New York City was in ruins, the bodycount had to be in the millions already. That far eclipsed any mistake Neal could possibly have made, back home. And as for how Mozzie expected him to fix it–
"Of course, Lawrence doesn't think we're going to be correcting the contract," Mozzie said. "He plans on canceling it entirely, which is why you can't tell him about any of this. Trust me when I say he does not have your best interests at heart."
"I know I'm the new guy here," Neal said, "but have you considered the merits of canceling the contract? Why–"
But Mozzie was already waving the objections off. "A properly-handled demonic contract is no more dangerous than a properly raised dog," he said. "Neal, trust me. Lawrence doesn't have your best interests at heart, but I do. We'll correct the contract, the world will be safe, and we'll be able to write our own tickets. We just have to get your through tomorrow and the Great Occasion and everything will be fine."
Mozzie's sense of fine could, on occasion, be hugely suspect. Neal had the feeling this was one of those times. "And what's your level of confidence?"
"High," Mozzie said, instantly. Then, after a moment, "Moderately high. I'd expected to be working with a skilled sorcerer, but... well, you're good at following scripts?"
"Ostensibly," Neal said.
Mozzie nodded. "You'll do fine," he said. "You put yourself in the right headspace and you say all the right words, attendant to the right symbols and the correct temporal positions. I refuse to believe there's a universe where Neal Caffrey can't handle that."
That might have been reassuring, in a world different from this one. "Thanks."
And Mozzie's voice got oddly soft, at that. Shades of grief around his eyes, and Neal didn't want to see it. Circumstances were too strange for that. "Any time, mon frere," he said, and sidled toward the door.
With his hand on the doorframe, though, he stopped, and gave Neal a considering look.
"Lawrence thinks he's in control of the situation," Mozzie said. "For the time being, it's advantageous to let him continue to think that. So, unfortunately, you're going to have to stay in here for the immediate future. Don't worry, though – you'll see the full extent of this world's hospitality after the contract is corrected."
"Noted," Neal said.
"Oh," Mozzie said, and scrambled about in his pockets for something. After a moment, he located it. "Cover story," he said, and tossed Neal a pack of cards. "If anyone asks, I came in to talk to you in an attempt to salve my own conscience."
He vanished out the door before Neal could ask what he was salving his conscience for.
Day Two
So far as he could tell, Neal had essentially been put into storage. Someone came by as the sky was going dark and gave him food – most of which seemed like it had come out of cans, though Neal suspected that there weren't many grocery stores around that were still working, if Queens had suffered the same as Manhattan. Breakfast, when the sky was lightening, was a bit better; fresh eggs from somewhere, even though he suspected the accompanying bread had been toasted to conceal how stale it was.
He'd tried to make conversation with the person bringing his food – a fresh-faced young woman who seemed like she could have been an advertisement for the National Guard – but she just looked at him with a degree of suspicion, and refused to say a word.
Though, if all she knew about him was "he's another version of the guy who summoned the giant monster," he supposed he couldn't blame her. And the guards outside the door were no more friendly. In fact, Neal got the distinct impression that if they had a choice in the matter, they'd already have murdered him.
After they refused to carry a message to Lawrence, carry a message to Mozzie, catch him up on the news, or let him stretch his legs a little, Neal tried to limit his interaction with them.
Between the fort's general hostility and the revelations Mozzie had spring on him the night before, Neal wasn't expecting anything good to come of the hard knocking at the door when midafternoon rolled around. Still, he called out "I don't think it's locked," because there were only so many versions of Solitaire that he knew and sitting there, waiting for something to happen, was going to drive him insane.
The door swung open like a fist. And there was Peter, the burning of Manhattan in his eyes, but also that look he got, like he was fighting hard to give someone all the chances they were due. Neal scrambled to his feet.
"Peter," he said, but warily. Seeing Peter, down in the courtyard – well, his first instinct had been that he'd been rescued before he made it out of the city. But that... wasn't the case, at all.
"Caffrey," Peter said, acid in his voice. But he glanced around, and then invited himself in, and that was still Peter Burke, even if none of the rest of this was.
Or. Rather. The rest of this was, but it was a Peter that Neal didn't often have to see. Not with all that smoldering anger directed at him. There had been times, though.
They'd barely gotten past some of those times.
"I feel like I should point out that I'm probably not the person you're angry at, right now."
Peter didn't look especially mollified by that. "I know!" he said. "I know. Just – I'm not exactly used to dealing with people from other worlds."
"Oh," Neal said, "so this isn't a common–?"
The look Peter shot him ended that quip quickly.
After a moment, though, Peter relented. "No," he said, "it isn't." Then, with a glance out toward the ocean, "Lawrence thinks you're not a sorcerer."
So, Mozzie and Lawrence really weren't sharing all their intel, and Mozzie wasn't telling things to Peter. Good to know. "No, I'm not," Neal said. "But I'm allegedly a pretty good bond forger, if that helps."
Peter didn't seem to find that funny, but he also didn't find it an odd enough statement to comment on. "Good going, them, then. Well, they wouldn't have been able to find you if you weren't–"
"Still me, at least for the purposes of magic, yeah," Neal said. "Mozzie said. Apparently I can help with your–" He waved a hand at the window. "–giant monster problem."
Peter looked at him, and then Peter looked at him, a searing, searching look that Neal could feel turning him inside-out. He was hoping that was just a metaphor. "Lawrence hasn't told you what he has planned for you?" Peter asked. "Neither has Mozzie?"
Well, Mozzie had told him that he was leading Lawrence on. Mozzie had shared his plan, but Neal got the feeling Peter wouldn't approve. Hell, Neal didn't approve.
But Neal was also not going to turn Mozzie in to Peter. This was a new world, and he wasn't sure of all the rules. Best not to burn any bridges until he knew he wouldn't need them; he didn't get the feeling that this Peter was overfull of fond-feeling for the two of them. "No," he said. "Nothing."
Nothing so far as Lawrence's plans, at least.
Peter looked at him, and there were shades of nausea around his expression. "Caffrey," he said. "They're going to sacrifice you to that thing."
Neal didn't even have to fake his surprise, at that. Granted, Mozzie apparently had no intention of letting that happen, but he'd also failed to mention it as a part of Lawrence's plans.
"The only way a contract is severed with Pandomaine is if it kills you," Peter went on. "Not if your plane goes up in flames, not if you die of old age. And Pandomaine remains on Earth until his contract is severed. If I know Lawrence, he's going to use tomorrow's Occasion to walk you to the shore as soon as the time is right, and compel you to call Pandomaine onto you."
Peter Burke: master of breaking the news gently. Neal let out a shaky laugh. "Okay," he said. "I'm getting the feeling this is one of those things I should run from."
"You run and Lawrence is going to summon up something to hunt you," Peter said. "You wouldn't make it twenty miles."
Oh, good to know that was something Lawrence could do. Track him across worlds, and summon demons to hunt him. He was beginning to miss the days when pissing someone off just meant you risked having a hit put on you.
"So why are you telling me this?" Neal asked. It clearly wasn't out of compassion or fellow-feeling. "Are you my exit counselor?"
"Hardly." Peter crossed his arms, and Neal fought to hide a look of surprise. Peter's arms were crossed a little too tightly, and it broadcasted his unease as clearly as a snarl or a whimper. "The you who was here," Peter said. "Him? I would have let him. He should have had the guts to correct his own mistakes, not run off to – but I'm not going to let you die for a mistake you didn't make."
Neal let out a shaky laugh. Some of that was feigned, but too much of it wasn't. "And Lawrence doesn't have your compunctions."
"Lawrence would have gone after you the day he got here," Peter said. "He didn't have any way to find you. I would have found a way to confiscate that phylactery, but I didn't think Mozzie was that mercenary." After a moment he laughed, short and bitter. "Then again, I guess I didn't know the two of you so well."
Even beyond the fact that it might or might not get him killed by a demon, Neal had a feeling he was going to regret showing up to take on this history. More than he already did, that was. "All right, so what's your plan?" Neal asked. He already knew Mozzie's, and Mozzie's sounded like a terrible idea. But if he knew Peter Burke, then Peter would–
"What makes you think I have a plan?" Peter demanded.
–then again, he didn't know this Peter Burke, did he? And part of that was his own fault. His, from a life he'd never led, in a world that wasn't his own.
Peter walked to the window, rubbing his hand across his chin.
"Jesus," he muttered. "Should have pushed the Frater Elah. No chance Lawrence would agree–"
Then he went rigid, eyes locked on the ocean outside.
"What," Neal began, and then the howling of a siren started up from the fort proper.
"Stay here," Peter was already snapping, heading toward the door. "Stay down; stay away from the window."
Then he was gone, out the door, his footsteps echoing from the stairs.
Neal didn't stay away from the window. He walked to it, looked out to where thunderheads were frothing up from the surface of the sea, and the vast dark shape breached the surface, shedding waterfalls.
For the first time, Neal saw Pandomaine's face.
It could have begun as the face of a man. It could have begun as Neal's face, though it was four stories tall at an estimate, elongated and sharpened like some kind of nightmare fish, the two bottom teeth jutting forward and twining together like the tusk of a narwhal. The skin was slicked with oil-black scales, the eyes were molten gold and crimson. Even without pupil or iris, Neal could feel them fixing on him, the whole beast turning to regard him. Its body was serpentine and squamous, fins making long shadows in the water.
It laughed, and its laughter was like a shipping container full of silver bells rupturing into the ocean.
Then it struck.
Neal threw himself down onto the mattress as Pandomaine's tusks breeched the wall on the far side of his cell, and half of the building was ripped away. He could feel the building tremble as the tusk swung around again, tearing the whole ceiling away. A patter of shingles fell down around him, and a crash like the ocean splitting in two announced Pandomaine as it dropped back into the waves.
Neal risked a look up. The guards outside his door might have still been there; the door was still, there, and most of that half of the wall, but the opposite end of the room dropped out and vanished into a tangle of ruins.
Neal bolted for it.
Bits and pieces of wall and ceiling were still falling, but he scrambled down the most stable-looking piles of debris and launched himself out into the paths between the buildings, and then the courtyard.
Which were a controlled chaos: men and women, some in camo, some in civilian clothes, coming out with rifles and automatics and one with what looked like a rocket launcher, rushing past him toward the water. He couldn't see Peter or Mozzie in the commotion.
Then came a cacophony of trumpets and cymbals, a howling, and a roar like a lion or a waterfall.
All at once the whole fort was full of golden forms, some shaped like men, some very much not – he caught a horse with a bouquet of lashing snakes as its tail, a four-legged eagle with a curling scorpion's tail. They were rushing the shore like a reverse tidal wave, breaking over each other as they ran.
Pandomaine reared from the ocean, its tusk all but drawing blood from the sky. Then the golden army met it and it thrashed, water careening up and over the roofs of the fort, and it laughed again, the last Neal saw of it was its great flank turning, then vanishing behind the buildings that were still standing, diving downward as the thunderheads boiled away to nothing and the sun streamed down again.
–
The gunfire and the trumpets continued.
Going toward the shore seemed like an idiotic idea, so Neal turned and headed out into the open, trying to get a sense of what had just happened. Besides the obvious, of course: Pandomaine had attacked, and this was probably the same sort of sight that had greeted Manhattan, which hadn't been ready. And how could you have been ready for something like that?
All those people, running for the water with guns that wouldn't have stopped a bear or a mountain lion, let alone that monstrosity. Neal had a feeling that image would haunt him. He'd go for the long shots, sure, but not just throwing his life away on some doomed sense of duty.
In the courtyard, a man wearing a huge golden crown sat on the back of a camel. The crown gleamed in the sun, jutting skyward like a stag's horns, tumbling down the man's back like a maille cap. That much weight in precious metal should have snapped his neck.
Odd, that. Probably had something to do with the wave of creatures that had turned Pandomaine away. Neal angled his steps toward him, hoping to get a better look.
"Great King Paimon," Lawrence called, and Neal startled. Lawrence was coming up to them from the direction of the shore, his hand raised, gold and silver rings on his fingers. He swept his hand toward Neal. "I charge you bind this man to my design, and grant me two familiars, quick of eye, fleet of foot, and uncompromising in their arms to guard that he does not stray."
"Wh–" Neal said, and got just that far because two great shapes had beaded into existence beside him like the condensation of nightmares on the cool surface of the world. They stood a head taller than him, looking like long-legged golden cats whose faces had the underlying anatomy of toads. They both turned to him, fixing him with identical green stares.
That, Neal decided, was infinitely less reassuring than having a couple hostile goons looking after him.
"Great King Paimon," Lawrence said, and his voice was steadier. "You have diligently answered my commands, and so I give you leave to depart to your proper place."
The man on the camel – Great King Paimon, apparently – nodded, and vanished the same way the familiars had appeared. All the trumpets and the legions that had ridden against Pandomaine vanished too, and in their absence, Fort Tilden seemed desolate and empty.
Neal eyed the beasts flanking him. Demons, probably; it wasn't getting any less strange.
Lawrence turned and walked to lean against the nearest wall, and pulled a pouch of something out of one pocket. Neal followed him.
The game had been up since before it was played; still, it cost nothing to chat a while.
"Peter told me what you were planning," Neal said. It seemed as good a preamble as any.
Lawrence didn't seem surprised. "Expected he would."
His hands were trembling.
Neal caught that, and looked between the demons that were guarding him. He edged in Lawrence's direction. He wanted to get a look at whatever was in the pouch, know if it was useful to him, know if it was an addiction.
And, he had to admit, there was a flutter of concern in the back of his throat. Lawrence had kidnapped him, dragged him to another world, and planned on sacrificing him to a demon, but–
He's a criminal, whispered a voice in the corner of his head. Sounded like Peter. And yeah, he was, but so was Neal, and so were a lot of Neal's friends. And Lawrence might like twisting the knife, when it came to this world's Peter, but when it came to all the people in Fort Tilden, it was Lawrence's demons who'd come riding to their rescue.
Neal might not like him, but he found a core of grudging respect where affection would have been. And he could hardly fault the man's motives. "You need any help with that?"
Lawrence looked up at him sharply, then let out a splintered laugh. "You want to help me?"
Neal shrugged.
Lawrence narrowed his eyes, but just for a moment before he tossed the pouch at Neal. "Roll one for me."
Neal opened it, and found... a potpourri of barks and leaves and bits of flower, shredded or crumbled, a set of cigarette papers, and a roller. Didn't smell like tobacco. Didn't smell like weed. He couldn't resist a glance to Lawrence, who'd pressed his back up against the wall and was trying to contain his tremors.
"If you can turn that to your advantage," Lawrence said, wryly, "Maybe you deserve to escape."
Neal exhaled, and pulled a paper from the pack. "I'm not going to escape," he said, and surprised himself by saying it.
Against the wall, Lawrence seemed surprised, too. "You know, I never figured you for the self-sacrificing sort."
Neither did I, Neal thought. Then, he had as little intention of sacrificing himself as he had of staying here.
But Pandomaine was here, and Neal had a sense of the damage it could do. And if Mozzie was right, he could stop it. No harm to him.
Not that he didn't have questions about that plan. But when it came down to it, it looked like the choice was between letting an entire world go to ruin because of a mistake he might as well have made, letting himself die according to Lawrence's plan, or making a grab for power. It wasn't a great set of options, but it wasn't exactly a hard decision.
"Nice army," Neal said, instead, tamping down the herb mixture into the roller. "How far would Pandomaine have come in if you didn't stop him?"
"It's Paimon's army. And as for Pandomaine, it's gone thirty, thirty-five miles inland in places," Lawrence said. "Went straight through DC, the day it got loose. Probably keep expanding its territory as it destroys all the coastal towns. Fortunately, we've got you."
Neal glanced at him, anger tightening his jaw.
Lawrence tilted his head, then waved a hand. "I mean, it can sense you. It knows its contract hangs on you. That's why it's still in our waters, not wrecking Lisbon or some shit."
And why it didn't kill me. Pandomaine had come straight at his window, but it had freed him, not buried him.
Neal pulled a rolling paper out, fed it down into the little contraption. A few twists, and he handed it over to Lawrence, who accepted it and licked the last bit of paper to adhere it. Before he popped the cigarette out of the roller, though, he held out his hand.
"And the rest of it."
Well, Neal hadn't really expected him to forget that. He handed over the pouch, and watched as Lawrence fumbled for a lighter, lit it, and inhaled. His eyes closed, and his entire body seemed to melt into the smoke.
"Stressful job?" Neal asked.
Lawrence slitted one eye open, then shifted the cigarette to the corner of his mouth. "'The best days be when the Moon Luna be aged two, or some count of twos; no other days be profitable,'" he quoted. "'As to the four Great Kings, they are not to be called forth except it be upon Great Occasions.' Guess how old the moon is today, Caffrey. Guess what day it's not."
Aha, Neal thought. Every other day was an off day. Good to know.
Putting that to use would require living through this day and the next, but one thing at a time.
"Fucking swear," Lawrence muttered. "If it keeps on like this, it is gonna kill me young."
Neal clenched his jaw. No, he had no intention of dying. But Lawrence intended him to die, which made Lawrence complaining about this a little rich, in Neal's book.
"My cell's broken," Neal said, a bit more acerbically than he'd intended.
