«Oh God, here, now you've jinxed it!» Chico rolled his eyes. Banshee glared at him. Vopros raised a hand to shut them both up. He didn't have to say anything else. And they began.

Rituals included a lot of preparations. Strange ingredients, symbols to be written on the ground, precise gestures to be done in a precise order and words to be spoken. Unlike light spells, who were basically left to the personal touch of every mage, rituals were on point, and intensively specific.

It took them a couple of hours. Chico went to the Headquarters' Division 3 to retrieve rare ingredients for the ritual, luckily covered by their Order membership, while Vopros and Banshee laid down the physical part of the ritual, moving out of the way all of the furniture of the living room, and painting the magical, ancient runes with colored sharpies and 2-for-a-dollar candles from the nearby supermarket.

Right in the middle of the ritual circle they had formed, with the rare ingredients in small IKEA bowls in the expected places, Vopros put a bigger bowl, and filled it with the Lenin Vodka he kept for special occasions.

"The Mirror of Vopros", as Banshee and Chico called it with an unexpectedly good classic fantasy reference, was almost more transparent than water. Without the pungent smell of strong alcohol and the little ripples over the surface if someone bumped it, everyone would have thought it was simply an empty bowl.

Vopros took Banshee's hand in his.

«You show me path. I bring you through path. We bring the path in the bowl. Da?»

Banshee nodded at that absolutely incomplete explanation, and then they both suspended a hand over the bowl, closing their eyes. Only the slight trembling of Vopros's bushy mustaches indicated that his lips were lightly moving in a repetitive, self-hypnotic mantra of secret Russian words, mirrored by Banshee who was using her own native language.

She saw the forest of fluxes that formed the pattern you could see with Know, much more entangled and twisted than anyone else. The fluxes that were, that is, and that will be, all in one writhing mass in front of the eyes of her mind. She tried to focus on River. His voice, his face, his demeanor. They just needed a glimpse of the right fluxes, and everything would have been all right. If she could pinpoint Vopros on the right path, he would have taken it from there.

Strangely enough, she couldn't feel him, at all. Usually, when two mages intertwined in a ritual they were aware of each other's presence. Banshee couldn't see Vopros in any vicinity of the fluxes.

She blamed it all on her own incompetence, and focused more, painting a sort of dissonant road in the hundreds of thousands of fluxes going around the air. It was just like undoing a complicated tapestry, tugging at each and every thread trying to understand where it led before choosing to follow it. Proceeding through trial and error wasn't really the best option, but at a certain point it became the only one possible.

Then, little and slow, small vortex, going faster and faster, started forming in the center of the bowl, until it suddenly stopped completely. The vodka moved around in the bowl, and then began to settle. And as it settled, first out of focus then more and more clear, an image appeared on the surface of the liquid.

The clear image of River formed. He was apparently in an apartment, very different from his Headquarters' base. The image was stable and, finally, Vopros and Banshee didn't have to hold hands and stand still anymore.

«Aw me God! Me can't feel me legs!» whined Banshee, starting to stretch, her muscles tangled from the rigidity of her position. «I can't believe it worked!»

Vopros went straight to the freezer to drown a half bottle of vodka. His throat and mouth were so dry he felt like he was swallowing rubble.

«Usually is more difficult.»

But before Banshee could ask something, Chico yelled.

«... ay caramba! But that's...That's not River! That's a... woman!»

«No way! It was River! It's not someone you confuse with someone else!» Banshee protested, looking back at the basin. But it was true, that was a woman, and not River, at all.

Then, a tall, slender man in a suit entered the room. He marched towards the blonde, beautiful woman.

They all looked away at once.

«What. Is. Happening?» asked Chico, trying not to watch, even if the noises and grunts that came, in a sort of old-radio distorted audio, were quite unmistakable.

«You see. When daddy pays a mommy very much, they fuck.» Vopros explained, with a creepy soft voice.

«Oh... I get it...» Banshee whispered, her eyes stuck to the very graphic image in the basin, where the now naked man was vigorously having sex in quite creative positions with the most gorgeous blonde they had ever seen, with incredibly long hair, that apparently played a good part in the whole scene, and a body that incarnated aesthetic perfection. «River is a morpher. Well, the best morpher I've ever seen.»

«And apparently he's the strangest kind of genderfluid?»

«I just think he likes to have sex.» Banshee shook her head, trying to look away. But it wasn't easy.

«Vodka, messy room and poor quality porn. I feel young.» Vopros sentenced, downing another good gulp of liquid, and then marching towards the fridge «So, have a nice evening. Call me if he goes to music box.» he concluded and closed the fridge door behind himself, retiring to his cellar.

Banshee and Chico looked at each other, somewhat uncomfortable. It was quite difficult to find a place to look at while sexy moans and noises came from a washbasin of vodka in the center of a magic circle in a disheveled living room. That was nothing folklore prepared you for.

«So, you stay and monitor. I'll go... fetch pizzas.» offered Chico, masking his awkwardness as perfect excuse to appear gallant. Which didn't deceive Banshee one bit, but any excuse was better than share the same living space with another person and loud porn. And by the sound of it, it wasn't going to end soon.

As Chico left the house more hurriedly than ever, Banshee uncapped the whisky bottle and threw away the cap. They just had to wait now and see.

Maybe, after all, her plan would have worked.

Two pizzas, two bottles of whisky and tequila and a lot of awkward very loud conversations with Chico later, the sound stopped. The man in suit and the woman exchanged some words they didn't catch, and then the man left.

