Medusa spat at Kayla.

It caught her on one cheek and ran down her jaw towards her throat. Kayla’s breath caught hard, and she muttered something too low for JC to make it out. She hiked up the bottom of her t-shirt to wipe her face and neck.

JC stepped in the middle, dropping the cookie box back into the bag with the lid loose on top, and reached out to help Kayla.

Zach hissed at the faeling and jerked her away, throwing her back in the direction of the troll. “What the fuck?”

Rusty bolted to and up the nearest tree, chittering in agitation, and crouched there on a branch. She hugged her own tail so tightly the muscles of her arms quivered, her face buried in the thick fur, and rocked from foot to foot; the chittering melted into a repetitive, oddly high-pitched moan sliding back and forth between three notes with barely any pause for breath.

Four-armed Nisha just sighed. “Oh, here we go.”

“Damn it, Lou,” the scaled woman hissed. “You set Rusty off.”

Closer, JC realized that the saliva was thick and had a yellow-green tinge. Alarmed, she abandoned the bag of cookies and tugged Kayla’s t-shirt out of her hands. Getting that off Kayla’s skin and keeping her from further contact with the contaminated fabric might be vital. Kayla blinked at the yellow-green stain on her grey t-shirt, and hastily shrugged the whole thing off, not resisting when JC took it from her.

Kayla, with no warning, collapsed where she stood.

JC blessed her fast fae reflexes, as she managed—barely—to get an arm around Kayla so she fell into JC instead. Gently, she lowered her to the ground, finished wiping off the spit and checked. Kayla was still breathing without any indication of difficulty, at least, and her heartbeat was steady, but she was completely unresponsive to attempts to wake her.

“What did you do?” Zach snarled. JC, still kneeling next to Kayla, looked up. There was red on Zach’s right hand, wet and glossy, and Medusa was holding her upper arm.

“Fucking asshole,” Medusa said angrily. “Human-lover. She wants to help us, huh? Fine. We throw that gold trinket down the nearest black hole. It stops existing, maybe we’re a step closer to freedom. It’s better than anyone having it.”

“I doubt you can get it off her without consent,” Nisha commented. “If you can touch it at all. You think they’d have left something like that to chance?” She finished the last bite of her cookie, then backed away until she was leaning against the distressed squirrel’s tree, all four arms crossed in what looked like a very complex position. She did glance up, and for just that long, her expression softened into something like concern, but she refocused immediately on the others.

“So we’ll remove her hand, her arm... whatever it takes, even if we have to throw in body-parts too.”

“Over my dead body,” Zach said, and JC saw muscles bunch and flex under those violet scales, but the dragon hesitated to pounce. It would leave the other two far too vulnerable, JC realized. Worse, she couldn’t think of a solution.

Nisha showed no interest in getting involved, and Rusty was clearly not about to—possibly she was more of a danger to herself—but that still left five opponents. It was possible Zach could win, but being effectively alone, plus that ice fae...

There was no point asking Alison to tell Des to hurry. She’d get here as fast as she could and adding pressure wouldn’t speed that up.

“Actually,” JC said rapidly, “judging by what I found while reading books in the house in the middle of the night, throwing a highly magical item into the recycling system would be a very bad idea. When it deconstructs the physical components, it could release all the embedded aether, all at once, and that could at best short out the whole recycling system and a wizard would have to rebuild it.”

“Won’t matter, if we can get out of here,” Medusa said.

“At worst, it could short out all the magical systems on the island. Including the only way in or out. It could trap us all right here while the island decays around us at an accelerated rate.”

“You’re lying! You’re just trying to protect her!”

“Obviously I’m protecting her, but I’m not lying. I was right in the house and playing along, and humans keep forgetting I exist. I learned a lot. Islands, wizards, mediums, fae. I’ve read part of Isabel’s journal and her research notes. I know what they were doing. I know they were planning on doing a major culling of faelings already here to make room for the next group. Among others, they were planning to thin out the house-fae collective, although not eliminating all of them since they were useful.”

“In other words,” Nisha said sourly, “no one would have been safe.”

“I don’t think I believe you,” the scaled woman said.

“Why’s that, Ren, because it’s just so implausible that they would do such a terrible thing?”

“It gets worse,” JC said. “They were so freaked out over being caught that they intended to sterilize the island completely—nothing left alive at all. And Isabel and the two wizards were going to bail just before it. Just the three of them.”

“Like anything would panic them,” the satyr-like man said sceptically.

At least they were listening, not attacking yet. That was a good sign.

“They broke wizard laws doing this. The fae are going to object rather strongly. And they had no way to get out of it. The wizard who opened the door to bring Kayla and her new medium friend Riley here is much more powerful than the two who were here, and he was coming back for them, so Isabel couldn’t just make them vanish. Riley has a large family with multiple mediums and the others support them, and they have a lot of allies and contacts. Isabel played friendly and innocent until Riley went home—Kayla stayed with an invisibility charm against humans. To keep them from killing all of us, we worked together and took them down.”

“Gonna hold off on the hero parade,” Nisha said. “But I suppose possibly we owe you one for that. Life sucks but I’m not sure I’m ready to die just yet.”

