I run my hand through my hair, pushing pieces of coloured glass tinkling to the ground. I snag a knot and cringe as my thumb gets momentarily trapped in a mess of damaged hair. For someone who obviously used to use as many product as Lucien did, I can’t believe that he’s got no idea how to mix a hair potion. Amidst all that half remembered magic futzing about in his head, you’d think that he’d at least know how to make soap not smell like animal fat. I’d kill for even half-remembered conditioner – especially since it looks like we’re going to be here for a while longer.

The villager’s celebration is still going strong, the third football chant in as many minutes starts up and most of the town joins in. Somehow, it manages to be basically identical to the ones that we use to sing along with back at school – though ‘sing’ is probably giving us too much credit.

There have been times during the past few weeks when something like this would have given me a nostalgic buzz in my chest, a little echo of home that softened the reality of being in Narnia. But right now, all I seem to smell is the raw manure wafting in from the pumpkin patch behind us.

I sigh and turn to Abbey, gesturing wordlessly at the tavern and getting a shrug in response. I guess we’re both a little out of it.

A few ‘scuse me’s, ‘coming through’s, and a ‘move it idiot’ from Abbey, gets us to the tavern door. Inside, it’s marginally quieter, as in nothing’s on fire. We must be giving off mad ‘new in town’ vibes because a spotty teenager behind the counter waves us over with a bored expression.

“You two looking for something?” He drawls, leaning back and looking as disaffected as he can manage. It would be a convincing performance if he wasn’t surreptitiously glancing at us to make sure that we saw how much he didn’t care.

“Ah yeah,” I say, unbalanced, suddenly confronted with a vision of myself a few years back. Stay strong, we overcame it. “I guess we’re looking for the owner?”

He shifts slightly and points a thumb at an older guy clutching an ale barrel like it was his first born. His actual first born looks back at us and hands me a wooden board, then goes back to brooding.

I see squiggly lines and brace myself for the task of reading this stupid language, but I’m pleasantly surprised – and mildly patronised – as I’m met with a bunch of stick figures with numbers attached. I trace the number under a grouping of four little guys, biting my tongue trying to parse the digits – numbers suck in any language.

I keep tracing until I hit the actually important part – the denomination. Instead of a little crown – that I’d been dreading – or a stick figure sword, there’s a frowny face with devil horns squatting at the end of the number. I glance up to the concierge and raise an eyebrow.

“This your work?” I ask and he doesn’t manage to fight back his blush in time. I smile and slide my best guess of silver barons over the counter. He takes half of them and I manage to not take it too personally when he smirks.

I nab the key and we trot off to our room – up the stairs, third on the left. I open the door, take two steps and honestly just get lucky that there’s a bed under me as I flop forward in exhaustion. The mattress crunches like autumn leaves, except its dried straw. The course fabric of the pillow scratches my face, and I get a deep whiff of barely washed sheep wool. The tide comes back in, washing my sandcastle away in a wave of homesickness.

Wood creaks and I turn to see Abbey climb onto her bed, wrinkling her nose at the eau du farmhouse, and flopping down onto her back.

“I think I got my hopes up a little,” I say and Abbey turns around to face me. “Thought that I’d be home tonight.”

“How long’s it been? A few weeks?” Abbey asks and I nod. “Fucking hell, I’d off myself if I had to sleep on this pillow for more than a day.” I snicker into the gross mattress and flop onto my back.

“I didn’t take you for the sensitive type.” She scoffs and shucks off her shoes.

“First pay check I ever got went to memory foam. That cultist guy’s getting his head caved in for taking it from me.” Her grin sharpens around her canines and I can’t tell how much of it is an act.

“Preach it queen,” I say and settle back. I’m grateful for the injection of levity, but unfortunately, my sulkiness is terminal. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now though. The whole goddess thing just sort of dropped into our lap, and we don’t really have any other leads.”

“Getting god to send us back was the best lead?” Abbey asks, somewhere between sarcasm and despondency – so mostly sarcasm. I let out a self-deprecating chuckle.

“You kind of get swept up in this place’s pace,” I say. Obviously I’m contagious, because we both settle down and let the silence glomp over us.

“What you said about the air conditioning,” Abbey begins. “Was that true?”

The dry heat coming off the portal comes easily to mind. The surface of the air warping like boiling water.

“Depends on who’s on shift,” I say. “And who knows how portals work anyway.” I can feel a pretty intense look coming from Abbey. “I mean, I was right in the end, wasn’t I? She had it in for us.” I turn to face her, a veneer of incredulity over a grim understanding. “You felt it too?”