Lawrence waved him off. "You've got two of Paimon's best looking after you, Caffrey. You're not going anywhere."
"Thanks," Neal said, and walked away.
Just to see what would happen, he walked to the gate at the fort's entrance. The cat-beasts didn't seem to care, just stalked along beside him on their lanky legs, right up until the moment he touched the gate.
The next moment, he was on the ground two meters back from the fence, trying to catch enough air to curse while one of the demons put its paw primly back on the ground. Neal rolled onto his side, one arm over his stomach.
Ow.
As soon as he could reliably get in a breath or two without wanting to vomit, he lifted his head and glared at the demon who'd swatted him. "There were," he bit out, "better ways of communicating that."
It watched him impassively. Much like a real cat.
He pushed himself into a sitting position, sat there and hurt for another minute or so, and then clambered to his feet. He wanted to put a hand out to something to steady himself, but the only available options were the fence and the demons, and hell no.
He just hoped they hadn't ruptured any organs.
"Okay," he breathed, and set off back toward the now-rather-damaged main bulk of the buildings, where people were milling about, seeing to injuries and generally being helpful. Halfway there, though, he was ambushed, and had to put up with Mozzie dragging him into a convenient office and going through his Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah routine again.
Neal just took the opportunity to sink into a chair and put his head back and close his eyes and wait for Mozzie to be done.
"What is that?" he asked, finally.
"Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram," Mozzie said. "Modified. I use the 1979 refinement, by S. Judith Moriah. That way I don't have to carry an altar, a robe, and a sword around."
He sounded pleased with himself, for that. It took Neal a moment to realize the extent to which he didn't actually care. Maybe the adrenaline crash from the attack was rolling up on him.
But he looked at the door to the office, and glanced to the window. The demons Lawrence had called up were standing there, faces scrunched in what looked like annoyance. If they'd been human, Neal would be sure that was what it was.
Mozzie followed his gaze, and said "Precisely. They won't enter the room, or hear what we have to say."
"Like sweeping for bugs," Neal said.
Mozzie looked confused, for a moment, but it cleared. "Your world seems vastly less efficient than ours."
"We manage," Neal said. Then, because he didn't want to defend his world's relative sanity against this demonic madhouse, he asked "What was our plan?"
Mozzie gave him a questioning look.
"Peter said that the only way Pandomaine would go back where it came from is if it killed me," Neal said. "And if it's not under someone's control, it goes around the planet and does this." He waved a hand at the wreckage outside. "So, was I just supposed to reach some point in my old age an make a graceful exit?"
"Neal," Mozzie said, sounding somewhat aghast. "Would your world's me ever suggest something that ghoulish?"
"My world's you doesn't summon demons," Neal said. "My world's you doesn't keep vials of my blood on hand." He thought about that, for a moment. "That I know of."
"With Pandomaine working for us, we'd have familiars who could go anywhere in the world and do anything we needed them to," Mozzie explained. "We'd have clout with all the Lords of Hell. Then, once we were safely ensconced in Pandomaine's power, the whole of the world's – and the underworld's – research would be at our fingertips. We'd be writing our own contracts."
"Do you know that?" Neal asked.
If this Mozzie was like the one at home – and he seemed to be, from what Neal had seen – then his answer was in the slight, frazzled pause more than it was in his voice. "I have reason to–"
"You don't know that," Neal interrupted. "You decided 'let's summon a Nazi war machine and work out how to put it back, later'."
"One," Mozzie said, "We decided that. Me and... my Neal." That ghost of pain crossed Mozzie's face again, and he looked away, and Neal had to resist the urge to do the same. It was downright unnerving, being in the same room as someone who was mourning his death.
He could only hope that he'd never become a ghost.
"Two, Pandomaine is not a Nazi war machine," Mozzie said, forging gamely on. "It was discovered by Nazi researchers, but it had a long existence in Hell, dating back to the Fall of Lucifer, and shouldn't be judged by the people who uncovered his incantations and seals. And three, this is a little ghoulish, but so long as I had your blood, there would have been... other options."
"Like dragging me in from another world?" Neal asked.
Mozzie fidgeted, and went cagey. "Among other options," he said.
Neal dragged his hands through his hair. He wanted, with a steadily growing urgency, to go home. That seemed to factor in exactly no one's plans for him. The moment he could start making his own plans was one eagerly to be anticipated; the only problem was, he had a feeling that moment would only come once he had Pandomaine under his control and the world metaphorically cowering at his feet.
"Why did we decide to do this?" he asked. "So we could purchase and retire on neighboring temperate zone islands?"
Mozzie looked delighted. Like he was pleased to find another point of commonality between his world and Neal's. "It was going to be the invocation of a lifetime."
Neal snorted. "Scores of a lifetime never work out well for me."
"'Ah,'" Mozzie said, and his voice had that quoting things tone. "'But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?'"
"Robert Browning," Neal said, and gave up. "I no longer have a room, and I want to lie down. Can you find me one?"
–
The room Mozzie found him was a bit better than the last one, in that it was a barracks and not a garret. Neal didn't get the sense that Fort Tilden had ever been designed for luxury.
Still, it had a bed, and the bed had a mattress – no sheets or pillow, but Mozzie vanished with a promise to send someone by with them. The demons parked themselves just outside, and Neal collapsed onto the bare mattress and closed his eyes with a groan. He managed to drift into some vague dozing state where the pain in his abdomen faded, or at least he thought he did; he was aware of time passing, but not of how much had passed before someone knocked at the doorframe.
Sheets and pillows, he thought, and rolled over to see... Peter Burke with what looked like a doctor's bag.
Okay.
"Not who I expected," he remarked, and reorganized all his various limbs so he was in a sitting position. His stomach protested, and he shot a glare at the demon outside the door; all he could see was its shoulder and the line of its neck, head turned away from him, but that was enough. "Is it too much to ask that that's a bag of take-out?" Or a cold compress. He'd take either one, honestly.
"I need to draw your blood," Peter said, and withdrew a needle, fortunately still in its sterile packaging.
Neal drew back, alarmed. "Whoa," he said. "Do you actually know anything about phlebotomy?"
Peter shot him a dark look, as he commandeered the room's chair. "What I'm doing here might just save your life, Caffrey, you want to dial back the snippiness?"
Neal didn't think it was snippiness when it concerned people sticking needles into him, but he wasn't going to point that out and risk antagonizing the man who was brandishing said needles. "Never mind. Just wondering."
"Give me your arm," Peter said, pulling a plastic tourniquet band out of the pack.
Neal extracted himself from his coat – painfully – and rolled up his shirt sleeve, despite the fact that he was certain this was a bad idea. "Can I at least ask how this is meant to save my life?"
"Magic," Peter deadpanned.
From what little Neal knew, this was a perfectly accurate explanation. It was also a perfectly useless one.
"I see you've got a couple of Paimon's familiars following you," Peter said, pulling out a few more things. An alcohol wipe, a collection bottle.
"That recognizable, are they?" Neal asked.
"I was raised Theognostic Catholic," Peter said, scrubbing the alcohol wipe across Neal's inner arm. "We were big on memorizing lists of demons."
"Theognostic," Neal said. "Never heard of it."
Peter huffed. "Probably because you didn't grow up in a world where explaining God through the equations of his demons made any sense," he said. "Not that it makes that much more sense here. I got to college, started reading, and the more I read... well, I lapsed. Still."
"You're lapsed Catholic back home, too," Neal offered, and tried not to wince too much when Peter selected one of the needles.
That got a thin and unamused smile out of Peter, at least. He picked up the torniquet, and leaned forward to tie it around Neal's bicep. Neal really hoped Peter knew what he was doing.
"So Mozzie tells me that demons aren't considered evil, here," he said, and looked away from his arm.
"Demons are just angels with free will," Peter said, drumming on the skin. "The way it goes – the way I was taught – was that God made the angels to worship him, and said they should never bow to anyone but him. Then God made humans in his image, and told all the hosts of Heaven to bow to them. Lucifer, who loved God – he was God's favorite, in the bible I read – saw the contradiction, and the in space of the contradiction was the kernel of free will. Lucifer refused to bow to humanity. He and the angels who followed his example were cast down from Heaven and sentenced to serve the humans they had spurned."
And there was the bite of the needle, and Neal stiffened, breathed through the suddenness of the pain, and then looked down when it abated. It didn't look like he'd been impaled. And Peter was reaching for a collection tube, all his motions easily enough to make Neal think that there was a story behind this. He'd been drafted into the medical corps for Fort Tilden, maybe, and they'd trained him.
And at least he didn't make any comments about Neal having good veins, the way the last person who'd drawn his blood had. Neal didn't think he would have been able to handle that.
Peter fit the tube against the needle, and slid it up to break the vacuum seal. Neal watched with a kind of morbid interest as his blood jetted into the tube, one continuous stream until it had filled the container and Peter removed it and clicked on the cap.
"Seriously, what are you going to do with my blood?" Neal asked. "I was under the impression it wasn't that useful to people who weren't me."
Peter raised his eyebrows, withdrawing the needle and pressing a bandage to the puncture. "You wouldn't know what I was talking about if I told you."
"You could explain it," Neal pointed out. "Give me the basic concepts."
Peter stood, eyeing Neal like a hawk might eye a jay. "Yeah," he said. "You know, call it a personal quirk, but I'm not really interested in teaching Neal Caffrey the finer points of expanded ceremonial magic."
In Peter's position, Neal guessed he wouldn't be all that interested, either.
Peter rummaged in his pocket, then flipped something down at Neal, who caught it on instinct. "Keep that with you tomorrow," he said. "And don't tell anyone about it."
Neal turned it over in his hand. It was a small copper disc, about the size of a quarter, with a design stamped into one side. Some symbol, crosses and circles and arcs that gave the impression of a Greek peplos. It was encircled by the letters, evenly spaced around the circumference: A-G-A-R-E-S. "What is this?"
"It's my seal," Peter said, then considered his words a bit more carefully. "It's the seal of Agares that was issued to me while I worked with the FBI."
Neal looked up. "'While'? You're not still FBI?"
Peter shrugged. "DC went down before anyone could get out," he said. "The federal government is kind of a mess right now. I slipped through the cracks."
Probably, Neal suspected, because he wanted to. If Pandomaine was only wrecking the coastal cities, enough of the FBI still existed to self-organize. But maybe it was easier for Peter to let himself be assumed in the ranks of the dead, knowing that an accurate count would never be made.
"You know," Peter said, "my contract with Agares is how I ended up catching you in the first place. He brings back runaways."
"I wasn't aware I was a runaway," Neal said, and then thought about it, and discarded a few uneasy hypotheses. Maybe in this world, Peter had tracked down his mother instead of setting a trap using Kate. Maybe in this world, it was easier to casually excavate that history.
...but this was a different world, and he tried to believe it didn't matter.
"You're afraid I'm gonna run?"
"Caffrey," Peter said. "That's not at all what I'm afraid of."
Neal wished he knew enough to untangle that. Instead, he said "You going to tell me what your plan is?"
"Nope," Peter said.
"To be clear, then," Neal said, "you're asking me to trust you."
"That going to be a problem?" Peter asked.
Neal could have done some soul-searching, maybe compared this Peter to the Peter back home. Searched through all the memories of Peter angry with him, Peter hurt or betrayed, Peter lashing out in the warehouse where the Nazi loot had been. But this Peter didn't give him the time to come to a conclusion.
"Don't need your trust anyway," he said, and turned to leave.
Neal had planned on letting him go, but a sudden impulse prevented him. "Peter," he said, and Peter stopped in the doorway. His expression had gone pensive, as soon as he'd turned his back. Neal pressed on. "Where's Elizabeth?"
The flash of raw pain told Neal exactly what he'd suspected. Peter didn't need to say a word.
He said plenty more than one, though. "Lawrence showed you the Gantry Park view. Did he drive you in here through Queens or Brooklyn?"
Neal swallowed. "I couldn't tell."
"I'm guessing it was Queens. Want to know why?" Peter asked.
No. Neal didn't. And he had the feeling he knew, already.
"Because Manhattan is looking a lot better than Brooklyn does, these days," Peter said.
Then he walked out, and shut the door behind him.
Day Three
As ritual sacrifices went, Neal thought he could have planned one better. They didn't even give any thought to his final meal.
Lawrence seemed to trust the familiars he'd set on Neal implicitly, and after an uneasy sleep and an early, disappointing breakfast, and the realization that no, Fort Tilden really didn't have an operating shower, Neal went to find Mozzie.
Which he did, eventually, in a room set up like a chemistry lab, where most of the broken glass had been swept into a corner and not actually thrown away.
Then, Neal didn't assume there was much by the way of garbage collection in this place, any more.
"Oh, come in," Mozzie said, motioning Neal over the threshold.
Neal stepped inside, and waited.
"You'll need all of these," Mozzie said, dropping a handful of small metal discs into Neal's hand. "Seals for all of the Great Kings and Marquises."
Neal looked down at them. They were all gold and silver, each one stamped with a different pattern. "You're not going to–?"
"Banish?" Mozzie asked. "This is my workshop. It's adequately protected. I refreshed all of the wards before you arrived. I was just about to go find you, actually."
"Right," Neal said. In addition to the abundance of seals cupped in the palm of his hand, he had the one Peter had given him, tucked away in his vest. He was going to have a fun time stashing all of these so they didn't jingle when he walked. "Should I be worried about adverse magical reactions between these things?"
"Please," Mozzie said. "They're tools, not pharmaceuticals. Are you worried about 'adverse aesthetic reactions' between your oil paints?"
"Sometimes, yes," Neal said, but took the point. He started tucking the seals into their own hidden pockets, safely away from Peter's seal of Agares, just in case.
"The moon is eight days into its cycle, and the celestial calendar marks this as the Great Occasion of Adaeoet," Mozzie said. "This can only happen from nine until noon. So. Lawrence is going to have his Paimon goons take you up to the embankment on the shore. Then, according to his plan, he's going to do his Lawrence thing, and make you call Pandomaine to you. Whatever you do, don't eat, drink, or smoke anything Lawrence gives you. And here."
He fished a small bag out of his pocket, and pressed it into Neal's hands. Neal looked it over. It seemed to be full of slices of some unidentified root.
"Keep some of that under your tongue," Mozzie said.
"For–"
"So that no one may compel your speech," Mozzie explained, with a flourish.
Neal pulled one of the slices out and stuck it under his tongue.
"Hopefully," Mozzie added.
The root wasn't terrible. Bitter, but faintly aromatic, like vanilla. A touch of bite to it. Neal aimed as much of that bite as he could toward Mozzie in his glare. "Hopefully?"
"Well, ideally, you won't have to find out," Mozzie said. The next object he produced was a small scroll – an honest-to-god scroll of parchment – which he also pushed into Neal's hands. "As soon as you get up to the embankment, you start reciting this. Lawrence won't put any restrictions on your speech, because that would interfere with his ability to compel your speech. He's counting on you not knowing the invocations. You already have the contract, so Pandomaine will listen to you. You just need to issue the correction, call on the Kings and Marquises as witnesses, and we'll be set."
Yeah, okay. Neal had a hard time believing it would be that easy. "What happens if we get it wrong again?"
Mozzie looked affronted. "We won't. Look, I've been up all night refining and then quintuple-checking the refinements on that incantation."
That did nothing to reassure Neal.
Lawrence had a plan, Mozzie had a plan, and Peter had a plan he wasn't sharing. And Neal would have had a plan, except that most of his problem-solving abilities were predicated on existing in a world where people like Lawrence couldn't summon a demon to hold him upside-down by his ankles if he tried anything.
Would have been nice if someone had asked him his level of confidence. Then he could've pointed out that he had no confidence in any of this. Except, maybe, the growing confidence that if he didn't end up dead, he was going to end up a toad.
"I'm going to go memorize this," Neal said, waving the scroll.
"That's wise," Mozzie allowed.
Neal tucked the scroll away with the seals – and the rest of whatever root Mozzie was feeding him – and walked outside. Luckily, he didn't jingle.
The two demons fell into step beside him, one of them looking rather self-satisfied. It made him pause, for a moment. The other still wore its cat-toad look of annoyance, and Neal had honestly not considered that they might be individual beings with their own private opinions on all this.
Not that it seemed to matter.
He found Lawrence out in the courtyard, pacing and muttering to himself. He stopped when Neal came near, and pulled out a cigarette case.
"Final smoke?" Lawrence offered.
The cigarette he held out smelled faintly of licorice, like the bag that'd been forced over Neal's head. "No, thanks," Neal said. "Never was a smoker."
"Huh," Lawrence said, and the cigarette vanished into his pocket. "You can roll a pretty good one."
"Life's taken me interesting places," Neal said.
Lawrence made a quiet, half-amused noise. "For what it's worth, Caffrey, I'm not the bad guy, here. I wish there was a better way to do this," he said. "But seven or so billion people are going to sleep easier tonight."
"Funny how I won't be one of them," Neal said.
Lawrence shrugged. "Depends on who you're asking."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "You summon demons for a living and haven't figured out the afterlife situation?"
"Depends on who you're asking," Lawrence said again.
Neal suspected that Lawrence, too, was uninterested in teaching him the finer points of magic. He'd have to rely on Mozzie for that. "Have you seen Peter?"
