31

Monday, November 19, 1990

Finnigan was on the ground. We'd, we'd… we'd been talking.

And now he was dead.

There was a hole in the door—

We'd been griping about DA Young. About that asshole—!

—the matching hole was in Finnigan's head.

And another matching hole in the window—

The window. Through the window?

He'd been a good man. He'd wanted to do the right things—

It came through the window.

It was still in Finnigan's head.

An arrowhead. Dripping blood.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

I pulled the door open. Had to get inside—

My heel caught on something. Almost fell.

It was Finnigan's arm—

No, no, no no nonono—

–had to get back into the courtroom, shut the door behind me! Pull it shut, hold it closed, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the FUCK—

"Noa, are you okay?" "What happened? What was that sound?" "Ma'am, is that blood? Where is ADA Finnigan?"

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know—

PAIN.

A hard and sharp tug on my tail. I spun to yell—

"Back with us?" Matt asked, blind eyes staring blankly in a decent approximation of where my face was. I felt something on my shoulder – his hand. On my shoulder, reaching around for my back. Guiding me away from the door. "Come on, up you go. Easy, easy—"

The door. The door.

"T-the door!" I interrupted. "B-bar the door, close it, lock it, quick!"

The bailiff didn't ask questions.

His keys came out and he locked the doors at the bottom, then turned to look at us.

"Whoever's got a belt that isn't the only thing keeping your pants up, give it here," he said. At the same time, his other hand went to his waistband and undid his belt, which he wrapped around the handles of the inward-swinging door, then fastened as tight as it would go.

Jonathan's and Matt's belts joined his a few moments later, and that's about when I noticed I'd been sat down back at counsel's table, with my briefcase. Wait—my briefcase!

I reached in, grabbed for my mezuzah-focus. It flew into my hand, and I clutched it tight. The wood and stone glowed faintly, like it had since July. Maybe a little brighter, now.

"Right." The bailiff walked over towards me, went down on one knee, and looked me in the eyes. "What happened? Ma'am," he added at the end.

"The ADA, F-Finnigan, h-he—" I stopped, took a deep breath. Held it for three seconds. Released. Okay. You could do this, Noa. "Heard glass breaking. T-there was a stick, p-poking out of his t-t-temple." I pointed up at my own — oh God, my hands were shaking. Was my entire body shaking? It felt like it. "H-he fell, s-saw the o-other side. A-arrow."

"How the fuck—" The bailiff cut himself off and stood up, pacing a moment. He went over to the wall and picked up a phone, dialed in a number. Brought it to his ear.

"Those windows aren't big," Matt said quietly. "Angle's gotta be shit." Then, more loudly, "how tall are the buildings across the street?"

"Twelve, thirteen stories," the bailiff answered automatically. He slammed the phone down on the receiver. "Nothing. Not even a dial tone. Fuck! Of all the days for goddamn maintenance!"

"What about the fire alarm?" Matt asked. His voice remained calm and steady, and I focused on that. If even the blind man could keep his wits about him, I had to try, too. I had to try.

"T-there," I pointed. The fire alarm was by the back door, the one the judge came in. St. John leapt up from where his mother had grabbed him close and pushed the fire alarm panel in, then pulled down. I winced, readying myself to be utterly deafened when the alarm went off, and caught Matt doing the same out of the corner of my eye.

But there was no sound. The fire alarm had been pulled, but nothing happened.

I looked at the ceiling, eyeing where I knew the sprinklers would be, but no. Nothing there either.

"Follow me." The bailiff stood, one hand pulling a massive keyring out of his pocket as he headed towards the back door. "Need to try another fire alarm. Maybe that one's just not working."

The five of us stood at his urging, and moved to follow. He handed the door off to Jonathan, who held it for the rest of us as the bailiff proceeded down a hallway lit only by cheap, lowest-bidder fluorescent lights. Normally, I would have been decrying the absence of natural light.

Right now, the lack of windows was a godsend.

There was another fire alarm panel in the hallway. The bailiff, who I only just noticed had a nametag on his uniform, pushed in and pulled down just as St. John had before. Once again, I expected to hear something, and had my hands up protectively to try and cover as much of my horns as possible to try and muffle the noise.

But once again, nothing happened.

"Shit." The bailiff, Michael, looked back at the five of us. "We could try a third, but I'm pretty sure that means they're all fucked."

"No phones, no fire alarms, can't go near the windows," Matt summarized, rapping his cane against the wall as he made each point. "Okay. No way to get a message out. Bailiff, where's the nearest stairwell?"

Something about what he'd said pulled at my memory.