«I'm so sure I've seen him somewhere...» Chico said.

Then, they had their suspects confirmed, when the blonde woman morphed back, with unusual elegance, in a tall, thick blonde man. Completely naked.

Chico looked away.

Banshee didn't.

They followed him around for the next three hours. He went out of the apartment, made some calls, sent some texts. He entered a florist and sent flowers to someone, then went into a gift shop and bought something for a girl he met an hour later. Chico and Banshee were the lucky audience of a furious back-alley quickie between the two.

Banshee looked away.

Chico didn't.

As the sun started going down, he moved around some streets they definitely couldn't recognize. He had finally started to look more conscious of his surroundings, checking all around him to see if he was followed.

«That's good! Call Vopros!» Banshee exclaimed, enthusiastically.

«How? He doesn't keep his cell phone on in the cellar!»

«Use the blender!»

Chico sighed and went to the kitchen appliance. He looked at it, as if he still regretted his mutation in botch-alarm and calling button to the cellar.

When Vopros arrived, River had descended into a manhole and was walking in the darkness of the sewers. The image was difficult to keep up with, and Vopros put his hands on the bowl as if he needed to keep it steadier. The vodka stabilized, and even if very dark, the image didn't disappear. In the brief time that Vopros had needed for the stabilization, though, they had lost some steps, and they were now seeing River entering a room.

A white room.

They couldn't immediately see if there was, in fact, a table with a music box over it, but something they did see.

It was the beautiful girl they've seen walking with River.

Nearly all the lights in the room were off, leaving just some light sources out of their line of sight, trembling, as if they were candles of torches, emitting a warm but eerie light on the completely naked body of the girl. She was kneeling, trembling, embracing herself with her arms.

Before any of them even tried to comment on something, a strange shadow appeared. It was huge, way bigger than any person they'd know.

And it wasn't human, at all.

It had the contours of something beastly, savage, covered in dark blue fur and with what, in the half-darkness, looked like claws. Its only clear detail they could see was the tiny, long, shiny red eyes glimmering in the dim light of the room. The shadow towered over the girl. They couldn't hear anything.

«Why did the sound go away? We had to listen to all the sex until now, but now that we need it, it's all gone 1930s tv on us?» Chico muttered as if he feared the vision in the bowl could hear him.

«He must be near artifact. Or in protected place.» Vopros warned them.

They watched, shocked, as the girl all of a sudden brought her hand to squeeze her head, so hard it looked like she'd wanted to crush it herself. From the pained expression on her face and her open mouth, it was clear she was screaming on top of her lungs. Her eyes glimmered with a strange black light, for a split second.

Then the shadow made an ample gesture, and a group of naked men suddenly jumped out of the shadows and threw themselves over her, covering her with their bodies. Not in a sexual way, not at all. More like when heroes launch themselves fearlessly over an exploding bomb, with no other thought than containing the explosion. They were no normal men, they could tell. Their skin was grey and somewhat tattered, and the little details they could make out in the half-light were of faces devastated by horrible illnesses... or rot.

They were waiting, holding their breath, when a purple light flashed in the vodka, blinding them with the strength of a flash-bang, but mercifully without the bang. They all jolted back, covering their burnt retinas, with yelps of pain.

They all blinked, seeing only white for at least two minutes, before, slowly, light, shapes, and colors started to make sense again in front of their eyes. They were all panting from the shock. The spell had been interrupted, and the bowl had gone tranquil again.

«Are ye all rite?» asked Banshee, furiously rubbing her eyes, as if it could help and not make things worse.

«Yo no veo! Yo no veo nada! Ay! Caramba! Yo soy... oh, no, ok, I'm starting to see again.» Chico's panic attack rapidly subsided. Vopros grunted something in straight Russian, and even if nobody mastered the language, they mysteriously understood what he meant.

«What the hell happened?» asked Banshee, now able to distinguish two shadows with some kind of human form in front of her. «What was that light?»

«I think they discover us.» theorized Vopros, whose head was like a concert of stonemasons playing bells.

«Their Enforcer.» Chico whimpered. «He had discovered and Dispelled the scry spell.»

«Didn't feel like Dispel.» Vopros wasn't certain, but he was fairly sure of it.

«Well, what could that be? It actually dissolved the spell. Nothing else in magic does that!» Chico pointed out.

«Well, we know that the thing is underground.» Banshee tried to get her thoughts in order, moving further along the problem. «Well, it's clear we won't get anywhere scrying. That's probably why the Lion's gave up.»

«Because they're always a paso in front of us?» Chico's voice was discouraged.

«I'm pretty concerned fer the girl, though. What the feck was that sick ritual?»

«Yo no sé, the non-muerte is one of my fields of study, but I never dabbled with bodies. They are messy. I prefer spirits.» Chico explained. «Seems like there was something very wrong with her, nonetheless.»

«If she's with River, and River is Staccato's Enforcer... she's the third member of their Coven, is she not?» Banshee thought.

«They should be three mages and one Enforcer.» Vopros said, absent-mindedly, still recovering.

«Covens find themselves personnel-short every day. Ours is one of the long-lasting formations of the last thirty years.» Chico pointed out.

«So, if we can't find Staccato, and River is a dead end... why don't we focus on the girl? What should she be? Eighteen? She's still in the Academy...» Banshee said.

Chico and Vopros looked at her.

Exchanged a glance.

And then rolled their eyes.

She was having a plan.