"Burke?" Lawrence sounded surprised to hear Neal asking. "Off in that direction." He waved a hand at a cluster of buildings. "Fort's chapel, is my guess."
"Thanks," Neal said, and walked away.
"He's not big on goodbyes," Lawrence called after him.
Neal hadn't planned on saying any.
It rankled a little – actually, it rankled a lot – having to rely on someone else to have a plan in place for him, being unable to put something in play, himself. But as far as he could tell, he was the only person in the world who hadn't made friends with one or more infernal entities. That was a bit of a handicap.
Never mind that even if he could get out of this, there was no way he was getting home – not if Lawrence was the only person around who could work that particular bit of magic.
Neal eyed the demons flanking him, as he approached the chapel. He should have asked Mozzie to teach him that banishing ritual. He needed to ask Peter what Peter needed him to do, in order to pull off whatever plan Peter had been cooking up. If it involved waiting until he got to the emplacement, Neal was going to have a scheduling conflict.
He pushed open the chapel doors.
They didn't open directly into the sanctuary. Just a white hall studded with classrooms or offices or meeting rooms or something, with the sanctuary down to his right. It was a small sanctuary, too; maybe it would fit fifty people, but Neal wouldn't bet on more. Still, it managed to look clean and cozy, maybe even peaceful with the early-morning light slanting in through the windows.
Peter was knelt at the altar, back to the door, hands clasped, head down. Praying. It made Neal stop; he'd never seen Peter pray, in this world or his own. He wasn't sure if he should interrupt or just observe, try to learn.
Maybe for this Peter, losing his wife meant turning to faith. Neal had to wonder what faith looked like, in a world crammed with demons.
He stepped forward.
And thought immediately that maybe Lawrence had taken control of his limbs; he tried to put his foot down and missed the ground, but no, it was because the ground was rearing up; the floor under him cracked like a peal of thunder, and beside him, Lawrence's two demons cried out and were slain by lances of light.
And then there was bag over his head but this bag was woven from adrenaline and fear, a world's worth of impulse falling through his shoulders and down into his legs, which moved without his orders. He was running, out the door, out toward the gate of the fort, up the chain links and over, feet and palms hitting the ground in a runner's crouch and then off, fast as a falcon with lungs struggling to keep up, the shapes of the ruined borough vanishing behind him.
–
Neal didn't know how long he ran. His attention was bound up in gulps of breath and bounds over the broken terrain. He thought it might have been about ten minutes, but he also thought he saw the wreckage of the Cross Bay Bridge glowering off to his side, and that was ridiculous; meant he was running two-minute miles. But running shapes appeared beside him as he leapt a fence into some forlorn lot, and quick as a bullet, they were on him.
He hit the ground and all the speed and breath went out of him. Found himself gasping against the grass, then against the sky as one of the things rolled him onto his back; they were some kind of demon, that was clear enough: face of a heron, body of a sight hound, hands of human. He kinda didn't want to be held down by them.
He didn't have a choice.
Still, at least he could swallow air and feel his heart racing to catch up until Lawrence arrived.
Which he did, a few minutes later, looking pissed as hell and riding on the back of some abomination made out of a stork's body and legs and a snarling baboon's head. Neal had to wonder why all the minor demons looked like someone had attacked an encyclopedia with a pair of safety scissors; it was one of the safer things to wonder, in the situation.
Lawrence dismounted, and fumbled in his pocket for something. He was shaking, Neal noticed; maybe whatever demon king he'd had to call on was charging his weekend rates, or however the hell that worked.
"Not smart, Caffrey," Lawrence said, and pulled some wad of vegetation from his pocket and shoved it into his mouth.
"Not my idea," Neal said.
Lawrence swallowed, which only turned his expression nastier, and spat to one side. "I know. You don't have the know-how to kill Paimon's legionnaires. So who was it? Your little friend putting something of his own in play?"
"I'm pretty sure this wasn't Mozzie's idea, either," Neal said. Mozzie's plan involved him in Fort Tilden, on the same embankment Lawrence planned to sacrifice him on.
"Everyone else at the fort is smart enough to be on my side, except for–"
Neal reached the conclusion as soon as Lawrence did. Peter Burke, praying in the chapel, the light slanting down around him.
"That bastard," Lawrence said, with a kind of annoyed respect in his voice. "Of course. Agares."
Neal shook his head. "Agares," he said. "I thought he brought back runaways."
Lawrence snorted. "'He bringeth back runaways; and them that stand still, he maketh them to run.'" He turned to one side, and spat again. "Burke might rather see the whole world crumble than betray his precious law, but I'm not that sentimental. You're coming back, Caff–"
And then he stopped, snapping around, as though caught by a sound only he could hear.
A red imp shot through the lot's scattered trees. It landed at Lawrence's feet and bowed, and Lawrence looked down on it. Held out an arm, which the imp hopped onto. It clambered up to his shoulder, then bent close to his ear. Neal could see its red jaw moving, and Lawrence turned to give Neal an incredulous look.
Then, after a moment, he laughed thinly. "That bastard," he said, again. His voice had a few more shades of respect, this time. "I didn't think he had it in him."
"Can the condemned man ask what the hell is going on here?" Neal asked.
"News from the Fort," Lawrence said, and gestured. The hounds on Neal's shoulders let go of him. "Burke went into shock. Empty syringe right next to him. He wouldn't happen to have taken your blood, would he, Neal? Wouldn't happen to have an incompatible bloodtype?"
That knocked any response right out of Neal's mouth. He gaped for a moment before scrambling to his feet and seizing on, "He injected–?"
"Frater Elah's invocation," Lawrence said. "It's an easy and stupid way of taking on a person's magical essence to execute contracts in their stead. It means we don't need you any more." He shrugged, expansively. "For the sacrifice, Burke will do."
Neal scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain in his muscles, scrambling for words just the same. Because somehow, he hadn't seen this coming. And maybe he hadn't known the exact magic, but he should have realized that Peter, even with a Caffrey-caused Brooklyn-sized hole in his heart, would rather take the law on his shoulders himself than see someone go down for a crime they didn't commit.
"You can't sacrifice him," Neal said. "He's–"
Innocent was not something that Lawrence seemed to care about. Peter had tested that theory as soon as they'd brought Neal in the gate.
"There's another way," Neal blurted. "Mozzie had it planned out; I can correct the contract – Peter could correct the contract, if you'd let him–"
"Of course he did." Lawrence's eyes narrowed. "Powers vast and overwhelming," he said – sounded like he was quoting from something. His mouth twisted. "No, Caffrey, not in my world."
A cold rage welled up in Neal's stomach, flooded across his shoulders, down to his fingertips. Of course. Of course, Lawrence had said There isn't a sorcerer left in New York who scares me, and why change that, with his contracts with Paimon and armies of demons at his command?–why take the chance that the law would get the big guns, when it was so much easier to drag Peter onto the emplacement and–
And before he could think it through, Neal lunged forward and swung a fist.
He hadn't expected it to connect. But Lawrence hadn't expected it, either, and Neal's fist hit his face with a crunch of cartilage and a rush of air, and Lawrence staggered back as the demons squawked and lunged forward.
Neal hadn't expected that, either.
Probably should have.
Then he was on the ground, claws in his stomach and beaks in his side and teeth at his neck and he'd only just managed to knock one of the bodies away when another dug into him and Lawrence snarled "Stop!" above him in time for the jaws closing around his throat to only draw blood and not end him. A gesture from Lawrence and the demons all stumbled back, leaving Neal gasping on the ground as blood seeped from a flurry of gouges.
Lawrence was wiping a trail of blood from his face, breathing tightly through his mouth. He glared down and, in a violence as sudden as Neal's had been, lashed out with one foot.
The kick caught Neal right at the base of his ribcage, and he felt something crack. Then Lawrence was in front of him, crouching, right in his face.
"You bastard, Caffrey," Lawrence spat. "I told you, I am not the fucking bad guy here. No one – not you, not me, not Burke or the goddamned Pope or your little friend should have access to that much power. Someone has to die to put Pandomaine back, and you should be thanking Burke that it isn't you."
"It could be you," Neal said. "If all you need is blood, you could take this on, yourself. If you're really going to play the hero–"
"Fuck heroism," Lawrence said. "I'm a pragmatist. Part of my pragmatism involves not getting killed."
"You'd rather sacrifice someone who hasn't done anything wrong."
"Like me?" Lawrence asked. "It was your goddamn wrongdoing, Caffrey, and I'm doing this, I'm cleaning up your mess." He sniffed. "I still don't believe you're innocent in any world. And Burke made his own damn bed."
Neal could have hit him again, if his whole body wasn't shooting pain past the rage and shock, if the demons Lawrence had with him wouldn't rend him limb from limb.
"I'm not the bad guy," Lawrence said again, and wiped more blood off his face, and stood. "I'll send you home."
He fumbled inside his coat for something, and Neal closed his eyes and tried not to vomit, tried to think of anything more to say.
He could imagine Peter, gray from shock and kneeling on the emplacement, mouth moved by magic to call Pandomaine toward him, and Pandomaine's long body cutting through the Atlantic waves as the sun in the east streamed down on them.
And then the world went black and blood and brimstone around Neal, the molecules-ripping-each-from-each sensation of world transit tore through him, and his side and his wounds lit up with a pain that tipped him straight out of knowing or feeling anything.
–
He came to in the middle of a ring of onlookers, with someone in blue crouched over him, latex-gloved fingers curled against the pulse in his wrist. There was the smell of bile in his nostrils and the taste of it in his mouth.
"Sir," said one of the paramedics. "Can you tell me your name?"
His head was swimming, but his limbs responded to his commands, and he could find his voice. Lawrence hadn't left him with any bindings, just a host of injuries and a persistent empty feeling under his lungs.
He closed his eyes again.
"Neal Caffrey," he said. "I'm a confidential informant for the FBI. They need to be notified." Because the alternative was that someone would see him and recognize him from a wanted poster or a BOLO and then the NYPD would storm in, and then the Marshals, and it would be a spectacle and he didn't want to deal with those dramatics right now. He just wanted Diana or Jones or whoever he'd been handed off to showing up at his hospital bed and asking questions he couldn't answer, and then he wanted a phone and a long-distance call to DC so he could hear Peter's voice and not be able to explain why it was so important.
That, at least, was somewhat automatic. And Lawrence's voice echoed for him: I'm a pragmatist.
The paramedic was asking him questions. Neal decided to play dead and see if that would stop her. It seemed to.
They put him onto a stretcher and moved him into the back of an ambulance, and Neal kept his eyes closed and just floated on the relative certainty that no one was trying to kill him, and no one had a demon they planned to summon on him. All he had were cuts and bruises, some gold and silver and one copper coin, and here he was in a world where none of what had happened had happened.
They took him into the ER, where there were tests and poking and prodding. Someone took his blood, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Not much you can do with someone else' blood.
Should have realized that not much was code for just enough.
He started hearing people milling outside his room while they were giving him stitches and painkillers, and when the nurse finally left and let people in there was Peter, and Neal felt a full-body startle as his mind leapt to all the ways that could be a bad sign. Like, maybe Lawrence had sent him back to the wrong world.
...or maybe he'd just vanished, and Peter, being Peter, had refused to leave until he was found.
"I thought you'd be in DC by now," Neal said.
Peter grimaced and said "DC isn't happening," and it seemed like that was all he was going to say on the subject. "What the hell happened? Where have you been for the last three days? Are you–?"
He stopped himself.
"Well, obviously if you're in the hospital, you're not okay," he said. "But are you–"
"I'm fine," Neal said. He just needed to reassert this place's reality, and "fine" would be somewhere in that vicinity.
Peter, the Peter who would have a conversation with him and had no contract with Agares and was standing there, not sacrificed, not dead, gave him a critical look. "You look like you've been mauled by a wildcat."
"Hah," Neal let out, and couldn't think of a way to banter back. Not a wildcat; some stork-monkey thing would just make him sound crazy. And you look like your wife is still alive was something he was never, ever going to say.
It occurred to him that trying to plausibly cover up his abduction to a world powered by demons and magical herbs was going to strain his resolution never to lie to Peter.
Peter nodded, as though he'd come to some sort of a conclusion. He walked over to the side chair and settled down into it, watching Neal closely.
"They found your anklet disassembled in the bed of a pickup truck," Peter said. "ERT guys had fun with that one. Movement patterns on the tracking data suggested a quick-and-dirty throw-it-out-the-car dump, but the way it was taken apart, you'd need time and specialized tools for."
Well, it was either magic or a demon's clever little fingers, Neal didn't say. "I'd offer some insight, but there was a bag over my head at the time."
"Did you see who grabbed you?" Peter asked.
Yeah, he had, and he didn't know whether or not to sell him out. Take a gamble on Lawrence's own assumptions about the universality of guilt? He didn't have to feign the wince, but he didn't hide it, which was as good as playing it up. "Peter, can we not–"
"Right," Peter said, and grimaced. "Look, I don't mean to push, but–"
"I know." The FBI had to catch their criminals, and Neal had to find some way to explain this. "I just–"
"It can wait." Peter set down the words like he was laying them into law. Neal let out a breath of relief.
Beside him, he could practically hear Peter holding in all the questions. The Do you know where you were? and What did they want from you? which should have been trivially easy.
"Hey," Peter said, and his hand curled over Neal's shoulder. Neal turned to look at it with a kind of surprise. "We were looking for you. Wouldn't have stopped until we found you."
You wouldn't have found me, Neal thought, and blinked, and swallowed, and then his hand was curled over Peter's, and it was Peter's turn to look a little surprised.
Peter's hand was warm. Warm with pulsing blood, no doubt; two different bloods between them, and ideally, never the twain should mix.
"I know," Neal said.
Epilogue
Their first case back, after Neal had made enough of the right noises to satisfy the FBI psychologists, they were driving back through Woodside in Queens when Neal turned in his seat and said, "Can we go to Gantry Park?"
Peter slid him a sidelong look, always out to see what Neal was trying to pull this time. "Why? Got your eye on a statue there, or something?"
He was joking, but it was the kind of joking that was probably meant to prod at Neal's psyche. He was doing that, these days. It would have annoyed Neal more if he didn't know exactly where it came from.
"I just miss the view," he said.
With the great gaps in what he could say, he'd had a choice between coming off crazy or traumatized. He'd aimed for the second option, feeding out bits of information as he worked out how to sanitize them. And then there was the info he couldn't possibly sanitize, and he had a feeling he'd sit on that until his grave.
He hadn't even told Mozzie, who would probably believe him. But telling Mozzie the story would involve telling Mozzie about the other Mozzie, and Neal hadn't worked out how he'd felt about him, much less how he could represent him to... himself. Or a version of himself.
And he hadn't come back to Gantry Park. It was outside his radius.
The night before, Mozzie had come by and said he'd almost got it; a few more days, and he'd be able to crack the anklet and they could vanish anywhere. Then, with a look too knowing and a tone loathe to suggest the possibility: "That is, if you still want to go."
It disturbed Neal a little to realize that he didn't know.
Beside him, in the driver's seat, Peter shrugged and flipped his turn signal. "Why not?" he said. "No rush to get back. Hey, we can even stop at that little deli, what's its name...?"
Neal gave him a sidelong smile, and looked back out the window at Queens, which was mercifully still there.
He had a scrap of paper in his pocket, on which he'd copied an entry out longhand. It wasn't too difficult, really, to find a copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon; even in a world steadfastly without magic, interest in the occult was still going strong. You could look the thing up online.
[The Second Spirit is a Duke called Agreas, or Agares,] the paper read. [… He maketh them to run that stand still, and bringeth back runaways. … He hath power also to destroy Dignities both Spiritual and Temporal, and causeth Earthquakes.]
The Lesser Key hadn't mentioned anything about Pandomaine.
In the end he'd told them he was grabbed, and driven a few hours out; that he thought he'd recognized Fort Tilden (and left them with an unspoken implication, but of course, that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?), he'd sketched out the room where he was held – hell, he'd given them a sketch of Lawrence.
(Peter had run that sketch of Lawrence. It'd only come back with one credible match: a petty ex-enforcer-turned-fence named William Abramczyk, preferred alias Lawrence Wing, dead for three years in this world, at least.)
Peter was still talking, but Neal's attention only drifted back when Peter said "–do you even eat pizza? I've never actually seen you."
"I think they kick you out of New York if you don't," Neal said.
"Up for a slice?"
I just want to make sure Manhattan isn't broken, Neal didn't say. "Hey, if you want one, don't let me stop you."
Peter seemed to know that he was hiding something. Peter got that look when he looked at him, sometimes. But he also seemed to sense that he should tread carefully, and Neal had been letting enough troubled looks escape onto his face that Peter seemed to think he should leave it to the counselors and to awkward reminders of his availability, should Neal ever need to talk.
Which suited Neal. He didn't know how he would explain that in another world somewhere, he was dead, and Peter was dead, and Elizabeth was dead, and Mozzie was trying to find his way onto the next con with that ghost of regret around his eyes.
Mozzie had had a vial of that other Neal's blood. He'd said, And this is a little ghoulish, but so long as I had your blood, there would have been... other options. And yet instead of pulling a Frater Elah invocation on himself and taking control of Pandomaine that way, he'd cut a deal with a sorcerer like Lawrence to find a Neal from another world.