“Why are you taking her word for any of this?” Medusa demanded.

“Possibly because it actually makes some kind of sense and it’s all easily something I could see Isabel doing? It’s not like she considered our lives to have any value at all. Little less convinced about our heroes, but seriously, you ever had a chat with the dragon there? Totally in-character, and not a surprise for their friends. The stuff about the wizard and medium... meh, we’ll see about that.”

“Whatever. Still no reason to believe the crap about tossing that cuff into a black hole destroying everything.”

“How about this?” Zach said. “Any hand that touches Kayla, I remove. Got any to spare?”

“Very funny,” the four-armed woman said, with a roll of her eyes.

Des darted out of the trees and crouched on Kayla’s other side. She met JC’s gaze, growled softly, and turned her attention to checking on Kayla.

“Oh, this is absolutely not okay.” That was Callie’s voice, and she sounded annoyed. She strode out, and crossed her arms, looking around sternly. “I don’t even know the details, although I can guess, but it is absolutely the opposite of okay. What are you doing to Kayla? Why is she unconscious? And why is Rusty up a tree freaking out?” She raised her voice. “Rusty, it’s going to be all right. I’m here and Jo is coming.”

JC held up Kayla’s t-shirt, with the yellow-green spittle visible.

“Lou, did you spit on Kayla?” Callie demanded.

“I... guess,” Medusa mumbled, eyes on the ground.

“I’m only saying this once. Spread it around. Consider Kayla someone I want alive and intact. The same is true for any of the humans she’s bringing in to try to, y’know, help us. If you want to be so paranoid that you refuse to accept any assistance, well, that’s up to you. But you are not going to mess up the chance for those of us who choose to hope for a real future.”

“How do you know she’s even for real?” the scaled satyr asked belligerently.

“I can verify personally the condition Isabel and all were in when I last saw them, and believe me, they were not happy about it. Do you think it’s very likely that Kayla and her friends are going to be worse? Thanks to them, the collective has a ton of supplies that have the house fae in excited raptures, planning food beyond the basics they’re so brilliant at scrounging up for us. I have a substantial bag of actual, proper medical gear. I’ve seen Kayla with her friends, and I believe her, that her only goal was to get them back. As far as I can tell, she is genuinely determined to do her best by us.”

“That’ll help a whole lot against a wizard.”

“Tanner, I don’t have time for this right now, I need to help Kayla and make sure Rusty is safe. If you want more information, it’s going to have to wait.” She looked behind her, as two more faelings caught up. One was Sly. Callie immediately shooed JC and Des away and knelt next to Kayla, assessing the situation and Kayla’s condition.

The other was a tall woman with long loose hair of a shimmery silvery grey, skin of a slightly paler shade of the same, and elegant curves. Her eyes were dark, though, and all the more so with what looked like heavy shadow; her lips, though still achromatic, were darker than her skin but stood out less than her eyes did. Her very full grey skirt had a mostly matte finish, though motion created dull highlights; an uneven gradient, with jagged contours, flowed from very light at the top down to dark where it brushed the floor. The jacket overlapped the top of the skirt, and cinched in snugly at her waist with the neckline low and square, the body of it all the pale grey of her upper skirt; the sleeves reached to just below her elbows, and draped dramatically from there, the fabric with the same ragged ombre effect her skirt had. A dark grey choker circled her throat, and a wide matching band held her hair back from her face. Despite the grey hair and the slightly unsettling sensation of looking at an old black-and-white image come to life, her age could have been anything between mid-twenties and mid-fifties.

The grey lady surveyed them all like a teacher with an unruly class of students, and shook her head.

“Nisha? Rusty?”

Nisha shrugged, and that definitely looked like a complicated gesture. “Not pulling her fur out this time. Probably just needs a few minutes.”

“Could be much worse, I suppose. As for the rest of you... honestly. Acting without thinking.”

“I was not!” Medusa said hotly.

“Oh no? Faelings who attack humans disappear. We all know that. If these ones will be the same or worse, then you just declared a wish to die for yourself and possibly every faeling present. If they are not the same, then you had no grounds to behave this way.”

Medusa, whose name was presumably Lou, grumbled under her breath, then said, more loudly, “What are we supposed to think about a human walking around like she owns the place, with that bracelet on?”

“You could have asked. As it happens, she was on her way to visit us.”

“With cookies as a gift,” JC said. “And a plan to talk to Callie about starting a list of who’s here and what help each person needs. Immediate and long-term. And so I could talk to the other house fae about what they need while we work on that.”

The grey woman inclined her head. “You’re JC, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Jo. My apologies for the welcome to the area.”

“The house fae do not have a leader as such,” Callie said, with a ghost of a smile as she glanced up from Kayla. “Jo is the leader they absolutely do not have. Sly, I need to get Lou’s toxic crud out of Kayla. She still probably won’t wake up right away, so we’re going to need a way to carry her to the nearest bed. That would be mine.”

Sly nodded and came nearer, alert and waiting, while Callie’s bright wings spread and she folded them over Kayla, hiding her completely.

Jo, keeping an eye on all of them, circled around towards Rusty’s tree.

