What the fuck was I supposed to think about Etna now? The idea of that being what had actually happened had me caught between this being a bad, cruel joke, like saying someone’s puppy had gone to live on a farm somewhere, and it being real and me then having zero idea what to think of the inept villain who irritated me so much but had actually done something cool.

“You hit her so hard she retired?” Tattletale asked, grinning.

“It wasn’t a hit, exactly. Is this a bad joke?”

“No joke. And you’re going to have to regale us with your explanation of what this mysterious technique is,” Prancer said. “Was it a specific angle of hit? A combination?”

“You’ll have to teach me, whatever it is,” Sveta added, playing along.

“I tackled her in the air. Spun her around pretty violently, then dumped her into the side of a hill.”

“Ten-eighty spin with a punt to finish it?” Prancer asked. “That’d do it.”

“More than ten-eighty and I didn’t punt. I spun, stopped, and after a momentary pause I… very firmly introduced her to the hillside. I measured my strength.”

“And worried you killed her,” Tattletale said.

“I—no. I—”

“You worried you killed her.”

“If someone disappears and the last thing you remember is a K.O.—”

“Midas!”

A voice from the crowd. We were partway down the stairs.

Fuck.

The guy looked like Cleat’s brother, but he was nubby instead of spiky. And clearly angry, from what I could see of his face behind the nub-studded helmet.

“Let it go,” Midas said.

“You’re letting them take him?”

“I made my arguments. I was outvoted.”

Not exactly resounding cooperation there.

“He fed himself to us!”

“If you want to take over the Lodge while Lord of Loss’s back is turned, now’s the time to show some leadership,” Tattletale murmured.

“Shut up, Tattletale,” Midas growled.

“It’s being handled. We have a solution in mind,” Semiramis said. “The heroes have a way to take away his power, then they’re bringing him back here.”

Not exactly the way we’d posed it, and now we looked bad if we didn’t do either.

“Not good enough,” Nubby said. The Desperado Dustwind stood behind him now.

“It’s going to have to be,” Semiramis said. “You—”

Nubby moved, and I flew over the railing, to get far enough away I could block with my forcefield if I had to. Semiramis moved in that very same moment, causing a ghostly, out-of-sync image to overlap Nubby.

It was the initial moves of a fight and those moves were very much on our side. But we were badly outnumbered by angry B-listers, and I had only a second to take stock of them and figure out who I was going to be fighting, out of everyone here. Not Nursery, thankfully, but there were others.