Even the fact that he was out of that world, back home where he was supposed to be, didn't quite put those ghosts away.
Peter wasn't going to abuse his FBI placard to get them good parking at Gantry Park, which meant that they pulled into a garage a block or so away and walked the rest of the way. Which was fine. Neal's worst injury had just been a crack in one of his floating ribs, well on its way to healing; he wasn't cleared to chase down suspects or get himself into firefights, but he didn't want to do either of those things anyway, and he could authenticate art pieces and interview persons of interest to his heart's content.
The city was there, standing tall as ever.
Neal knew that – he'd been in Manhattan since he got back, since he was released from the hospital and driven home, and aside from some unseasonably hard rain around Syracuse, the news hadn't found anything unduly concerning in the state of New York. No, say, gargantuan demon kings terrorizing the coastline.
Still. Knowing and seeing felt different. The one was as important as the other.
After a moment, Neal felt the peculiar niggle at his attention that meant while he was watching the city, Peter had turned to watch him. Neal dipped his head, suppressed an uneasy laugh.
I'm fine. Really. All these uncertainties were a world away.
"Here," he said, and pulled a small, copper disc out of his pocket. He tossed the seal toward Peter, who caught it. It had no power here, so far as Neal could tell; and even if it did, even if Peter thought to go looking up the sigil and the name inscribed around the edges – which he would, being Peter – he wouldn't make the leap to try to summon a demon to do his bidding.
Honestly. Who would?
Peter opened his hand, frowning down at the thing.
"It's something I had on me when I... got back," Neal said. "I didn't think to hand it over."
Peter's frown deepened a degree. "Neal. Is this evidence?"
Neal didn't have to lie to say "No." There wasn't a crime the FBI could prosecute, in all of this. They couldn't just hop on into another world and pick up Lawrence and bring him back for trial.
And besides. Neal had checked. The only fingerprints on the seal were his and Peter's own.
"It's just something I picked up somewhere. It isn't something the guy who grabbed me had."
Peter held it up, gripping it carefully on the edges. "Foreign currency?" he asked.
"No currency I've ever seen."
And there was that look. If it was even remotely possible for Peter to dig to the bottom of this one, Neal would have loved to see the moment when he worked it all out. (Demons, Neal? Really?) But Peter dropped it into his pocket, and said "Thanks," and said It's a clue, I'll look into it, without saying anything.
Then he turned back to the city across the river.
"You don't get tired of that view," he said.
"No, you don't," Neal agreed. The Empire State Building solid like a pillar of the world, the crown of the Chrysler proud against the sky. Up north, the Queensboro Bridge marched across the river like it didn't believe in disasters. One pretty city, just the same as he'd left it.
One more view to stand against memory.
"Come on," Neal said, and inclined his head back toward the car. "Let's go home."
Peter obliged him.
– END –
Requestor:
sholioRequest Link: http://collarcorner.livejournal.com/27620.html?thread=936420
Prompt Details:
Prompt/Request: Neal's abductors are dimension jumpers
Characters: Neal, any
I Would Like: When the bag comes off, Neal finds himself in an alternate reality version of our world. Maybe they need him because their Neal died and there's something only he can do.
I Don't Want: Mainly what I don't want is the implication that, if one of the altverse characters is evil/corrupt, the same is true in our world. (e.g. I don't mind evil mirrorverse Peter, because it would really throw Neal for a loop, but not if it goes along with the implication that our Peter is also evil). And I'd prefer if it was more serious than totally cracky -- that is, more like Fringe than the mirrorverse episode of Community, you know? :)
Rating: Yanked into an alternate universe where nothing makes sense and you're pretty sure everyone wants you dead? T, dammit.
Wordcount: 16,000
Additional Notes: This contains a great deal of magical detail cribbed from all manner of places – primarily the Lesser Key of Solomon – and a great deal of magical detail I made up on the spot. It should not be considered accurate or faithful to the traditions of ceremonial magic, goetic demonology, enochian magic, herbal magick, Catholic theology, or anything else.
As soon as the bag went over his head Neal knew he should scream, should make a scene, use the few seconds before he was taken God knew where to try to leave a witness behind, at least. Someone might call it in, and someone might put that report together with his anklet tracking data–
But as soon as the bag went over his head, his mouth filled with the taste of licorice (and something warmer, darker, more bitter below it, tanged coppery like blood) and his tongue refused to move. All his limb went sluggish.
They didn't even need to restrain him when they dragged him into what he suspected was a featureless van.
He felt the vehicle pull into traffic, and heard the scrape of shoes on sheetmetal floor as someone knelt in front of him. Then hands on his anklet, and a low murmuring. Then – he could feel this much – the anklet split, falling away from his leg.
What parts of him could react, reacted with surprise.
"Get rid of this," his tail-turned-captor said, and Neal heard a rustle from the direction of the front seat. Had a feeling they were going to toss the anklet; and he had to hand it to them, that was quick. Hadn't even brought him out of his radius. It could take hours before Peter even knew he was missing.
Or whoever was in charge of caring about these things, with Peter on his way to DC.
Still, a part of him thought, as hands explored his pockets, divested him of his phone and wallet, probably better that this happened now. Probably for the best that they hadn't waited a week or two. At least now the jaws of the FBI would be closing in on them, and he felt a thrill of preemptive schadenfreude at the thought.
"Slow and steady," the front man said, his voice angled toward the front. "Across the river, and no one's the wiser."
Who are you? Neal wanted to ask, but his tongue lay in his mouth like a lump of clay.
What he could do was listen, count, and mark out the stops at stoplights and the turns of the van. So by his measurement they'd turned east and crossed the East River, probably on the Queensboro bridge, and then turned south for a few minutes before they parked, and dragged him out of the van. So far as abductions went, they hadn't bothered to relocate him very far.
He could see snatches of the ground when they hauled him upright; his own feet and the feet of his kidnappers crossing from pavement to grass, and then he was on the grass, tossed down like a sack of sand.
His arms wouldn't move to catch him, and he flopped like a ragdoll. He could hear people, not too far away – usual city sounds, snatches of inane conversation, horns honking, people arguing. Like they'd just dragged him out in public with a bag over his head, and surely, even in New York, that would attract some attention.
"Right, steady him up," the front man said. Then there were hands on Neal's shoulders, pulling him into a rough sitting position.
He was about to try to speak again when his body tore itself apart.
Felt like it, anyway – a ripping, tearing, twisting sensation, like every molecule in him had been velcroed to every other one, and someone was going through and ripping up every grip at once. But there wasn't enough time to panic before it was over, and the world's sounds rushed in around him again, and someone snatched the bag off his head.
He flinched at the sudden light – still had that much range of motion, at least. The man who'd been tailing him was staring at him, chewing on something, a measuring look in his eyes. There was something – a joint, it looked like – smoldering between his fingers.
Where am I? Neal's tongue wouldn't say.
–there weren't any people. Neal registered that, not that he could examine that. Everything had gone quiet except birds and the river.
After a moment, the man brought the joint to his lips and took a long pull, cheeks puffing out. Then he leaned close, letting all the smoke – not marijuana, not tobacco; smelled herbal, like something Mozzie would stick in one of his bizarre alternative pharmaceuticals – stream over Neal's face. Neal flinched again.
But the licorice taste dissolved, and when he acted on instinct to bring a hand up and wave the smoke away, his hand obeyed. He found himself coughing, but he could move, and–
"What the hell!"
–speak. He could speak again.
He made an abortive bid to stand, but hands on his shoulders forced him back to the ground again. The man in front of him spat a wad of chewed-up leaves and bark into the grass.
"There," he said. "Welcome to our world, Mr. Caffrey. I'm afraid you won't be able to get home from here, but you shouldn't let that worry you. Live in the moment, is my advice." He stubbed out the joint. "Call me Lawrence."
"Lawrence," Neal said, testing the word on his tongue. He had a feeling it wasn't the man's real name. "You're making a mistake."
"Because the FBI will be after me?" Lawrence asked. "Doesn't concern me."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "It should. The people who'll be looking for me aren't the type to give up easily."
"Oh?" Lawrence said. He was humoring him, Neal thought. Or he thought he was. "And what would you have me do?"
Neal didn't think this would work. If nothing else, though, it might dislodge some new piece of information, some insight into his kidnapping. "If you let me go, you might get away."
Lawrence's mouth curled up.
"I thought you might say that," he said. "I thought you might fail to comprehend the situation you were in. That's why I brought you here. Do you know where you are?"
Neal glanced around, though the hands on his shoulders prevented him from getting much of a field of view. Still, there were benches nearby of a very particular design, and he could see the lawn, and hear the water behind him. He could guess how long they'd been driving, and he knew how the sound of the van had changed as it passed over a bridge. "At a guess? Gantry Park."
"They said you were clever," Lawrence said, and stood. He motioned for Neal's guards to let Neal do the same. And they did, hauling him up to balance on his own two feet, and turning him around.
And the view slammed itself into Neal's gut.
He surged forward without thinking about it, and his guards restrained him; a startled cry escaped from his throat, even when he couldn't believe his eyes. The Manhattan skyline stood shattered across the river, like a model someone had thrown against a wall; the Empire State building skeletal and beginning to buckle, the Chrysler building beheaded, all the offices of Midtown gaping broken-windowed and brought low. Along the line of the coast hulked shapes that had once been buildings, which were now piles of rubble and debris. Up north, the Queensboro Bridge twisted and dove down into the water, graceful as a swan's neck in its ruin.
It looked like a bomb had gone off, or a hurricane thrown its full might against the city, but what–
Lawrence came up beside him.
"Like I said." His voice was sardonic. "Welcome to our world, Neal Caffrey. You don't have to worry. Everyone you know is just how you left them. Your pretty city is just the same as it was – probably won't even notice you gone. But it's my world that needs you now, and I don't intend to disappoint them."
They pushed him into the van again – or, a van; Neal had to admit that he wasn't sure it was the same one. But they didn't pull the bag over his head this time. Still, he was sitting between the people who had grabbed him (hired muscle, he thought; no chatter, no banter, just a solid, present threat), and he was rattled more than he'd like to admit.
The smoke, the paralysis, the shattered Manhattan – it was a trick. It all had to be a trick, though he wasn't sure how it could be; even he wouldn't be able to pull off that view, with the open air of Gantry Park, with the sky above, without a mural stretching the whole length of the island. And he was pretty sure that, if they'd soaked the bag in something to dose him, the effects wouldn't be that clean, and the antidote wouldn't be that simple.
"All right," he said, after a couple streets went by. There were no windows in the back, but he could catch glimpses of the windshield through the mesh barrier that separated the cab from the cargo. He couldn't tell much, but it seemed like the places they were driving through didn't look much better than Manhattan had. He kept catching glimpses of torn-up roofs, of telephone poles listing at uncomfortable angles. Kept feeling jarring bumps as the tires ran over some roughness. "You can let me in on the joke now."
"Everything in its time," Lawrence answered easily, from the front seat.
And that was it for conversation.
Neal kept trying, but there was only so much he could do with the stony-faced goons and Lawrence's self-satisfied silence. Eventually he gave up, and leaned back against the wall, categorizing his options. So long as he was hemmed in on both sides by men who could probably snap him, they were more or less nonexistent. No one was going to believe a conveniently-timed misdirection or illness.
So, he had to wait until they got where they were going. And damn, but that took time.
He supposed it could be worse. They could be driving cross-country on these awful roads. As it was, he thought it was a full hour, maybe two, before the van rolled to a stop, and Lawrence opened his door and got out.
Neal could hear his footsteps crunching on gravel outside, and then the back door swung open. Lawrence beckoned them out, and the goons all but hauled Neal into the sunlight. He had to stand, blinking, until his eyes adjusted again.
He saw a gate and a palisade. Old, uninspired buildings in military rows. People going here and there, though most of them with a furtiveness to their steps. A few of them had gathered, some distance away, to stare at Lawrence, but they didn't come close, and Neal couldn't quite read their expressions. Out past the buildings stood something that looked like a silo. And from not too far away, he could hear the crashing of waves – the ocean.
With a snap, he recognized where he was. This was Fort Tilden, but a Fort Tilden he'd only seen in historical documents: back home, most of the old military buildings were abandoned or destroyed. Here, it was though the place never went out of service.
Fort Totten, Fort Tilden. His life had been full up on forts, of late.
Lawrence motioned them ahead toward one of the outlying buildings, and his goons dragged Neal forward by the arm. Still, it was only a few steps later when a voice boomed out, "Lawrence!", in a tone that said someone was about to have the Riot Act read.
And a welcome voice, too. Though this had to be breaking some records, even for him.
Peter.
But then he turned and saw him, and saw that Peter... looked wrong. Not as wrong as the Manhattan skyline, but wrong, nonetheless.
He was dressed in work clothes – hard, outdoor work clothes; laborer's clothes, not an FBI suit and tie. And he looked haggard. Like he hadn't remembered to shave in a day or two, like he hadn't had a full night's sleep in longer.
His eyes, though, were clear and burning sharp, and hit Lawrence with a force Neal could almost feel biting him. Lawrence, though, seemed less than impressed.
"What the hell did you do?" Peter snapped. "I said no. I said, under no circumstance–"
"You carrying your agrimony, Burke?" he said. "Agrimony, bay, and black snake – that what they were rationing you?"
Peter stopped up short, anger in his eyes, coiled violence in the set of his shoulders. But he didn't reach out to cuff Lawrence, or take his eyes off him.
"How'd you find him?" he asked, finally. "Dig up a scrap of bone from somewhere?"
"Nah," Lawrence said. "His little friend provided the materials."
Peter's face twisted into a show of incredulity. "Mozzie?" he demanded.
"That surprise you?" Lawrence said. "You think you'd talked him around to your side of the law?"
Peter's jaw worked for a second. Then, he seemed to file that away, presumably until he could corner Mozzie and interrogate him on his own terms. "I don't care," he snapped out. "Whatever our Caffrey might have done, as far as this world is concerned, he's an innocent."
That was accompanied by a jab of a finger in Neal's direction, and met with a derisive snort. "I doubt Caffrey's innocent in any world," Lawrence said.
"...excuse me," Neal said. He'd been hoping – trying desperately, actually – to feel out the balance in this situation, maybe get a sense of what he had to work with before taking the chance of speaking up. But he wasn't liking where this was going. "Can I just–"
"Shut up!"
That caught Neal like a bucket of ice to the face. He jerked back, but Peter hadn't even glanced in his direction.
"I'm still the law here, Lawrence," Peter said.
Lawrence barked out a laugh. Neal knew the tone of that laughter – Lawrence didn't give a damn for the law, but he sure as hell gave a damn about letting the law know it. "Burke, you're a lucky survivor with a halfpenny contract with Agares. I'm not scared of you. There isn't a sorcerer left in New York who scares me. Including this one."
That was all the warning Neal got before Lawrence's hand smacked into the back of his head, and he stumbled.
"Don't," Lawrence growled, voice a sharpened threat, "insult me."
Lawrence gestured, and the goons holding onto Neal spurred him forward. Neal cast a glance back to Peter, but Peter's eyes never left Lawrence, and his expression never changed from hate and rage.
A few steps later, with Neal still being dragged forward, Lawrence stopped and turned back.
"When this is over," Lawrence called, "I'm going to be a hero. What about you, Burke?"
"Not like this," Peter called back. And that was the end of the conversation.
The goons dragged him through the fort and to a solid brick-and-mortar building, then inside, up a winding and narrowing set of stairs, and tossed him through a door.
Beyond the door was a garret. Maybe twelve feet by eight, with a composting toilet set up in the corner and a mattress left as far away (not far) as possible. A glassless window sat on the wall, just about chest-height. Neal turned, and there was Lawrence in the doorway, looking at him with that same measuring gaze.
"Your little friend will probably bring you up a pack of cards," he said. "Burke might stop by. Never mind either of them. There's a Great Occasion in two days. Just bide your time until then."
"What am I doing here?" Neal asked. "What occasion? What's going on?"
And there, again, that thin, sardonic smile. "Don't waste time worrying."
The Lawrence turned away, and the door swung shut behind him.
Neal listened, but didn't hear a latch. But he didn't hear any footsteps walking away, either, so he decided to wait on pushing open the door. He turned, and walked to the window.
The window was about a yard high; slightly less wide. Large enough to wriggle out of, though the brick wall below was smooth to the touch and didn't look like climbable without equipment. The ground below was bone-breaking, organ-rupturing ground: rocky outcrops, some too uniform to be natural. Not like the Fort Tilden beach he was familiar with.
Elaborate trick, his instincts said. Some kind of misdirection. But there was too much that didn't add up, even for that explanation.
The window faced out over the fathomless expanse of the Atlantic, the white light of afternoon shattering on the water's surface. Something vast and dark moved within its depths.
It took, by Neal's reckoning, two hours before the familiar cadence of Mozzie's speech started up beyond the door, in which time he'd heard one set of footsteps leave and the other two stick around, occasionally pacing a few steps here or there in the hall. He'd gone through the room, and discovered nothing more interesting than a line of intermingled Greek and Latin inscriptions twining their way around the room on the baseboards. He'd never paid that much attention to learning dead languages – not when there were so many living ones that were more useful – but he thought it was mostly to do with demons, kings, and angels.
