"God has made man in his own image -- man has retaliated."

― Pascal 

The hall's mood had changed. Not that it was ever consistent, but the small clusters of hunters had developed into a larger, cohesive group. And they were deathly silent.

No bawdy chatter, no muttered jokes. Not even murmurs of complaint at the quiet.

They were waiting.

About three dozen hunters, armed to the teeth and solemn for once. Lin furrowed her brow and scanned them. Nobody looked up.

Julian stood to the side, smaller than all the others and strangely lonesome. His skin was still red and irritated from the new sigils. His dark head was bowed as he toyed with a Bowie knife's tip.

Lin watched as he slit his finger open and waited for it to heal. Blood welled and then disappeared beneath both their watch. Her stomach churned. She sighed and walked over, snatching the knife from him.

Immediately, he straightened and glared into her eyes.

He was at least three inches taller than she was, but not nearly as broad-shouldered. She raised her eyebrows, unimpressed.

"Give it back, bitch."

"Not until you tell me what everyone's doing here."

"Leave him alone, Lin," one of the hunters, Gerald the Ginger, said. "We've got intel about a witch colony out west."

"And we don't need you," Julian said.

None of the other hunters reacted much to that. Julian must have taken their silent as support, because he puffed up and stepped closer. "Now gimme my knife."

Lin snorted and took a step back, dangling the knife in front of him. "Take it."

Julian's face twisted as he realized what she was doing. His eyes darted around for help, but even Pierce stood aside and paid no heed to the taunting. The boy opened his mouth to say something else. Lin didn't really feel the need to let him.

The knife dropped out of Lin's grasp, and she caught it in her other hand, slashing a neat line down Julian's cheek.

The boy gasped and slapped his hands over the cut, reeling backwards into a tall hunter. The man sidestepped without so much as blinking, ignoring Julian completely.

Julian panted heavily, eyes burning. "I'm going to kill you."

She turned to Pierce, flipping the knife into a reverse grip. "Hey, you never taught this kid any manners?"

He stared at her balefully, then over to Julian. "Back away."

"But she -"

"You can't win this fight." He sounded almost bored.

Julian's cheek had already healed, leaving a smear of blood down his palm and neck. His hands shook, but his stance was steady as he spun. He pulled the scimitar from Pierce's hip in a practiced rotation before bringing it down towards Lin.

The kid was good, she had to admit. Lin sidestepped easily, dancing across the creamy tile floor with Julian on a constant attack.

He was too fresh, too ambitious. No doubt he thought he'd be able to surpass Lin.

She ducked beneath a swing, just barely catching his feinted kick in time to keep her head.

Perhaps he would, someday. His stamina was certainly adequate. For several straight minutes, Lin pranced around him. She dodged more than anything else, fraying at his temper every time. Her light steps and the swish of his sword echoed through the hall.

"Lin, that's enough," Pierce said. His voice cut through the almost oppressive silence.

She gave a laugh, bright, loud and clear as she could. Then she ducked beneath a too-high swing and behind Julian. Lin pushed his knife deep into his lower back, severing his spine like butter.

He gave a strangled gasp and froze.

Satisfied, Lin stepped back, giving him a light push and letting his body clatter to the ground.

"I thought you said he was the rude one." Pierce stared at his former apprentice as the boy twitched and whimpered on the ground.

"I said you should have taught him some manners. Like respecting his superiors and knowing when to run away."

Pierce sighed, walking over to the boy and yanking the knife from his back. Julian let out a hoarse scream, his legs twitching back to life as the smoky scent of overworked sigils surrounded him.

"Now, I gotta go train my own apprentice."

Pierce's eyes shot up to hers. "You don't have an apprentice."

"I do now."

"You've never had an apprentice. You -" Pierce looked down at Julian and gestured empathetically. "Wait, it isn't that boy you were talking to earlier, is it?"

Lin shrugged.

"Lin."

"Pierce," her voice made every hunter in the room freeze, "what did I just teach Julian about manners?"

"Nothing you haven't taught the rest of us." He glared at her. Lin nodded at his answer.

She turned on her heel, wiping the bloody smear on her pants. It was understandable that they hadn't wanted her to come with them to the coven. She didn't really work well in teams, especially when the team failed to include Alekhine.

She stopped when she passed the lip of the hall.

"I told you to stay."

Hadrian peered around the corner, most of his body hidden behind a pillar. If she hadn't been paying attention, she might have walked right past him.

"What're they doing?"

"Hunting. We're hunters, it's what we do."

His brow furrowed. "All of them?"

She looked over her shoulder, squinting at the main hall. "Like, half of them? There are around eighty of us. It's pretty rare for so many of us to go on one hunting trip, something must be different about this."

"They found a coven?"

"A big one by the sound of it," Lin said. She hooked her thumbs in her belt. "Whatever. Didn't want to go to their stupid slaughter-party anyway."

He took a beat too long to look up at her, but when he did it was with a timid smile. The charm was ruined by his busted lip. "You could go though, right? If you wanted?"

"Yeah. Nothing can really stop me." Lin shrugged again. "But I just said I didn't want to."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." She rolled her eyes and slung an arm across his shoulders. "Don't worry, though. I'm not leaving your side for the next few weeks. It'll give you time to sort your shit."

Hadrian gave another tight smile and pushed into her a little. She could feel his bones through his sweater, combined with a softness that she just didn't have. She smiled and started walking.

