A caricature of a monstrous caricature. Features distorted, with mouths yawning open in horror, lips lipstick red, or whole faces smooshed into distorted kissy faces. I saw a tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it, the space within with a word in it. ‘Amy’.

“Listen to me!” it screeched, shrill. A hand slapped against a nearby car, caving the tire’s housing in while pushing the car a few feet away. “Ugh! I have a runny nose and a sore throat!”

Sidepiece began cackling.

“I… actually don’t know what to say,” Damsel said. “I was going to joke I didn’t have to go with you to have a face to face with you. But there’s nothing to joke about. It’s just sad.”

“Get rid of it,” I said.

“Get rid of me!” the thing screeched. “I’m so done with this shit!”

“You’re so ugly inside,” Damsel said, before looking up at me, locking eye contact with me, narrow pupils staring.

I tried to draw in a breath to say something else, and the breath hitched. “Let’s call a truce. Thirty minutes, we have tea, you tell us what you—”

The thing used my aura, its power spurting and stuttering, washing over me as something I had too many resistances against.

No, that wasn’t enough to interrupt me. What was enough to get me to stop talking was that it kept talking over me, louder, echoing my words. It flopped around, trying to use flight while having no less than six different frames of orientation fighting against one another. “—have some fucking tea! Tell us what you want!”

Sidepiece fell over, laughing.

I couldn’t get distracted. We’d been told our presence helped the numbers. I’d work toward that.

“—tell us what your demands are,” I said. “If you guys back down and don’t stir things up, we’ll pay you off, strike deals, give you a territory. You picked the right time and place for this. You win.”

“—right time and place for this. Fuck! You win, we lose like we always do, boo hoo!”

“Can we keep it?” Sidepiece asked.

“You want to deal?” Damsel asked. “Truce?”

“Yes!” the thing on the road screamed.

“Let’s shake on it,” she said. Her eye contact didn’t waver. Her clawed hand extended my way.

I knew Ashley. I knew that she had her tells, and one of those tells was that she tended to go very still and quiet when poised for the attack. Swansong had done it with Beast of Burden. Before any outbursts, there was often a moment where she was more terse, quiet, as if something below the surface was simmering, and a part of her was trying to keep it from losing control by doing nothing.

Which was ironically what I wanted her to do.