"Harder question than I'd like," he answered. "This part o' the building's a new addition. Corners got cut, stairwells only go down to the top of the old half. Gotta cross from there to the other side of the building."

"Fucking government accounting," one of the men muttered. I'd stopped paying attention to them as I pulled on that thread of memory, trying to figure out where it lay –

Wait.

With a deep breath and a thought, my focus came flying out of my clasped hands, and hovered to a stop between my hands.

"Noa?" Matt asked. "What're you—"

"Quiet," I shushed him. "Please. Need… need to concentrate."

I took as deep a breath as I could, but even that was shaky and raw. Both hands came up to try and aid my casting as the tip of my focus lit up, and I gestured. It was a simple spell, Stephen had called it. A beacon, tied to him, that would tell him where I was, how I was feeling, and give him a path to me. All I had to do was…

I dragged my hand in a circle, the mezuzah focus mirroring my movements. A ring of light floated in midair, and then I added the next step: the magen david, inscribed within it. Once that was done…

… nothing.

I blinked. That… that wasn't how that was supposed to go. When Stephen demonstrated, it flashed, and vanished.

But mine still just hung in midair, sitting there, doing… something. It wasn't doing nothing, because I could feel it doing something, there was this, this sixth or seventh sense such that I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what!

"Noa?" Matt asked, hand coming up to gently rest on the outside of my upper arm.

"It's not working." I tried, I tried to keep how distraught I'd begun to feel from leaking into my voice. "I, I don't know why, but it… it's not working?"

Matt's hand flashed out and grabbed my focus, drawing a surprised squeak from me and disrupting the spell. His other hand took one of my own, and he deposited the focus into it, closing my fingers around the metal and wood.

"It's okay," he said, his tone and cadence perfectly even. "We'll figure this out. Save your strength for later." He turned his head away from me, in roughly Bailiff Mike's direction. "The stairs down to the old building, where are they?"

"End of this hall," he said. "We don't need to face any more windows yet, but… ah, shit."

"What?" Linda asked, her hands clenched tight around one each of Jonathan's and St. John's.

"Only paths to the other stairwells are full of windows." Bailiff Mike grimaced. "Don't have the keys to the other hallways on me, and those doors open out, so we can't kick them down. Which means we gotta go past half a dozen windows, no matter where we go."

"Where are they facing?" Matt asked.

All of us stopped to look at him. He had a hand on his chin, the other tapping his cane against the wall.

"... what?" I asked.

"We were on the north-facing side of the building," Matt explained, his voice steady. "Given what Noa could tell us, and what floor we're on, this means the shooter was at least thirteen, fourteen stories up, and across the street. We're at a corner, with a park on the east side, which means I doubt they're still in that starting position. They can't pull off a follow-up from there."

"So they'll be going across the street to our west," the bailiff followed up. "Okay, we'll go to the west hallway then. He can't—"

"No." Matt punctuated his statement by using his free hand to swing his cane against the hallway's ceiling. "It's too obvious. And consider, we have to move from north to south on the part of the building with the most visibility from the outside. To get an angle, the shooter will be either southwest or southeast. Across the street again and one building over."

"So it's a coin toss." Jonathan tapped at the wall, and all I wanted was for him to STOP. His tapping didn't have a definite rhythm, unevenly clipped nails meant the sounds weren't uniform, and the enclosed hallway's acoustics meant it just bounced everywhere. "We pick the wrong one, he shoots."

"Please stop tapping the wall," I murmured.

He didn't stop.

"And how long is the hallway?" Jonathan continued, tapping faster, and faster, and faster. "Thirty yards? Forty? How long do we even have to get all of us down the hall and into the stairwell?"

"Dad—"

"And once we're there, what then? We get to the lobby, and then what? Just find someone, run out to the street and into another random building? Oh, maybe we'll just hail ourselves a cab, that'll be—"

"Stop it!" I shrieked. "Stop it, stop it, stop, tapping!"

The tapping stopped. I could hear myself think again, could listen to my own breathing, could… could…

… that wasn't right.

I tapped my fingers on Matt's, and he let my hands go. I tapped near his ear, and he nodded.

"What?" Linda asked, seeming to pick up on my disquiet. "What is it?"

"Somebody—"

I swallowed, wetting my lips as I tried to get some moisture back into a mouth that had gone dry.

"Somebody should have heard that," Matt finished for me. He took two steps, then banged a fist on the wall. Three seconds later, he slammed his heel into the floor.

His head turned in roughly my direction, and he shook his head.

"Bailiff, how many people are normally working on this floor?" Matt asked. "Rough average."

"At least thirty."