"Alright, do you need to bring anything?"

"Nah," he said.

"Great. Me neither."

Hadrian looked back up at her. "Where are we going again?"

"I dunno. Wherever. Probably drop by Janus' place to see how he's doing. Maybe the Citadel. There's gold everywhere there. And a hot chick who may or may not want to have sex with me, we'll see."

He snorted, turning away as his shoulders shook briefly with laughter. Lin grinned.

"Looking forward to it," he said.

"Or," Lin released him to clap her hands together, "we can go bug Razo."

"Hang on, is this actually to get me away or are you taking a vacation?"

"I said I was good at running from my problems. There are problems, so I'm running."

Hadrian rolled his eyes and let her drag him along to the mirror room. He tensed as they approached the seemingly innocuous pane of silvered glass.

"You done this before?" Lin furrowed her brow.

"Did it to get here," he said. His lips were turned down slightly.

"It is sort of like being dragged through a sand tunnel. You get used to it." She patted his shoulder and stepped through.

The mirror portals didn't actually feel like being dragged through a sand tunnel. There was a strange sensation of inertia and a disconnect between yourself and your skin, but aside from that it was an ordinary door.

It made Lin's legs itch.

Now, the key to getting where you're going in a mirror was in the intent. Knowing. Everything else, all other factors were secondary. It didn't matter if Lin had never seen the mirror room where she was aiming, or if Hadrian wasn't quite sure where they were going.

Hadrian knew he would end up wherever Lin was going.

They stepped out into a plush sitting room, everything lacy and pink with needlepointed flowers on the armchairs and polka dotted wallpaper. The smell of rosy potpourri smacked Lin in the face like a wall.

"Oh shit, he redecorated again."

Hadrian coughed and put his sleeve-covered hands over his face, eyes wide. Lin breathed through her mouth - which did almost nothing to save her from the smell - and pulled Hadrian along behind her as she practically kicked the door open.

She practically gasped in clean air in the hallway. Hadrian seemed slightly more put together, managing to get some tight inhales through his nose before slowing his breathing down to his regular near-silence.

"Yeah," Lin coughed, "Janus does that to keep people from visiting him."

"It works," he rasped back at her.

The hallway was more of a forest of white stone pillars, some of them melding to form walls and rooms. The peaked ceiling mirrored the mosaic floor, and light fluttered in through high windows.

"Well shit, I have no idea where anything is." Lin winced and looked around. Every direction looked the same, all bright and clean, utterly unlike the King who lived there.

"Why aren't there any guards?" Hadrian whispered.

"You don't have to whisper. Everything here is unguarded because nobody can find anything if they tried. Look at these pillars - every long-range and mid-range weapon is useless, and you can't get close enough for a good fight because the guards know the layout better than anyone. Ultimate defense."

"It's kind of," he trailed off with a wince.

Lin snorted and started walking to the left. "Ugly? Yeah. That's also the point. Janus is pretty good at psychological warfare, it's how he won the south islands. It tends to transfer to his décor, though."

Hadrian's brow furrowed and he looked around as they walked, no doubt confused beyond belief. His hands remained tucked near his front. "What if a witch attacks?"

Lin smirked. "That's what hunters are for."

His eyes shot up to hers. "What?"

"People who own islands usually have a couple hunters on contract to deal with these things. Your father's actually the only one who's never asked for it." Neither had Shabina, Lin thought. Though perhaps the open invitation was just that.

Hadrian swallowed and averted his eyes, making Lin frown.

"We uh - we don't really have trouble with witches."

Lin waited for him to continue, but he seemed content to leave her with that. She tapped her fingers on a pillar as they passed it, blowing out her cheeks. "Why?"

"They don't endanger their own."

Lin might have laughed out loud were it not for the fact that Hadrian had said it with such impermeable certainty. Nothing was certain with witches. The only absolute they had was that they didn't deal in the absolute.

Witches were unpredictable, Lin had seen them go out of their way to avoid collateral damage and then burn islands in the same fight. Then her mouth went dry.

Wilson's wives were witches.

Hadrian was Wilson's son.

The two facts had been separate in Lin's mind, and their sudden collision made her heart squeeze. "Right."

Hadrian nodded, eyes front as he walked beside her.

His mother was a witch.

Lin breathed out hard, trying to quell her discomfort. Alekhine had thought it was logical to have Hadrian train as an apprentice. She had to trust him.

Wilson's entire project - capturing and bedding docile witches - was all an attempt to better understand the creatures. The children created by the project were human more often than not, even the female children.

Only one viable witch had been successfully produced by the unions.

Lin remembered the dispassionate way Greymark had reported it to her. The exact same tone in his voice when he'd said Alekhine had betrayed them; a subtle what are you going to do about it? in his tone.

She hadn't done anything about the witch child. About a year later, the thirteen-year-old witch died, so it didn't really matter.

The whole project seemed ill-thought out to Lin, but she was content to let Wilson and Greymark go down burning when the time came.

She snapped out of her thoughts when the sound of someone running interrupted her. Her arm shot out across Hadrian's middle and she shoved him behind her, hand falling to her knife.

Janus skidded across her path. Literally skidded, he wasn't wearing shoes, and the polished mosaic had zero traction against his sheepskin slippers.

The King stopped himself by clinging to a pillar, a wide grin gracing his handsome face as he saw Lin.

"It's my favorite serial killer!" Janus crowed, his voice bouncing across the building.