The whitejackets are outside the door in a few minutes, which is how I know that I've done something really bad. Their guns are loaded with something that makes my already shaky head fill with purple thunder.

Angel turns. Her shoulders, so much wider than ours, tense up so that they're almost up to her ears. Her hair flutters up with it, making a hissing noise as it tries to settle again around her back, and in the light of the room the blonde locks look a deep blue, like an asphyxiated face. "See what I told you, dear?"

"The others will be here any minute," I tell myself. I repeat it again, for strength. "They won't just let us die. They'll be here."

Something grabs me by the leg. The entire house flashes crystal, the walls refracting as the paint turns into a thousand different facets, all of them gleaming with a slightly different color. I can sense the floor above me crumple. Or maybe it's under me? I don't know which way is up. I'm suffocating inside of my own body, which is me, but is also the house. I can feel Angel and Adaline in the front entrance, and when Angel steps across the floor, almost human, and collapses over me, her legs cracking as they become something else, it is like she's stepping through my throat. I cough violently as the entire illusion shatters around us, and the first shot rings out across the yard.

I hear the sound in green. All my senses are a muddled pool from the effort of holding everything together for so long, and I almost pass out as Angel's tail coils around me. One tail. Adaline ducks for cover from an oncoming bullet and Angel grabs her too, almost willingly. I reach out to Adaline, but I can't tell which hand is my hand. I'm not in Veritas, but everything feels fake. The sky overhead melts in oilspill colors, and the aroma of oil is there too, like things that died so long ago that you can't believe they were ever alive.

"Addie," I whisper.

She doesn't respond.

The others are there a moment later, and the entire street goes up in flames. Kali's fire is hot against my face, then my face is changing too, crackling like the flames. I try to drag myself out, but Angel's grip is tight. She rips the breath out of me, and when the black tail around me convulses, I feel the air go in and out, like I can't even be trusted to breathe on my own. Hot water spills down the sides of my face as something twitches in my stomach. I can feel her clawing out my guts. "I didn't want to go along with this," I whisper to the pandemonium, the roar of light, color, noise, and even the faint taste of my own bloodied mouth. "I don't want this. I just want to go home."

"Tell me where home is," whispers a voice in my ears. It sounds so much like Angel that I lash out with one hand, which is half restrained, and nothing happens. There's no one there. "Come on. Don't you want to get out of there? All of space is yours, and you're going to sit your own fight out?"
"I'm so tired," I complain to the air. When I open my eyes, there's nothing there but the haze of smoke. My body is so large around me, like I'm in the house again, that awful house, the personification of all my powers, the house I should have been sharing with her instead of with them... it's too small, too. I can see pure light on my arms, where the skin is so tight that it's begun ripping. All my senses are folding in to a point, where I can feel everything all around my head. The outside world seeps into my mind and becomes not as it seems, but as it is, at last.

I take the last of my energy and push myself further. I'm swimming downwards in a deep pool, and at the bottom is all of space. I can feel the universe opening up for me like a new flower, like Adaline's smile, and I pull through it and into the night. The black coil of Angel's tail turns to crystal around me as I step out in Veritas, the air tasting of lavender as the dusk smokes around us, and I lift a hand, turning all the guns into flowers. They become strangling vines as my intentions seize up in my stomach, and I swing a hand upwards, causing them to surge up the whitejackets' arms.

A car roars to life and I crush the engine under its hood like a piece of the flat, painted stuff that people put everywhere. I consider swinging that out of the way, too, but as a calmer, gray wind (taste: warm soup, sound: small bells) sweeps over me, I find some degree of mercy in me. Maybe it's always been there. Maybe. I leave them all where they are and turn to Angel. My hair trails behind me, extending from its curls into a vast web of space, and I can see its reflection in her eyes. She raises some of her hideous hair, which itself has been transfigured, and I lift up a mirror. The silver pane extends over me like a shield, but the snake doesn't strike. All I can hear is her breathing. The world is still and silver, with the moon shining down through my pane of glass. Humans are beginning to come out of their houses, at least, those who aren't cowering in their homes. Our own party lies bleeding or stilled and all the whitejackets are bound.

"What do you see in this mirror?" I call from behind it.

I don't know what Angel sees, but she answers, in a voice that seems to break the stiff silence like a peel of lightning, "I'm not human."

I withdraw the glass to find her there, crying in human form as all her scales and all her bravery recedes back into her body. Dylan pushes me out of the way and grabs her, putting her hands behind her back. His face is marked on the opposite side of his coppery patch by a long scar nearly as sharp as his slit eyes. He looks half human as she drops to the ground at his feet, crying softly.

"Give up easily and you won't have to fight anymore," he warns her.

Angel looks at the lights of the houses around us as if they were distant constellations in the night sky. I feel myself receding too, senses separating into distinct channels instead of the singular, overpowering blast of pure energy that held me captive up until a moment ago, and I wipe away crystal tears from my face.

I cup Addie in my hands as she runs up my leg and into them in her mouse form. Her heartbeat is so fast through my fingers and I can feel my own human heart trying to keep up, the thrum, thrum ascending into pure chaos. At least, I think that's my heart. I'm not entirely sure that I have one right now. I bring my hands towards my chest, I feel that there's a parallel beat there.

"Hey, how'd I do?" I ask, woosy. "Did I do okay? Guys?"

Everyone looks so scared of me.

"Guys?" I ask, and I feel the world go sideways again as I pass out.