Curious, that. Especially as it was far too neat to suggest the rantings of a raving lunatic.
But now the door was swinging open and there was a familiar face, shuffling in like he was on business. Neal straightened up. Maybe there would be some answers, here.
"Mozzie."
Manhattan was ruined, Fort Tilden was still standing, and Peter didn't give him the time of day. Neal had no idea what to expect.
Mozzie, it seemed, had the same reservation. He eyed Neal the way he used to eye Peter, back home – because wherever Neal was, in his mind or out of it, it certainly wasn't home. "Neal." A moment passed, Mozzie studying everything from Neal's haircut to his shoes, then he said, carefully, "Briarpatch?"
A jolt of familiarity hit him. It was an old passphrase, and there was no telling if it would work here, but Neal answered, "Romain Bouquet?"
Mozzie nodded, though. Closed the door, and looked satisfied. "Well. That much is the same, at least." He bustled to the window, peering out; the sun was beginning its trek down the far side of the sky, and the vast dark shape had swum away. It had swum away twice before, and always come circling back.
Mozzie turned back to Neal.
"It's good to see you again, mon frere."
Something in Mozzie's voice made Neal's stomach twist. "I wish I could say the same," he said. "What's going on?"
Mozzie raised a finger. Then, in the silence, he touched his forehead, and mumbled something.
"Ateh," it sounded like.
Neal's brows furrowed.
Mozzie didn't seem to notice or care. His eyes were focused on something entirely different, in some middle distance which probably exceeded the span of the room. He moved his hand over his heart. "Malkuth." His right shoulder. "ve-Geburah." Left shoulder. "ve-Gedulah."
Neal watched him, entertaining the idea that maybe everyone he knew had gone insane. Maybe he had gone insane. Maybe the bag they'd pulled over his head had been soaked in ether and he was lost in some kind of remarkably internally-consistent hallucination. He hadn't come out of it with that breath of smoke.
It was that, or believing that he was actually in another world, where all of this nonsense made sense.
Mozzie had moved on to drawing shapes in the air with some small device he'd produced from some pocket, somewhere, and Neal shook his head and went to sit down on his mattress. He counted up to fifty, back down to thirty-eight, and Mozzie finally finished whatever he was doing and turned back to him, brushing off his hands. "There," he pronounced. "Now we can talk freely."
Neal wasn't sure what he was supposed to say to that.
Granted, that had been the case back home frequently enough. So he cleared his throat, and said "What's going on?" again.
Mozzie looked at him, and it wasn't often that easy to see that there were things Mozzie wanted to say, but wasn't saying. "You're in another world," he said, after a pause. The pause had been laden with implication, though Neal wasn't sure what was being implied. "We need your help. I convinced Lawrence to do a Soror Cardea translocation to bring you here – sorry about that, by the way. He's the only one left on the East Coast who can pull off that kind of a working. But for our purposes, consider him a patsy – a very dangerous patsy, mind, but we can use him to our aims." And then he stopped, turning a look on Neal that was almost desperate. "There may have been a... slight miscalculation in one of our plans."
"Okay," Neal said. "But why me? There have to be plenty of people in this... world... who can fix whatever we did."
Mozzie sidled. "Not exactly," he said. "It has to do with a contract you made." Then, after Neal apparently failed to produce the correct response, "A demonic contract."
Neal shook his head.
"...you're really not a sorcerer?" Mozzie asked. "How did life conspire to allow that? That's an unconscionable waste of your skills!"
"As far as I know, sorcerers don't exist in 'my world,'" Neal said. "Neither do demons. This is all a little weird."
"Seriously?" Mozzie burst. "How does that – I fail to understand how a global economy could even develop, absent the resources provided by the underworld."
"I fail to understand how one could with them," Neal parried, and didn't notice until he had that he'd been run around into taking the conversation at face value. "Aren't demons... I don't know, evil?"
"Ah, the prejudices of the pre-Enlightenment era," Mozzie said. "I can tell we have some remedial lessons in theology in our future." Then, before Neal could bristle too much at that, he went on to say, "Anyway, your blood wouldn't have found you if you weren't still – you know. You. At least for the purposes of expanded ceremonial magic."
That didn't sound pleasant. "My blood?" Neal asked.
"I had a phylactery," Mozzie said, which didn't explain anything.
"A scroll? A – a tefillin?"
Mozzie gave him an odd look, which Neal felt was unfair. "No," he said, "a vial of your blood."
That sounded unnecessarily morbid. "You had a vial of my blood in storage."
"You had one of mine!" Mozzie protested. "We needed a way to get in touch with each other if something should happen. A simple astral communications spell, using the blood as an anchor–"
"Like a burner phone," Neal said.
Mozzie looked taken aback. "I guess you could use a phone for that," he said. "But why would you? Those things are insecure; the feds control all of the satellites."
"...right," Neal said.
"There's not much you can do with someone else' blood, anyway," Mozzie continued. "Communications spells, tracking spells, one or two of the nastier curses, though those usually end bite you, in the end. A Frater Elah's invocation."
Neal shook his head. "Okay, but why did you need to grab me from another world, if you had something you could use to track–"
Halfway through the sentence, with Mozzie looking pained, he got it.
"...don't tell me I'm dead in this – here."
Mozzie shifted unhappily.
Neal took a moment to breathe. Given all the scrapes he'd been through in his own world, he probably shouldn't be surprised by that. Still, he didn't really like having an awareness of his own mortality thrown in his face, and certainly not by sorcerous alternate-world versions of his friends. That was all sorts of discomfiting.
He thought about asking Out of curiosity, how did I die?, and wondered if he really wanted to know.
"Okay," he said. "So I'm dead, you need someone to fix a mistake I made–" A mistake that your me made, he thought, but that just sounded clumsy. He wasn't sure about the grammatical rules of talking himself in a different reality. "–and you were expecting me to know about sorcery. Does the fact that I don't put a crimp in your plans?"
"I taught you once," Mozzie said. "I can do it again. Though I had hoped you'd come with some expertise; the Great Occasion is the day after tomorrow."
"I'm guessing that's bad," Neal said.
"No," Mozzie said. "Not bad, exactly. Just a rush job." Then, before Neal could ask what the rush job was, Mozzie looked at him and got a glint in his eye. "In a way, you could look at this as the quintessential eucatastrophe," he said. "Lawrence said he found you on an anklet. But in a mere two days, you will have accomplished the score of a lifetime, and be free forevermore from the bindings of the FBI. Songs will be sung and tales told."
A chill wound down Neal's spine. Oh, he'd like freedom, sure. And once, he'd have been excited about ultimate score. These days, it just started him wondering what was about to go wrong.
But Mozzie was on a roll, now. He waved a hand out the window, eyes lit up with an enthusiasm that, admittedly, was good to see. "I'm sure you've noticed our companion in the waters? That's Pandomaine, a Great King of Hell, only discovered in the 1940s by German demonologists. It grants 'powers vast and overwhelming' to those who seize his contract – that is, assuming they execute the contract correctly. Which we, unfortunately, did not."
"I'm guessing this is what got me killed?"
Mozzie paused. "No," he said. "That was... extraneous. FBI-related. ...Kate-related."
Oh, and Neal could see where this was going, and wished he couldn't. "Plane-related?"
"It was bad," Mozzie said, in a small voice. That seemed like agreement to Neal.
Silently, they both reached the decision that the less said on that topic, the better.
"Anyway," Mozzie said, "as a result of the error in our contract the first time, Pandomaine is currently at loose ends, and expressing its boredom... destructively."
Two and two came together in Neal's mind to create a four he wasn't happy with. "We summoned the thing that destroyed Manhattan?"
"There was nothing in the literature to suggest it would do that!" Mozzie said. "The literature was incomplete! The Germans lost the war before they could complete their research! It's not like we were trying to deal in weapons of mass destruction – a career choice, I should note, which has been made available to me at various points, and which I have always taken a principled stand against." But then he seemed to melt back, a little. "That said... you see how important it is that we correct the contract, as soon as possible."
If New York City was in ruins, the bodycount had to be in the millions already. That far eclipsed any mistake Neal could possibly have made, back home. And as for how Mozzie expected him to fix it–
"Of course, Lawrence doesn't think we're going to be correcting the contract," Mozzie said. "He plans on canceling it entirely, which is why you can't tell him about any of this. Trust me when I say he does not have your best interests at heart."
"I know I'm the new guy here," Neal said, "but have you considered the merits of canceling the contract? Why–"
But Mozzie was already waving the objections off. "A properly-handled demonic contract is no more dangerous than a properly raised dog," he said. "Neal, trust me. Lawrence doesn't have your best interests at heart, but I do. We'll correct the contract, the world will be safe, and we'll be able to write our own tickets. We just have to get your through tomorrow and the Great Occasion and everything will be fine."
Mozzie's sense of fine could, on occasion, be hugely suspect. Neal had the feeling this was one of those times. "And what's your level of confidence?"
"High," Mozzie said, instantly. Then, after a moment, "Moderately high. I'd expected to be working with a skilled sorcerer, but... well, you're good at following scripts?"
"Ostensibly," Neal said.
Mozzie nodded. "You'll do fine," he said. "You put yourself in the right headspace and you say all the right words, attendant to the right symbols and the correct temporal positions. I refuse to believe there's a universe where Neal Caffrey can't handle that."
That might have been reassuring, in a world different from this one. "Thanks."
And Mozzie's voice got oddly soft, at that. Shades of grief around his eyes, and Neal didn't want to see it. Circumstances were too strange for that. "Any time, mon frere," he said, and sidled toward the door.
With his hand on the doorframe, though, he stopped, and gave Neal a considering look.
"Lawrence thinks he's in control of the situation," Mozzie said. "For the time being, it's advantageous to let him continue to think that. So, unfortunately, you're going to have to stay in here for the immediate future. Don't worry, though – you'll see the full extent of this world's hospitality after the contract is corrected."
"Noted," Neal said.
"Oh," Mozzie said, and scrambled about in his pockets for something. After a moment, he located it. "Cover story," he said, and tossed Neal a pack of cards. "If anyone asks, I came in to talk to you in an attempt to salve my own conscience."
He vanished out the door before Neal could ask what he was salving his conscience for.
So far as he could tell, Neal had essentially been put into storage. Someone came by as the sky was going dark and gave him food – most of which seemed like it had come out of cans, though Neal suspected that there weren't many grocery stores around that were still working, if Queens had suffered the same as Manhattan. Breakfast, when the sky was lightening, was a bit better; fresh eggs from somewhere, even though he suspected the accompanying bread had been toasted to conceal how stale it was.
He'd tried to make conversation with the person bringing his food – a fresh-faced young woman who seemed like she could have been an advertisement for the National Guard – but she just looked at him with a degree of suspicion, and refused to say a word.
Though, if all she knew about him was "he's another version of the guy who summoned the giant monster," he supposed he couldn't blame her. And the guards outside the door were no more friendly. In fact, Neal got the distinct impression that if they had a choice in the matter, they'd already have murdered him.
After they refused to carry a message to Lawrence, carry a message to Mozzie, catch him up on the news, or let him stretch his legs a little, Neal tried to limit his interaction with them.
Between the fort's general hostility and the revelations Mozzie had spring on him the night before, Neal wasn't expecting anything good to come of the hard knocking at the door when midafternoon rolled around. Still, he called out "I don't think it's locked," because there were only so many versions of Solitaire that he knew and sitting there, waiting for something to happen, was going to drive him insane.
The door swung open like a fist. And there was Peter, the burning of Manhattan in his eyes, but also that look he got, like he was fighting hard to give someone all the chances they were due. Neal scrambled to his feet.
"Peter," he said, but warily. Seeing Peter, down in the courtyard – well, his first instinct had been that he'd been rescued before he made it out of the city. But that... wasn't the case, at all.
"Caffrey," Peter said, acid in his voice. But he glanced around, and then invited himself in, and that was still Peter Burke, even if none of the rest of this was.
Or. Rather. The rest of this was, but it was a Peter that Neal didn't often have to see. Not with all that smoldering anger directed at him. There had been times, though.
They'd barely gotten past some of those times.
"I feel like I should point out that I'm probably not the person you're angry at, right now."
Peter didn't look especially mollified by that. "I know!" he said. "I know. Just – I'm not exactly used to dealing with people from other worlds."
"Oh," Neal said, "so this isn't a common–?"
The look Peter shot him ended that quip quickly.
After a moment, though, Peter relented. "No," he said, "it isn't." Then, with a glance out toward the ocean, "Lawrence thinks you're not a sorcerer."
So, Mozzie and Lawrence really weren't sharing all their intel, and Mozzie wasn't telling things to Peter. Good to know. "No, I'm not," Neal said. "But I'm allegedly a pretty good bond forger, if that helps."
Peter didn't seem to find that funny, but he also didn't find it an odd enough statement to comment on. "Good going, them, then. Well, they wouldn't have been able to find you if you weren't–"
"Still me, at least for the purposes of magic, yeah," Neal said. "Mozzie said. Apparently I can help with your–" He waved a hand at the window. "–giant monster problem."
Peter looked at him, and then Peter looked at him, a searing, searching look that Neal could feel turning him inside-out. He was hoping that was just a metaphor. "Lawrence hasn't told you what he has planned for you?" Peter asked. "Neither has Mozzie?"
Well, Mozzie had told him that he was leading Lawrence on. Mozzie had shared his plan, but Neal got the feeling Peter wouldn't approve. Hell, Neal didn't approve.
But Neal was also not going to turn Mozzie in to Peter. This was a new world, and he wasn't sure of all the rules. Best not to burn any bridges until he knew he wouldn't need them; he didn't get the feeling that this Peter was overfull of fond-feeling for the two of them. "No," he said. "Nothing."
Nothing so far as Lawrence's plans, at least.
Peter looked at him, and there were shades of nausea around his expression. "Caffrey," he said. "They're going to sacrifice you to that thing."
Neal didn't even have to fake his surprise, at that. Granted, Mozzie apparently had no intention of letting that happen, but he'd also failed to mention it as a part of Lawrence's plans.
"The only way a contract is severed with Pandomaine is if it kills you," Peter went on. "Not if your plane goes up in flames, not if you die of old age. And Pandomaine remains on Earth until his contract is severed. If I know Lawrence, he's going to use tomorrow's Occasion to walk you to the shore as soon as the time is right, and compel you to call Pandomaine onto you."
Peter Burke: master of breaking the news gently. Neal let out a shaky laugh. "Okay," he said. "I'm getting the feeling this is one of those things I should run from."
"You run and Lawrence is going to summon up something to hunt you," Peter said. "You wouldn't make it twenty miles."
Oh, good to know that was something Lawrence could do. Track him across worlds, and summon demons to hunt him. He was beginning to miss the days when pissing someone off just meant you risked having a hit put on you.
"So why are you telling me this?" Neal asked. It clearly wasn't out of compassion or fellow-feeling. "Are you my exit counselor?"
"Hardly." Peter crossed his arms, and Neal fought to hide a look of surprise. Peter's arms were crossed a little too tightly, and it broadcasted his unease as clearly as a snarl or a whimper. "The you who was here," Peter said. "Him? I would have let him. He should have had the guts to correct his own mistakes, not run off to – but I'm not going to let you die for a mistake you didn't make."
Neal let out a shaky laugh. Some of that was feigned, but too much of it wasn't. "And Lawrence doesn't have your compunctions."
"Lawrence would have gone after you the day he got here," Peter said. "He didn't have any way to find you. I would have found a way to confiscate that phylactery, but I didn't think Mozzie was that mercenary." After a moment he laughed, short and bitter. "Then again, I guess I didn't know the two of you so well."
Even beyond the fact that it might or might not get him killed by a demon, Neal had a feeling he was going to regret showing up to take on this history. More than he already did, that was. "All right, so what's your plan?" Neal asked. He already knew Mozzie's, and Mozzie's sounded like a terrible idea. But if he knew Peter Burke, then Peter would–
"What makes you think I have a plan?" Peter demanded.
–then again, he didn't know this Peter Burke, did he? And part of that was his own fault. His, from a life he'd never led, in a world that wasn't his own.
Peter walked to the window, rubbing his hand across his chin.
"Jesus," he muttered. "Should have pushed the Frater Elah. No chance Lawrence would agree–"
Then he went rigid, eyes locked on the ocean outside.
"What," Neal began, and then the howling of a siren started up from the fort proper.
"Stay here," Peter was already snapping, heading toward the door. "Stay down; stay away from the window."
Then he was gone, out the door, his footsteps echoing from the stairs.
Neal didn't stay away from the window. He walked to it, looked out to where thunderheads were frothing up from the surface of the sea, and the vast dark shape breached the surface, shedding waterfalls.
For the first time, Neal saw Pandomaine's face.
It could have begun as the face of a man. It could have begun as Neal's face, though it was four stories tall at an estimate, elongated and sharpened like some kind of nightmare fish, the two bottom teeth jutting forward and twining together like the tusk of a narwhal. The skin was slicked with oil-black scales, the eyes were molten gold and crimson. Even without pupil or iris, Neal could feel them fixing on him, the whole beast turning to regard him. Its body was serpentine and squamous, fins making long shadows in the water.