“This is all so fucked up,” she mumbles. “Is it all like this?” She means everything, but she’s thinking of Her faces. Sometimes I forget that she’s been here, like, four days or something.

“A lot of it is,” I say, my hand tracing my side where an arrow hole is conspicuously absent. “But it can be fun,” I mime sword swings. “That demon was pretty cool.”

“Didn’t Lucien almost die?” She asks, dark humour playing around her eyes.

“We had it under control,” I say and giggle as she lets out a rougher laugh.

“Is all that your power – or whatever you were saying? Like my hand thing?” Abbey asks after we get our shit together. “You didn’t do karate or something?”

“A class or two of yoga,” I say. “Nah, I took drama at school.”

Abbey scoffs, “Well, I took boxing.” She stays silent for a moment before jerking up and whirling around. “Hey, that’d be something to do – let’s have a go.” She slides off the bed and pads over to the middle of the room, taking a fancy fighting pose. My arm clenches in response and I push the fucking thing down.

“What? You want to fight?” I ask incredulously.

“Yeah it’ll be fun,” she says with, as I’m starting to find out, her typical fierce grin.

“I don’t know if we told you, but I’m not really doing the fighting, it’s sort of automatic – it would be too dangerous.” Abbey scoffs again. She fetches some of our ragged clothes and begins wrapping them around her hands.

“C’mon, it’ll be a bit of fun. Emmet’ll be back soon to patch us up,” she says and the idea starts to win me over. It is way cool – even better if I’m not in danger of dying.

I stand across from her, and with nothing better to do, awkwardly copy her pose. “Er, just to let you know, I don’t think it knows boxing – I think it prefers flips and stuff.” The fact that my super brainwashed sleeper agent power has preferences at all is probably something that I should be more concerned about. Though, the fact that it goes for swords and flips is cool enough to make up for it, at least a little.

“It’ll be fine,” Abbey says and starts hopping around like she’s busting for a piss.

“Alright, bring it,” I say, partly because it sounds cool, but mostly because the fighting power doesn’t have an ‘on’ switch.

Abbey flutters her feet about, bobbing up and down. I don’t know if it has any tactical significance, but it is distracting enough that I don’t immediately notice her fist jabbing at me until it’s already hurtling forward.

I choke on spit and jerk my arms up to protect my face. I’m momentarily dismayed when both arms respond and fail to become endowed with supernatural competency. But the next second, my vision is filled with carpet and my foot has deftly parried Abbey’s strike. I wave my arms and manage to right myself, coming up to see Abbey’s bewildered look as she nurses her wrist.

“What the fuck?” She asks, but my legs are already doing their thing and I charge her. She brings her arms up in a proper boxing block, just as I land on my right foot, pivot hard and throw a haymaker into her guard.

The strike sends a shock running down my arm and we both grit our teeth. Abbey grits harder and pushes me off, then follows it by swinging her fist up from below. Somehow, my knee intercepts it and my arm darts out in a jab. Abbey manages a parry and swings back. My head shifts at the last second, then the world starts spinning in the way that I’ve come to recognize as my power deciding that it’s backflip time.

Abbey chases after me with a grin and I land, crouched next to the bed. She bears down and I shoot up swinging to meet her. The muscles in my shoulder strain oddly and Abbey’s eyes go suddenly wide. The sensation of gripping something in my hand filters through to my brain, and something metallic glints at the corner of my vision. I give a sharp mental jerk, and for a moment, the fighting trance is broken.

The sword – unwrapped and steel bared – clatters across the floor and crashes into the opposite wall. Our eyes follow it and we slowly turn to look at each other.

“Holy shit,” Abbey finally says, breathing heavily and distantly rubbing her arm.

“Yeah,” I manage. “Maybe we should give it a rest for now.” Ideally, we don’t do this when there’s anything sharp in grabbing range – or ever again, to be honest. “You alright?”

Abbey takes a moment more to brush off the post-traumatic tremor – which she takes like a champ – before chuckling. “Yeah, I’m good. You hit like a girl.”

I flick her off and head towards the sword, pillowcase in hand, and wrap it up. Maybe we should keep it like this all the time. If this proves anything, it’s that my powers don’t really mind what ends up on the pointy end of this sword. The thought makes me a little sick, and I tighten the knot.

I throw the stupid chunk of metal under the bed for now and hobble back. I think I pulled something during that last backflip. How I hadn’t torn my leg in half is anyone’s guess – I can barley touch my toes without a warmup.

“I didn’t get you too bad, did I?” Abbey asks, watching me limp around the room.