Phones down. Fire alarms not working. Nobody on the floor.

Shit.

"Worry later," Bailiff Mike continued. "C'mon. Gotta keep moving."

So we did.

For better or worse, we followed the bailiff. We followed him down four flights of stairs, Matt and Mike in front, Linda and me trailing as we negotiated going downstairs in high heels. The bottom level of the stairwell had two doors, one with a push-bar, one with a handle.

"Not that one," Mike said, pointing at the push-bar. "That goes out to the old half's roof. This way."

He opened the other door, leading us into a hallway that was just about identical to the other one. The only difference was the spots of sunlight at either end, ever so slight slivers of daylight slipping in from under the doors that led out onto the open-air walkways connecting the north and south halves of the building.

"Okay," the bailiff said. "We have to pick a side."

"West," Matt said. "Exit's on the east."

"What if you're wrong?" St. John asked.

I saw Jonathan about to start tapping the wall, but he looked at me, flinched, and stopped.

"Come on." Bailiff Mike walked west, and for lack of any better idea, the rest of us followed him.

The door leading to the walkway opened outwards, and gave a couple feet of seeming safety to peek through. The bailiff reached down to his belt, pulled his nightstick off, and tossed it down the hallway at approximately head height.

The sound of it clattering to the floor seemed far louder than it actually was.

"Okay," he said. "Get ready. We'll make a break for it in—"

"No."

Matt tugged the bailiff away from the door and let it fall closed.

"What're you doing!?" Mike yelled, rounding on Matt. "We had a chance! He wasn't there!"

"The person who lands a headshot from across the street and through a small window isn't going to be fooled by a nightstick." Matt nudged the bailiff's shoulder with his cane, and gently shoved the man away from him slightly. "We cannot move until he's fired a shot and committed to a side."

"And how do you suggest we do that? It's not like we have a spare head to just get shot at!"

"Except we might."

Huh?

Before I could think to voice that concern, Matt had turned towards me, and had a gentle hand resting on my shoulder.

"Noa," he started, voice soft. "I don't know how your power works, but I have to ask. You can make an illusion. Could you make a fake St. John?"

"I… I—"

The request brought me up short, even as everybody turned to look at me. Could I do that? Was that even possible for me? I'd always used my glamour to layer an illusion directly over my skin, and no further. I'd never tried to do anything other than that, never even considered what Matt was asking of me.

But… but what choice did I have?

Either I succeeded… or someone died.

This wasn't like a court case. There was no way to catalog an error through which I could wedge an appeal. There was no chance to salvage a bad cross with a redirect. There was no jury instruction to omit consideration of a bad fact.

This was final. One time.

And… and for the sake of everybody here, I had to try.

I took a deep breath, then reached into my briefcase to retrieve a tiny flashlight, and the small prism I used to make things easier on myself. If I was going to try something new, I wasn't going to just wing it with plain old white, fluorescent light. I was going to scatter it through the prism, and give myself something better to work with.

"St. John?" I asked, walking back down the hall towards him. "Can you hold these?"

"What do you need?" he asked. I handed him the flashlight and prism.

"Shine it that way," I said, pointing at the west door. He caught onto what I was asking and twisted the bottom of the flashlight, then aimed the beam through the prism.

And then… I focused. Not on that kernel of magic, deep in the center of my chest and ever so slightly sideways. Instead, I reached for its corona, the rainbow light flaring around it.

My fingers hooked onto the rainbow shining from the prism, and I let it slide through them as I walked forward. It felt harder and harder to hold onto the further I walked, and I had to really focus when I felt it almost slide through my fingers about twenty feet away from St. John.

Then, I wound it around my hand, like it was the cord from a computer mouse, until I had what felt to me like 'enough'. A quick brush off of my fingers, and I had a prismatic bundle in my hands. Three fingers grasped the leading edge, and I lifted it to St. John's head height.

Then, I tossed it, and the length fell out of my hand.

I had to keep looking between St. John and the glamour I was weaving, making sure every single detail matched. It was so much easier when it was myself, but that was also much smaller scale, just hiding a few details, replacing them with something simple and easy to grasp.

The more of the false St. John appeared, the worse the tension in the back of my head became. It was just a slight tightness, escalating to pain, and as he finally took shape, like somebody was trying to hammer an ice pick through my forehead. It was hard just to keep my eyes open and breathing steady, but I had to do this. I had to do this.

"T-try to… to take a step," I bit out through clenched teeth. St. John stepped forward.

In front of me, the fake one took a step as well.

"It's facing the wrong way," I heard someone murmur.