It laughed, and its laughter was like a shipping container full of silver bells rupturing into the ocean.
Then it struck.
Neal threw himself down onto the mattress as Pandomaine's tusks breeched the wall on the far side of his cell, and half of the building was ripped away. He could feel the building tremble as the tusk swung around again, tearing the whole ceiling away. A patter of shingles fell down around him, and a crash like the ocean splitting in two announced Pandomaine as it dropped back into the waves.
Neal risked a look up. The guards outside his door might have still been there; the door was still, there, and most of that half of the wall, but the opposite end of the room dropped out and vanished into a tangle of ruins.
Neal bolted for it.
Bits and pieces of wall and ceiling were still falling, but he scrambled down the most stable-looking piles of debris and launched himself out into the paths between the buildings, and then the courtyard.
Which were a controlled chaos: men and women, some in camo, some in civilian clothes, coming out with rifles and automatics and one with what looked like a rocket launcher, rushing past him toward the water. He couldn't see Peter or Mozzie in the commotion.
Then came a cacophony of trumpets and cymbals, a howling, and a roar like a lion or a waterfall.
All at once the whole fort was full of golden forms, some shaped like men, some very much not – he caught a horse with a bouquet of lashing snakes as its tail, a four-legged eagle with a curling scorpion's tail. They were rushing the shore like a reverse tidal wave, breaking over each other as they ran.
Pandomaine reared from the ocean, its tusk all but drawing blood from the sky. Then the golden army met it and it thrashed, water careening up and over the roofs of the fort, and it laughed again, the last Neal saw of it was its great flank turning, then vanishing behind the buildings that were still standing, diving downward as the thunderheads boiled away to nothing and the sun streamed down again.
The gunfire and the trumpets continued.
Going toward the shore seemed like an idiotic idea, so Neal turned and headed out into the open, trying to get a sense of what had just happened. Besides the obvious, of course: Pandomaine had attacked, and this was probably the same sort of sight that had greeted Manhattan, which hadn't been ready. And how could you have been ready for something like that?
All those people, running for the water with guns that wouldn't have stopped a bear or a mountain lion, let alone that monstrosity. Neal had a feeling that image would haunt him. He'd go for the long shots, sure, but not just throwing his life away on some doomed sense of duty.
In the courtyard, a man wearing a huge golden crown sat on the back of a camel. The crown gleamed in the sun, jutting skyward like a stag's horns, tumbling down the man's back like a maille cap. That much weight in precious metal should have snapped his neck.
Odd, that. Probably had something to do with the wave of creatures that had turned Pandomaine away. Neal angled his steps toward him, hoping to get a better look.
"Great King Paimon," Lawrence called, and Neal startled. Lawrence was coming up to them from the direction of the shore, his hand raised, gold and silver rings on his fingers. He swept his hand toward Neal. "I charge you bind this man to my design, and grant me two familiars, quick of eye, fleet of foot, and uncompromising in their arms to guard that he does not stray."
"Wh–" Neal said, and got just that far because two great shapes had beaded into existence beside him like the condensation of nightmares on the cool surface of the world. They stood a head taller than him, looking like long-legged golden cats whose faces had the underlying anatomy of toads. They both turned to him, fixing him with identical green stares.
That, Neal decided, was infinitely less reassuring than having a couple hostile goons looking after him.
"Great King Paimon," Lawrence said, and his voice was steadier. "You have diligently answered my commands, and so I give you leave to depart to your proper place."
The man on the camel – Great King Paimon, apparently – nodded, and vanished the same way the familiars had appeared. All the trumpets and the legions that had ridden against Pandomaine vanished too, and in their absence, Fort Tilden seemed desolate and empty.
Neal eyed the beasts flanking him. Demons, probably; it wasn't getting any less strange.
Lawrence turned and walked to lean against the nearest wall, and pulled a pouch of something out of one pocket. Neal followed him.
The game had been up since before it was played; still, it cost nothing to chat a while.
"Peter told me what you were planning," Neal said. It seemed as good a preamble as any.
Lawrence didn't seem surprised. "Expected he would."
His hands were trembling.
Neal caught that, and looked between the demons that were guarding him. He edged in Lawrence's direction. He wanted to get a look at whatever was in the pouch, know if it was useful to him, know if it was an addiction.
And, he had to admit, there was a flutter of concern in the back of his throat. Lawrence had kidnapped him, dragged him to another world, and planned on sacrificing him to a demon, but–
He's a criminal, whispered a voice in the corner of his head. Sounded like Peter. And yeah, he was, but so was Neal, and so were a lot of Neal's friends. And Lawrence might like twisting the knife, when it came to this world's Peter, but when it came to all the people in Fort Tilden, it was Lawrence's demons who'd come riding to their rescue.
Neal might not like him, but he found a core of grudging respect where affection would have been. And he could hardly fault the man's motives. "You need any help with that?"
Lawrence looked up at him sharply, then let out a splintered laugh. "You want to help me?"
Neal shrugged.
Lawrence narrowed his eyes, but just for a moment before he tossed the pouch at Neal. "Roll one for me."
Neal opened it, and found... a potpourri of barks and leaves and bits of flower, shredded or crumbled, a set of cigarette papers, and a roller. Didn't smell like tobacco. Didn't smell like weed. He couldn't resist a glance to Lawrence, who'd pressed his back up against the wall and was trying to contain his tremors.
"If you can turn that to your advantage," Lawrence said, wryly, "Maybe you deserve to escape."
Neal exhaled, and pulled a paper from the pack. "I'm not going to escape," he said, and surprised himself by saying it.
Against the wall, Lawrence seemed surprised, too. "You know, I never figured you for the self-sacrificing sort."
Neither did I, Neal thought. Then, he had as little intention of sacrificing himself as he had of staying here.
But Pandomaine was here, and Neal had a sense of the damage it could do. And if Mozzie was right, he could stop it. No harm to him.
Not that he didn't have questions about that plan. But when it came down to it, it looked like the choice was between letting an entire world go to ruin because of a mistake he might as well have made, letting himself die according to Lawrence's plan, or making a grab for power. It wasn't a great set of options, but it wasn't exactly a hard decision.
"Nice army," Neal said, instead, tamping down the herb mixture into the roller. "How far would Pandomaine have come in if you didn't stop him?"
"It's Paimon's army. And as for Pandomaine, it's gone thirty, thirty-five miles inland in places," Lawrence said. "Went straight through DC, the day it got loose. Probably keep expanding its territory as it destroys all the coastal towns. Fortunately, we've got you."
Neal glanced at him, anger tightening his jaw.
Lawrence tilted his head, then waved a hand. "I mean, it can sense you. It knows its contract hangs on you. That's why it's still in our waters, not wrecking Lisbon or some shit."
And why it didn't kill me. Pandomaine had come straight at his window, but it had freed him, not buried him.
Neal pulled a rolling paper out, fed it down into the little contraption. A few twists, and he handed it over to Lawrence, who accepted it and licked the last bit of paper to adhere it. Before he popped the cigarette out of the roller, though, he held out his hand.
"And the rest of it."
Well, Neal hadn't really expected him to forget that. He handed over the pouch, and watched as Lawrence fumbled for a lighter, lit it, and inhaled. His eyes closed, and his entire body seemed to melt into the smoke.
"Stressful job?" Neal asked.
Lawrence slitted one eye open, then shifted the cigarette to the corner of his mouth. "'The best days be when the Moon Luna be aged two, or some count of twos; no other days be profitable,'" he quoted. "'As to the four Great Kings, they are not to be called forth except it be upon Great Occasions.' Guess how old the moon is today, Caffrey. Guess what day it's not."
Aha, Neal thought. Every other day was an off day. Good to know.
Putting that to use would require living through this day and the next, but one thing at a time.
"Fucking swear," Lawrence muttered. "If it keeps on like this, it is gonna kill me young."
Neal clenched his jaw. No, he had no intention of dying. But Lawrence intended him to die, which made Lawrence complaining about this a little rich, in Neal's book.
"My cell's broken," Neal said, a bit more acerbically than he'd intended.
Lawrence waved him off. "You've got two of Paimon's best looking after you, Caffrey. You're not going anywhere."
"Thanks," Neal said, and walked away.
Just to see what would happen, he walked to the gate at the fort's entrance. The cat-beasts didn't seem to care, just stalked along beside him on their lanky legs, right up until the moment he touched the gate.
The next moment, he was on the ground two meters back from the fence, trying to catch enough air to curse while one of the demons put its paw primly back on the ground. Neal rolled onto his side, one arm over his stomach.
Ow.
As soon as he could reliably get in a breath or two without wanting to vomit, he lifted his head and glared at the demon who'd swatted him. "There were," he bit out, "better ways of communicating that."
It watched him impassively. Much like a real cat.
He pushed himself into a sitting position, sat there and hurt for another minute or so, and then clambered to his feet. He wanted to put a hand out to something to steady himself, but the only available options were the fence and the demons, and hell no.
He just hoped they hadn't ruptured any organs.
"Okay," he breathed, and set off back toward the now-rather-damaged main bulk of the buildings, where people were milling about, seeing to injuries and generally being helpful. Halfway there, though, he was ambushed, and had to put up with Mozzie dragging him into a convenient office and going through his Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah routine again.
Neal just took the opportunity to sink into a chair and put his head back and close his eyes and wait for Mozzie to be done.
"What is that?" he asked, finally.
"Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram," Mozzie said. "Modified. I use the 1979 refinement, by S. Judith Moriah. That way I don't have to carry an altar, a robe, and a sword around."
He sounded pleased with himself, for that. It took Neal a moment to realize the extent to which he didn't actually care. Maybe the adrenaline crash from the attack was rolling up on him.
But he looked at the door to the office, and glanced to the window. The demons Lawrence had called up were standing there, faces scrunched in what looked like annoyance. If they'd been human, Neal would be sure that was what it was.
Mozzie followed his gaze, and said "Precisely. They won't enter the room, or hear what we have to say."
"Like sweeping for bugs," Neal said.
Mozzie looked confused, for a moment, but it cleared. "Your world seems vastly less efficient than ours."
"We manage," Neal said. Then, because he didn't want to defend his world's relative sanity against this demonic madhouse, he asked "What was our plan?"
Mozzie gave him a questioning look.
"Peter said that the only way Pandomaine would go back where it came from is if it killed me," Neal said. "And if it's not under someone's control, it goes around the planet and does this." He waved a hand at the wreckage outside. "So, was I just supposed to reach some point in my old age an make a graceful exit?"
"Neal," Mozzie said, sounding somewhat aghast. "Would your world's me ever suggest something that ghoulish?"
"My world's you doesn't summon demons," Neal said. "My world's you doesn't keep vials of my blood on hand." He thought about that, for a moment. "That I know of."
"With Pandomaine working for us, we'd have familiars who could go anywhere in the world and do anything we needed them to," Mozzie explained. "We'd have clout with all the Lords of Hell. Then, once we were safely ensconced in Pandomaine's power, the whole of the world's – and the underworld's – research would be at our fingertips. We'd be writing our own contracts."
"Do you know that?" Neal asked.
If this Mozzie was like the one at home – and he seemed to be, from what Neal had seen – then his answer was in the slight, frazzled pause more than it was in his voice. "I have reason to–"
"You don't know that," Neal interrupted. "You decided 'let's summon a Nazi war machine and work out how to put it back, later'."
"One," Mozzie said, "We decided that. Me and... my Neal." That ghost of pain crossed Mozzie's face again, and he looked away, and Neal had to resist the urge to do the same. It was downright unnerving, being in the same room as someone who was mourning his death.
He could only hope that he'd never become a ghost.
"Two, Pandomaine is not a Nazi war machine," Mozzie said, forging gamely on. "It was discovered by Nazi researchers, but it had a long existence in Hell, dating back to the Fall of Lucifer, and shouldn't be judged by the people who uncovered his incantations and seals. And three, this is a little ghoulish, but so long as I had your blood, there would have been... other options."
"Like dragging me in from another world?" Neal asked.
Mozzie fidgeted, and went cagey. "Among other options," he said.
Neal dragged his hands through his hair. He wanted, with a steadily growing urgency, to go home. That seemed to factor in exactly no one's plans for him. The moment he could start making his own plans was one eagerly to be anticipated; the only problem was, he had a feeling that moment would only come once he had Pandomaine under his control and the world metaphorically cowering at his feet.
"Why did we decide to do this?" he asked. "So we could purchase and retire on neighboring temperate zone islands?"
Mozzie looked delighted. Like he was pleased to find another point of commonality between his world and Neal's. "It was going to be the invocation of a lifetime."
Neal snorted. "Scores of a lifetime never work out well for me."
"'Ah,'" Mozzie said, and his voice had that quoting things tone. "'But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?'"
"Robert Browning," Neal said, and gave up. "I no longer have a room, and I want to lie down. Can you find me one?"
The room Mozzie found him was a bit better than the last one, in that it was a barracks and not a garret. Neal didn't get the sense that Fort Tilden had ever been designed for luxury.
Still, it had a bed, and the bed had a mattress – no sheets or pillow, but Mozzie vanished with a promise to send someone by with them. The demons parked themselves just outside, and Neal collapsed onto the bare mattress and closed his eyes with a groan. He managed to drift into some vague dozing state where the pain in his abdomen faded, or at least he thought he did; he was aware of time passing, but not of how much had passed before someone knocked at the doorframe.
Sheets and pillows, he thought, and rolled over to see... Peter Burke with what looked like a doctor's bag.
Okay.
"Not who I expected," he remarked, and reorganized all his various limbs so he was in a sitting position. His stomach protested, and he shot a glare at the demon outside the door; all he could see was its shoulder and the line of its neck, head turned away from him, but that was enough. "Is it too much to ask that that's a bag of take-out?" Or a cold compress. He'd take either one, honestly.
"I need to draw your blood," Peter said, and withdrew a needle, fortunately still in its sterile packaging.
Neal drew back, alarmed. "Whoa," he said. "Do you actually know anything about phlebotomy?"
Peter shot him a dark look, as he commandeered the room's chair. "What I'm doing here might just save your life, Caffrey, you want to dial back the snippiness?"
Neal didn't think it was snippiness when it concerned people sticking needles into him, but he wasn't going to point that out and risk antagonizing the man who was brandishing said needles. "Never mind. Just wondering."
"Give me your arm," Peter said, pulling a plastic tourniquet band out of the pack.
Neal extracted himself from his coat – painfully – and rolled up his shirt sleeve, despite the fact that he was certain this was a bad idea. "Can I at least ask how this is meant to save my life?"
"Magic," Peter deadpanned.
From what little Neal knew, this was a perfectly accurate explanation. It was also a perfectly useless one.
"I see you've got a couple of Paimon's familiars following you," Peter said, pulling out a few more things. An alcohol wipe, a collection bottle.
"That recognizable, are they?" Neal asked.
"I was raised Theognostic Catholic," Peter said, scrubbing the alcohol wipe across Neal's inner arm. "We were big on memorizing lists of demons."
"Theognostic," Neal said. "Never heard of it."
Peter huffed. "Probably because you didn't grow up in a world where explaining God through the equations of his demons made any sense," he said. "Not that it makes that much more sense here. I got to college, started reading, and the more I read... well, I lapsed. Still."
"You're lapsed Catholic back home, too," Neal offered, and tried not to wince too much when Peter selected one of the needles.
That got a thin and unamused smile out of Peter, at least. He picked up the torniquet, and leaned forward to tie it around Neal's bicep. Neal really hoped Peter knew what he was doing.
"So Mozzie tells me that demons aren't considered evil, here," he said, and looked away from his arm.
"Demons are just angels with free will," Peter said, drumming on the skin. "The way it goes – the way I was taught – was that God made the angels to worship him, and said they should never bow to anyone but him. Then God made humans in his image, and told all the hosts of Heaven to bow to them. Lucifer, who loved God – he was God's favorite, in the bible I read – saw the contradiction, and the in space of the contradiction was the kernel of free will. Lucifer refused to bow to humanity. He and the angels who followed his example were cast down from Heaven and sentenced to serve the humans they had spurned."
And there was the bite of the needle, and Neal stiffened, breathed through the suddenness of the pain, and then looked down when it abated. It didn't look like he'd been impaled. And Peter was reaching for a collection tube, all his motions easily enough to make Neal think that there was a story behind this. He'd been drafted into the medical corps for Fort Tilden, maybe, and they'd trained him.
And at least he didn't make any comments about Neal having good veins, the way the last person who'd drawn his blood had. Neal didn't think he would have been able to handle that.
Peter fit the tube against the needle, and slid it up to break the vacuum seal. Neal watched with a kind of morbid interest as his blood jetted into the tube, one continuous stream until it had filled the container and Peter removed it and clicked on the cap.
"Seriously, what are you going to do with my blood?" Neal asked. "I was under the impression it wasn't that useful to people who weren't me."
Peter raised his eyebrows, withdrawing the needle and pressing a bandage to the puncture. "You wouldn't know what I was talking about if I told you."
"You could explain it," Neal pointed out. "Give me the basic concepts."
