Trophy Wife had a white fur coat with a trophy rack sweeping up from her back, behind her head, with animal parts and what might have been human bits dangling from it. Very intimidating, regal, messed up. I could see why Ashley liked her. Backwoods had a gnarled wooden mask, black toque, black overalls, heavy boots, and a dark green canvas coat that looked like it had been liberally smeared with oil or black grease. Maybe to dull colors or to turn a regular coat into something resembling forest camouflage. He held spear-like branches in each hand, and had a ‘v’ of two more branches sticking up from his shoulders.

Nailbiter and Hookline were the ones who had reacted most to Damsel’s alert, and walked on top of cars to get closer to me. Nailbiter had extended her limbs. Same principle as Trophy Wife putting herself closer to the Huntsmen. Old grudges, and they had some sense of how to fight me, both in terms of what I was capable of and how that actually applied in the real world.

Gibbet was sticking close to Hookline, I noted, despite being a member of Mockument and Torso’s troupe. She wore a truncated red noose around her neck, a black head covering that covered everything from the neck up, with a tear for the mouth that had been stitched up with red cloth, and tears around the eyes, which had been painted black, with red ‘x’s over the eyelids, and either contact lenses or a minor mutation that gave her actual eyeballs the same red ‘x’. She wore a long and heavy black coat that probably weighed as much as she did, with more stark red imagery embossed on it. She looked barely over five feet tall, petite enough I doubted she weighed over a hundred pounds, and she carried a L-shaped length of wood, telephone-pole thick, with a noose hanging from the short end, bearing it across her shoulders.

I guessed Hookline had a girlfriend now.

Hookline’s hook flew up at an angle, flying past the rooftop’s edge and past me, then did a U-turn, reversing course to travel back down to him, hook looped around and scraping against the chain on the way down.

Gibbet hopped up onto the hook itself, swayed a second for balance, and then found her position. The hook started to retreat back up toward me, carrying her.

Nailbiter, too, started climbing, using the chain as a handhold.

I flew away from the roof they were aiming for, which made Nailbiter stop. Gibbet continued to be carried up.