“The human body is only meant to bend so far,” I mutter, trying to remember which way you’re meant to massage muscle fibre. Against the grain? Or was that for cutting steak?

Abbey walks over, grabs my knee and brings it up to my chest. I squawk and flail about elegantly until I catch a hold of the bed post and shoot a look at her. She shrugs and starts moving my knee in a circle around my hip.

“I’ll show you the stretches we did at hockey practice,” she says, and I immediately begin feeling the tension at the base of my spine.

She lets me go, then steps aside to take me through a bunch of yoga poses that look vaguely familiar. In no time at all I’ve managed to limber up enough to go from just bad, to beneficially bad. Christ, exercise sucks.

The door opens up as we’re facing away from each other, holding hands behind us, and pulling our shoulders back. I glance over to see Lucien’s frowny face poking through.

“The fuck are two you doing?” he asks, pushing through and stalking in. Emmet trails in after him, looking a little better than he had when I saw him last.

“Exercise,” I say, flipping slightly sweaty hair out of my face. “You wouldn’t get it.” He makes a decent effort to ignore me, instead tossing me a bag of biscuits and a stunted lobster. “Gross, what the fuck?” I flinch away and the lobster flops to the ground.

“We found dinner,” Lucien says and cracks his lobster open. Black mud bursts out of the shell, spraying over his shirt and dribbling down his hands. “Fucking fish gods!” he shouts and throws it against the wall.

“Wait, so it wasn’t the ballast?” Emmet asks, though I have no idea what he’s talking about. Lucien looks at his muddy hands for a moment before sighing and heading towards the door.

“I’m going to go clean up.” The door clicks closed and we’re left in the room as the lobster slides slowly down the wall. After a moment, I turn to Emmet.

“Are you doing alright?”

“Yeah,” he says, still looking a little out of it. “I talked with Lucien, worked some stuff out.” He shrugs and eats a biscuit. “Have you thought about what to do now?” He asks, changing the subject.

“I dunno,” I say, climbing onto my bed and settling in. “I guess The Mother is out. And we never did think of another way for us to get back home.”

The door opens again and Lucien shuffles in, waving his hands about to dry them. “What are we talking about?” He asks, not noticing, or ignoring, the dour atmosphere in the room.

“Our next steps,” I say. “And how we don’t have another way home.”

“I thought we’d just go back to plan A.” I give him a funny look.

“Wasn’t The Mother plan A?”

“No, that was plan B. Plan A is finding the cult and making them send you back.”

Our conversation just before the church back in Kismet comes back to me. I can’t believe I forgot, what I said about getting caught up in this world’s pace must have been more on the mark than I thought.

“That is a good idea,” Abbey says from her bed. “Make those fuckers clean up their own mess.”

“I seem to remember that the plan was to head west and hope to stumble onto Sable,” I say, feeling the need to interrupt those two and their vicious grins. Lucien brushes his knee-jerk defence of his previous shitty plan, and points at Abbey.

“This time, we know that they’re looking for her. I say we follow the river and wave her around once we reach the next town. Then they’ll come to us and we can ask all the questions we want.”

It’s simple, direct, but puts Abbey in a lot of probably unnecessary danger. Luckily for the plan, she looks completely down with the idea.

We make an effort to plan it out, but very quickly find that no one has any idea about the local geography. In the end, we just point to a town shaped smudge on the map and circle it with the mud from the lobster.

“What’s up with this anyway?” I ask Lucien, softly waving the silty crustacean.

“Some guy back in Kismet taught me divination, but I’m beginning to think that he just hexed me or something.” I gingerly lay the possibly cursed lobster aside. It oozes a little more black silt onto the floor.

“So it’s meant to tell the future?” I ask. He shrugs in the affirmative. “What do you think it’s meant to mean?”

“Dirt is bad? Beware of holes?” He guesses unconvincingly and levers himself onto his bed. “Let me know if I’m about to step in a pothole on our walk tomorrow.”

We blow out the candles and settle into our beds. The smell of hay and sheep wool cycles through the air and I take a deep breath through my mouth. When I get home, I’m going to wash my blankets every day, water costs be damned.

I hear the crinkle of hay around me as Emmet and Abbey toss around in their beds, probably still thinking about what happened today. Lucien is entirely still – the bastard.

I settle back and shut my eyes, mostly ignoring the cloying disappointment of being stuck here for a while longer. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find those cultists tomorrow.

Though I’m not sure where I went wrong in my life when finding a bunch of magic wielding psychopaths became the best-case scenario.