911 [Attn: All y'all.]

[mnemosyne]

And finally, Sera tells him.

Curled up in the bed, his arm around her. Her spine against his chest, which feels strange, rather off because Pan is out there somewhere, in surgery, under the glare of too-bright lights, his body opened up down to the glistening viscera and Sera does not know the specifics but she knows some of them, and hates them, and cannot quite contain in her mind and body how she can be in a still house in a big, soft bed, clean, right? and mostly-sober, in a way that makes her think that she should take something, though to be fair she doesn't know what - while the world is bending itself open around someone she -

Oh, she breathes, steadily in the silence. Her hair spread over the pillow smelling of strawberries because Dan used the wrong shampoo, the weird one she bought for a lark at Goodwill a few weeks ago with Sid.

--

She had a dream last night, she tells him, quiet. Just like that, head moving minutely against the pillow as she speaks. The specifics are opaque, cryptic, they always are but she remembers moths, filling the air. Gray-winged in the moonlight, swarming from the dark march of trees. She remembers this sense of grievance in the air. Not grievance, that word is too small for it. It was deeper and older and hotter. Call it rage, call it wrath, pregnant yes but old enough that it had long-since curdled and gone still and ugly and sour. There was a broken tree, just a stump, and a figure covered in owl feathers.

And blood. Blood raining down from a roiling sky.

You can understand why she shivers there.

--

So she went to see Pan; to tell him what she'd dreamt. What she'd seen, and then there was the park and the park was deserted and there was Lena - strange you know? - and

blood

on the sidewalk, smeared and dark. The blaze of the setting sun on the lake. Wind in the trees. This choking sense of rage. No magic, none that she could taste in the air around them, and then, this sudden cloud of mouths, hundreds of them, a livid, living flock so dense that Sera thought she was going to inhale one, get it stuck in her throat, fluttering and futile. From the underbrush, there were these noises they were tearing-at-flesh noises they were crunch-and-crack noises and hey, Sera would've fucking left, would've run if that were an option. Sera wasn't armed. Sera doesn't wander around with a gun a sword a cudgel hidden somewhere on her person. Where would she hide a weapon? In her bustier?

This is a quiet story though; she tells it with a wrung-out sort of calm: the dogs, not-living but still-moving. The attack; she can hardly remember how many. Fucking Pan stepping in front of her. Just the way time stops and stutterstarts again; peels back into slices. Opens up and narrows all at once. Pancho beside her bright as a solar flare, as the aftermath of a bomb blast, she tells him. And Sera, god knows how she ripped the magic out of herself again and again to send one after another of the things fleeing in fear. But she did. And the story turns round. Back to the point where they're gone, there's blood everywhere, Pancho's weaving but not - not -

- and then something just hit him, and he fell, and she couldn't catch him, he's so fucking big. He's too heavy, and all she could do was cushion the fall of his body with her own.

Sera breathes out a little shudder when she's done with the telling-of-what-happened. From a distance, from a certain distance, in the still and quiet dark, the blood scrubbed away, the muzzy, throbbing distance of her headache from all that crying receding into something else, the vaguest sort of ache, it hardly seems real.

--

It is past two-thirty in the morning and Sid's coming over but the house is quiet and the street is quiet and the city is quiet and Sera finishes her story and isn't going back to sleep, see, and figures she'll hear: the truck or footsteps on the steps up to the front porch or the bell.

Or maybe she figures that Sid will know or understand that the door to this house is hardly-ever locked if the inhabitants are home.