"I c-can turn it," I mumbled. "Gotta focus…"

"Right." Matt took charge again, thank God. "I'll hold the door open. Bailiff, get ready to stop St. John before he hits the wall. Noa, walk towards me as far as you think you can hold it for."

I stepped backwards towards Matt, stumbling in my heels until I felt my tail touch Matt. He nudged me forward until I was out of the doorway, then beckoned. St. John walked forward, the glamour clone mimicking his movements until it was in front of the door, but facing the wrong way.

I reached out and carefully, ever so carefully, turned the fake so it was facing out the door.

"Is it in position?" Matt asked.

"Y-yeah."

"Good," he said. "St. John, I will open the door. Move so the clone is barely peeking out, fake looking to your right, then sprint down the hall. The bailiff will stop you before you hit anything. Are you ready?"

St. John exhaled, inhaled, and shook himself out.

"Ready."

"Okay." Matt pulled down on the door handle. "Three, two, one—!"

St. John's doppelganger peeked around the corner so flawlessly that if I didn't know this was my glamour, I'd have thought it the real thing. He waited, one mississippi, two mississippi.

And then he ran—

Glass broke, and my glamour with it.

Matt's hand closed around my arm.

We flew down the hall, he tugged me in front of him—

And then I was through the door, stumbling.

Feet fell on stone tile, Matt's hand shoving at my back to give me a boost.

Mike held the door for us, tugged me through, hooked me around and into the stairwell.

The stone stairs were rough. These stockings were goners.

Matt wasn't behind me anymore.

When did he – when did I lose him

The others stopped at the bottom for Matt and me. But he wasn't here.

I pushed open the door to the stairwell. The lobby was empty. The street was right there.

The street was right there.

I ran for it, if I could just get to a payphone—

Something shattered above me. My tail flew out behind me as I tried to stop.

Glass fell to the ground, shattered into even more pieces. Something landed with it—

—no.

Not something. Someone.

Couldn't pick out the details. I saw a black bodysuit, a crossbow, a target on his forehead.

My focus hovered over my shoulder. Could I blind him—

Metal and wood crunched. And I felt it – the moment the morsel of magic I'd enshrined in my focus flew back to me. I spared a moment to look at the destroyed thing, at Stephen's gift.

The man laughed.

I looked in front of me. There was a gun pointed at me. Pointed between my eyes.

"So much for your toy." His thumb came up. Pulled back the hammer. "And I was having fun, too."

Oh, God.

There was nothing I could do. I had no trump card, no eleventh hour superpower, no anything. All I could do was stare down the barrel.

I'm sorry Mom, Dad. Cate. Sam. Erik, Pietro. Lorna.

Oh God, Lorna. I'd… I'd just adopted her. Given her a family. And now it was going to be taken away again.

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

I closed my eyes.

I heard a click.

And then the clattering of many pieces of metal bouncing off of the floor.

I…

I wasn't dead?

"No."

I knew that voice. I knew that voice.

I dared to crack an eye open. And then fell backwards as the vertigo hit me.

Eyes. Eyes, everywhere. Familiar gray eyes, usually warm, but now cold as chips of frozen steel. They were in every single stone tile, every shard of glass, every window, every reflection, everything I could see.

The eyes began to glow. Something flowed out of them and into midair, coalescing into an oh so familiar shape.

Dr. Stephen Strange hovered in midair, standing sentry between the assassin and me.

And from the way I could taste the magic coming off of him, he was furious.

The assassin's hand flashed down to his waist and back up, faster than I could even register what I'd seen until it was over.

But all that left his hands were butterflies. Monarch butterflies, brilliantly blue, flew away from the Sorcerer Supreme and his quarry.

Stephen flicked two fingers. All of the glass on the floor flew together into one suddenly-liquid mass, before it leapt up and bound the assassin's limbs tight.

"Hm." Arcane traceries flowed off of Stephen's fingers, ones that I could barely even look at, let alone glean any shred of understanding from them. A negligent wave of Stephen's hand pasted the now-unconscious assassin to the wall, his glass confinement melding with the wall.

Stephen turned towards me, and kneeled down. One of his arms went behind my shoulders, the other sweeping down my back to under my knees. He picked me up, then faced the door to the stairwell.

A snap of his fingers opened another portal.

"Come," he said.

Bailiff Mike walked out of the stairwell, and took position beside the assassin. St. John, Linda, and Jonathan ran through the portal.

Stephen carried us through.

It was the Sanctum Sanctorum's guest room. It was safety. I was safe.

I was alive.

Stephen set me down on the bed. He reached under the nightstand, pulled out a first aid kit. The peroxide stung.

I was alive.

Thank you, God.