Peter stood, eyeing Neal like a hawk might eye a jay. "Yeah," he said. "You know, call it a personal quirk, but I'm not really interested in teaching Neal Caffrey the finer points of expanded ceremonial magic."
In Peter's position, Neal guessed he wouldn't be all that interested, either.
Peter rummaged in his pocket, then flipped something down at Neal, who caught it on instinct. "Keep that with you tomorrow," he said. "And don't tell anyone about it."
Neal turned it over in his hand. It was a small copper disc, about the size of a quarter, with a design stamped into one side. Some symbol, crosses and circles and arcs that gave the impression of a Greek peplos. It was encircled by the letters, evenly spaced around the circumference: A-G-A-R-E-S. "What is this?"
"It's my seal," Peter said, then considered his words a bit more carefully. "It's the seal of Agares that was issued to me while I worked with the FBI."
Neal looked up. "'While'? You're not still FBI?"
Peter shrugged. "DC went down before anyone could get out," he said. "The federal government is kind of a mess right now. I slipped through the cracks."
Probably, Neal suspected, because he wanted to. If Pandomaine was only wrecking the coastal cities, enough of the FBI still existed to self-organize. But maybe it was easier for Peter to let himself be assumed in the ranks of the dead, knowing that an accurate count would never be made.
"You know," Peter said, "my contract with Agares is how I ended up catching you in the first place. He brings back runaways."
"I wasn't aware I was a runaway," Neal said, and then thought about it, and discarded a few uneasy hypotheses. Maybe in this world, Peter had tracked down his mother instead of setting a trap using Kate. Maybe in this world, it was easier to casually excavate that history.
...but this was a different world, and he tried to believe it didn't matter.
"You're afraid I'm gonna run?"
"Caffrey," Peter said. "That's not at all what I'm afraid of."
Neal wished he knew enough to untangle that. Instead, he said "You going to tell me what your plan is?"
"Nope," Peter said.
"To be clear, then," Neal said, "you're asking me to trust you."
"That going to be a problem?" Peter asked.
Neal could have done some soul-searching, maybe compared this Peter to the Peter back home. Searched through all the memories of Peter angry with him, Peter hurt or betrayed, Peter lashing out in the warehouse where the Nazi loot had been. But this Peter didn't give him the time to come to a conclusion.
"Don't need your trust anyway," he said, and turned to leave.
Neal had planned on letting him go, but a sudden impulse prevented him. "Peter," he said, and Peter stopped in the doorway. His expression had gone pensive, as soon as he'd turned his back. Neal pressed on. "Where's Elizabeth?"
The flash of raw pain told Neal exactly what he'd suspected. Peter didn't need to say a word.
He said plenty more than one, though. "Lawrence showed you the Gantry Park view. Did he drive you in here through Queens or Brooklyn?"
Neal swallowed. "I couldn't tell."
"I'm guessing it was Queens. Want to know why?" Peter asked.
No. Neal didn't. And he had the feeling he knew, already.
"Because Manhattan is looking a lot better than Brooklyn does, these days," Peter said.
Then he walked out, and shut the door behind him.
As ritual sacrifices went, Neal thought he could have planned one better. They didn't even give any thought to his final meal.
Lawrence seemed to trust the familiars he'd set on Neal implicitly, and after an uneasy sleep and an early, disappointing breakfast, and the realization that no, Fort Tilden really didn't have an operating shower, Neal went to find Mozzie.
Which he did, eventually, in a room set up like a chemistry lab, where most of the broken glass had been swept into a corner and not actually thrown away.
Then, Neal didn't assume there was much by the way of garbage collection in this place, any more.
"Oh, come in," Mozzie said, motioning Neal over the threshold.
Neal stepped inside, and waited.
"You'll need all of these," Mozzie said, dropping a handful of small metal discs into Neal's hand. "Seals for all of the Great Kings and Marquises."
Neal looked down at them. They were all gold and silver, each one stamped with a different pattern. "You're not going to–?"
"Banish?" Mozzie asked. "This is my workshop. It's adequately protected. I refreshed all of the wards before you arrived. I was just about to go find you, actually."
"Right," Neal said. In addition to the abundance of seals cupped in the palm of his hand, he had the one Peter had given him, tucked away in his vest. He was going to have a fun time stashing all of these so they didn't jingle when he walked. "Should I be worried about adverse magical reactions between these things?"
"Please," Mozzie said. "They're tools, not pharmaceuticals. Are you worried about 'adverse aesthetic reactions' between your oil paints?"
"Sometimes, yes," Neal said, but took the point. He started tucking the seals into their own hidden pockets, safely away from Peter's seal of Agares, just in case.
"The moon is eight days into its cycle, and the celestial calendar marks this as the Great Occasion of Adaeoet," Mozzie said. "This can only happen from nine until noon. So. Lawrence is going to have his Paimon goons take you up to the embankment on the shore. Then, according to his plan, he's going to do his Lawrence thing, and make you call Pandomaine to you. Whatever you do, don't eat, drink, or smoke anything Lawrence gives you. And here."
He fished a small bag out of his pocket, and pressed it into Neal's hands. Neal looked it over. It seemed to be full of slices of some unidentified root.
"Keep some of that under your tongue," Mozzie said.
"For–"
"So that no one may compel your speech," Mozzie explained, with a flourish.
Neal pulled one of the slices out and stuck it under his tongue.
"Hopefully," Mozzie added.
The root wasn't terrible. Bitter, but faintly aromatic, like vanilla. A touch of bite to it. Neal aimed as much of that bite as he could toward Mozzie in his glare. "Hopefully?"
"Well, ideally, you won't have to find out," Mozzie said. The next object he produced was a small scroll – an honest-to-god scroll of parchment – which he also pushed into Neal's hands. "As soon as you get up to the embankment, you start reciting this. Lawrence won't put any restrictions on your speech, because that would interfere with his ability to compel your speech. He's counting on you not knowing the invocations. You already have the contract, so Pandomaine will listen to you. You just need to issue the correction, call on the Kings and Marquises as witnesses, and we'll be set."
Yeah, okay. Neal had a hard time believing it would be that easy. "What happens if we get it wrong again?"
Mozzie looked affronted. "We won't. Look, I've been up all night refining and then quintuple-checking the refinements on that incantation."
That did nothing to reassure Neal.
Lawrence had a plan, Mozzie had a plan, and Peter had a plan he wasn't sharing. And Neal would have had a plan, except that most of his problem-solving abilities were predicated on existing in a world where people like Lawrence couldn't summon a demon to hold him upside-down by his ankles if he tried anything.
Would have been nice if someone had asked him his level of confidence. Then he could've pointed out that he had no confidence in any of this. Except, maybe, the growing confidence that if he didn't end up dead, he was going to end up a toad.
"I'm going to go memorize this," Neal said, waving the scroll.
"That's wise," Mozzie allowed.
Neal tucked the scroll away with the seals – and the rest of whatever root Mozzie was feeding him – and walked outside. Luckily, he didn't jingle.
The two demons fell into step beside him, one of them looking rather self-satisfied. It made him pause, for a moment. The other still wore its cat-toad look of annoyance, and Neal had honestly not considered that they might be individual beings with their own private opinions on all this.
Not that it seemed to matter.
He found Lawrence out in the courtyard, pacing and muttering to himself. He stopped when Neal came near, and pulled out a cigarette case.
"Final smoke?" Lawrence offered.
The cigarette he held out smelled faintly of licorice, like the bag that'd been forced over Neal's head. "No, thanks," Neal said. "Never was a smoker."
"Huh," Lawrence said, and the cigarette vanished into his pocket. "You can roll a pretty good one."
"Life's taken me interesting places," Neal said.
Lawrence made a quiet, half-amused noise. "For what it's worth, Caffrey, I'm not the bad guy, here. I wish there was a better way to do this," he said. "But seven or so billion people are going to sleep easier tonight."
"Funny how I won't be one of them," Neal said.
Lawrence shrugged. "Depends on who you're asking."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "You summon demons for a living and haven't figured out the afterlife situation?"
"Depends on who you're asking," Lawrence said again.
Neal suspected that Lawrence, too, was uninterested in teaching him the finer points of magic. He'd have to rely on Mozzie for that. "Have you seen Peter?"
"Burke?" Lawrence sounded surprised to hear Neal asking. "Off in that direction." He waved a hand at a cluster of buildings. "Fort's chapel, is my guess."
"Thanks," Neal said, and walked away.
"He's not big on goodbyes," Lawrence called after him.
Neal hadn't planned on saying any.
It rankled a little – actually, it rankled a lot – having to rely on someone else to have a plan in place for him, being unable to put something in play, himself. But as far as he could tell, he was the only person in the world who hadn't made friends with one or more infernal entities. That was a bit of a handicap.
Never mind that even if he could get out of this, there was no way he was getting home – not if Lawrence was the only person around who could work that particular bit of magic.
Neal eyed the demons flanking him, as he approached the chapel. He should have asked Mozzie to teach him that banishing ritual. He needed to ask Peter what Peter needed him to do, in order to pull off whatever plan Peter had been cooking up. If it involved waiting until he got to the emplacement, Neal was going to have a scheduling conflict.
He pushed open the chapel doors.
They didn't open directly into the sanctuary. Just a white hall studded with classrooms or offices or meeting rooms or something, with the sanctuary down to his right. It was a small sanctuary, too; maybe it would fit fifty people, but Neal wouldn't bet on more. Still, it managed to look clean and cozy, maybe even peaceful with the early-morning light slanting in through the windows.
Peter was knelt at the altar, back to the door, hands clasped, head down. Praying. It made Neal stop; he'd never seen Peter pray, in this world or his own. He wasn't sure if he should interrupt or just observe, try to learn.
Maybe for this Peter, losing his wife meant turning to faith. Neal had to wonder what faith looked like, in a world crammed with demons.
He stepped forward.
And thought immediately that maybe Lawrence had taken control of his limbs; he tried to put his foot down and missed the ground, but no, it was because the ground was rearing up; the floor under him cracked like a peal of thunder, and beside him, Lawrence's two demons cried out and were slain by lances of light.
And then there was bag over his head but this bag was woven from adrenaline and fear, a world's worth of impulse falling through his shoulders and down into his legs, which moved without his orders. He was running, out the door, out toward the gate of the fort, up the chain links and over, feet and palms hitting the ground in a runner's crouch and then off, fast as a falcon with lungs struggling to keep up, the shapes of the ruined borough vanishing behind him.
Neal didn't know how long he ran. His attention was bound up in gulps of breath and bounds over the broken terrain. He thought it might have been about ten minutes, but he also thought he saw the wreckage of the Cross Bay Bridge glowering off to his side, and that was ridiculous; meant he was running two-minute miles. But running shapes appeared beside him as he leapt a fence into some forlorn lot, and quick as a bullet, they were on him.
He hit the ground and all the speed and breath went out of him. Found himself gasping against the grass, then against the sky as one of the things rolled him onto his back; they were some kind of demon, that was clear enough: face of a heron, body of a sight hound, hands of human. He kinda didn't want to be held down by them.
He didn't have a choice.
Still, at least he could swallow air and feel his heart racing to catch up until Lawrence arrived.
Which he did, a few minutes later, looking pissed as hell and riding on the back of some abomination made out of a stork's body and legs and a snarling baboon's head. Neal had to wonder why all the minor demons looked like someone had attacked an encyclopedia with a pair of safety scissors; it was one of the safer things to wonder, in the situation.
Lawrence dismounted, and fumbled in his pocket for something. He was shaking, Neal noticed; maybe whatever demon king he'd had to call on was charging his weekend rates, or however the hell that worked.
"Not smart, Caffrey," Lawrence said, and pulled some wad of vegetation from his pocket and shoved it into his mouth.
"Not my idea," Neal said.
Lawrence swallowed, which only turned his expression nastier, and spat to one side. "I know. You don't have the know-how to kill Paimon's legionnaires. So who was it? Your little friend putting something of his own in play?"
"I'm pretty sure this wasn't Mozzie's idea, either," Neal said. Mozzie's plan involved him in Fort Tilden, on the same embankment Lawrence planned to sacrifice him on.
"Everyone else at the fort is smart enough to be on my side, except for–"
Neal reached the conclusion as soon as Lawrence did. Peter Burke, praying in the chapel, the light slanting down around him.
"That bastard," Lawrence said, with a kind of annoyed respect in his voice. "Of course. Agares."
Neal shook his head. "Agares," he said. "I thought he brought back runaways."
Lawrence snorted. "'He bringeth back runaways; and them that stand still, he maketh them to run.'" He turned to one side, and spat again. "Burke might rather see the whole world crumble than betray his precious law, but I'm not that sentimental. You're coming back, Caff–"
And then he stopped, snapping around, as though caught by a sound only he could hear.
A red imp shot through the lot's scattered trees. It landed at Lawrence's feet and bowed, and Lawrence looked down on it. Held out an arm, which the imp hopped onto. It clambered up to his shoulder, then bent close to his ear. Neal could see its red jaw moving, and Lawrence turned to give Neal an incredulous look.
Then, after a moment, he laughed thinly. "That bastard," he said, again. His voice had a few more shades of respect, this time. "I didn't think he had it in him."
"Can the condemned man ask what the hell is going on here?" Neal asked.
"News from the Fort," Lawrence said, and gestured. The hounds on Neal's shoulders let go of him. "Burke went into shock. Empty syringe right next to him. He wouldn't happen to have taken your blood, would he, Neal? Wouldn't happen to have an incompatible bloodtype?"
That knocked any response right out of Neal's mouth. He gaped for a moment before scrambling to his feet and seizing on, "He injected–?"
"Frater Elah's invocation," Lawrence said. "It's an easy and stupid way of taking on a person's magical essence to execute contracts in their stead. It means we don't need you any more." He shrugged, expansively. "For the sacrifice, Burke will do."
Neal scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain in his muscles, scrambling for words just the same. Because somehow, he hadn't seen this coming. And maybe he hadn't known the exact magic, but he should have realized that Peter, even with a Caffrey-caused Brooklyn-sized hole in his heart, would rather take the law on his shoulders himself than see someone go down for a crime they didn't commit.
"You can't sacrifice him," Neal said. "He's–"
Innocent was not something that Lawrence seemed to care about. Peter had tested that theory as soon as they'd brought Neal in the gate.
"There's another way," Neal blurted. "Mozzie had it planned out; I can correct the contract – Peter could correct the contract, if you'd let him–"
"Of course he did." Lawrence's eyes narrowed. "Powers vast and overwhelming," he said – sounded like he was quoting from something. His mouth twisted. "No, Caffrey, not in my world."
A cold rage welled up in Neal's stomach, flooded across his shoulders, down to his fingertips. Of course. Of course, Lawrence had said There isn't a sorcerer left in New York who scares me, and why change that, with his contracts with Paimon and armies of demons at his command?–why take the chance that the law would get the big guns, when it was so much easier to drag Peter onto the emplacement and–
And before he could think it through, Neal lunged forward and swung a fist.
He hadn't expected it to connect. But Lawrence hadn't expected it, either, and Neal's fist hit his face with a crunch of cartilage and a rush of air, and Lawrence staggered back as the demons squawked and lunged forward.
Neal hadn't expected that, either.
Probably should have.
Then he was on the ground, claws in his stomach and beaks in his side and teeth at his neck and he'd only just managed to knock one of the bodies away when another dug into him and Lawrence snarled "Stop!" above him in time for the jaws closing around his throat to only draw blood and not end him. A gesture from Lawrence and the demons all stumbled back, leaving Neal gasping on the ground as blood seeped from a flurry of gouges.
Lawrence was wiping a trail of blood from his face, breathing tightly through his mouth. He glared down and, in a violence as sudden as Neal's had been, lashed out with one foot.
The kick caught Neal right at the base of his ribcage, and he felt something crack. Then Lawrence was in front of him, crouching, right in his face.
"You bastard, Caffrey," Lawrence spat. "I told you, I am not the fucking bad guy here. No one – not you, not me, not Burke or the goddamned Pope or your little friend should have access to that much power. Someone has to die to put Pandomaine back, and you should be thanking Burke that it isn't you."
"It could be you," Neal said. "If all you need is blood, you could take this on, yourself. If you're really going to play the hero–"
"Fuck heroism," Lawrence said. "I'm a pragmatist. Part of my pragmatism involves not getting killed."
"You'd rather sacrifice someone who hasn't done anything wrong."
"Like me?" Lawrence asked. "It was your goddamn wrongdoing, Caffrey, and I'm doing this, I'm cleaning up your mess." He sniffed. "I still don't believe you're innocent in any world. And Burke made his own damn bed."
Neal could have hit him again, if his whole body wasn't shooting pain past the rage and shock, if the demons Lawrence had with him wouldn't rend him limb from limb.
"I'm not the bad guy," Lawrence said again, and wiped more blood off his face, and stood. "I'll send you home."
He fumbled inside his coat for something, and Neal closed his eyes and tried not to vomit, tried to think of anything more to say.
He could imagine Peter, gray from shock and kneeling on the emplacement, mouth moved by magic to call Pandomaine toward him, and Pandomaine's long body cutting through the Atlantic waves as the sun in the east streamed down on them.
And then the world went black and blood and brimstone around Neal, the molecules-ripping-each-from-each sensation of world transit tore through him, and his side and his wounds lit up with a pain that tipped him straight out of knowing or feeling anything.