“On the whole,” the ice fae said, speaking up for the first time, “I find it unlikely that any group of humans owning us will be significantly different from any other group. Good intentions on one side do not necessarily lead to good results for those on the other side, and that’s assuming that anyone involved honestly does have good intentions.”

“Then assume that attacking humans is a death sentence,” Jo said pleasantly. “You are free to continue feeling oppressed and hopeless if you so choose. Some of us have decided to be optimistic instead. Only time will establish which of us was correct. However, I’m going to give you one warning. Anyone assaulting any human will no longer be welcome. No beds, no meals, and while I can’t speak for Callie, she won’t be pleased either. You can see that as our sucking up to the new overlords, or you can see it as protecting ourselves by refusing to associate with anyone whose actions could bring harm to us, or whatever you like, but the policy remains and will be enforced.”

“Humans over your own kind?” the satyr spat.

“Tanner, even I think that’s a ridiculous statement,” Nisha sighed. “At least Haru has a point. You and Lou and Ren just sound like Internet trolls at this point.”

“Excuse me,” said the faeling who actually looked like a troll.

“Oh, you know what I mean. I’m quite certain that everyone present has at least that much memory.”

“Fuck off, Nisha,” the scaled satyr, apparently Tanner, flung at her.

“Yeah, what’s with you?” Medusa-Lou demanded. “Standing there watching like it’s a play to entertain you?”

The four-armed woman did one of those complicated shrugs. “It’s simple. I gave my word to the dragon there that I wouldn’t fight them or their friends for as long as they still cared about it. Clearly, caring is still a thing, so I’m not fighting. On the flip side, I haven’t decided yet just how I feel about this under-new-management stuff. Experience says it will probably be bad but I’m not sure I’m willing to pass up even a long shot at something different. Jury’s out. Completely aside from that, I’m not going against both Callie and Jo, because I’m not totally stupid, and that would be seriously detrimental to looking out for my own survival. From here, it actually is sort of entertaining, but that might just be because there’s not much around here that is and my standards are low these days.”

“How about,” Jo said, “the lot of you drop by for a bowl of soup and a piece of cake? We’ve been having a wonderful time with the supplies we just got. Since we can’t keep milk or butter safely cold, we’re using that as quickly as we can, without trying to save anything for later.”

“I should stay with Rusty,” scaled Ren said.

“I will,” Jo said. “You go eat. I’ll make certain she isn’t alone. She trusts me.”

“Might as well,” the troll said. “We’re not getting any chicken, and I’m hungry.”

“Can’t argue that, I guess,” said scaled Ren, and with icy Haru, Medusa-like Lou, scaled-satyr Tanner, and the troll whose name hadn’t been mentioned—at least, as near as JC could attach names to various individuals—she strolled off, back in the direction Des and the others had come from.

“Now,” Jo said, surveying Kayla. “I assume it’s safe to move her?”

Callie nodded. “No risk. It’s going to take a bit for her to sleep off the effects of Lou’s toxin, but she’s a full-sized human, not a chicken, and I just did my best—I think I was actually able to do more for her than I normally can for faelings. It’ll just be safer and more comfortable to spend the next hour or two in bed instead of on the ground. Des? Maybe you could run back and ask for the stretcher?”

“Easier option,” the four-armed woman said, and looked at Zach. “You going to let me help?”

“Why?” Zach asked.

“’Cause Jo is right and Lou shouldn’t have done that, and even I think threatening to hack someone’s arm off is excessive. I’m not going to step in against the people I need to watch my back and work with me, but I can carry your friend.” She spread all four arms. “It’s not that far. If it helps, I give you my word, no ulterior motives, no intentions of hurting her, just carrying her.”

Zach hesitated, then looked at Callie.

“I’ve never known Nisha to lie,” Callie said. “She’s more likely to be abrasively honest and direct. I’ve seen her pick up faelings before, I imagine she could carry Kayla safely.”

Zach traded looks with JC and Des, then slowly nodded.

JC knew Zach was less than comfortable with the idea—so was she, and Des’ ears kept swivelling halfway back and her tail was twitching as spasmodically as Rusty’s had been, if less dramatically. Still, if Callie vouched for four-armed Nisha, and it got Kayla to safety more quickly, it would be worth it.

*Jace? Des? Zach says to keep an eye on her but she’s the one he has the most hope for, if she can accept that there actually is a future. What the hell is going on out there?*

*Catch you all up later,* JC said. If Theo found out that Kayla had been attacked, she’d probably hike out here regardless of water. *Bit busy.*

*Details. Later. Be careful.*

“Good,” Jo said. “I’ll be here until Rusty comes down. We’ll see how she’s feeling afterwards and go from there.”

Callie helped Nisha gather Kayla up with surprising gentleness, her clawed lower arms under her knees and around her back, her more ordinary upper arms supporting Kayla’s head and over her to steady her.

“Got it,” Nisha said. “She’s more solid than she looks, but I’ve got her, she’s not going to fall. Suppose you entertain me on the way by telling me the epic tale of how the ever-loving fuck you managed to get that cuff off Isabel.”