He came to in the middle of a ring of onlookers, with someone in blue crouched over him, latex-gloved fingers curled against the pulse in his wrist. There was the smell of bile in his nostrils and the taste of it in his mouth.
"Sir," said one of the paramedics. "Can you tell me your name?"
His head was swimming, but his limbs responded to his commands, and he could find his voice. Lawrence hadn't left him with any bindings, just a host of injuries and a persistent empty feeling under his lungs.
He closed his eyes again.
"Neal Caffrey," he said. "I'm a confidential informant for the FBI. They need to be notified." Because the alternative was that someone would see him and recognize him from a wanted poster or a BOLO and then the NYPD would storm in, and then the Marshals, and it would be a spectacle and he didn't want to deal with those dramatics right now. He just wanted Diana or Jones or whoever he'd been handed off to showing up at his hospital bed and asking questions he couldn't answer, and then he wanted a phone and a long-distance call to DC so he could hear Peter's voice and not be able to explain why it was so important.
That, at least, was somewhat automatic. And Lawrence's voice echoed for him: I'm a pragmatist.
The paramedic was asking him questions. Neal decided to play dead and see if that would stop her. It seemed to.
They put him onto a stretcher and moved him into the back of an ambulance, and Neal kept his eyes closed and just floated on the relative certainty that no one was trying to kill him, and no one had a demon they planned to summon on him. All he had were cuts and bruises, some gold and silver and one copper coin, and here he was in a world where none of what had happened had happened.
They took him into the ER, where there were tests and poking and prodding. Someone took his blood, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Not much you can do with someone else' blood.
Should have realized that not much was code for just enough.
He started hearing people milling outside his room while they were giving him stitches and painkillers, and when the nurse finally left and let people in there was Peter, and Neal felt a full-body startle as his mind leapt to all the ways that could be a bad sign. Like, maybe Lawrence had sent him back to the wrong world.
...or maybe he'd just vanished, and Peter, being Peter, had refused to leave until he was found.
"I thought you'd be in DC by now," Neal said.
Peter grimaced and said "DC isn't happening," and it seemed like that was all he was going to say on the subject. "What the hell happened? Where have you been for the last three days? Are you–?"
He stopped himself.
"Well, obviously if you're in the hospital, you're not okay," he said. "But are you–"
"I'm fine," Neal said. He just needed to reassert this place's reality, and "fine" would be somewhere in that vicinity.
Peter, the Peter who would have a conversation with him and had no contract with Agares and was standing there, not sacrificed, not dead, gave him a critical look. "You look like you've been mauled by a wildcat."
"Hah," Neal let out, and couldn't think of a way to banter back. Not a wildcat; some stork-monkey thing would just make him sound crazy. And you look like your wife is still alive was something he was never, ever going to say.
It occurred to him that trying to plausibly cover up his abduction to a world powered by demons and magical herbs was going to strain his resolution never to lie to Peter.
Peter nodded, as though he'd come to some sort of a conclusion. He walked over to the side chair and settled down into it, watching Neal closely.
"They found your anklet disassembled in the bed of a pickup truck," Peter said. "ERT guys had fun with that one. Movement patterns on the tracking data suggested a quick-and-dirty throw-it-out-the-car dump, but the way it was taken apart, you'd need time and specialized tools for."
Well, it was either magic or a demon's clever little fingers, Neal didn't say. "I'd offer some insight, but there was a bag over my head at the time."
"Did you see who grabbed you?" Peter asked.
Yeah, he had, and he didn't know whether or not to sell him out. Take a gamble on Lawrence's own assumptions about the universality of guilt? He didn't have to feign the wince, but he didn't hide it, which was as good as playing it up. "Peter, can we not–"
"Right," Peter said, and grimaced. "Look, I don't mean to push, but–"
"I know." The FBI had to catch their criminals, and Neal had to find some way to explain this. "I just–"
"It can wait." Peter set down the words like he was laying them into law. Neal let out a breath of relief.
Beside him, he could practically hear Peter holding in all the questions. The Do you know where you were? and What did they want from you? which should have been trivially easy.
"Hey," Peter said, and his hand curled over Neal's shoulder. Neal turned to look at it with a kind of surprise. "We were looking for you. Wouldn't have stopped until we found you."
You wouldn't have found me, Neal thought, and blinked, and swallowed, and then his hand was curled over Peter's, and it was Peter's turn to look a little surprised.
Peter's hand was warm. Warm with pulsing blood, no doubt; two different bloods between them, and ideally, never the twain should mix.
"I know," Neal said.
Their first case back, after Neal had made enough of the right noises to satisfy the FBI psychologists, they were driving back through Woodside in Queens when Neal turned in his seat and said, "Can we go to Gantry Park?"
Peter slid him a sidelong look, always out to see what Neal was trying to pull this time. "Why? Got your eye on a statue there, or something?"
He was joking, but it was the kind of joking that was probably meant to prod at Neal's psyche. He was doing that, these days. It would have annoyed Neal more if he didn't know exactly where it came from.
"I just miss the view," he said.
With the great gaps in what he could say, he'd had a choice between coming off crazy or traumatized. He'd aimed for the second option, feeding out bits of information as he worked out how to sanitize them. And then there was the info he couldn't possibly sanitize, and he had a feeling he'd sit on that until his grave.
He hadn't even told Mozzie, who would probably believe him. But telling Mozzie the story would involve telling Mozzie about the other Mozzie, and Neal hadn't worked out how he'd felt about him, much less how he could represent him to... himself. Or a version of himself.
And he hadn't come back to Gantry Park. It was outside his radius.
The night before, Mozzie had come by and said he'd almost got it; a few more days, and he'd be able to crack the anklet and they could vanish anywhere. Then, with a look too knowing and a tone loathe to suggest the possibility: "That is, if you still want to go."
It disturbed Neal a little to realize that he didn't know.
Beside him, in the driver's seat, Peter shrugged and flipped his turn signal. "Why not?" he said. "No rush to get back. Hey, we can even stop at that little deli, what's its name...?"
Neal gave him a sidelong smile, and looked back out the window at Queens, which was mercifully still there.
He had a scrap of paper in his pocket, on which he'd copied an entry out longhand. It wasn't too difficult, really, to find a copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon; even in a world steadfastly without magic, interest in the occult was still going strong. You could look the thing up online.
[The Second Spirit is a Duke called Agreas, or Agares,] the paper read. [… He maketh them to run that stand still, and bringeth back runaways. … He hath power also to destroy Dignities both Spiritual and Temporal, and causeth Earthquakes.]
The Lesser Key hadn't mentioned anything about Pandomaine.
In the end he'd told them he was grabbed, and driven a few hours out; that he thought he'd recognized Fort Tilden (and left them with an unspoken implication, but of course, that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?), he'd sketched out the room where he was held – hell, he'd given them a sketch of Lawrence.
(Peter had run that sketch of Lawrence. It'd only come back with one credible match: a petty ex-enforcer-turned-fence named William Abramczyk, preferred alias Lawrence Wing, dead for three years in this world, at least.)
Peter was still talking, but Neal's attention only drifted back when Peter said "–do you even eat pizza? I've never actually seen you."
"I think they kick you out of New York if you don't," Neal said.
"Up for a slice?"
I just want to make sure Manhattan isn't broken, Neal didn't say. "Hey, if you want one, don't let me stop you."
Peter seemed to know that he was hiding something. Peter got that look when he looked at him, sometimes. But he also seemed to sense that he should tread carefully, and Neal had been letting enough troubled looks escape onto his face that Peter seemed to think he should leave it to the counselors and to awkward reminders of his availability, should Neal ever need to talk.
Which suited Neal. He didn't know how he would explain that in another world somewhere, he was dead, and Peter was dead, and Elizabeth was dead, and Mozzie was trying to find his way onto the next con with that ghost of regret around his eyes.
Mozzie had had a vial of that other Neal's blood. He'd said, And this is a little ghoulish, but so long as I had your blood, there would have been... other options. And yet instead of pulling a Frater Elah invocation on himself and taking control of Pandomaine that way, he'd cut a deal with a sorcerer like Lawrence to find a Neal from another world.
Even the fact that he was out of that world, back home where he was supposed to be, didn't quite put those ghosts away.
Peter wasn't going to abuse his FBI placard to get them good parking at Gantry Park, which meant that they pulled into a garage a block or so away and walked the rest of the way. Which was fine. Neal's worst injury had just been a crack in one of his floating ribs, well on its way to healing; he wasn't cleared to chase down suspects or get himself into firefights, but he didn't want to do either of those things anyway, and he could authenticate art pieces and interview persons of interest to his heart's content.
The city was there, standing tall as ever.
Neal knew that – he'd been in Manhattan since he got back, since he was released from the hospital and driven home, and aside from some unseasonably hard rain around Syracuse, the news hadn't found anything unduly concerning in the state of New York. No, say, gargantuan demon kings terrorizing the coastline.
Still. Knowing and seeing felt different. The one was as important as the other.
After a moment, Neal felt the peculiar niggle at his attention that meant while he was watching the city, Peter had turned to watch him. Neal dipped his head, suppressed an uneasy laugh.
I'm fine. Really. All these uncertainties were a world away.
"Here," he said, and pulled a small, copper disc out of his pocket. He tossed the seal toward Peter, who caught it. It had no power here, so far as Neal could tell; and even if it did, even if Peter thought to go looking up the sigil and the name inscribed around the edges – which he would, being Peter – he wouldn't make the leap to try to summon a demon to do his bidding.
Honestly. Who would?
Peter opened his hand, frowning down at the thing.
"It's something I had on me when I... got back," Neal said. "I didn't think to hand it over."
Peter's frown deepened a degree. "Neal. Is this evidence?"
Neal didn't have to lie to say "No." There wasn't a crime the FBI could prosecute, in all of this. They couldn't just hop on into another world and pick up Lawrence and bring him back for trial.
And besides. Neal had checked. The only fingerprints on the seal were his and Peter's own.
"It's just something I picked up somewhere. It isn't something the guy who grabbed me had."
Peter held it up, gripping it carefully on the edges. "Foreign currency?" he asked.
"No currency I've ever seen."
And there was that look. If it was even remotely possible for Peter to dig to the bottom of this one, Neal would have loved to see the moment when he worked it all out. (Demons, Neal? Really?) But Peter dropped it into his pocket, and said "Thanks," and said It's a clue, I'll look into it, without saying anything.
Then he turned back to the city across the river.
"You don't get tired of that view," he said.
"No, you don't," Neal agreed. The Empire State Building solid like a pillar of the world, the crown of the Chrysler proud against the sky. Up north, the Queensboro Bridge marched across the river like it didn't believe in disasters. One pretty city, just the same as he'd left it.
One more view to stand against memory.
"Come on," Neal said, and inclined his head back toward the car. "Let's go home."
Peter obliged him.
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Date: 2014-03-27 11:44 pm (UTC)I was particularly curious about the alter version of Peter. Even though at first he seemed completely different, while I was reading, I could see our Peter shining through :) And what he did to save Neal ♥
And I have so much love for the Epilogue, with Peter taking Neal to see Manhattan, and offering him pizza... and taking him home. And giving me a feeling that all is right in the world again. I love it :D My boys *smishes them*
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Date: 2014-03-28 03:06 am (UTC)And poor alt!Peter. Poor alt!everyone, really; it does kinda seem like a universe where the major differences are "everything went wrong". I'm glad the differences and similarities came across. And glad the epilogue worked. ^^
Thanks!
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Date: 2014-03-30 11:41 pm (UTC)(Headcanonically, I choose to subscribe to Chandlia's theory over on AO3, because as much as Peter does seem like the type to die in a heroic sacrifice on the battlements, I can't help finding the idea of Peter and Mozzie rebuilding the world, and incidentally each other, a very appealing one.)
This was just lovely, though! The worldbuilding is amazingly creative and compelling -- I love how the details are seeded in casually, and how vivid a character Lawrence is, for no more than we see him. All the clues leading up to Peter's sacrifice were build plausibly (I could see it coming from farther out than Neal could, because he's Peter, and not only that, but a Peter who's lost Elizabeth, which means he really has no reason not to) .... which didn't stop it from being a heartpunch when it actually happened. Also, this is a fantastically creative version of the U-boat fiasco, as well as a glimpse of a world in which Neal and Mozzie's inability to think about the long-term consequences is taken to its disastrous conclusion ...
And I really like how you can see the emotional vestiges of Neal's experiences in his behavior after he comes back; it's not quite an "It's a Wonderful Life" type experience for him, but in some ways some of the effects may have been similar.
I'm so delighted you wrote my prompt! YAY FIC. \o/
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Date: 2014-03-31 12:05 am (UTC)Also, I'm far too amused by the idea that, after the failed Adler scam and the U-boat treasure snarl, Neal just has this vague Pavlovian fear response any time Mozzie mentions an ultimate score.
GLAD YOU ENJOYED.
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Date: 2014-04-01 05:32 am (UTC)Lawrence really comes alive, and it's impressive how much nuance you manage to get across.
Like others, I'm jumping on the "Peter survived" bandwagon. Because while I get Lawrence's point that no one should have that kind of power, if I'd trust anyone in the White Collar verse with it, it would be Peter. And there's so much potential in the idea of Peter and Mozzie putting the world back together, each of them having lost the person they love most.
But seriously, oh Peter, his innate sense of justice, so unchanged. And Mozzie, clutching at ghosts. Even Lawrence, who doesn't need to be a hero, but also doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy.
It's a compelling situation to put Neal truly out of his depth, but it's also difficult to achieve, given Neal's intelligence, his talent for manipulation, and, above all, his adaptability. But throwing him into an alternative world run by demonology and magic, where no one's plans involve any input from him, yeah, that would do it.
once, he'd have been excited about ultimate score. These days, it just started him wondering what was about to go wrong.
Trust that feeling, Neal!
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Date: 2014-04-01 10:13 am (UTC)Hah! I feel like that resolution has been carried by majority, at this point.
Lawrence was a surprisingly fun character to write – especially as, about halfway through the writing process, I lost all ability to tell whether or not he was a villain. I feel like that would be another interesting aspect to the Chronicles of Peter Burke, Accidental Ruler of the World, because Lawrence is one of the most powerful sorcerers around, and clearly capable of a lot of good, even if he doesn't have entirely altruistic reasons. And even if he and Peter can't stand each other.
Other things that happened halfway through the writing process: I looked at the story and went "Wow, Neal, you're really failing at the 'try' part of the try-fail structure," and Neal – or the reaction simulation running in my brain – more or less looked at me and went "What do you want from me? Everyone has a magical demon friend!" Which I wasn't sure would make for a satisfying story, to be honest. ^^ I'm glad it came across as compelling and not frustrating!
Thanks!
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Date: 2014-04-01 10:59 pm (UTC)It's funny, because while making my comments, I was thinking about how this might be a story without villains. Lawrence kidnapped Neal and wanted to kill him, and his concept of the "universality of guilt," as the story put it, is pretty terrible, but he is trying to save the world. And he does send Neal back when sacrificing him no longer becomes necessary. So, yeah, I don't know about Lawrence. And of course there's Pandomaine, but, with the way he's used in the story, it almost feels like calling the iceberg the villain of Titanic. So, we've established that I have no clue.
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Date: 2014-04-02 12:03 am (UTC)[Agrimony: One of the few magic herbs believed to reverse a jinx, curse, or hex after it has been put on you.
Bay Leaf: For protection and to avoid being jinxed, especially if you are doing a job on someone else.
Black Snake Root: Provides magical protection and strengthens those who are weak, timid, afraid, or shy.]
The first thing he says is, "Get out of my way or I will curse you."
...and at the same time, he's hanging out in Fort Tilden instead of going "Fuck this shit!" and moving off to become a crime lord in Chicago, or something. And when Pandomaine attacks, he doesn't just run off somewhere safe on his baboonstork steed, he goes to great personal trouble to call on Paimon and his legions to turn Pandomaine back, even when he knows that Pandomaine isn't going to kill Neal and he can find Neal and bring him back if he decides to use the opportunity to run.
And, in a weird way, I feel like the fact that he lets Peter pull his switch is significant. Because if he wanted to stick it to Peter, he could have dragged Neal back in. But instead, he basically shrugs and says "Fine, we'll do it your way." Which is the weirdest favor to do someone ever, considering the favor is sacrificing the person he's doing the favor for, but argh. It's all confusing. He's an antagonist, definitely, but he skirts a weird line around villainy.
And oh, Pandomaine. It is not his/its fault that the people who summoned it failed to read the fine print. Granted, the fine print wasn't available for them to read, but that's still not Pandomaine's fault.
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Date: 2014-04-02 02:42 am (UTC)And I was sort of getting at this before, but I didn't know quite what my point was. (That happens to me a lot.) Lawrence isn't spiteful. He doesn't, as you said, stick it to Peter. If he wanted to stick it to Neal, he could have let his demons kill Neal or refused to send Neal home, but he doesn't do either of those things. Though maybe that's just giving him the "not as big a jerk as you could have been" award.
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Date: 2014-04-02 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-03 12:06 am (UTC)Poor Neal. Stuck in a portal fantasy dilemma.